← Zero to Well-Read
Zero to Well-Read
How to Get More Out of Your Reading, and More From the Mailbag
01:15:05
Jeff and Rebecca answer listener questions about how to get more out of your reading, find the ideal reading position, and maintain reading as a part of your identity during major life changes
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- [00:00]
Jeff O'Neill
This episode of Zero to well Read is sponsored by ThriftBooks.com It's a Mailbag episode today. So we don't have a lead title. Usually I like to feature some the title we're talking about and tell you about where you can get it on Thriftbooks. What I will tell you about is I just bought something from Thriftbooks. Actually, I didn't buy it. I cashed in one of my reading rewards. Rewards to get a very good hardcover of an upcoming release. Paid for clearly by the already rewards I had gotten from shopping@thriftbooks.com so go to thriftbooks.com set up an account, start shopping for books, you accrue the awards and then you can turn them in for a free book. Who doesn't like that? Thanks so much to thriftbooks.com for sponsoring zero to well read. Welcome to Zero to well Read, a podcast about the books you wish you'd read. I am Jeff o'. Neill.
- [00:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
And I'm Rebecca Schinsky. Today we are dipping into the summer mailbag. Well, and like the last couple seasons of Mailbag, we're talking about a bunch
- [01:02]
Jeff O'Neill
of April ish is where some of these emails have come from at this point. Yeah.
- [01:06]
Rebecca Schinsky
A bunch of the letters y' all have written us about the books we've talked about that you've read or that you have questions about. And some general questions about our reading habits. Tips for engaging with books to hold it down and guide us through our journey. We have brought our managing editor, Vanessa Diaz, who is going to emcee us today. Vanessa, thanks for joining us.
- [01:24]
Vanessa Diaz
Of course. I realized the last time I did this with y', all, we were in person. We were all sitting around Jeff's living room.
- [01:30]
Jeff O'Neill
Right.
- [01:30]
Vanessa Diaz
I am missing my blood orange flavored beverage. That's okay.
- [01:35]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes. Jeff o', Neill, famously a great mixologist of whole tea.
- [01:39]
Jeff O'Neill
Thank you very much. Very nice of you to.
- [01:41]
Rebecca Schinsky
And that was. Yeah, that was a book riot podcast mailbag that we recorded together in person last summer before this podcast even officially existed.
- [01:49]
Vanessa Diaz
At least only in our minds. Yes.
- [01:52]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, we come a long way, babes. Before we jump in. Just friendly, friendly reminder, please rate or review the show wherever you are listening. It makes the algorithms happy. It helps other book nerds find their way to our wonderful community here. And we are cruising towards a thousand ratings on Apple podcasts. So smash that five stars wherever you're listening. But we are gonna be especially stoked to hit a thousand, hopefully before our one year anniversary on September 9th. Of course, also you can check out Our patreon@patreon.com 02 well read for bonus content for our read alongs. We just wrapped up our read along for the Odyssey by Homer and it was a great time. We've picked the book for fall. It's still a secret, but that's coming soon. Lots of good stuff happening there. So again patreon.com 02 well read or shoot us an email and end up in the next mailbag at 0 to
- [02:44]
Jeff O'Neill
well read bookriot.com Vanessa has done us a solid by organizing, arranging the emails and feedback here into certain sections. Just to let everyone know, not everything that y' all sent got put in here, but these were things I thought were maybe worth, you know, other people hearing about. We appreciate all of you writing. I spent a good chunk of yesterday responding to things that aren't gonna be in the mailbag. I was kind of holding on response to some things I didn't know what to get. But appreciate everyone's kind words and thoughts and a lot of read alike recommendations. That's when you're gonna hear about something like I heard you asking for read alikes for this book you talked about three months ago. And you know what, the great books are always there for you. The Odyssey's coming out. It's 3,000 years old. We ain't in no hurry here, Rebecca, to do a read alike for Little Women. Right? It's important but not urgent that we get to it in a timely fashion. Never too late. Vanessa, as you were looking through all these, did anything jump out to you? Like what are people interested in? What are they responding to? Like, you know, what's your vibe check on how are they doing out there?
- [03:42]
Vanessa Diaz
A lot of folks definitely had specific. I mean honestly a lot of people just came in to be like and, and also, and also and also with recommendations for books. So some of them are not so much asking for comps as being like, please mention this other one. Yes, of course. Lots of folks wanting to be in case you need to add to what is, I'm sure a very short list of contenders might you be interested in. So there's a little bit of that. Of course we'll do some honorable mentions. So folks wanted to just kind of know about our process and also just bigger questions about, you know, authors that we might be interested in adding to like a canon. So yeah, it's kind of a mixed bag kind of what you did sort of expect to some degree and then a couple, you know, saucier questions as well. I Love a saucy question or semi saucy at least. But yeah, good, good, good varietals.
- [04:22]
Jeff O'Neill
All right, we're gonna do a quick sponsor break and we'll get into some questions here. All right, Vanessa, the reins are yours. Feel free to mush and woe us as we need to go along here.
- [04:33]
Vanessa Diaz
I figured that might have to happen at some point. So let's start off with some questions about kind of sourcing where we get books and like platform related things. Someone specifically wanted to know a little bit about using thriftbooks, like how we use thrift books. They appreciate that we've been. They had a lot of good things to say about the hot Greek summer and the read along but they are not sure how to always source the books. They're looking thriftbooks. They've tried using ISBNs, but they kind of want to know what your tips are, especially if you're looking for specific editions of a book on thriftbooks.
- [05:01]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, it's a good point. If you go to thriftbooks.com and go into the they did not sponsor this question though of course they sponsored the show. I should say that out loud. Nor did they sponsor a place for the top of the show. But as a nuts and bolts kind of way, you're right. Because if you go look at the Odyssey, what you will see in the grid there is the odyssey of Homer 1,523 editions. I was just looking at this at the other day and then you click on that and then you can scroll through a whole bunch of editions and if you put in the search bar a particular author or translation, it's not super good at that. So a couple things. One is you can just scroll, you can see there. You know, there's not so many. The more popular ones are going to be towards the top. If you're looking for a Portuguese translation from 1973, they may have it available, but it's going to be way, way down on the list because the their algorithm or their database is surfacing the most popular and available one. So sometimes the scroll doesn't hurt. The other thing you might do is just jump back into Google and go Thriftbooks and then the edition you're looking for and that can pop up the right thing. Again, not quite as simple as Amazon specific ISBN. There's a trade off there, but you can do it. I have found it to be like an extra five seconds of work on the whole when I'm looking for a specific edition.
- [06:08]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, same. I went and checked this this morning and it seems like there was an improvement between the time this person wrote in and today. Because when I grabbed the ISBN 10 for the Emily Wilson paperback from Amazon and then I dropped it into Thriftbooks, it does pull up Emily Wilson's translation of the Odysse directly on Thriftbooks. So sometimes it's just a matter of like what's going on with their catalog. But I think if you don't find it on your first like keyword search directly on thriftbooks going like googling thriftbooks plus the book title or the translation you're looking for will get you there. And we're proud of you for looking at all of your alternatives for acquiring your books, especially used books and watching wallets and the environment in that way.
- [06:51]
Jeff O'Neill
And you can also think of it as a feature rather than a bug to like, okay, there's 300 editions of an Love in the Time of Cholera and like I didn't even know that one existed. Or I didn't even know there was a special critical edition, Norton Hardcover or something else you can get. So there is a way that it can be a little bit more like browsing the bookshelves of a physical bookstore by looking at all the editions. And it scrolls pretty quickly and you can pop in and out of there too. So maybe think it's the journey and the destination when it comes to finding the edition.
- [07:18]
Vanessa Diaz
Yes, friend, friend whose name is James by the way. And yes, I second the ISBN 10. That seems to be the best way
- [07:25]
Rebecca Schinsky
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- [12:30]
Vanessa Diaz
Potential follow up question they had kind of general as somebody who not everybody that comes to this podcast is necessarily from the same book right Ecosystem. Right. So we create we are Book Riot, but there's people that are listening that come from a lot of this. The Book Riot podcast people that come from Book Riot all access and now we've got this. And these people's questions was like do we ever have an idea of wanting to combine some of that? Or like why have we kept it separate?
- [12:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
That is a technical Patreon question. Or the answer is related to the technical ways Patreon is set up. Because we didn't know what was going to happen with Zero to well read when we launched it and we were hoping that we would be tapping into not just the Book Riot audience, but also the wider podcast listening world. We didn't want to tie it directly to one of our other products and audiences, so we set them up separately. There are ways that we could potentially do it under one Patreon, but it would involve a whole bunch of levels that would need to be navigated and just on the back end. It's logistically quite complex. We would love to find a solution in the future that allows us to offer both. Or maybe one that allows us to offer all of the podcast content inside of Book Riot All Access, which is our membership program that unlocks paywalled content that's available on the site and in our newsletters. That's also limited right now for technical reasons like plugging all the pipes types together. It's just way more complicated. Yeah. Than you think it should be from the outside and because our content management system is set up the way that it is and we're not running on something like substack that just lets you do sort of all the pieces at once. Yeah, we're just much more complicated than that. But we do think about it. We hear you. At some point, I'm gonna like run comparisons of the membership lists for the two patreons and figure out what the overlap is. And then from there we might. We might be able to offer some kind of discount or bund. But with this show being under a year old and still really in the growth phase, it's too soon to know.
- [14:26]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. And another thing to think about too, this is nuts and bolts. You asked. Is like some people are on monthly, some people are on annual. So that's an additional complication. At the same time, probably the simplest way to do. We could have a level underneath either the zero to well read Patron or the. Or the Book Riot podcast where you could get the bonus content from the other. But it would come to you from just that thing. Like we'd have to repost the things over there. It's all kind of wonky. We're sorry. We wish it was a little bit easier. Trust me, it pains no one greater than us to manage this. Whatever. Individuals whose ears are buzzing somewhere who's touching all the money at the same time, I would suspect in the fullness of time we may have a Voltron. One thing to rule them all, but it might be some time before we get to. That makes sense.
- [15:13]
Vanessa Diaz
Great. Well, I have another question that funnily enough, I think I'm going to have the best answer to. But we'll get that out of the way since it's not the Vanessa show, but someone who listens to the Book Riot podcast for a long and just really appreciates the way we've helped them kind of sharpen their understanding of the canon and discourse was specifically asking, do we know of any resources specifically that talk about all that but from a South Asian and Indian authors we just happened to on the site organically way before this question was ever posed to my eyeballs. Have a contributor, Arvin hello who lives in the Philippines who put together a really cool post called the Best Book Talk Bookstagram and bookish newsletter creators across the globe. It is not specifically just South Asian, but it is from like again a global perspective, so not necessarily American based. And I think that's going to be a really great resource for folks that are creating lots of different kinds of bookish content. Obviously there's no exact comp to zero to well read but it's going to be a great resource for that. So I'm just going to say that we can put that link in the show notes for people and they can navigate to that. Unless you'll have any other contributions you want to add.
- [16:09]
Jeff O'Neill
I was going to say I poked around in Apple podcasts for this and I didn't find anything necessarily. The other thing, and maybe Rebecca was going to go there anyway is substack may be the place to go poke around.
- [16:19]
Vanessa Diaz
There are some substacks in that listing
- [16:21]
Jeff O'Neill
and seeing some substacks.
- [16:22]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, yeah, I would look at substack. It's exceedingly challenging for podcasts outside of just trying to google your way to it because when you're inside especially the Apple podcast app, those are geo targeted. So when I pull up like the best books podcasts, it's showing me the ones for US listeners. Folks in the UK are seeing a different list. Folks in India are seeing an even different another different list. So if you're like in the US and you're trying to find podcasts about South Asian literature produced by folks who live over there, it's going to be challenging to do it. So I think starting with this list from you Vanessa, and thanks for pulling that in is a really great place to be.
- [16:59]
Jeff O'Neill
Of course another tactic you might do in newsletter substack has a better directory. That's what I'm saying there. They just have a better directory. But if you search for an individual book you're interested in sometimes that will then discover. You'll discover posts individual episodes from which the rest of it could be about.
- [17:17]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, this is also one of my hacks when researching the show is as I'm like on a Wikipedia page for something and there's a little footnote citation next to it. Go to those articles and then maybe go through the things that those articles cite and that can get you to a critic or a publication that is doing what it is that you're looking for.
- [17:36]
Vanessa Diaz
Great suggestions. Thank you to Shailee for that question. We're gonna move on to some questions about reading habits. We have one from Bianca who says, how do I engage even deeper with my reading? Besides annotating and asking the text or author basic questions, they want to kind of think deeply about the text in front of them and remember more than just the main themes and ideas.
- [17:55]
Rebecca Schinsky
I love this question. I have a question for Bianca right back.
- [17:59]
Vanessa Diaz
What do you do?
- [18:00]
Rebecca Schinsky
What are you doing with your annotations? Like, I think, find some way to synthesize the thinking that you've done as you've read. So when I'm preparing for an episode of the show, I read all the books for the show in print. So I'm like, marking stuff on the pages. I'm making little notes in the margins. And then when I'm finished, I sit down and I go back page by page, and I sort of transcribe over the notes that are useful in doing that. You start to weed out which things you marked are actually meaningful and which things just seemed like they might be at the time and then turn it into some kind of finished product. Like, it can just be for you. But I think a reading journal is a great place to do this. Our friend and one of the original contributors of Book Riot, Greg Zimmerman, just wrote on his substack, which is called the New Dork Review of books, about the 25th anniversary of his reading journal. And when he's not blogging, he just takes notes about everything that he's read. Obviously, it's ideal, like, if you can find a friend that you can have those conversations with, or the book buddy that I've pitched on these episodes in the past. Like, maybe you don't need a whole club. You need one person who will engage with you about this stuff. But I think it's finishing the reading process and then doing something that approximates like, a classroom of your own. Write yourself a couple paragraphs about it or put it in a reading journal or think about how you would describe and explain this book. You can even take the framework we use for the podcast and, you know, run your book through that. Like, what are the essential questions or the immortal questions that Art asks? How would you rate this on the elements of the 0 to well read score? What does it feel like to read it? What are the big ideas? What do you think, Jeff?
- [19:40]
Jeff O'Neill
Those are all great. I have a couple of additional ones, too. Is I would also then maybe deny the premise in which you will ever to be able to fully formulate your thoughts on any of these books. That's why we're still talking about them. So I think I may live with the struggle of never really feeling like you wrapped your arms all the way around Vineland or something like that. Like if you come back to it ten years later, even if, Bianca, you wrote a really beautiful 5,000 word disquisition on your opinions, your feelings, your interpretation, my guess is 10 years later that's going to be meaningfully different. So it's an evolved your, your understanding is going to evolve over time. So maybe don't put so much pressure on yourself to like get the answer, to digest it. It's like here's now beyond. Here's what I take out of the Great Gatsby or what it means to me. That's going to be sort of like Heraclitus says, you never step into the same river twice because the water keeps on flowing. Now having said that, I think capturing your, your thoughts, your questions, your inquiry at that time is very valuable. I maybe would turn it on his head and rather than journaling is great, but what questions do you come out of the book with? Right. So rather than shut it down, open up. Right. Okay. I'm reading this and I was thinking this or I'm wondering about this got me thinking about this. X, Y or Z and those things then you can help remember. Then maybe you write a little answer to that at that moment. A little. Why it's interesting why you're having difficulty with that questions at the same time, I think we have been taught and I don't know what your own educational background is, Bianca, like the five paragraph essay where you have a thesis and body and conclusion. We're not in that business anymore. Usually especially in the era of LLMs which write that way, it's like one question leading to another. The other thing I would suggest is put it in constellation with other things that you know about. It could be a book, it could be a movie, it could be a TV show. But like put it in context, then you can start to see it through some sort of stereoscopic kind of vision at the same time. But Rebecca's initial thing. What is my initial thing? Is like, okay, you've done this annotating, then what? That's just the raw material, then what? But there's other ways of like capturing your feeling at the moment of time, but also not suggesting you're chiseling on a stone tablet or something like that.
- [21:53]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah, that's Great. Thank you again, Priyanka, for that question. We have another one from Katie that is like the most common question I've ever. We get a lot, but it's a thing that readers just always think about. And that's great. But it's just asking, how do you track your reading? Do you do Goodreads? Do you do Storygraph? Do you have the chaotic system I have? Yeah. And also, do you use bookmarks or do you dog ear your pages like a monster?
- [22:14]
Rebecca Schinsky
How dare you, Katie. Jeff, you want to take this one first?
- [22:19]
Jeff O'Neill
I have a Google Doc and I've been keeping it for 10 years at this point. Then I have like a paper thing from before that. So I don't do a lot of the more sophisticated things. Some people do where they're tracking like genre and page numbers. And mine is very instrumental. That's just so I can remember what I've read a so they don't try to read it again. But if I'm buying a gift for someone and we're doing a roundup on a show, you know, just kind of keeping track of it so that I have access to it because I will forget some of the stuff that I've read at all. Not what's in the book, clearly that's gone. But that I even read the book is still something I need to capture at this point. It's just a Google Doc. Then I'm not, you know, I'm not in bed with one of these platforms. I know people like them, but I'm not really into that. So I don't do that at all. I think, Rebecca, you're probably similar. We don't touch the. The platform for us.
- [23:04]
Rebecca Schinsky
I also have a spreadsheet. It goes back to 2013 and it has expanded and contracted over the years. Like there are some years that contained a lot more variables about what I was reading. Now it is title, author, the number of pages, and then I keep track of like the gender of the author and am I reading enough authors of color against my personal goals? So it's quite simple now, but for the same reasons that Jeff was citing. Like every book lover has had the experience, I think of your at a party or someone asks you, like, what have you read lately? And it just, they all disappear from my mind. Like books. What are those? So being able to pull it up. But it's especially useful for preparing things for the show or like when we're nominating our favorite books of the year for the site, that kind of thing. So it really is just for Me as basic as a spreadsheet. I think I have enough social interaction around books thanks to our staff and colleagues and the bajillions of hours that Jeff and I have spent talking to each other that I don't feel the need for like social networking around books. To answer the second part of Katie's question, I generally don't use bookmarks. I do dog ear like a monster or leave my pen in the book at the place that I stopped reading. Or if it's French flaps or a hardcover, I will like put the flap in. Yeah, but I'm not precious about my books as objects, so. And Jeff, you're doing a lot of E reading for this.
- [24:33]
Jeff O'Neill
I use bookmarks for zero to well read. I use ebooks because I can just highlight the quotations and export them all at the same and then I find that probably for me, when it comes time to filling in the what does all mean? What does it like to read this? I'm really looking at my quote document as as my raw material. So I sort of do some inductive psychological, emotional reasoning out of that at the same time too. I'm a big believer though, when it comes to something you are going to want to capture. A lot of the books I read I'm not really trying to capture. I'm just getting through them at some point. But if you come back around to I'm going to make a project out of this. This I'm going to write about this. I do believe in a reading copy. I do have first editions and hardcovers that I don't want to mess up. I'll just go buy a paperback, a used paperback and I'll use that, a reading copy. So that's not uncommon for me to do. But now, weirdly, unless you're really collecting things are going to be valuable someday. What I have found immensely useful is my reading copies from when I was teaching or when I was a student now are my most precious versions because they've got my notes and in them, right? So like, you know, I think probably again, if you're a collector, most of us aren't collecting books that are going to be worth a whole bunch of money someday. The thing that is not replaceable is your own notations, your own thoughts, your own underlining of Seneca when I was 15, which is hilarious to go see what I was underlining of Seneca at 15. That is not replaceable. That's worth more to me than keeping the book in tidy form. I know other people do this, but the book as object does not matter that much to me. Except when it does. And I try to separate that. These books matter to me as objects. I'll keep them there. But most of my library is an active area. It's like the foyer to my house. I'm never going to expect all the shoes to be put away or all the umbrellas to be put up. Exactly right. That is a battle zone. And the best use of that is for it to be a little shabby, but also for it to use it. So that's how I think about my books.
- [26:27]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, I totally agree with that. Like, for the show, I end up buying reading copies of things that I have already in my personal library because it's like, I'm gonna mark the crap out of this book. But I've got like, my copy of Sula from college that I've now read half a dozen times. I have to change pen color every time I read it. And it's fun to see that. When I took paradise by Toni Morrison off the shelves right before we had Namwali Serpell on the show, a bunch of note cards fell out of have been tucked in the back since college when I was studying for the test.
- [27:00]
Jeff O'Neill
Amazing.
- [27:01]
Rebecca Schinsky
And like, all that stuff is so fun to find. But yeah, I think of the books, like, I did famously write a piece for the site several years back called Books are not Sacred Objects. I think of books as delivery devices. They're tools in getting those ideas into my head. And I want to utilize every bit of that as it suits me to process it.
- [27:23]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, great.
- [27:24]
Vanessa Diaz
Thank you. Thanks again to Katie. I feel very seen by Shannon's question, which is one posed to. I would argue all three of us being that we all have a four in front of our age. What is your go to reading position? They asked this. This part I love because it's a misconception. How does a professional reader read all day comfortably? And I was like, so funny thing, that's something you can address. But it's like, I think we're of a similar age range as the two of you. How do you know? Do you find it difficult to concentrate as eyes change as we age? So, yeah, lots of questions about, like, how do you read positionally? And then again, just bodies.
- [27:56]
Jeff O'Neill
Jeff, I am both old and big, so I have a double whammy here. My answer is I move around so I don't usually stay in the same position for very long. When it's nice outside. My ideal is on my porch in one of my cheap plastic chairs. On the porch I am mostly reading for this show on the iPad, which I can just, I don't have to hold it, I can just set it in my lap or I can put it into the landscape mode and I have the COVID turns into a little stand where I can sit there and I can just swipe And I find that anymore to be. And this goes to the question about eyes here. I can change the font size so it's very accessible to me to do it that way. I find it the most pleasurable, I guess, for lack of a better term, to read a hardback in my hand. Like that's what I think of when I think about reading. But instrumentally, it is more efficient for me to do my iPad when I'm sitting up in a chair and balancing it like on my lap or on the wide arm of a chair. And I could just sit there and swipe and then I can also highlight with one hand and I don't have my pen and all the other stuff like that. I do find it difficult now to find the right distance for my eyes as I've gotten older. I'm wearing my readers right now. I also don't really love a progressive lens because then I end up doing this thing where you're looking down your nose at things all the time. So I do have a dedicated pair of reading computer glasses that, that I should not be driving in or watching TV in. But that's easiest for me rather than bouncing through three prescriptions in one frame at the same time. We also don't read all day. We don't. I can't really spend eight or nine hours a day reading just even comfortably. But my kind of like a lot of things. After about two hours of serious reading, I think I'm not as good at reading. After two hours, yeah, the brain gets full, I start to get foggy, I start to skip, I start to wander. And so I think like a lot of things, I find this true of most things, like a couple hours of it at a time and then switch context or do even just take a break for a little bit, wire a little bit longer. And this has been true of me. I don't know about you guys, but I've never really been able to sit there for eight hours straight. I could do a few three hours over the course of the day if I'm really ambitious. But I'm not reading nine hours straight in the daylight.
- [30:05]
Rebecca Schinsky
Even when I talk about something having been a one sitting read for me like Go Gentle by Maria Semple earlier this year Was what that really means is I read it over the course of one day, but I was on the couch for a while, and then I, like, ran some errands, and I came back to it, and then I got up and did some chores, and then I sat back down with it. I need that break just to put some numbers to it. Because we don't read all day. Most of what we're doing is not reading during our work days. I probably, on a typical day, read for half an hour in the morning with my coffee. I might with zero to well read. Sneak an hour of reading into the workday when we don't have a bunch of calls, and then maybe another hour in the evenings. There's a lot of time on weekends.
- [30:47]
Vanessa Diaz
I.
- [30:48]
Rebecca Schinsky
We have a big sectional couch, and I like to sit with my legs out in front of me and a pillow under my knees. And, like, we gotta make sure the hips are supported. And all the things that you're doing when you're not reading become really important. Like, also, we're just in our 40s, so there's a lot of stretching that happens in my house. But I think this is kind of similar to what we were saying in the previous question about books being instrumental. Like, I don't do a lot of romanticizing my reading life because my reading life is so practical for my working, exercising my liver.
- [31:21]
Jeff O'Neill
It's just part of it, right?
- [31:23]
Rebecca Schinsky
So it's usually like, the hair is in a messy bun. There's a pen in my hair. I do have the book in my hands. We're just getting in reading time wherever we can, and then taking walks and doing chores and, like, trying to be a person who's moving around. I have reading glasses in every room of the house now.
- [31:41]
Jeff O'Neill
I need to do that. I need to have pens and reading glasses and add just, like, geocached around my house.
- [31:47]
Rebecca Schinsky
I got tired of, like, having to go to another room, just buy cheap readers. And, like, whether it's your coffee table or your bedside table or your desk or, like, I work at the island in our kitchen a lot. I just want them to be right there. And it does get difficult to concentrate after more than an hour or two. Also because of, you know, just eye fatigue. So take it easy, Shannon.
- [32:09]
Jeff O'Neill
I've always been immune to sort of the aesthetic reading scenes that people like to glorify. And I don't know if it's on social whatever, because. Because if I'm really in the zone, I kind of don't even remember where I am most of the Time. Right. The timer is like my back. The timer is not like my tea cozy or the perfect thing I've got laid out. So it's extremely instrumental to me as well. I've always been able to read really kind of anywhere. Except in a moving car in a disaster zone.
- [32:36]
Vanessa Diaz
No, no.
- [32:37]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. My personal ideal is on a plane with the white noise of the plane happening all around me. And I just live in perpetual denial. That plane WI fi is a. Like, I'm getting on that plane. I'm ignoring reality. The white noise is going to put me in the zone. That's where I want to be.
- [32:53]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah, I love that. I mean, I famously do romanticize reading from time to time. And even I have a two hour romance. Romance cutoff.
- [32:58]
Rebecca Schinsky
What does that look like?
- [32:59]
Vanessa Diaz
Vanessa, I'm just a person who loves a vibe. Like, I think I talked about this last time on the show, so I won't. Or it was on the book Riot Mailbag. But like, I will absolutely turn on the silly little fireplace thing or like music. I don't like quiet. Quiet. I never actually have, like, it doesn't bother me per se. But I like a little bit of ambient noise, so I'll put on some. It has to be somewhat related to the book. Not related, but I don't want to listen to, I don't know, like something super upbeat if I'm reading a horror. But so I'll just kind of match it because I love that kind of thing. I do love a little bit of ambiance, but even that is only like, okay, we're going to do that for a couple hours, then I'm going to get up and go for a walk. So, I mean, just got to do whatever feels right to you is my general feeling. But man, the body absolutely dictates the position and like, how long for most of that.
- [33:41]
Rebecca Schinsky
So yeah, this is another place where like just a quick shout out for the Spotify page match feature, which has gotten really good. Like, I've tried it a couple times with nonfiction and memoirs where if, like, you're really into it, but you just cannot be sitting that long. Like bouncing from the written copy to an audiobook to take a walk or wash the dishes or whatever is another way to like, keep your reading time where you want it to be without your body suffering. Great.
- [34:07]
Vanessa Diaz
We have one more question of this kind of category and then we'll move on. And I think we can keep this one relatively brief, even though it is like a big question. Just because I think we all know how to Answer this at least. I think knowing you too, and it is just asking. This is Hillary. How do you maintain reading as a pillar of your life during a big life change? Specifically, she's asking because she just had a baby a year and a half ago, and she's like, hey, it's, you know, changed my life. And I'm trying to, like, feel like myself. Reading was a big part of my identity. Like, what are your thoughts on that?
- [34:34]
Rebecca Schinsky
I'm gonna pass this to Jeff because I don't have kids.
- [34:36]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, I had something not dissimilar when our son was born. And for me, it was making audiobooks a part of my life. That was the simplest thing for me to do at the same time. But like anything, you may have to make time for it in a way you didn't have to make time for it. I remember I said something on the BR Pod a long time ago that a listener wrote back a really long email about saying, I don't rewatch movies anymore. Right? Because I don't really have. Well, I have the time, but I'm not choosing to use the time that way anymore because my kids have taken up gloriously and for a short time, taken up a lot of my time. But then you got to find other ways to do it, and you may have to be more intentional than you would before. I will say this, too. If you had a baby one and a half years ago, it's not always going to be like it is right now. A one and a half year old is a lot of work, and they're going to be a lot of work. They're always a lot of work. But you're going to have more time come up. You're going to have more energy and attention come up. So this is not forever where you are right now doesn't mean it's going to go back to the way it was. But zero to like two and a half is a pretty hard time to find time for something like reading, which is silent and still most of the time and takes a certain kind of attention and alertness that you maybe aren't having right now. But you also might say, this is my time. You know, kind of like the Yardbirds, by way of the Bible say, for everything there is a season, and it might be for this season, you're just not reading as much, and that's okay. You might keep the fires burning, the embers aglow, you know, read for pleasure a little bit more. If you are more of a classics kind of reader, a hardcore history reader, I Don't know what you are as a reader, Hillary, but you might just sort of get through this time with whatever's fun. Keep that muscle available to you. Throw on a podcast about books. We have a lot of people that don't read as much as they'd like to, but they listen to us talk about books. And that can scratch kind of the same itch. It doesn't do the same thing, but it can keep you feeling like you're in the game and you're not completely devoid or detached from an intellectual or philosophical aesthetic kinds of experience where you don't have the juice right now. And that's okay not to have the juice for a little while.
- [36:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. I think I'll just add that anthologies and short story collections are a good hack for this. They have been for me in other seasons of life where reading in an extended or more deeply engaged way just wasn't available. But maybe you've got enough time for a 20 page short story or a 10 page essay. The best American collection is a great place for this. Like you get to take in some of the best short stories and essays of the past year. You could go like, pick up a bunch of the past years and then that's also a way into discovering writers that you love. And when you are ready to do book length, detailed, like long work again, you can pick up their full length books and check them out. But I think flexibility about what it means to be a reader. Just because you're on a drier season doesn't mean you're not a book person anymore. And giving yourself low friction, low effort ways to reach for books or to feel engaged and connected is at least that's what's worked for me in the past.
- [37:55]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah, I always say the books will always be there. It's fine. It's my big takeaway. You come in and out of it and it's okay. But thanks for that question, Hilary. All right, so we're gonna move on to some different kinds of themes. We have one on genre that I'm really interested in as a person who used to not read the genre and now does. So they have their own opinions. This is from Jessica, but she would like to know what y' all consider sort of relwed mandatory for contemporary hor. And I don't actually think either of you read much horror from. So this may not be a question for.
- [38:22]
Jeff O'Neill
I think this is obvious. I mean this is easy to me unless I misunderstand contemporary horror. We've talked to enough authors that say they Just say Stephen King over and over. It's so important for so many, you know, Stephen Graham Jones and like, all kinds of people. So probably, you know, pick your poison. I don't know. Like, it is the one that I think people have read the most. But you can do the Shining, like pick a Stephen King, one of the big ones. And. And so, you know, I think it was Hemingway that said American literature came out of Huckleberry Finn. I think American, Western, English horror as we know it has come out of Stephen King. And we're going to be living in the Stephen King shadows for as long as those generations that grew up in the 80s having access at their public library and just pulling them off the shelf and scaring the living bejesus out of themselves. Like most of the horror. I would be shocked if there weren't major horror writers or even nudelest horror writers that don't have Stephen King at the number one of the list of, like, why they became a horror writer.
- [39:19]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, I think that's the number one with a bullet answer. And it's not just horror writers. Like, we just recorded an episode about Colson Whitehead and Stephen King was huge for him. Like, a lot of the writers who were doing literary things, but exploring genre, really, anybody who came up in the 70s was reading a lot of Stephen King. I just pulled it up on Goodreads. The Shining is his Most popular with one 1.7 million ratings. And then it comes after that with 1.3. So those are probably your two biggest ones, but I think. Really? Yeah. Pick your Stephen King and get in there.
- [39:53]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah, yeah, that's a great one. Yeah. Adding to that, as far as, like, contemporary canonites, people who. Absolutely. I've heard cite Stephen King. But you said the Stephen Graham Jones. I think Mariana Enriquez is like a really interesting. Because she's really representative of that wave in Latin America. Tanana Reeve, do. I could go on, but. But I. Yeah. So a Stephen King and then all the people that cite Stephen King, there's lots of great ones out there doing work to diversify the genre. So I think those are super.
- [40:17]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, I bet a Google for writers inspired by Stephen King would take you down some interesting paths.
- [40:21]
Jeff O'Neill
It would just have all the writers. It was just a list of all the writers.
- [40:24]
Rebecca Schinsky
The Venn diagram is a circle.
- [40:26]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, the Venn diagram is a circle. A real weirdo on our. A real weirdo on our next writer. This is a strange.
- [40:32]
Vanessa Diaz
This is a weirdo I really, really loved. I was like, what? Oh, okay, I understand what's I just
- [40:35]
Jeff O'Neill
included that for fun. You don't have to read that.
- [40:37]
Vanessa Diaz
No, I know. And it was great fun for me. The beginning of the question, I was like, okay, cool. So it says, hey, I really enjoyed the Emily Wilson episode. I always admire the English accents. How do you invite your guests to your podcast and do most of them accept? And before you answer, I really loved it. The next part was like, by the way, so and so's fire damage is turning out to be more than expected. And I was like, wait, what? Because this is from Jeff's dad.
- [40:56]
Jeff O'Neill
This is my dad. Hi, dad.
- [40:57]
Rebecca Schinsky
Hi, dad.
- [40:58]
Vanessa Diaz
Hi, dad.
- [40:58]
Jeff O'Neill
Hi, Jeff's dad, Dr. Lynn O', Neill, piping in. How do we invite guests to our show? So this is both, I think think he was listening to Zero to well Red, but he's also heard us on the BR Pod at the same time. How do we do this, Rebecca?
- [41:09]
Rebecca Schinsky
It happens in a couple of ways. Typically, we have landed on somebody that we think would be interesting for a reason. Like, we knew the Odyssey was coming out. We knew we were going to do an episode on it. We thought it would be fun to talk with Emily Wilson. And we are currently working in a mode where rather than have an author on while we are analyzing their book, we want to have them on to be an expert about something related to their book. So it was like, well, let's talk about how to approach those kinds in the nitty gritty. I email someone at the publisher if I can get directly to that person's assigned publicist and say, here's what we're looking for. Sometimes it goes the other way around, where the publishers know about the show and they will say, hey, this is going on. Do you want to have this person on? For instance, Namwali Serpell had her own podcast called Passages on Morrison that was coming out that Random House, Penguin Random House was promoting. And the podcast person over there emailed me and was like, hey, hey, this seems like a good fit. Would you like to have her on the show? And of course, we were delighted in terms of do most of them accept. We have not issued that many invitations for Zero to well read because, like, the show is so new and we're figuring out the ways that we want to incorporate guests. But most of the ones we've invited have said yes. The ones who have said no are very, very fancy.
- [42:28]
Jeff O'Neill
Yes.
- [42:28]
Rebecca Schinsky
And I have not taken it personally that they've said no. And then for the Book Riot podcast, almost everyone that we invite over there says yes. And we're Tending to invite people that are subject matter experts on certain topics that on that show it's more like, oh, this is just really interesting, this work these people are doing. And we think our listeners would be interested in it as well. There's a little bit more flexibility.
- [42:50]
Jeff O'Neill
It's funny, BR is to the place where it is and we can get almost everyone we would want except the ones we can't. Right. Like there's like the very like most famous authors or, or that like proper celebrities that have a book may not be available to us. But there's like, there's some people that are doing in a New Yorker profile or they're doing the New York Times or they're doing the Today show or something like that. So we've had a few say they're too busy. Some people come back around. We also don't do that much of just wanting to talk to an author of a book. We'd rather just read the book and talk about it. Honestly, for first edition, when I was doing that, I would say I'd get about 85% of the people that I was interested in, but I was also kind of self centered, selecting a little bit at the same time. So there are some people that we've read and loved and talked about their books which I've invited and they've said not for us. I won't name their names because it doesn't matter. But like it's kind of like 95% of the people we could get I think at this point. But there's 5% that might be tough.
- [43:49]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think that's about right. Like this show is a big fish in a pretty small pond. Like zero to well read is pretty consistently in the top 10 books podcasts on Apple. We're one of the essentials. It's trending. Our downloads make us like in the top 1% of all podcasts. All podcasts, not just book podcasts. But that top tenth of a percent are huge shows doing like hundreds of thousands if not millions of listens per episode. And those shows can get the tippy top of authors who are going to go on to, you know, like Armchair Expert or Ezra Klein or NPR Fresh Air, that kind of thing. And often the folks at that level like they're busy doing those kinds of things and they don't have space in the calendar for something else. Maybe we could get them when the paper bag comes out. Maybe we can get them in between books. Like we're kind of playing with that. Can we get somebody when they're off cycle. But yeah, in terms of like a straightforward author interview, you don't hear us do those because everybody else does them and we're really looking for a fun way in.
- [44:47]
Jeff O'Neill
Vanessa, I did you dirty. Let me do the next one here because a nice big long one because I had a specific thing I was going to pull out and I realized I didn't do it for you. So this is from Betsy, writing about my brilliant friend. And her critique is that we didn't read the whole series, all four of the novels in the series, and that we were close to getting it. And to get the whole thing, we need to do the whole thing again. I'm not going to tell you to feel differently about it. Here's my thesis statement on why to take it as one and why I don't feel the need to do all four at the same time. A she could have written all in one volume. War and Peace exists. Moby Dick exists. If you wanted to take them all as one, you could make that artistic choice or you could have fought your editor or whatever to make that artistic choice. So we're going to read them as presented. The second one one is that was the one that gets read the most and it was number one on the list. It wasn't number two, it wasn't number three, it wasn't number four, and take it as it is. Now, does that mean I have completely about the whole project? No, but we weren't talking about the whole project. We were talking about that single book on its own. Does it change if you read them all? Yeah. Does Huck Finn change if you read Tom Sawyer and Connecticut Yankee and the King Arthur Court? Yeah. Does your understanding of any one particular book change if you've read everything? Everything else, yeah, But I think I'm going to take it as read for this particular one. If you're going to write a novel in parts, it should say Part one. I just am going to think that way. And it doesn't. So I'm taking as it is.
- [46:11]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. I think also I've seen some comments on that episode about My Brilliant Friend where people are like, they should have brought on someone who really loved the book. Like, we don't know. We don't know where we're going to land on it until we read them. I think you had read My Brilliant Friend first. I had not read it. We are reading and then we're recording an episode. And these shows are trying to do something different than the like. Let's all just celebrate this for people who love It. You can hear it in the Twilight episode too. I think in many of them where we're like, here is what it feels like to read this. Here were like, for me, especially with my brilliant friend, like, it was really challenging to get outside the weight of expectation from all of the accolades that that book has received. And that's something that a reader who's going to it today is going to run into. They might not have run into it when the book first came out, but we're going to talk about our experiences of it. If we really. If we both really hated. I don't think it's gonna make the list, but we could make an interesting episode. We've done interesting. We've had interesting conversations about books that we both really hated before. But the goal of the show is not to explain ourselves or validate why people love a particular book by going out to find somebody who loves those books when we just happen to be like, I think we both really appreciated My brilliant friend.
- [47:25]
Jeff O'Neill
My brilliant friend. I don't think it's the number one book of the century so far. But that's one man's opinion.
- [47:29]
Rebecca Schinsky
Right. Neither of us was in like all caps, exclamation points, muppet arms mode about it. But that's just not what we're trying to do here. And I understand it can be a bummer if you loved a book and you don't hear one of us reflect that back. But that's not the goal that we're working towards.
- [47:46]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. And we talk about Gilead or something like that. Like we're taking the book on its own terms and that's a book that we love. But we're not like, you've got to read all four of them because it stands on. On itself. I also think that's just part of
- [47:55]
Vanessa Diaz
the authenticity of it. Personally.
- [47:57]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. I think we're even something like, I think probably the hardest book for us to get through jointly. Rebecca Tom of Iran was Wuthering Heights.
- [48:05]
Rebecca Schinsky
It was Man I Suffered.
- [48:07]
Jeff O'Neill
But we're looking for some way to engage with that's interesting, enriching to our own experience and helps other people have some context to get something out of it, understand it for themselves, even if they're not ever going to read the book by themselves. And it's just not going to be the case that we're going to love everything. And I think think also inherent in that is a thesis statement about what we understand well to be well read means, which is you're going to take seriously things that aren't in your comfort zone that aren't your cup of tea and do something other than I didn't like this. That also means you're going to do something other than I love this. So that's what we do.
- [48:38]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah.
- [48:38]
Rebecca Schinsky
Nope.
- [48:39]
Jeff O'Neill
But I hear you. If you read them all, I guarantee my reaction would be different if I read all four of them. I'm not guarantee you it's a bit better, but I'm willing to entertain that. Like, you know what? Now that I see the totality of this thing, I love the whole series better. But I, I am going to stick to my guns in this regard of like, it was one book and it was presented as one book and as a one book. It is what it is.
- [49:00]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah. And this is a person, by the way, who genuinely loves the podcast, which I appreciate. So yeah, it's just that's the way it goes. Again, part of my appeal to the show and why I volunteered to do more work to do on it is because it is a very authentic approach to reading, which is this. Like, if the only reason you're reading a book is because you're convinced you have to love it and that that's just never going to be a good. Like, I think you're going to be
- [49:20]
Jeff O'Neill
discouraged with you're going frustrated with the quote unquote great books if you do that.
- [49:24]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah, like, you're just going to be
- [49:25]
Jeff O'Neill
like, what do people get out of these things? I hate this book. Am I broken or are they, you know? And the truth is neither is true.
- [49:31]
Vanessa Diaz
Neither is true.
- [49:32]
Jeff O'Neill
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Vanessa Diaz
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Jeff O'Neill
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Rebecca Schinsky
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Vanessa Diaz
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Rebecca Schinsky
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Vanessa Diaz
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Rebecca Schinsky
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Vanessa Diaz
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Rebecca Schinsky
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Jeff O'Neill
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Rebecca Schinsky
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Vanessa Diaz
Well, the rest of our questions are definitely from folks who all have again, either some feet not feedback but like suggestions for read alikes that are either asking for read alikes or are offering read alikes from our many, many, many episodes. The first one is I don't think we have a name for this person, but they asked specifically about Breeding Sweetgrass saying they really, really enjoyed that resonated with them. And that they loved a book about the Canadian forests called when the Forests Breathe, saying that it's not an exact comp but that it does spend a lot of time, you know, engaging in some of the similar themes. So is there anything else you'd want to add? They did want to put at the end as a shout to Rebecca that they also read the overstory and thought that they were unique in their opinion that it wasn't that interesting. So yeah.
- [51:35]
Rebecca Schinsky
Any other thoughts on ratings is overrated. Fight me
- [51:41]
Jeff O'Neill
and maybe we can. Oh, go ahead Rebecca, you go first.
- [51:43]
Rebecca Schinsky
I was just gonna say I just appreciate this recommendation cause I remember having read Breeding Sweetgrass a couple of times and then talking about it on that episode that it is one of those books that's really difficult to find read alikes for. It does something pretty singular and unique. It's hard to find another book that is set up in the same way that combines the kinds of perspectives that Robin Wall Kimmerer is combining. And that weaving of indigenous wisdom into nature writing is really compelling. And it sounds like when the Forest Bre has that note as well. So thank you to our unnamed listener for writing in with that.
- [52:16]
Jeff O'Neill
Well, down, I think down the way we have another braiding sweetgrass one and they recommended the Cosmos series, the Carl Sagman. The Carl Sagman series from the 80s of how everything is connected. I'm not sure I would have made that connection. I clearly didn't make that connection myself, but I thought that was pretty fascinating. What are these other efforts to integrate different kinds of ways of understanding? I was also thinking of the Power of Myth by Joseph King. Can like, can I look at this thing in a different kind of holistic way? So I thought that was fascinating. I Am especially interested in here. Here's a meta note for everyone on not necessarily books in that vein, but there are other works of art, painting, a ballet, music or opera or a movie or TV show. Because I am. I know a lot of the books that people mention and that's fine. But what I don't know are these other domains as well. So I'm especially interested in like oh, this is something that's similar or here's an adaptation or here's something that takes up a similar kind of question or artistic mode. Because that I might. I consider myself barely well read in this field, but whatever the well read equivalent is in most other art forms, I'm a neophyte at the very, very best.
- [53:21]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's hard to be an expert in more than one thing.
- [53:23]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah, sure, yeah. Famously we had a listener who really enjoyed our 1984 episode. So they couldn't agree more with the comps to andor. That is a show I absolutely need to watch. People who I know who are like vehemently opposed to most things also love andor. Yeah. So it's. I think it's finally time. The best comp that they wanted to share with the People for 1984 is Evgeny Yamatyin's We Are Y' all familiar with this one? I'm definitely not. Yes.
- [53:46]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, it came up in the research for 1984.
- [53:49]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah. It says. Orwell says it inspired him. So that's great. They love spec fic, sci fi. Kind of shouting out the Parable of the Sower Never Let me Go episodes and specifically have the first of a few questions about will you consider covering X. So do we have any plans to cover Ursula K. Le Guin?
- [54:06]
Rebecca Schinsky
We do someday.
- [54:09]
Jeff O'Neill
Plans. I don't know if. Plans that rise to level of plans,
- [54:11]
Vanessa Diaz
intense intentions, long document of ideas.
- [54:15]
Rebecca Schinsky
Just this morning I was going through like the master list of all the books that we might talk about someday and putting in their publication years so that I can start to do like big anniversary kinds of sorting. And there are many Ursula K. Le Guin books on there. I believe the Left Hand of Darkness, wizard of Earthsea and the Dispossessed are all on that list. Which one we do first and when we do that is a question I would anticipate we'd get to her within the first few years of the show, but that's as far as I can go.
- [54:46]
Jeff O'Neill
We're looking for some reason to talk about in particular week a lot of the times. Like why now? Is there an anniversary or an adaptation or Is there a new critical thing coming out or a anniversary? We're also looking at mix at the same time. I think Le Guin is an interesting case where if you read books, you know. But if we were to doing a people on the street that care about books that maybe really read 12 books a year and we gave them a list of a hundred authors and say, have you heard of this person? I think probably a lot less name recognition than someone like I would be thrilled to see. So that's always hard to know at the same time like, and then which of. Because she also writes across ages. Right. Wizard of Earthy is kind of a middle grade book. Some of the other stuff is much darker. She has nonfiction. I think another thing that's difficult with Le Guin is there's not one to hang your hat on right away. I don't think. Like there's not like if you're going to do Le Guin, you can even hear what we're talking about. We're saying, do Le Guin not do this book where really I think as we're getting through this sort of first wave, it's like it's even less that author. I think Rebecca. It's like that book is one that people know about. They see it on a bookshelf. They didn't read it in class. They hear someone talking about it. And Le Guin doesn't really rise to that level yet. Now completely worthy of talking about and be make a good episode. But I think we're in the low hanging fruit stage. We're like picking apples off the ground right now and there are apples all over the place. We got too many apples. We can't eat them all. But I think Le Guin is a bit of a reach up into the tree, which we'll do because I can
- [56:13]
Vanessa Diaz
already hear somebody like, what do you mean? No, we're not saying Le Guin isn't the great that she is. It's just again, we're at a different stage in this particular phase of the podcast. But someday maybe cool. Potentially. We'll see.
- [56:25]
Rebecca Schinsky
I'm sure we'll get there.
- [56:27]
Jeff O'Neill
We, I should say by semiautin, if anyone's interested in reading. It's been a while since I've read it, so my memory is fuzzy. It's pretty impersonal. Like they're robots that have digital names. It feels a little bit more like a thought exercise to me. My memory of it. One of the things that's amazing about 1984, how personal it is with Winston, there's this love story. And what would an actual squishy human body be doing in this sort of situation where with we it it is like it feels. It's maybe more terrifying. I don't know which one is more terrifying, but there's like a totalizing vision that in 1984 there is a little bit more of an affordance for the human perspective. Again, I think it's been 20 years since I read W.E. in graduate school, so take that with a grain of salt.
- [57:14]
Vanessa Diaz
Cool. We had someone else, Nikita, write in about the Jhumpa Lahiri episode about Interpreter Maladies, how they have kind of been chasing that short story high since 2017 and really appreciated the perspective we gave for understanding why it felt so different to them and asked if we have ever considered doing a podcast on short stories in the New Yorker. And I can't remember, Jeff, you kind of teased the idea of like short. Not that we would do an episode, but you talked about doing something like this for a book club when we reread Bartleby the Scrivener. But anyway, that was a question that came up.
- [57:43]
Jeff O'Neill
We had such a good time with Bartleby. And again, it's hard to know if that's the exception that proves the rule. Rebecca, like, not every short story is Bartleby, but we could do a meaningful episode on individual short stories. I think I wrote Nikita back directly and I'll repeat what I wrote back to her here. There's like, I don't see us ever sort of focusing on the short stories of the New Yorker. But having said that, so many of the titanic works of 20th century short fiction first appeared in the New Yorker.
- [58:08]
Rebecca Schinsky
That's what I was going to say,
- [58:09]
Jeff O'Neill
that you may de facto do it anyway. So, you know, it's another one where the Venn diagram might be a circle. But I think we have a couple of novellas that we're doing soon. I think probably I asked the question, I think we got some response about, like, what short stories have people heard heard of but like A Good man is Hard to Find by Flannery o' Connor or the Gilded Six Six by Zora Neale Hurston, or the Lottery by Shirley Jackson or Telltale Heart. None of those appear to the New Yorker. But once you really get I think it's really once you get into the mid century, earlier in the century. The New Yorker, I believe, started in 1926, but it wasn't really until after the hiroshima piece in 1946 where, like, it became a national magazine that in the 20s and 30s was a Saturday Evening Post. That's where Hemingway and Fitzgerald and a lot of. And a lot of these people were writing the short stories. So it kind of moved right around mid century, but certainly in like the Updikes and the Roths and like those kinds of people and Alice Monroe's like those people were writing into the New Yorker. So there may be a themed like short stories of the 70s. Right. Like you could kind of look at those together. Might be interesting. Which would be kind of a de facto New Yorker episode. I think it'll lot of ways.
- [59:21]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. I think also just so many of the writers that are doing short stories today. As you were saying, Jeff, like we. We on the Book Riot podcast interviewed Louise Erdrich about her new collection Python's Kiss. Many of those were originally published in the New Yorker. Lauren Groff's collection Brawler, which came out earlier this year. Many of those were originally published in the New Yorker. A lot of Zadie Smith's essays start off in the New Yorker. So it's. The New Yorker is like the feeder system for a lot of the books and the kinds of writers that we are concerned with. And we have thought about doing some like starter packs kind of episodes, a starter pack of short stories, a starter pack of, I don't know, transcendentalist poetry. But I think some of those more granular things will come in later seasons of the show after we've picked up all the apples that are on the ground.
- [60:08]
Jeff O'Neill
I think Brokeback Mountain was originally in the New Yorker, which if people don't know, that's a short story within a larger collection for.
- [60:13]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah. So kind of in a backwards way, it seems like we're sort of accomplishing this maybe one way or another.
- [60:17]
Jeff O'Neill
But I mean, yeah, it's just that that's where. If you could get your story published in New Yorker, that's what everyone pick. That's their number one draft pick for where I could place my shorts short story in America. At least the last seven.
- [60:28]
Vanessa Diaz
We have the in. Sorry. In our next question is the most respectful way to ask this question. This person was like, I don't. I hope I'm doing this right. I hope I'm not online. Would you ever possibly consider this book? Thank you so much. Which I just appreciate you because that is not how most Internet discourse goes. People are asking us to do a thing.
- [60:43]
Rebecca Schinsky
Although our emailers are very polite in general.
- [60:46]
Vanessa Diaz
So polite. I'm like, oh, look at you. Like, I want to show you what my inbox can look like sometimes. But this person wrote in and said, you know how we considered covering something like angel down by Daniel, which just won the Pulitzer. It is a very different feeling kind of book to have won the Pulitzer. It surprised a lot of people, but they said that to them it felt like a spiritual sequel to McCarthy's Blood Meridian, which I hadn't heard someone say before. I also haven't read angel down yet. But, yeah, questions about stuff like that, which maybe we answered with the, like, apples on the ground. But just some thoughts.
- [61:13]
Rebecca Schinsky
I mean, we have been toying with how to do, like, late breaking news kinds of things on zero to, well, read. Somebody wins the Pulitzer or say a writer who writes in English or has been translated into English wins the Nobel. How and like, when does something rise to the level of a crash episode and how to handle that? Because behind the scenes, there's the reading, which takes time, and the research, which takes time. But also, our editor, Chica Onyadike, needs time to edit this podcast and make it good. And we could crash episodes, but it would require rearranging several people's working lives for a couple of days to do it. So it would really. We would really need to believe that it was worth it. With something like Angel Down, I'll speak for myself. Like, I haven't read it. I'm sure I'll read it at some point. That's still not, like, name recognition enough to me to cross the line of, oh, we should just, like, let's drop what we're doing. We should read that book tonight. We should record an episode in two days. Let's get it out there. My dream is that eventually we get to the place where people are winning the National Book Award and the Pulitzer and the Nobel that we already have episodes about, and we're able to surface those. But, you know, Daniel Kraus seems to be really announcing himself as a comer in American letters and someone who is being taken seriously and will continue to be taken seriously between the receptions of Whalefall and Angel Down. So I wouldn't count either of those out. But just know that, like, we're having those conversations behind the scenes as major book awards happen about what to do with them and when something rises to the level of stop the presses, Put this episode in. Make it happen right now.
- [62:52]
Jeff O'Neill
I. I didn't put every email we got into this document. I put this one here for a couple reasons. One, the books and then talking about. Did you get to the McCarthy part of that, Vanessa? I was thinking about. Did you mention. Okay, I'LL get to that in secondly, I kind of think if we were to do it, it certainly would be for the Pulitzer and the Nobel. I think it might be worth us thinking about putting a hole in our schedule. We know when these things are announced. Luckily, that's one thing we do know that makes this a little easier. If someone dies or there's a big announcement, that's going to be even more of a crashing kind of a situation. But I think not just because people are talking about, but I think it would be good. It's an interesting intellectual exercise because they're by definition going to be current. They are not going to have the weight of critical whatever. And we've heard about them and they've got a big not necessarily right. Daniel Krause is a good example. I've read Whale Fall and I've read angel down, but I'm not dealing with all the stuff I've read about people reading Daniel Krause or on a syllabus or something else. So you get maybe one of the first cracks at the pinata, frankly in something like is there a big insight intellectual review of angel down out there somewhere? I don't really know that there is right now. Not that's necessarily what we do. And then we get something kind of undriven snow to sled across and let our intellectual chips follow where they may. The Nobel comes from the other version, which most of the time the Nobel winner is completely, literally and figuratively foreign to us. And that's its own kind of proposition. We may be doing sort of reader listener service of here's what this is about. You heard them coming out. So I think I would argue and I haven't really, but I guess I'm arguing it for now, like put a hole in the calendar. And we just know we're going to crash one of these and hopefully it won't be someone that writes 1,100 page novels and we have to do something like that. But I think, and again, I don't have to be that weak, but maybe we say okay, when it comes out, we're going to know that in two weeks our episode is going to be on that book. I don't think it needs to be overnight.
- [64:43]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, I mean, and I think in the case that it was an 1100 page novel, if we wanted to take it on, that would be be a good candidate for a read along where we could pass over to the folks on Patreon, like we're all going to do this. Everybody go grab your copies. Like we're diving in ASAP so we can put a spiritual hole in the calendar for November when the Nobel comes out. We have no idea who that might be. I would love for it to be Louise Erdrich this year because I have her in the fantasy draft, but we'll see.
- [65:12]
Jeff O'Neill
I'm going to throw something back at Vanessa because I think I know Rebecca's answer. Answer. So Cormac McCarthy is of course on the list. We will get to Cormac McCarthy probably sooner rather than later. I think the big three for me that people know about Vanessa, I'm not saying this is the best one, are Blood Meridian, no Country for Old Men in the Road. Is that kind of your sense of it? Like, those are the three?
- [65:32]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah, yeah. I would have, like, verbatim. I was in my head clock and I'm with you. Yeah.
- [65:36]
Jeff O'Neill
Have you guys read all three of those? Or any of those? Where are you at on McCarthy, Vanessa?
- [65:40]
Vanessa Diaz
I've only read no country for Old Men and that was after watching Javier Bardem terrify the absolute crap out of me in the film adaptation. If I saw that man on a dark alley, I'd run still. But yeah, so that's the only one I've read.
- [65:50]
Jeff O'Neill
The scariest. Bad haircut in a minute.
- [65:52]
Vanessa Diaz
That bowl cut. I see it.
- [65:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, Memorable.
- [65:56]
Vanessa Diaz
Seems like a lovely human, but oof.
- [65:57]
Rebecca Schinsky
Anyway, yeah, I've also read no country for Old Men and Sutri. I've not read the Road, but spoiler alert, that'll be changing soon. And the Road is the number one on Goodreads by five times. It has more than a million ratings. And no country for Old men comes in two at 263,000.
- [66:18]
Vanessa Diaz
One million to 260.
- [66:20]
Jeff O'Neill
So when I do the which one is number one to talk about? I'm not even saying best, but, like, what's. Where's the one to like the trophy one to talk about? I end up like Vasini in the Princess Bride where I'm just sort of going back and forth. I'm sort of ping ponging between Blood Meridian and the Passenger and Stella Maris together. Those are packages in one thing just for all the Neapolitan people out there. They came to in one thing. We knew to read them together. That way they were part of the same thing. And then no country for Old Men. I don't know in the Road. Like, you hear me right now, I'm in a tizzy. This would be the greatest way to get me sort of stuck. Like if I'm a robot, like, ask me, which Cormac McCarthy should we do for zero to well read? And I will just be paralyzed by analysis till the end of that.
- [67:01]
Vanessa Diaz
In my back pocket.
- [67:03]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. The way that I've threaded the needle for some of those authors, especially in these early days of the show, is looking at, like, we want to get this author on. And either way, what is, like, clearly the biggest one that the most people are familiar with, or is there one that has some sort of anniversary hook to it where we can make it something timely? And sometimes those are the same things. Sometimes it's just we like this one better. Like, we started with the bluest eye for Toni Morrison, because that is the first one I wanted to do sula. We kind of went back and forth about it, like, no, let's start at the very beginning. And then Namwali Serpell came on and said that we should have started with sula, so, like, we'll get there.
- [67:41]
Vanessa Diaz
You can't win them all.
- [67:42]
Rebecca Schinsky
And of course, Beloved is the one that everyone knows Toni Morrison's name for, but that's also the most difficult. And we didn't want to come out of the gate in, like, the third episode of this show being like, here is the most difficult, traumatic book you're ever gonna read.
- [67:54]
Jeff O'Neill
I think I have to reframe it as there's not a wrong answer. There may not be a right answer, but there's not a wrong answer of this particular.
- [68:01]
Vanessa Diaz
I like that framing. So another listener specifically was listening to Midnight's. The Midnight's Children episode and wanted to know what your thought are as a comp for James. If you think this is a comp. James Elroy's American tabloid, or if you have anything else that you think are spiritual comparisons to Midnight Children, of course,
- [68:19]
Rebecca Schinsky
is by, I don't know, American tabloids.
- [68:22]
Jeff O'Neill
I don't need it, Jax. I put it on here because I was trying to think about the James Elroy of it all. Probably best known. I mean, clearly best known for LA Confidential and the Black Dahlia. He's an American crime writer. I don't have a sense of crime fiction is difficult to jump from a really good career in that genre into the kind of space we're talking about right now. Because it's not like an Agatha Christie situation where it's like the Queen of Crimes sold a billion, like, kind of changed the game or like a Stephen King or something like that at the same time, or a romance writer that really broke the seal and opened it up. James Ellroy is a wonderful practice Practitioner at the highest level within. I still think sort of American crime writing, but I don't know. I'm interested for feedback on the feedback. People 0 to well read listeners. James Elroy, do you have any sense of him as a. In this conversation is all. So forget the comp piece for a minute. I think that's interesting. American tabloid is not one that I know. I've only got a few James Elroy's under my belt. But I think what I wanted to highlight here is how deep the bench is for people that are writing really interesting and good books that may not be a great fit for the show and doesn't mean they're bad, doesn't mean these are better, but they just aren't quite in circulation in the way even a Twilight is.
- [69:45]
Vanessa Diaz
Right.
- [69:45]
Jeff O'Neill
It's just not. It's just not in the same circulation. It doesn't have the same. I am going to understand something different about American culture by wrestling with this in the way that a Twilight or something else is going to at this time.
- [69:56]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. I mean for Midnight's Children directly, the things that I think about as being similar are the other postmodernists. Like we talked about Pynchon, you know, we did Gabriel Garcia Markov.
- [70:09]
Jeff O'Neill
I mean those are the two right there.
- [70:11]
Rebecca Schinsky
Those like really messy, unruly, loud worlds of fiction where you feel reading it the way that the characters feel living inside the world. But I love it to see these like the creative lines that folks can draw between like I would never have. It would never have occurred to me to think about James Elroy or crime fiction at all as a connection for Midnight's Children. So even just that, like everybody's own little mental maps of how books are written, related to each other is so interesting.
- [70:40]
Vanessa Diaz
Now I really want to think about a crime fiction book that could land and I have access to these spreadsheets so I could just go check things. But.
- [70:45]
Jeff O'Neill
Well, it would probably be noir. Right. It'd be like the Maltese Falcon or Mildred Pierce or something like that kind of originated the noir and Elroy's riding in that tradition and bringing sort of the LA Hawaiian shirt vibe to it that sort of frankly, Pynchon is vibing on Inherent Vice. Right. He's sort of doing a James Elrond. So like, I don't know, it's hard to say.
- [71:04]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah.
- [71:04]
Rebecca Schinsky
And like Devil with a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley is one of those sort of legendary of crime fiction that's on the list. So that's kind of the direction I'm thinking.
- [71:14]
Vanessa Diaz
Ooh I'll definitely be listening to that.
- [71:16]
Jeff O'Neill
This next one's just a fun story, so that's why I put it here.
- [71:19]
Vanessa Diaz
I love this one. This is from Marissa, who was listening to our episode on Forever by Judy Blume, which is a book that her mom got for her fifth in fifth grade for Christmas because her family didn't read. So they just bought this for her back in 1977. They're like same Rebecca, but then she got her copy notes at all, which like we said, this is to us like some of the most valuable forms of, you know, reading copies is stuff that's got that ephemera or what have you. She spread it around to her sixth grade class in 2006, so it ended up being a bonding experience between her and the students in her class. So I thought that was great. She took the copy that her mom had and then shared it with.
- [71:53]
Jeff O'Neill
I just love that story.
- [71:54]
Rebecca Schinsky
Love to hear it. And she says that she and her mom listened to the Forever episode together, which is super fun.
- [72:01]
Vanessa Diaz
I love that story. So thanks Marissa. Appreciate that. And our last one on the list is someone who said thank you so much. You know, they zero to roll. Red has helped them remember how much they love reading that grad school, which tales this time. It feels like they kind of zapped their love of reading there for a long time. Which is definitely not an unoriginal thought. We've gotten that from folks a lot. So they appreciate that the show gives them the scaffolding for how to remember to read and think about books. And their comment specifically was on another mailbag episode and it's about Jude. They said they recall reading it in high school, that they kind of dragged their way through it until they read basically the way they described it. It was the book that I loathed until I loved it. So don't see any other thoughts on. On that particular. I didn't listen to that.
- [72:42]
Jeff O'Neill
I wish I was this. I put this here because I wonder if guys had a book where, you know, 2/3 of the way through you really turned around on it. I don't ever remember having this experience. I don't remember ever having experience where I was really drag assing my way through a book and the last act or something saved it for me. But I don't know. I wonder how common that is. I think there's book that I've liked better with time on a second reread, but it's pretty unusual I guess, to the exclusion of all my reading experience, to have one like oh I actually like this now when I didn't like it for the first time.
- [73:15]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, I was trying to think about things I read in school that I didn't love but that I couldn't put down because I had to finish them for school. Because in my personal reading, if I'm hating it, I'm not making it two thirds of the way through. I'm not gonna wait for it to turn me around. I don't know, like Faulkner, I think I had a really hard time with. Until a teacher opened it up the right way and then it blew my mind. But when you just sit down and try to read As I Lay Dying, it's a truly like, what the fuck Experience. But I think that's about the magic of a good teacher and not necessarily a book turning you around on it by itself. But I have not had this. If it's not working for me and I have the option of putting it down, I just put it down and I think I'm open to the idea of coming back around to something. For me, it would be more likely that if one of y' all loved a book that I had put down in the past and you're like, no, dude, if really it's worth it, I promise it will turn around. And for how well you know me and know what I like to read, I would go, I would conduct that experiment and like, and hope that it would. That I would have that experience. But I haven't had it. I can't. There's nothing at the top of mind, like, it sounds pretty cool. I want to have this experience of like, I loathed it till I loved it. I think I've felt that with TV or with movies especially, where you're like, it's only a two hour investment and I don't know where we're going. And then all of a sudden it's great. But with a book, it's a lot harder for me.
- [74:43]
Vanessa Diaz
It's different. Yeah, I'm definitely more of a. Sometimes a book just doesn't grab me at the right time. And so I've had to go back and keep reading something that I had originally bounced off of. And then it worked out well for me. But I am like, to steal a phrase from Rebecca, like constitutionally opposed to a. A lot of hype, but also to whenever someone's like, just keep going. Like, I swear something gets better. Four episodes. Episodes in, it's at the two hour mark and where this case like 70, I'm like, I. My. I don't know My brain is wired in a way that I need it to grab me a little sooner in most cases.
- [75:17]
Rebecca Schinsky
Like, I got one wild and precious life. We're not.
- [75:19]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah, exactly. And granted, I know that this, like, it has paid off for me precisely two times that I can think of a recent memory. And those memories were succession and severance where I was like, I don't like these people. I don't want to keep going. And then I'm glad that I eventually did. But with most other things, like, there's 2,000 pieces of media vying for my attention right now, it's okay if I just bounce off this, but I don't know. Yeah. Yeah.
- [75:41]
Jeff O'Neill
I think the only. The only comparable kind of experience I have is, like, sometimes it takes me a while to figure out that's true. What a book is trying to do, like to sort of read along with it. So it's not really even about liking it or loathing. It is.
- [75:53]
Vanessa Diaz
Like, that's different.
- [75:54]
Jeff O'Neill
I don't have purchase on this. I remember my first reading of Beloved. Like, it took me a class, but also it took me 100 pages. Yeah, you know, Faulkner, you know, is very similar. Like, some of that. And in talking to Namali Chappelle, some of that is intentional, that disorientation and trying to rewire your reading brain a little bit. And that can be quite cool at the same time. And anytime you go back to something that's really outside of your cultural understanding or sympathy, like, it takes a while to get back into reading, like Oedipus. It takes a little bit of time to get. Get back into reading the Odyssey or Don Quixote or Moby Dick or the Tale of Genji or something like that, because you are having to almost literally time travel out of space and time. And that re entry is not easy. And so I've learned to give myself a lot of grace for. I'm not getting it. I don't know what's going on here. I don't want to read this because I think if you will go along with it, it'll push you in the right direction. You'll sort of get. You won't get all the details, of course, if you are an expert of the same time and place. But I've had that experience more that something kind of unlocks or I start to be able to see it where sometimes at the beginning of a book that's really difficult or foreign to me or have a lot of experience in the genre or the culture, cultural tradition, I'm fighting for I'm thrashing. I'm doing the thing where I'm just trying to stay above water, but eventually I find a rhythm and I can sort of doggy paddle my way through it. But I have that experience quite often. But I don't have a really a My thumb turned around quite so radically that articulates it.
- [77:29]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. Really. N. I think that for me it's rarely a question of do I hate this. It's more a question of do I just not know what I'm doing yet? Do I need to get my feet under me? And like Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Pynchon are all examples of that from the backlist of this show. Like, it just is slippery and it's slippery by design and the slipperiness is part of it. And giving yourself permission to splash around in the water or really just to be. To stay in the water and like get acclimated and let what's going to make sense start to make sense and let the pieces that aren't going to land for you not land for you has been part of it. Which now we're way off of Jude the Obscure.
- [78:11]
Vanessa Diaz
We want to obscure.
- [78:13]
Jeff O'Neill
Have you read Tess or Jude? Have either read Hardy, Tess or Jude or Father Madison.
- [78:16]
Vanessa Diaz
Yeah, Hardy is a blank spot.
- [78:17]
Rebecca Schinsky
I never got assigned Hardy and it was never compelling enough for me to go back.
- [78:21]
Vanessa Diaz
I've actually always wanted to read Tess, but I just haven't and you know, time.
- [78:26]
Jeff O'Neill
I wonder what we were talking about that brought up Jude the Obscure when
- [78:29]
Rebecca Schinsky
in the last episode on that past mailbag episode.
- [78:31]
Jeff O'Neill
I don't remember. Yeah.
- [78:33]
Vanessa Diaz
Anyway, that's a thought for past us.
- [78:36]
Jeff O'Neill
Yes. Thank you, Vanessa, for navigating us through this. It makes it a lot easier where we're not trying to answer and transition and be objective all at the same time.
- [78:44]
Vanessa Diaz
It's fun getting to pull those little levers. And thank you everyone for your.
- [78:48]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, all these questions and our thoughts on them are fair game for your emails and feedback for the next mailbag episode.
- [78:54]
Jeff O'Neill
It's an infinite feedback loop.
- [78:56]
Vanessa Diaz
Right?
- [78:56]
Rebecca Schinsky
So zero to well read bookriot.com again you can find patreon stuff@patreon.com zero that's our office hours and bonus content read alongs. The one we're doing for the fall will be announced soon. Smash the five stars on wherever you're listening to this podcast app. What else, Jeff? Thank you to Thriftbooks for sponsoring this season. And zero to well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network.
- [79:24]
Jeff O'Neill
Oh, you did without an agenda off the dome. Rebecca. Well done.
- [79:28]
Rebecca Schinsky
I've heard it, you know, a couple dozen times.
- [79:30]
Jeff O'Neill
We'll be back to do it a regular old book next time. Something weird and unruly and timeless rather than us talking about whether we doggy or shit or not. But that's fun.
- [79:38]
Rebecca Schinsky
Thanks, everybody.
- [79:39]
Vanessa Diaz
Thanks.
- [79:39]
Rebecca Schinsky
Thanks, everybody.