How to Hone Your Reading Skills, What Makes a Good Reading Goal, and More from the Mailbag

Summary

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Zero to Well-Read

Episode: "How to Hone Your Reading Skills, What Makes a Good Reading Goal, and More from the Mailbag"

Date: March 24, 2026
Hosts: Jeff O'Neal & Rebecca Schinsky

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Episode Overview

In this lively, wide-ranging mailbag episode, Jeff and Rebecca tackle listener questions and comments covering everything from reading evaluation strategies, when to DNF (did not finish) a book, setting and reaching reading goals, reading diversely, and the enduring power of the canon. They share resources, commiserate with common reader dilemmas, and offer practical, irreverent advice — all while keeping the tone welcoming and witty. If you’ve ever wondered how to get more from your reading life, this episode is packed with rich insights and both philosophical and practical tips.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Improving Reading Evaluation & Articulation Skills

Listener Amanda: Wants to better articulate what she enjoys/dislikes about books and assess quality beyond enjoyment.

• Jeff:

  • You must start with your own reaction, but don't end there.

    “There is no way that I am aware of in which you can put your Amanda-ness or your Rebecca-ness or your Jeff-ness to the side and engage cyborg brain to come to sort of some evaluation of it… Your own reaction becomes the subject of scrutiny.” — Jeff [03:56]

  • Key questions: Does the book feel real? New? What is it good at?
  • Scrutinize not just the text but your response: why are you reacting in a given way? What are you bringing as a reader?

• Rebecca:

  • Look for what feels alive: Is the language electric? Are character relationships believable?

    “Does it feel alive? And if the answer to that is yes, then what about this feels alive to me?” — Rebecca [06:38]

  • Try reading in print with a pen, mark intriguing passages, look for patterns.
  • Build scaffolding by consuming lots of good books, noticing intertextuality, and experimenting across genres — much like learning to appreciate film or wine.

• Both:

  • Practice is key. Connect your reactions to specific moments in the text.
  • Texts are made from visible “source code”— so “close reading” is accessible to all.

    “There are no secrets… The text, all the letters are there in a row.” — Jeff [08:46]

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2. To DNF or Not to DNF (Abandoning Books)

Listener Hugh: Struggles with whether to finish or abandon books he’s bored by.

• Jeff:

  • Sometimes you finish, sometimes you DNF — you’ll probably guess wrong sometimes.
  • Suggested “coin flip therapy” for practice; flipping a coin can help build a habit of both finishing and quitting.
  • There can be benefits to pushing through unengaging books (for insight into your own tastes or for building stamina with challenging texts).

• Rebecca:

  • Very “pro DNF.” If you’re forcing yourself, ask “why?”

    “There are just too many books… Just deciding for yourself what’s important… Maybe let yourself off the hook a little.” — Rebecca [15:26]

  • Try putting a book down and see if you return to it after a few days.
  • Trusted reviewers can help you decide if a book is worth finishing.
  • Reading goals/expectations matter: If you seek knowledge (e.g., canonical texts), pushing through may be the point; if pleasure, DNF freely.

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3. Setting & Measuring Reading Goals

Listener Olga: Wants to read more diversely, especially translated authors, and is thinking about goals.

• Jeff:

  • Doesn’t track number of books read but pays attention to author diversity.
  • Aims to reflect US demographic diversity (as a baseline), but not rigidly.
  • Also considers time period and genre for a richer reading spread.

• Rebecca:

  • Echoes that “goals should step you just outside your comfort zone.”
  • Keep it manageable: “One or two [goals] per year are more than enough.” — [22:14]
  • Volume isn’t everything — focus on what you’re reading and how you select it (e.g., reading in a new language or genre).

Listener Kate: Is focusing on reading one book a week, but also trying genres and popular books she wouldn’t usually pick up.

• Rebecca:

  • Advocates reading with a “curious mind.”
  • Reading outside your norm (especially popular books) can be fascinating from an “anthropologist” viewpoint — ask “what is the deal with this book?” even if you don’t love it.

• Jeff:

  • Popular phenomena are worth studying—sometimes what makes a hit isn’t “quality,” but a unique hook.

    “Often it’s that strangeness that’s compelling… not all the books at the end of the grocery store are for me, but I always find it interesting…” — Jeff [24:49]

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4. Reading as an Intentional Practice

Listener Carol: Reads a lot, wants to be intentional and do more “immersive” reading—pairing fiction and nonfiction on a theme.

• Jeff:
  • “Short courses”: Pairing books creates synergy and depth.
• Rebecca:
  • Use interviews, articles, or podcasts as lighter nonfiction companions.
  • For example, pairing Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns with Their Eyes Were Watching God or Baldwin’s Go Tell it On the Mountain. [29:03]
• Embraces podcasts and other media as ways to expand the reading experience.

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5. Classics, Canon, & Being “Well-Read”

• Standard Ebooks: A listener recommends standarebooks.org, a curated resource for free public domain ebooks with higher quality than many free alternatives.

  “There’s really no reason to pay $8.99 for a digital version of a book [in the public domain].” — Jeff [33:12]

• What does it mean to be well-read?

  “That is a point of being well-read… knowing something of that history informs its current state of being.” — Jeff [41:18]

  • No trophy is coming; it’s about enriching your experience and recognizing references and conversations among writers.
  • Don’t suffer through classics with harmful content if it’s not worth it to you — summary/recap media can give you context without the pain.

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6. User-Requested Books & Reading the Canon

Popular Requests:
Scarlet Letter, Tale of Two Cities, Frankenstein, Pride & Prejudice, Middlemarch, Beowulf, Diary of Anne Frank and more

• Jeff and Rebecca’s Approach:
  • They consider popularity, upcoming adaptations (strong predictor for inclusion), and teachability/value.
  • They use “anniversaries, adaptations, and enduring interest” to guide selection. [42:26]
  • Pride & Prejudice and Frankenstein: Absolutely on the to-do list.
  • Middlemarch stans (“the Infinite Jest for grad students”) — it will happen, but not soon!
  • Diary of Anne Frank: High interest, especially given how the book’s sophisticated structure and context is often underappreciated [53:20].

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7. Book Clubs and Reading Communities

Listener Anne: Asks if they’ll ever run a book club tied to the podcast.

• Jeff and Rebecca:
  • They value the “relational” aspect of book clubs but cite scale, moderation, and business realities as hurdles.
  • Technical/book club logistics are tough — finding the right intimacy is hard with big online groups.
  • Their ideal alternative? Find just one book buddy:

    “Maybe you don’t need a book club. Maybe you need one reading buddy.” — Rebecca [73:43]

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8. Community Recommendations, Anecdotes & Notable Listener Moments

• Notable resource: Standard Ebooks for accessible, well-made digital classics [33:12].
• Joy Luck Club anecdotes: How books hit differently across time, genders, and family context [62:43-64:06].
• 100 Years of Solitude: Listeners report heavy family and community re-reading; “famous because it’s good – but also famous because it’s famous.” — Jeff [65:00]
• Little Women: Many learned about it and performed it in school plays; kids “playing Little Women” was a real thing [67:36].
• Project Hail Mary follow-up: On Rocky's genderlessness—brilliant detail, meaningful to readers beyond the binary [58:17].

  “I really liked the idea of a planet where sex or gender doesn’t necessarily play a key role in your life.” — Listener Melissa [58:17]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Does it feel alive? And if the answer to that is yes, then what about this feels alive to me?” – Rebecca [06:38]
• “All the letters are there in a row... there are no secrets [in books].” – Jeff [08:46]
• “There are just too many books… let yourself off the hook a little.” – Rebecca [15:26]
• “If you’re a literary anthropologist, it can be an extraordinarily interesting reading experience.” – Jeff [24:13]
• “You’re not going to get a trophy descending from the heavens for being ‘well-read’.” – Rebecca [41:28]
• “Sometimes, a book grows in your estimation as you have more time to marinate with it.” – Rebecca [71:58]
• “Maybe you don’t need a book club. Maybe you need one reading buddy.” – Rebecca [73:43]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• General reading & evaluation: [03:09–11:16]
• When to DNF: [13:39–19:25]
• Reading goals, diversity, & intention: [19:25–31:12]
• Resources (Standard Ebooks): [31:12–33:22]
• Classics/canon requests: [40:39–54:51]
• Book clubs / communities: [33:31–40:35], [72:54–74:52]
• Listener stories & book culture: [62:43–69:01]
• Project Hail Mary & gender: [57:58–60:49]
• Final reflections (reading buddies): [73:43–74:52]

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Summary Takeaways

• Evaluating books is a skill honed by practice, reflection, and consuming a variety of works — start with your own response but work outward, building a vocabulary for “what” and “why.”
• Reading goals should be tailored, achievable, and focused on curiosity and intentionality rather than raw volume.
• Don’t feel obligated to finish every book — permission granted to DNF.
• Literary culture is richer for its variety: read outside your comfort zone, sample “popular” titles, and pair fiction and nonfiction for new context.
• Being “well-read” isn’t about the trophy, but about recognizing the deep river of conversation that runs through literature.
• Finding one great reading buddy to discuss finished books with is often more satisfying than a big book club.
• The Zero to Well-Read community is vibrant and resourceful — keep sharing your stories, goals, and questions!

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Contact & Community:

“Let’s keep [questions and anecdotes] coming at zero to well read at bookriot.com…” — Jeff [75:00]

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Transcript

[Jeff O'Neill]

This episode of Zero to well Read is sponsored by ThriftBooks.com we're not doing a specific book this time. It's a mailbag episode. So we're talking about a lot of different kind of books that we've been discussing answering all sorts of questions. So what I did is I went back through all the episodes we've done so far since September and I saw what is the cheapest basket I put I could put together using thriftbooks.com and I got all 30 down under to about $247. You got yourself a library for less than $250. And if in the US that more than qualifies for free shipping which comes on orders of over $15. And I also would have picked up a few reading reward redemptions through Thriftbooks Reading Rewards program. Go check out thriftbooks.com if you're filling up your shelf. Thanks so much to listening. Thanks for them. Here comes the show. Welcome to Zero to well Read, a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you read. I'm Jeff o'. Neill.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And I'm Rebecca Schinsky. Today we're dipping into the mailbag for the first time. Lots of mail from listeners over the last almost. It is six months since the show launched and we're going to be answering your questions, responding to your comments about the show. People shared a lot of really fun and interesting experiences that they've had with the books and some insights and tips for other listeners. So little bit of everything, some general reading stuff, some things that are specific to several of the titles that we talked about. It's going to be a really good time. Thanks to everybody who has written in and shout out to all of you who have listened and followed and shared the pod in these first six months. We broke a half a million downloads today as we are recording. We couldn't be happier. And all of your rating and reviewing on Apple podcasts and Spotify, that's made a huge difference. It's helped other folks discover us. If you've not not done that yet and you'd like to give us a little boost, just, you know, tap that five star button.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, we're going to get annoying when it gets to around 800 ratings on Apple podcasts again because we did it, remember we did the drive to get to I think 150 and folks blew by that. So you and I as stat watchers who like a nice round number, we'll come back to there. What's fun about this kind of mailbag and we haven't done with 40 to well read. Of course, our other show, the Book Riot podcast, is much more news oriented, so it tends to be much more timely. Getting a lot of feedback and things going. People are emailing as they listen to a show. Right. And not everyone is necessarily listening to every show. So they could be listening something several months ago today, and they've got something to tell you about it today. So what you're going to hear in the mailbag today is really going all, I think, almost all the way back to the beginning. Do we have some Gatsby stuff?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Somebody does mention Gatsby, Yes.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. So it's going to be kind of all over the place. Rebecca, some stories, like you said, some questions will kind of respond to the nuggets. Thanks so much everyone for listening and for writing in there. So you have this under general reading stuff here at the beginning. And this is from Amanda. And what did you want to highlight about what Amanda wrote into us about?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Amanda is interested in improving her ability to articulate what she does and doesn't enjoy about a book and to assess a book's quality as a work of literature. And Amanda points out, because she's been a good listener of zero to well read, that enjoyment does not equal quality, as I've heard you tell us all on a number of occasions. So thank you for listening, Amanda. She says listening to podcasts like yours has helped me become a more insightful reader. But if you have other resources to recommend, I'd love to hear them or even a whole episode devoted to your personal schema for evaluating a work of literature, reflections on how you honed this skill and how it continues to evolve. And then she says a bunch of really nice things about us that if I read all the nice things that people have put in these emails, you would die of Midwesternness. So. So we'll just do a general thanks right now to everyone for your kind words.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, I have a fatal allergy to cringe when it comes to receiving compliments. I mean, we could do a whole episode on this question. But I think, Amanda, that the answer is it's in the shows that we do, right? I think a lot of how we do it is based on the shows that we do. So, you know, there could be all kinds of things. Does it answer interesting questions? Does it feel real? Does it feel new? I think what the only thing any of us have to begin on evaluative process is our own reaction to it. There is no way that I am aware of in which you can put your Amanda Ness or your Rebecca Ness or your Jeffness to the side and engage cyborg brain to come to sort of some evaluation of it. So like, you don't want to end with your own reactions, but that's the only place you have to begin. So. But then your own reaction becomes the subject of scrutiny as much, maybe even more than the text itself. What are you acting to? Why might you be reacting to it? How much are you bringing to the table and how much is it something that the book itself is eliciting to you? And I think what you're talking about in here is pleasure, right. Is not necessarily a good corollary, a good proxy for the quality of something. We've talked about several books this year that have long stretches that you and I, Rebecca, would not call pleasurable.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Correct.

[Jeff O'Neill]

A, we're glad we read them and B, we wouldn't hear too much criticism of this isn't an interesting bit of literature to do. So that I guess that's my first thing is like while you're right, that your own reaction isn't the total is not enough, but it's what you have to begin. So what kinds of things are you attuned to? What kinds of things do you care about? Because something can be good at something you don't necessarily care about. So if you're a real big plot or character reader, as a lot of people are, if you get into, I don't know, Vineland, which has a lot of plot but also not in a conventional way, a lot of plot or character that may not be be for you, but ideas, sentences, intellectual rigor. There's some other things to do there. I think that's one thing. We have a couple of different ways of evaluating literature on the show, which is the questions and the, you know, the show to well read scores give me some data points that I'm going to look to every single time we. When I'm talking about a book because that gives me some fixed points. So I'm not really grading on a curve where books that I like, I ignore some pieces of it that may not be as strong or books that I hate, I might sort of over index on things I really hate versus something kind of other evaluative metrics that you could find to do something. So it's not a really good answer, Rebecca, but I don't know how else to do it right. And where else do we go?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think it's one of those things that really is just born of practice and asking this kind of question is an indicator that you're already on that Pat. One of the things that I thought about was like, to me, I'm looking for, like, does it feel alive? And if the answer to that is yes, then what about this feels alive to me? Is the language really crackling? Are the relationships between the characters, do those feel true? Do they feel revelatory in some way? Is the writer doing something with language that makes me pause? You might try read. If you're not reading in print, you might try reading in print with a pen in your hand and just notice. How often do you want to mark something? Like, how often does something feel like it might be worth coming back to? And what do those things have in common is an interesting way to get into it. And then really it's, I think, just putting as many good books into your head as possible. I have a little of an analogous answer to this because I've been trying to do this with movies for the last several years. And, like, prior to really Covid, my relationship to movies was like, I just know what I like. You know, like, like how a lot of us experience wine. I just know that I enjoyed it. I could to you about it afterwards, but I hadn't ever tried to, like, really think about what made the greats great or how to evaluate something that was considered to be a great. But then I watched it and was either like, I didn't like that or I didn't get it. And I want to understand why things are considered to be great. And I've just been listening to podcasts that are kind of the movie equivalent of what we do here, looking at lists of stuff, watching as many of them, and seeing what I can pick up. And it does sort of start to build a scaffolding in your head, because you start to see in movies the ways that they refer to each other. And the great books do the same thing as well. Even great new books are often drawing on or building on something from the literary past. I think this would be an interesting thing to do, maybe in like a summer school episode at some point. So, like, how to get, like, really, maybe take one text and use it as an example. I love this question, Amanda, keep us posted on your journey, too.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, you know, something else to say there. We could talk about this and we'll try to move along here. I think you were giving a specific example of a larger practice, which is to connect your reaction to specific moments in the text. If you're feeling some kind of way, good, bad, in between where point to. Is it this section? Is it this character? Is it this line of dialogue? Is it this technique, strategy, or stylistic choice that could reflect, recur, or be, I don't know, a one off? And then also, what are the places that you're not responding to? And then look at those seriously in their own way. Like what's going on in this place that my eyes sort of glossed over about or that I was confused by or I didn't know how to feel about? Look at those moments and then you can see how it's made. Because this is one thing that's fascinating about text books themselves. Any. Any kind of written language is. There are no secrets. It's not like you eat something and you're like, wow, this is so good. But you have no idea how it was made or what goes into it or anything. Or like your computer or a car. The text, all the letters are there in a row. There's no secret thing behind the thing that comprises thing. Now, the composition could be complicated and fraud and expert and all those things, but the data is all there for you to investigate. There's nowhere else to go. Even a movie you may not know, like that was CGI versus that wasn't or that was caught in editing, there's no version of that in the text because that A came after that B, and that's just how it was. And that's the word order that goes into it. So everything's there and available. You're seeing the code, right? You're seeing the source code for that text without any need to intermediate. So you really can, I think why Close reading in text is something that people do. It's just more available than almost any other medium or art form where it's right there, like painting, like, I guess those are the colors like that Vasquez. But I have no idea how they got that brushstroke. This is ABC space. Abc. Like you can see it just in order right there. And I think that's so fascinating to think about and one reason a lot of people can, if not teach themselves to write. I think Rebecca's point about just taking a bunch in, especially of text, you become an LLM, a living language model. I guess this way where you have so much experience and so much reference that you can start to feel how things are put together, even if initially you don't know it. But then once you apply a critical consciousness or more critical eye, you can then interpret your own reaction and put into words that someone else can understand

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[Jeff O'Neill]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Jeff O'Neill]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Jeff O'Neill]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Jeff O'Neill]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Jeff O'Neill]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Jeff O'Neill]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Jeff O'Neill]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

Next question is from Hugh. Hugh says my reading pile is gloriously unoptimized. I have a list of books that I want to read and I shove them into the library. Q based more or less on whim, but I never know when I should quit. Is it optimizing if I stick with a book I'm bored of or prove that I have the mental capacity. Please discuss. I need to know I'm not alone.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So I responded to Hugh. Some of these I've responded to in more or less detail. I did respond to Hugh because I wanted to give him an answer. And my answer is this is yes. That's my answer. Sometimes you should stick, but I. And I think sometimes you shouldn't, and you may get it wrong. And Hugh and I, if I remember this right, I'm sorry, Hugh. If I don't remember, we had a little bit of a back and forth and he's like, well, how do I know this one versus I think you probably won't. If it helps you, you could do two face it, coin flip, right? You know, for every. Every time you feel like you want to stop, flip a coin. Heads is finished, tails is abandoned. And that will give you reps at finishing some things that you weren't going to finish anyway. I would imagine if you do more of those, it may be less discomforting to stick with something. If you get some exposure to therapy, to reading something. And this maybe goes a little bit to Amanda's question. It also gives you reps at working with, if you want to working with texts that you are maybe not vibing with. Right. If you only are reading things that you're vibing with all the way through, that can be a great reading experience. I don't want to say anyone that's a wrong way to do it, but there's other virtues. There's other pleasures and compensations for engaging with something that you don't enjoy, but then making that unenjoyment subject your own scrutiny. What is it? Why is this? How would I wish it was different? What are they trying to do? If this is not for me, then who is it for? And what kind of message is being tried to relate it for someone that is not me in those particular texts?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Those are great questions. You know, we talked about this a little bit in our how to read More and better in 2026 episode. I am very pro DNF. If you're just trying to power through something because you believe you have to finish every book that you start, and there is no magic, you know, like arbitrator, who's gonna come down and say, but that's one you really should have finished.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right? Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

The great news is that the books will still be there if you want to go back to them. We also talked about this in our bonus episode for in the Office Hours after Wuthering Heights on how and why to sometimes finish a book that you're not particularly enjoying and what the value of that can be. And I'll say, in my reading life, when I'm reading something that I don't have to read for the show, if it's like a new release that's getting a lot of buzz and I'm early on and I'm trying to pick it, you know, to get there before a bunch of people have read it, see what it's all about. If I get 50 pages in and I'm like, I don't know, I might put it down and see if I'm still thinking about it a few days later. Am I curious about it or have I completely forgotten what was happening there? I might wait until some of the reviews come out or even go seek out reviews from a couple trusted sources. Like, usually I try to keep myself pure from reviews, but sometimes when I'm on the fence, I will go to, like, get the general vibe of did somebody who I trust find value in finishing this book? And. And often the reviews will give you a like, well, this part is weak, but it's still worth it. And if I was identifying with those same weaknesses, I might decide I'm going to go back and finish it. I don't think we need to do anything to prove that you have the mental capacity, like, prove to whom other unless it's important to yourself. And even in those cases, like, there are are too many books, there are way more than you can ever finish. So just deciding for yourself what's important, like, I want to have read Wuthering Heights because I want to have my own opinion about it when all of the news happens, great. But also, if you didn't want to read Wuthering Heights, there's plenty of other difficult stuff that you could go pick up. Or even just your flavor of difficult or not quite enjoyable. But it feels important. Maybe, like, let yourself off the hook a little. If you're having that readerly imposter syndrome about it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And the reason you're reading a particular text may matter. Like, you may roll a different kind of die versus a coin. Like if you're reading a classic test or a canonical work and your goal is to have knowledge of it and you want to know it, well, then probably you should finish it for your own goal there. If your goal is to read for pleasure and you picked up something for pleasure and it's not pleasurable, that's an easy DNF for me. If, like, I'm one to escape or it's a nonfiction book that I want to learn and I'm not feeling like it's doing the job, I'm more likely to abandon something like that. So if you can match the goal with what your reading experience is like, if you're like, I've always wanted to know what the deal is with Herodotus and you get into the histories and you're like, wow, this is really tough. Well, you might think is tough. The value of metric I want to use to decide whether or not I want to get through this, I think not. I think it's going to be tough. You should expect something of those things to be tough and quote, unquote, not like them. But if you have some other goal, then that may help you, you know, think about whether or not you want to make the go through it or not. Like, if you, if you go. If you walk into a marathon expecting it to be easy, you're like, no. But most people going to a marathon know what they're getting themselves into. And the difficulty is sort of the point in a lot of ways, because you could. It's a sense of accomplishment. It gives you a goal in a training situation like that, you know, So I think that would be my, my. My second vector is just outside of the coin flip. Like, sometimes you should finish things you don't want to get through is if it's not serving what you want, then don't do it. But sometimes serving what you want might mean that you've got to buckle up and just get through it and experience some discomfort for a little while.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. Are you going to be proud of yourself when you've done it and that's going to be meaningful to you? Does this feel like it's going to be a meaningful experience rather than necessarily a fun one? Is sometimes a good rubric for me. You want to read our next one?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. It's a long one from Olga with a lot of stuff in here about her own desire to read more diversely. And this is something we care about and have cared about for a long time. Reading diversely can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different kinds of people. Olga is especially interested in reading translated authors and books from around the world, and then also about setting goals. Right. So it is. How do you connect something you'd like to do with some kind of target for how you measure? I. I'd say this really only pay attention. I don't have reading goals. I don't. I'm going to read this number of books a year whether I want to read more or not. I usually end up between 125 and 150 books a year. That's just kind of where I end up. The one thing I do pay attention to and we pay attention to though in this show, I should say, is are we reading people that don't look like us in. In a percentage that we want to. And that's sometimes that's about our own reading, you know, Desires. Rebecca. That's what we're putting out into the world. That's how we try to get more of the kind of reading we want into the world and books we want into the world because we like to read stuff from a bunch of different kinds of people. And we, you know, I think it's okay to. I don't mind putting this out. Like, we kind of peg it at what's the US Demographic look like, right. That if we're kind of close to that. And again, we may have a run of three or four people of color in a row and then we have four or five white people in a row and then come back and forth. We're not trying to be, you know, four out of every 10. And it has to be that percentage every single time. But if you look at the whole course of the show over time, kind of like your coin flip is going to regress towards 50%. We want to regress or progress maybe is the better word in today's day and age towards something that looks like this is the demographics of the US now. You could pick whatever frame you want if you want to pick the world. I don't even know how you would figure that out. That would be an interesting project of its own. Are biased towards. Focused on. Would be another way of putting it right now the Western literary canon and some US Cultural phenomenon right now. Over time we will broaden our horizons as well. We also want to give some sense of like we did a Sophocles early. That's something really old. We've done a couple of Shakespeare. We also want to look at time, right. We don't want everything that's old. We want everything that's new. So I think that's one thing in our feed that you're gonna see different. Some other feeds that do. This is Twilight and Herodotus. I'm not sure. Rebecca too. I mean, we haven't done Herodotus. We will.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

But Twilight and Sophocles.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Sophocles And Twilight. I'm not sure there's a lot of that. So we have our own interest in reading diversely. That's not beyond. In addition to what we think about, like DEI type stuff.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Which is to think about time and think about location, think about scale and import and across people's reading lives from a kid to an adult to an older person.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. One of the things that I love in this email from Olga too is it's kind of getting at developing your own philosophy of reading what you're trying to do in your reading life. And she also says that she's discovered that setting a reading goal is about stepping outside the comfort zone just enough that it's still manageable, but it triggers meaningful change. I think it's crucial not to overwhelm yourself with too many goals. One or two per year are more than enough. And I think that's right on. If you are looking for a way to give your yourself some structure, it doesn't need to be. I want to read twice as many books as I read last year. That's a really big leap. It would probably require rearranging components of your life in a pretty significant way to make that happen. But could you read 10% more than you did last year and then do you layer on some other thing? I'd like to read 10% more and I'd like to do X with them. Volume by itself can be good, but what are you doing inside your book selection? For Olga, it's reading in multiple, multiple languages that she's learning to speak. Olga is goals, apparently.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right. Can't spell goals without Olga.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Really admirable from. From Olga. And nice work there. Yes. Let's move on. Let's see. This next one is from Kate from Toronto, also speaking to goal related.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yep.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. Her goal this year is to read one book a week and says I will adjust if it isn't working for me. And that goal is both both fast and slow. I'm a very fast reader who can read a book in one to two days, but I find that I don't remember the book very well later. So it's about like slowing down to actually enjoy the book. And she says that more interesting to me than one book a week is my simple goal to try more books, including ones I normally wouldn't think are for me. And especially to read more popular books this year with a curious mind about if they entertain so many people, then maybe I could be one of those people and see what it's all about. Here we call that Things people like are good.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Actually sometimes are good. Yeah. Or sometimes bad. We have also, in the privacy of the Book Riot podcast, Patreon read some things we were pretty sure weren't for us. And we were not unwrong, I guess, euphemism, I want to say, for that we were not. But I will say this is, if you come to it as a, I don't know, literary anthropologist, it can be an extraordinarily interesting reading experience to read something and be like, what is going on with this? To pick one that's a little bit long in the tooth now, so I don't think I'm gonna hurt anybody is like, where the Crawdads Sing.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That's the one I was looking a few years ago.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And not our favorite book that we've ever read. We wouldn't have read it ourselves, but it became such a phenomena. We want what is the deal with this? And we didn't go walk into it thinking like, the point of this is we have to like it or not like it. And that's the only rubric we can use to evaluate whether it's good or not. But what is the deal with this? Like, what is that people are responding to? And I find that especially interesting in phenomenons that seem like they come out of nowhere, like the romanticies, the twilights, the 50 shades of grays, the Harry Potters, or even something like the coloring Books or Freedom McFadden, like these things or the Dan Browns. These things that are seemingly pretty weird, that are unlike things that have come before them, by definition are weird. But what Often it's that strangeness that's compelling. And sometimes you'll find some virtue of that book is the thing people are there for. And some of the other stuff is really pretty, not good. But it doesn't matter because I think people are there for is so compelling that they'll forgive a lot for it. I'm like this with a lot of my own reading as well. So that's one thing I really like about reading, quote, unquote, popular books that are not for you. Because I'm like a snobby, like a look at my hat, you can hear me, look at my glasses. Like, you can probably get some sense of the kind of reader I am. Not the snobbiest. But let's just say that not all the books at the end of the grocery store are for me. But I always find it interesting and not in the look how dumb these people are way. I don't think that's fun or cool to do. But, like, what is it about this book that people are responding to? Because it shows you something with the lack of that representation. Colleen Hoover is what I'm thinking about in this regard. Like, this kind of representation of a kind like domestic violence and the complexity of it, especially in it ends with us. Like, there wasn't seemingly something for a lot of people's attention, care, interest, experience to latch onto. And that became a thing for a bunch of.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I love this literary anthropologist phrase. I wish that we had onto it like 15 years ago, but we now we have it, it's with us. And I think the combination of what Kate is talking about, this going into it with a curious mind, like one of the patterns that it's not always true. But one of the things, as you're saying, that's happened sometimes when we go into these, like, big pop culture phenomena is we are going in with the like, is this actually good? And whether it's good or not, what are people into about it? And on the occasions where we conclude this is not for us, I don't think this is actually a good book. Folks can get kind of upset by the dec. Like, by our opinion of this isn't a good book and think that it must map onto, like, therefore there's something wrong with you for liking it. And separating those two things is really important. Like going into it with the spirit of curiosity and not with, I'm trying to shit all over this thing. And I think we try to take special care in this didn't work for me. And I thought this sentence was especially bad. But, like, people either don't care about that or the rest of it is bad is so compelling to them that they're not even noticing. And that's interesting too, because there are lots and lots of bad books that do not become phenomena. And trying to figure out what it is that that's driving those things can be really satisfying. If you're, like, in a book club or you're casually seeing people at your kids, you know, softball games or soccer practice or whatever, and. Or like, I've had the experience of sitting, getting my hair done and seeing two or three people reading the same book at the same time, and you just want to know that spirit of, like, slowing down and pay attention, that curiosity can get you a long way.

[Jeff O'Neill]

This is another one about goals and reading intentionalities from Carol. Thank you, Carol. I'm going to pick out a couple pieces here. Carol reads a lot already, 140 to 200, so she's reading at the top end or more than I.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Very top end. Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And that particular reader, and I'd say we are both of this is we are not wrestling with how to read more necessarily, but how to, for lack of a better term, optimize or be choosy or get the most out of the way you're going to do already. And Carol has this interesting idea of having intention of doing more immersive reading, where you read a fiction book in conjunction with a nonfiction book or an interview, an article or some other media on or similar theme or topic, every book. And for Carol, that's a challenge because she's not a nonfiction reader typically, but have found that other people have done this. Have found this. I mean, essentially what you're doing is like doing a little short course, right?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Rebecca?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Okay. How can I connect with something in the larger world? I really like this.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I really like this idea. And especially as she's saying that she's not usually a nonfiction reader. Finding. Maybe the way to do it is to find nonfiction that you are interested in, and then you can work backwards to find a novel. We've only done one nonfiction here on Zero to well read so far, but it was the Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. Like magisterial work of nonfiction. If you have not read it, it's super readable. Sharifah, our colleague, described it on that show as reading like fiction. The story is really compelling. From there, you could go to a couple of the things that we've talked about here on Zero to well read. You could go right into Their Eyes Were Watching God, which is set in the Jim Crow south around the same time as the story that Isabel Wilkerson is picking up begins. You could also pick up James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain, which is the next generation of folks who had moved to New York in the Great Migration. And we read Isabel Wilkerson after both of those. And I felt myself like retrospectively adding color to those reading experiences now, having the nonfiction fleshed out. So I think that might be one way to do it. And you might also expand your idea of what the nonfiction is here, because I like, you know, read an interview or an article or some other media, I guess, captures it. But a lot of times you can find the author on podcasts. Like, George Saunders has been on every big podcast in the last two months promoting Vigil, and he's talked straight up about the creativity and the aspects of writing the book. But just as an example, he's also been on like a meditation podcast. He's been somewhere talking about like what is Sin and revenge? He did a really interesting conversation with Ezra Klein. So you could take the fiction book and find if the author is big enough, you should be able to find them in conversation with someone where they're going to get into more of the ideas and the scaffolding of the book rather than having to like just pick up a straight nonfiction if that's a struggle for you.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, it's a great idea. So best of luck. Carol. That sounds like a cool reading. We're already into March, so maybe you've done some of this already. Feel free to write in and let us know.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I'd love to know.

[Jeff O'Neill]

This one came from a reader who really liked the Bartleby the Scrivener episode. And this is more just a, I guess a listener education hit here for the Standard Ebooks project. And basically the idea is as a repository for getting ebooks, especially of things that are in the public domain. This person has done some volunteer work for the project and has found it to be like really invested in the mission. So if you want to read a high quality ebook copy of one of the classics, either online or a Kindle or Kobo, you're going to have a better experience with the Standard Ebooks edition than anywhere else, including from commercial stores or everywhere else. It doesn't have everything. It does have Bartleby the Scribbler. It has a Melville short collection. Standard ebooks.org it has Wuthering Heights in there. I think this is cool. I have. I've looked at this. I need to spend like six minutes figuring out a workflow to get it onto the A device I want to read. But I really like having this resource and it sounds like a little more elbow grease goes into each individual book than something like Project Gutenberg that has so many that it's almost it's a great project, but it is a junk drawer is not quite right, but it's not curated in a little bit more of a way like the standard ebook project is. We do cover a lot of public domain things. We're going to cover more. I would my thought was here is I should shoot an email over there. Could we have a zero to well read page on standard ebooks? We could click on it and go find the digital copy you want to get in addition to checking out thriftbooks.com of course if you want to print thing. But if you are a digital reader, there's really no reason to pay 8.99 for a digital version of a book. I found the audiobooks for classics, of course, because they're, they're recorded by a living person generally speaking. And so it's still subject to the performance copyright you still have to pay for. I'd be curious to see, I think Project Gutenberg or someone else shoot us an email zero to well read.com if you know. But I think there are some public domain audiobooks that are pretty good quality coming into availability. So I didn't have anything else to say there. I just want to make people available aware of standard ebooks.org It's a great resource.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Thanks for writing that into us. We are now entering the portion of the mailbag that I'm calling are you ever gonna do X?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yes.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

The first question is from Anne, who really enjoys the podcast. Thanks Anne. And wants to know will we ever or do we think we'll ever launch a book book club tied to the books we're discussing?

[Jeff O'Neill]

I also responded to Ann saying, so what do you mean Anne? And Ann was very kind and said I'm not really sure, but what if it was X, Y or Z? So let's play this game out for five or 10 minutes. Rebecca, because we do get this question a lot and people think when I tell people we're doing the show in my civilian like, so it's like a pot. It's like a book club of like. Well, it depends on what you mean by a book club necessarily. I think what Ann and some others are wanting are more than just listening to 90 Minutes of Us talking about the book or different than that because we do a lot. So more I'm blanching at the idea of more like that's a lot that we put into a particular episode, but a different kind of experience around their book where a book club I think is relational. Right. And could put something into the book club that someone else in the book club could get something out of. And that to me is the definition of what a book club is, digital or otherwise is like do people participating it contribute content of some kind? Whether that's your wine book club where you can just contribute that you didn't read it right or you hated it, like that's your contribution to the content of the show. That's not what we're doing here. So if you picked Book X, if you picked Herodotus is the history and we're going to do a book club.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I love that Herodotus has become our go to example.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Well, I like Herodotus. I want to get there someday. But I'm just picking it because it seems so silly. But, like, what would that look like? And the thing that I think gets in our way, Rebecca, is how would you manage the number of people wanting to contribute and what that contribution would look like? And not for nothing, is there a business around that? Is it just more time that we're spending doing stuff? Because this is part of our jobs and we're trying to figure out to keep this game going, having 14 people in a Zoom for two hours once a month unless they're paying a couple hundred dollars. I mean, I'm being honest with everyone out there. Like, we'd rather make another episode of this, you know, and put that out and make it available for other people. So that's, I think, where we get stuck. Rebecca, if we had ideas, what else do you think? What should we tell people about? I mean, we're interested in this. What to let us know or brainstorming about this.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

We've been doing Book riot for almost 15 years now, and for as long as we've had it, the how do you have a good online book club? Has been a question. I know that there are podcasts who have this successfully in Discord or Patreon or Slack, you know, some. Some form of that. One of the things that we feel really strongly about related to that is content moderation and keeping ourselves and our staff safe. And we've had some experiences in the past because we're people who work on the Internet and we write about, you know, literature and issues of diversity and all of the kinds of things that literature talks about where moderating comments has. Has been challenging. Now, I don't. I don't assume that anyone listening to this show would come into a book club and be a jerk, but we have to be prepared for, like, how are we going to manage and moderate a conversation? The Patreon is a place where this can happen. Like the Book Riot podcast. Patreon has a larger community now, but that happens when we do a book club. We even call them book clubs. You and I book club. Something that we've read together over there. And folks who have also read it will. Will drop their comments and they'll chat with us and with each other in those comments. It's not formal. It's not a. Like, on this day, everyone is going to come and have this. This conversation. I'm open to this. I have. I have not seen a version that I find to be really compelling. I. I tend to think that what's under these questions from people is just a desire to have more places to connect about books. And I think that like, in person is a great way to do that. Like, I would love to hear about folks using zero to well read to structure book club selections for their own things. Like, we also get questions about are you going to tell us what we're reading in advance so that we can read along and be there on the day the show drops. We do some of those previews. But also these episodes live forever in your podcast play.

[Jeff O'Neill]

They're always there waiting for you. Yep.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Right. You can decide. I'm going to bring Herodotus. Like, oh, the Herodotus episode dropped today. I'm going to save it. Go read Herodotus, build my own book club. Which is all a long way, I think of answering this question that we're open to it, but we don't have any solid plans to make it happen. And also just like a little how the sausage is made content strategy around this is that to build audience and maintain a large audience's interest, which we're so grateful to have, having content that moves along and offers enough variety for people is really important. So the structured, like, we're going to do one quarter of this big book each week for four weeks in the main feed is not something that we're likely to do because. Because there's a lot of people that aren't going to be interested in that book. And you don't want to lose a chunk, a big chunk of your audience because you did four episodes in a row that they weren't interested in. So all of these are things that are in the mix that we're thinking about.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. I mean, one version that you could do is again, there's a How does it. How does it worth our while? And that's. There's no reason you all should care about that as listeners. But there's something we care about. Right. Because the replacement value for us is doing just a regular episode, doing, you know, two episodes that week or it's already a lot of work to do one book a week. We have thousands of people that listen to this show. Only some subset of them. Could you get into a book club like environment and have it be a good experience where people think they're getting some. What would you charge and what would the experience be? I don't really know the answer that I love the idea of like a seminar. Right. But. But people would have to pay quite a bit of money to have a seminar. I don't think people. I don't. The Sticker. I mean, we're not talking like undergraduate tuition or something like there. But it would have to be a couple hundred dollars per unit of some kind to keep it to 20, 25 people. Which my experience is about as many people as work in a seminar like environment. Anything other than that is like a message board and you're gonna dwell and linger. I just. That doesn't. That doesn't move the needle for me. I don't find that interesting. I feel like I find myself not wanting to make that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So I think this is also part of the reason why the big celebrity book clubs are just called book clubs, but they're actually just curation. They're just a celebrity declaring a thing that they like. Unless you're Oprah and then you're also interviewing that author for content that goes.

[Jeff O'Neill]

But even that's not a book club.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's not a book club in the

[Jeff O'Neill]

way people understand it. Like Ann is asking about it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I could imagine maybe some future episodes where if we're doing a contemporary book and we have access to the author, maybe we might build to a place where we offer a companion. Me, an episode that's an interview or a conversation with a select group of authors. Certainly something we're open to, that we've kicked around. But this is. It's really hard. Like it has to be at scale to make it worth our while as a business. But doing it at a big scale makes that intimacy of book club really difficult.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right. Okay, let's see. We. We want. We skipped one. I'm going to go one ahead. One back. This is about being well read. This is from kdp.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Well, this is the same person. This is the end of the remarks from the person with the standard ebooks recommendation.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I am sorry. It was the same idea. But as for being well read. So I'm a lifelong reader, but I don't feel well read because that's just not how I'm choosing books. And I only sometimes read literary affection. But I'm feeling more tempted now to reach into classics to get more of a foundation of what current books are referencing in reaction to and in discussion with which I guess is the real point of being well read. I mean, that is a point of being well read. I think there's a lot of versions of it, but like any, like anything with a history, which is most things, knowing something of that history informs its current state of being.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So that's. I think that makes a ton of sense. There's something to get out of it just sort of A generic I want to be well read because then I get to wear the well read pin. Doesn't exist and no one cares.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, you're not going to get a trophy descending from the heavens. Much as I love a trophy. It's true. Just not something that exists for us. She also points out that she's more of a sci fi fantasy reader and said that she tried reading a few of the classics from like the golden age of sci fi, but put them down really quickly because she didn't find that it was worth it to get through the misogyny, which can be very real in older books of all genres. And she's correct in saying that right now we're in a damn good age of science fiction and fantasy. That's a case where, like, if you know that this contemporary sci fi writer is building on the ideas of a previous one, you can listen to a podcast episode or watch some YouTube videos that give you the foundation of, I don't know, Heinlein without having to dip into an extended reading experience that feels gross to you. There's, you know, nobody needs to. You don't need to suffer in that way. Next one down from Steven. Yeah, you want to take us there?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. So we're just going to. I included some people giving us titles and we could just react in real time. The default answer is if you suggest something that anyone's ever heard of, we will consider it. So just take that as our standard answer. But we could talk specifically about a couple of these here. Stephen asked specifically about Nathaniel Hawthorne's the Scarlet Letter, Charles Dickens Tale of Two Cities, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Here's also something you might keep in mind as someone if you're going to be a seared, a well read feed prognosticator, if there's a major adaptation of something coming out, I would ratchet, ratchet up your couchy. Bets about whether or not that's going to show up in the feed. Actually don't do prediction markets. I'm just joking here. But like, that is something we are looking at. Are people going to be wanting to think about Wuthering Heights? Are they going to be thinking about Project Hail Mary? Are going to think about some of these things. So if you're paying attention to what adaptations or you see news on Netflix or movies coming out, those things are going to jump the queue a little bit as well. We also like anniversaries and birthdays and other kinds of celebratory moments. So that's Just something to know about these at all. Where are you at on the Scarlet Letter, Rebecca? What was that in your. In your bag?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I'm so glad that this was in the notes today. I love the Scarlet Letter, or I did in high school. I haven't touched it since, but I loved it. I still remember the paper I wrote about it. I just had like. And I think when we go back to it, because we'll definitely go back to it at some point, the big exercise for me will be, do I actually like this book, or did I just have a good English teacher?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Which. Listen, those two things may not be as different as people realize.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I don't think they are like shouts to Mr. Hunsley. I like, I had a wonderful experience. Just a terrific teacher. I loved almost everything that we read that year. So I will be really happy to do the Scarlet Letter at some point. To speak back to, like, the Frankenstein question, especially in what you were saying about adaptations. One of the, like, kinds of math that we're doing for this, that I'm. It's weird and I'm delighted to have this problem is there are so many adaptations, and we don't want this show to just be about books that have adaptations. So in the first season, we were kicking around Frankenstein. We settled on Vineland by Pynchon because one battle after another was getting so much heat. And then we did Hamnet as well. And Hamnet was not in our original original plan. But once it became such a hit and people were so excited about it, we were seeing the like questions about the book rise in popularity. We thought it would be a good listener service to do an episode about the book. Frankenstein was third on that list. Like, if we had not done one of those other two, we would have done a Frankenstein episode. I'm sure we will get there at some point. Probably in an October when we're doing spooky reading. I was curious. And of course we'll do Pride and Prejudice. Listeners are concerned about me saying that I don't like Jane Austen. And so we're gonna have to have that experience together. I'm curious from you because he also asked about A Tale of Two Cities. There is so much Dickens to choose from. We did A Christmas Carol, but if we were just going to start with a Dickens, where would you want to start?

[Jeff O'Neill]

I mean, this is my sense of it. And I didn't look at Goodreads ratings or. And for public domain stuff and stuff that's not for. I don't know. I think of Dickens as There's Great Expectations. Oliver Twist and David Copperfield are the three big ones. Like the three big novels. And then Christmas Carol's off to the Side is like this weird novella thing. I think a lot of people don't even know that Dickens wrote Christmas Carol. It also doesn't do the Dickens thing. When we use the word Dickensian, there's not a lot of Dickensian in it because it's short. And when we mean Dickensian, like there's a lot of characters and exaggerated.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

There's a lot of threads and they come together. Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. The Christmas Carol. A Christmas Carol is like a side quest in a David Copperfield with some supernatural spookiness thrown in. I like Tale Two Cities. This goes back to your point you made a second ago. We read the whole thing aloud in my eighth grade class. Ms. Wilbur, who was elderly then, and I can't imagine that 30 years she's still around. But if she is poor, one out for Ms. Wilbur. Wilbur and I was the reader of one of the two main characters. So I read a lot of that book out loud to my eighth grade peers, which was fun and terrifying. But also we got. We. It guaranteed that you read it. Right. Because we were reading it together in class. It took the whole year. Right. So we did a few pages a day for the whole year.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So I have a lot of years.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. It's the best of times, the worst of times, the ending. Like, it's a far, far thing that I do that I've ever done. It's a far, far better place that I go than I ever been. Like, I know this stuff in the back of my head. But having said that, I think from a listener service, I don't think. I think I have to do David Copperfield or Great Expectations. I think one of those two are. Are the things that people have heard of and when they think of Dickens, it jumps right to mind. But I could certainly have my arm twisted or something like that. I don't know. Rebecca, Am I. Is my Dickens power ranking grossly? I'm looking.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I'm looking at Goodreads because I was just curious. A Tale of Two Cities has more than a million ratings. Great expectations is 879,000.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Okay, maybe I'm wrong.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And those are the two highest by a long shot. Poor Bleak House down here with 114,000.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's where the real heads the. The Dickens nerds love Bleak House.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Chance Nicholas Nickleby with 47.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I haven't read Nicholas Nickleby.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I don't. I haven't either. I would be inclined to do Great Expectations because I have a large, like, just basket of affection in my heart for Ms. Havisham.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yes.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

But I'd be. I'll be happy to do any of them. I think they have pretty similar name recognition and I don't, as you were saying, don't fully trust Goodreads as a measure of people's interest in these because they are so old and have been read for, you know, so much longer than before Goodreads was around. But the answer is surprised?

[Jeff O'Neill]

That Tale of Two Cities is number one. But yeah, for sure.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It might also just be more frequently assigned. I don't know. We read Great Expectations before we read Tale of Two Cities and my educational experience.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Great expectation of David Copperfield. They blend together in my head. I have a hard time keeping them. I mean, Oliver Twist, of course, has one of the great musical adaptations of all time that also aged very strangely. I love this. When I was a kid, I still refer to like getting sex.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I know this adaptation.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Can I have some more?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Like, I do this all the time.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yep. And hot sausage and mustard.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yep. I know that part of the furniture. Yeah. To Scarlet. Tale of Two Cities. I don't know. A big adaptation of that. I mean, I'm sure there's a bunch of these for all of these, but I don't know.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

There's a really bad Scarlet Letter adaptation with Demi Moore.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Oh, yes. Where she's Hester Prynne.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So bad.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That came out in the 90s, I think, like when I was in high school.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. When we do Scarlet Letter, I will be making a full throated pitch for Easy A with Emma Stone.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I like that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Jeff O'Neill]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Jeff O'Neill]

Our best lineup is here at Lowe's. Valid through 4 a while supplies last selection varies by location. Soil offer excludes Alaska and Hawaii. All right, Margot is pitching us a few things. Things Middlemarch. I don't know what it is about Middlemarch because the Middlemarch stands stand hard like it's the greatest novel of all time. I don't know if any. I don't know if you. It's like infinite jest for grad students the way people stand for Middle March. Like they just really want you to read. And I like Middlemarch a great deal. I. I didn't resonate to me where I'm going to like put a Middlemarch book cover on a banner and like march into. Into war with it.

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[Jeff O'Neill]

But there's so many people I know this is very close to their hearts. Absolutely will be something we do someday.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Someday. Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It is not one that I'm going to have a lot of Jeff energy to bump up. We'll get to it eventually. But I'm like, I like Middlemarch vine. It just not one of mine.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I like the idea here that Margo has of reading it one book per month. It was originally serialized and into four parts, I believe. Four parts. So she's saying I'd love a series of shorter bonus episodes that do those big books in that style. Probably what we'll do is we approach really big books. The first one is going to be the Odyssey. Where that we'll do in July is we will give folks a heads up about when a big book is coming. So if you want to break it up yourself, you can. And at some point I think we probably will try something like this of like in the run up where we might record some shorter things or break some stuff up or come up with some kind of supporting material for people who are reading it. Like, you know, how are we going to tackle War and Peace someday? Is a similar kind of question. But. But we'll experiment with it. And the bonus episodes, the stuff over in Office Hours on Patreon is probably the place where those experiments will happen.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Beowulf is other pitch. Seamus Haney's version. Yeah, I like Beowulf Bay. My son read it in English class this year and he really liked it. I in grad school had to read it in old English and do translation side by side. So I've got some trauma scars from Beowulf myself. It was very difficult my first semester in grad school. It was a real.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That sounds tough.

[Jeff O'Neill]

A real journey. Yeah. So there's a lot of different choices we can make. The Haney is the best known. I am not sufficiently schooled to be like what are the virtues and weaknesses of that versus the other? Availability bias will be a real thing in picking a Beowulf transition. What's out there that people can buy and pick up?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's probably the Haney. That would be my. My pick as well. Although a couple years ago Maria Devana Headley did a translation that's in Modern Modern English and it's kind of a feminist retelling and I remember listening to it on audio and then it opens with like bro. So you really have to be ready for contemporary. A contemporary experience with it. I'm a little bit of a purist with Beo Brilliant.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That is not what I'm looking for either.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes, we'll do it the old fashioned way, but we'll talk about that as a retelling. Definitely on the list as is from our listener Joan the Diary of Anne Frank Jones, writing in said that she recently revisited it for the first time since reading it in middle school, which was decades upon decades ago, and found it so much more poignant as an adult. From what she remembers, she said the book had a profound impact on me and others my age way back in the 70s. I'm not sure if it will fit your criteria and certainly understand if it doesn't. However, I found it to be a powerful and meaningful insight into the mind of a young girl going through extraordinary circumstances. I think it would ring every zero to well read bell I abs.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I mean of the things that have been presented. I'm more interested in this for a couple reasons. One, it's been a long time, like Joan, since I've encountered Diary Van Frank. I think I read it in elementary school myself and I don't know I've revisited since then though I was at the bookstore not too long ago looking for stuff. I think it was last summer with my kids, like looking for stuff for them to read during the summer break and I picked up a copy of Diary of Anne Frankton was flipping through it and just reading a few sentences. It is not. I think there's a lot of people who read it a long time ago or haven't read this who don't really know and I have forgotten how sophisticated this book is. She is explicitly thinking about in the course of the diary people may be reading it Letter. She. She's precautionous in ways that are shocking the publication history of it. The effect of it's fascinating. I think it's extraordinarily well suited for a sort of full spectrum investigation like we like to do on this kind of show. So I think if you were placing a go ahead.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I say anytime that like the idea of a book has eclipsed the actual reading of the book itself, we're interested in getting in there.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. This one is from a reader in a listener in Cincinnati. And this is another cool thing to tell us about. And I had not heard of this.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Me neither.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The Wuthering Heights Manuscript Project. Apparently the original manuscript was lost. I didn't know this. And this project gave 10,000 visitors to write one sentence into a large manuscript volume. So you go and you just transcribe one and it becomes a manuscript of a whole bunch of other people to

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Haworth Parsonage, where Bronte was raised.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So I think that's cool. I don't know. Is that a lot of sound and fury adding up to nothing? I'm not sure I like the idea of it. Kind of an exquisite corpse. But you know what you're going to get at the end. I think that's cool to see at the same time.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Also a recommendation for James Shapiro's A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. James Shapiro is a longtime scholar at Columbia University and he's written several. They are meant for a general audience, but like, as you might imagine, a general audience for the Shakespeare is not your general audience. But. But he's written several. 1599 is my favorite of them. About his exquisite year. 1599. A year in Shakespeare's Life. I think that's what this one is too. I could be confused. The one recommended here is A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. I think the supra title is 1599, but there's a whole bunch of other ones. And he is terrific and much more readable than Steven Greenblatt. Greenblatt. Taking a stray out here. And not as pompous. Double shot. Double tap. Boy. I really am watching the Sopranos. So there. So there you go. I will second secondly recommend the work of James Shapiro for people who want to read more about William Shakespeare.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

A nice companion, too, since that's about the year that Hamlet was put up. A nice companion to Hamnet. If you've been following that. Next one comes from Melissa. We're going into Project Hail, Maryland. Melissa heard us on the episode where we couldn't remember if Rocky's gender was ever discussed and Melissa's letting us know. We were told Rocky is neither. His species is what we might term hermaphroditic and says that when two parent Iridians love each other very much, they. They each make an egg and they bury them together. I love this parenthetical from Melissa that I imagine this with like a sea turtle for some reason. Me too. Then the two eggs emerge and a new eridian hatches. Ryland Grace has no way of knowing this when he first met Rocky and was learning to communicate with him and he felt weird about referring to Rocky as it, so he decided to use masculine pronouns as a placeholder. Melissa says as a person somewhere on the non binary spectrum, I really liked the idea of a planet where your sex or gender doesn't necessarily play a key role in your life. Life. And you know, we talked on that episode about how Andy Weir says my books are just supposed to be entertainment. If you see any politics in them, like, that's just you, man. But there is something important about this. Like this exists in science, of course, and in biology and nature that there are creatures born who can either change sex or, you know, have a more evolving relationship to sex or gender. But. But I don't know, maybe even if Andy Weir wasn't thinking, some reader is going to relate to this. This exists in the text and is meaningful. And I'm sure that Melissa is not the only listener, the only reader of Project Hail Mary that found this to be a meaningful and interesting idea. So thank you for sharing that with us. Very cool.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's also a good micro example for people who, and I don't know, a lot of listeners of this show fall into this camp, but maybe some people do of thinking why does everything have to be political or whatever. And you know, we say all reading and writing is political, even when it's not overtly or intentionally political. Because you think about it this way and I think this idea is. Thank you for writing in and reminding us of this particular. What were Weir's choices about if you wanted to give more anthropology biology of how Iridians are. He's got really three choices. One is that they sort of conform to something like gender as we know it. Two, they don't. Or three, say nothing, just. Just not talk about biology or. All of those are loaded. All of those represent a different kind of. You can't escape it in this kind of situation too. So I think it's a really interesting one to see at this time. We may not be Saying something overtly and who knows what the actual thoughts are. But by making this choice to represent this other sentient species with a complicated cultural structure and advanced technology, that gender is not, not central, important or even known to them. And yet they're still should be considered people of value in being. And Ryland Grass says that by sacrificing his own life to go help save them. So it's there. Rebecca like I'm not trying to be overt here, but like you don't have to look very far in these books. Like this is not something where people are bending over backwards to make it political. It's there on a plain text reading of so many things. You just have to the kind of eyes to see how obvious it is.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This is what the personal is. Political means, yes, right. That everything about our daily lives is described and circumscribed by politics and by what exists in the political landscape. And we bring ourselves to our reading. So there are plenty people who read Project Hail Mary and didn't think about it at all. And that's fine too. But readers who exist outside of the traditional gender binary are bringing that experience to this book and they're seeing something that resonates with their experience. And that's what an author is ultimately setting out to do is give readers something that they can connect to. And whether we are intended this particular thing to be something that is, as you're saying, a choice that he made. And those choices all have impact. So I guess this is really for the writers out there. Pay attention to all those choices that you're making. And to go back to our questions earlier in the show, this is another way into evaluating a text. Like what are the choices that the author had to make in order to write this book? How did they make them and do those choices?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And what choices do they avoid? Sometimes you can suss out what they were trying not to address or skate around on the Project Hail Mary tip. This is a read alike. I've heard of this book, but I've never read it. Children of Tide by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Eileen, thank you for writing in. It's got space comas, space spiders, science dude who keeps waking up not knowing the heck is going on. And it's really fun. So that sounds like a real good read alike. Eileen. So for all of you, including me out there, I am putting that on the list that doesn't really exist, but sort of does. I just did. You see right there. It's up there.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's in the ether. Yeah. This will go into my immediately for my husband who's a big sci fi audience.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, Bob can report back to us on.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Speaking of Bob, no one has written in to ask us if we're going to do master and commander someday.

[Jeff O'Neill]

But I mean Bob can write in. Shoot him the email. He can. He could submit Mr.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Zero to well ready 123mail.com yeah, got a nice tip also from Kristin, who said I was wondering aloud during our episode about Their Eyes Were Watching God about how the audio production is and she said the audio is fantastic. She had a copy from Libro FM and listened to it as she read her book along.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Cool.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You know, picked it up after listening to the episode and thinks that it would be worth it for listeners and for me to go back and listen just so you can hear how Ruby Dean, the narrator of it, handles the dialect in the book. That's one of the things that we talked about. Kristen's also reading Midnight's Children with Simon Hazell's Footnotes and Tangents group, which is not something that I've heard about. But he does slow reads and posts something every week about the reading, including links and other information. So that might be something to check out. I think they're also they, you know, they've done War and Peace. They're doing the Wolf hall trilogy if you are looking for a little bit more of like a steady drip, drip, drip, drip. And then we'll be here for you with the full episode when you're done with that big reading experience.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And we got a couple of Joy Luck Club anecdotes so you can so glad some of these came out. This is from Suzanne saying she thinks of the movie first but then later read the book and enjoyed it. But the story here was Suzanne went with her husband and Washington Theater one night on their honeymoon at a local shopping center. She loved it and he was bored out of his mind. So you know what? Two people art is different. People are different. You don't know. That's terrific there.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's, I mean it's such a mothers and daughters story. I can understand a male viewer having feeling less connected to it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's fair, I guess. On the, on that point Karen wrote in to say on that point we were asking about Generations and Gen Z, Gen Alpha. She read it along with her daughter and had a great time.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Kids are loving it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I was gonna say kids are loving it. Yeah. This person, Karen, I don't want to say too much, but they are around our age and grew up in Leawood and worked at the Barnes and Nobles in high school. And you and I have a lot of affection for the Barnes and Noble and the Plaza in Kansas City. Who knows Karen? Who knows if you saw a tall, a tall kid with bushy blonde hair and pleated khaki shorts in a braided leather belt. Could have been me. Could have been me.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh, lots of candidates for that one. But thank you for the shouts, Karen. We've also I was wondering aloud on our episode about 100 Years of Solitude which has sold 50 million copies, how many copies actually got read? And this is one of our great unanswered questions about all books but especially a book that is this popular, this weird and this difficult. Like I imagine the phenomenon was huge and people picked it up and this person wanted to give their personal anecdote about it. They say in my family of four we had one copy and every member has read it. It's one of their all time favorites. So I later they later bought their own copy. Four people have read that copy and then said I'm sure that there are similar dynamics happening everywhere over the years. She's also found it in local libraries of Melbourne, Cape Town and and a small Swiss village. All of the copies were well worn and stamped. So thank you Jinan who is a Swissy living in Cape Town.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Very interesting like it. These books that become like this definitely have what. What did we learn in Covid in R value and R of greater than 1 and some of I I don't mean this as a slog to any of these books that have achieved this escape velocity because they they are doing something different. There's a reason that they are are even eligible to get that R +1 value. But you reach a certain escape velocity. I'm going to continue my orbital mechanics metaphor and you continue to stay in motion. Right. People then think of it because people think of it. I also think it matters that has a memorable title. I don't think we talked about this and like 100 years of Tahito feels like a challenge. It's super memorable. At the same time I was overhearing in Powell's the other day someone talking about I don't know why everyone just thinks of Things Fall Apart as the canonical African novel because I have some others that I liked and I was stopped listening to those. It's a great title but also this just happens sometimes it becomes a thing. It gets recommended and then other people recommend it and just becomes a thing. People recommend that it's self perpetuating, built Off. Yeah, it's usually built off a foundation of quality, interest and pleasure, whatever, but then it just sort of rises to the cream of top and then it gets to traffic in a different stratosphere and pick up different. And pick up different currents that can keep it aloft for a long, long time. So it happens like there's a bit of a chicken in the egg problem with a lot of these books that become international, multi decade canonical hits. It's like, is it famous because it's famous or is it famous because it's good? Well, it has to be decent and interesting enough to be eligible to be famous. But at some level you start being staying famous because you're famous. And that's one reason the canon can be problematic over time is that it, it doesn't allow room for other things or it's circulating in ideas that we're not as interested in circulating.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, people are still checking it out from the library. So I totally understand that These copies of 100 Years of Solitude are like well stamped, but still, how many of those people actually read that copy that they checked out? I hope it's a lot of them. But that book is so much more than, if you've just heard about it, what you think it might be about.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, a lot of Little Women love. I think what I didn't understand was how many people read it not, not, not own grade school and middle school, but then performed versions of Little Women. And like, you know, it makes for a wonderful play because there's lots of costumes and it's dialogue and there's like three settings. Right. Like you could, you can easily move around your, your 18th or 19th century stuff. And then. Yeah, I just. That hadn't occurred to me. Then it becomes used as a text for other kinds of performance experience in the middle grade school and middle school experience.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This makes me feel a little bit better because one of the things that we've been saying reading Little Women is like we used to be SM because the kids are performing Hamlet for fun.

[Jeff O'Neill]

They're in defense to perform Hamlet.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

But this listener, Katie says that after she read Little Women as a kid, playing Little Women immediately replaced playing house among the neighborhood kids. And it gave them framework to grow and learn and play. And she feels so grateful and sentimental for those days. And then she notes, our Beth usually died a more dramatic death with a face painted with sidewalk chalk. But it was mostly pretty wholesome. I just love this. Thank you for sharing this with us, Katie. Katie also wanted to let us know that the Secret History was her actual literary fiction awakening. I don't think you're alone there, Katie. But she said she was traveling for work. Her roommate tucked it into her carry on and she just devoured it. And the next few that this is a good roommate. The next few the roommate gave her were the Sellout by Paul Beatty, Commonwealth by Ann Patchett, and Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin. I miss her bookshelf. You should, Katie. That's a great book. Roommate.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's a really good one. Also, Katie forwarded along another historical fiction recommendation that gets out of the World War II bubble. She's recommending Lisa C. So the Snowflower and the Secret Fan and the island of Sea Women. I don't know anything about that, but I wanted to pass that along as well. Doing listener to listener listener service there at the same time.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

We love that this one is next directly for you. You had a stray thought during the Little Women episode wondering when swimming pools became backyard swimming pools became thing. And our listener, Kelly, who must have been listening to the Book Riot podcast and knowing that you cannot resist a single subject, narrative nonfiction is recommending for you a book called Contested Waters A Social History of Swimming Pools in America by Jeff Wiltse. And if you are not watching this episode right now, you can't see that Jeff just copy pasted that title and is searching for it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

No, I. Because I had looked at it before because it's kind of expensive. It's an academic title title. I'm looking on ThriftBooks right now. ThriftBooks.com sponsoring the show. I can get a very good paperback for 20 bucks. I was hoping for like five or six like but I think because it's a small thing and people get it for their own library. But I am definitely interested in this.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

No doubt a good that this person really has seen you. So I hope you're feeling.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think as I've gotten older, Rebecca, I must say that am I sure I don't want a long New Yorker thing about like. Like the. The person who invented swimming pools as a luxury item in like 1911 or something?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I mean I'm sure there was someone always want a long New Yorker thing.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. It will blow my mind and break your heart and make you boil with rage. Which I've got to say was not on my bingo card. For a book about the history of swimming pools.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I love that we now know you're not alone because someone else has also read a book about the history of swimming pools.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. For those who don't remember Me didn't listen to that episode. You know, they don't mention laying around by the pool in the Great Gatsby though. They're very much pool laying next to kinds of people and modes. So I was like, when did this become a thing where if you were of leisure, you know, now you can't open your Instagram without seeing someone who wants to pretend or actually be rich next to a swimming pool. It's so fascinating. How do people.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

We're just gonna do this again, right?

[Jeff O'Neill]

No, we're not doing. We're not doing this right now. Last one for us.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. This is from Sebastian. And this kind of brings us whole circle. Sebastian and his wife found our podcast because they were talking about reading more classics this year. And in listening to our year end episode, they realized that we were fans of the Secret History. And he said, I felt vindicated hearing your enthusiasm for it. I read it two years ago and it took me a bit to get through it, but since then I've come to love it and love it and more, more and more as I get some distance from it. My wife ridicules me for it. She says, you hated reading that book. How can you say it's one of your favorite favorites? But for real, this book has had such a slow burn for me and is now truly one of my favorites. I put this at the end because it does connect back to things that people were asking at the top of the show about a reading experience that maybe you don't like while you're going through it, but you end up being really glad that you read it. And sometimes a book does grow in your estimation as you have more time to marinate with it. The Secret History is totally a book that that's possible with, but you kind of never know, know what the book is going to be.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So thank you for sharing that with us, Sebastian.

[Jeff O'Neill]

We. We always find too. This goes back to. We were talking about the. Even the discussions we've had of books we didn't necessarily anticipate liking and maybe even didn't. I always find the book more interesting after talking about it. And I would love to hear from people if they found their own relationship to a book change by just hearing other people talking about could be us, could be your book club, could be a class that you have had. But you know, kind of like they say, hunger is the, the, the secret ingredient in good food. I think having a chance to think about it or hear about it or just spend some more time with the book outside of the actual Reading about it to almost a hundred percent likelihood will make you appreciate that book and read the experience more. I cannot remember a time where I ever taught a book book. I was taught a book or I talked about a book in which I was less happy to have read or thought about the book.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, you know, after the fact. It's one of the reasons that I was so excited to do this show and it's one of the things that got us excited in our initial conversation about doing this was that we have had such great experiences even talking about things that we didn't like. We. And that's. It's always enriching. I always appreciate a book more after we've about talked, talked about it. It kind of makes me think about all the, the folks wanting a book club. Like some of this is personal bias. I am a terrible book club member. I don't want to be told by anybody else what to read. I don't really trust anybody else's book selections. And like a room full of 10 people. I'm, I'm not confident that there's going to be like that much interesting stuff coming from such a big group. You can't get that deep with a lot of people in the course of like, like one or two hours, but you can with one other person. And so maybe you don't need a book club. Maybe you need one reading buddy.

[Jeff O'Neill]

A book buddy.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And if we could do anything, that might actually be the thing that I would do. Like in some future version of something, just help people match up with one book buddy. Because these like, you know, 60 to 90 minute conversations that we have about books that we've agreed to read with each other, where we show up in the appointed day and we've done the homework but we haven't talked about about it really at all before then, are surprising and fun and they're challenging. And I come in sometimes thinking that I understood something one way. But your perspective will either. Sometimes I get further entrenched in my perspective and sometimes your perspective shifts me a little bit and that like that give and take and the. Well, we, we just recorded that Much Ado About Nothing episode. So the merry war of intellect is such a, such a pleasure. And if you can find that, like trying to find it with 10 people in a book club just seems impossible to me. But if you can find one good reading buddy, like I don't. I'm not having these kinds of book conversations with 15 other people in my life. We do this together and our colleagues come on and do this with us sometimes, but if you can find one buddy, and maybe you just do one a quarter, you know, like even one a month could be a lot.

[Jeff O'Neill]

You could have a month, I think with two. With two people would feel. Feel like a lot. And maybe you want that, but it could feel like a lot.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Well, this is fun. Rebecca, thanks so much for everyone for listening and for writing in. Let's keep them coming at what is our email address again? Make sure 0 to well read 0 to well read book riot.com Boy oh boy, I'm gonna get this right at some point. Eventually. You can sign up for the newsletter or become a member to hear about our office hours episodes or get early ad freed [e-mail] to well read. Rebecca, thank you so much. It was fun.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And as always, we are a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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