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- [00:02]
Jeff O'Neill
When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and winter spice Flavor Fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season, and only for a limited time. Sprite Obey your thirst.
- [00:25]
Rebecca Schinsky
So good, so good, so good.
- [00:27]
Jeff O'Neill
Give big, Save big with Rack Friday deals at Nordstrom Rack. For a limited time, take an extra 40% off red tag clearance for everyone on your list. All sales final and restrictions apply. So bring your gift list and your wish list to your nearest Nordstrom Rack today. Welcome to Zero to well Read, A podcast about everything you need to know about the books you want to read, have read, maybe never will read, but want to know about. I'm Jeff o'.
- [00:58]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
Neill.
- [00:59]
Rebecca Schinsky
And I'm Rebecca Schinsky. Today we're wrapping up our first season with some reflections on what we've learned. We're taking questions from the Listener Mailbag and we're getting into some thoughts even about the future of this podcast. One of the things about the future of this podcast is that we have a bunch of new ways that you can connect with us if you want to get Our free newsletter comes out every Tuesday starting in January when the new episodes drop. It will have, you know, expansive show notes. You can think of it as kind of a mini syllabus of additional reading, some supporting material for episodes. You can get that by going to Our Patreon page, patreon.com 02 well read. Click the little Join for Free button. Or you can sign up to become a paying member with options to get ad free early access to the episodes. And then there's also our office hours level of sponsorship membership where you'll be able to get bonus content from us. That's also starting in January. So you can do all of that@patreon.com 02 well read. We're also spinning up some dedicated socials for this year podcast because y' all have made it so much more successful than we anticipated.
- [02:05]
Jeff O'Neill
It does not. We don't enjoy the SoC, but we can, we can appreciate it and I think it might be fun. We're going to try to figure out if you got ideas for what we can do there. There'll be clips from the show. The stuff will be on YouTube, but I think we could find some other uses for oh well, you can find. So what, what's the handle? We're Zero to well podcast everywhere.
- [02:22]
Rebecca Schinsky
Zero to well read podcast on Instagram, Tik Tok and YouTube. And if you're going like right today as you're listening to this episode, if it's brand new and fresh, there might not be much there. But give those a follow and they will be fleshed out in the new year. You can of course also always email us at zero to well read bookriot.com.
- [02:42]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, the newsletter is going to be free and you can sign up for that now. The first one will go with our January 6th episode. That's going to be the best way to keep track outside of listening to episodes. You know, sometimes not everyone listens to every episode or it's hard to get a URL. That's one of the great uses of that. We're also going to have extra material about each episode. If there's an image, you know, a first edition, a book link to like maybe there's an auction or an author image or something else, we can do more in that space beyond talking to each other. As much as we enjoy that there. If you have a moment to rate and review wherever you're listening, that super helps us. And I think it's really been a part of more people finding the show and we can devote more time to it and make more episodes. We weren't going to do this many episodes. We were going to take a break and we are still going because the iron is hot and we have some excitement and activity around it. And that's because you all have been listening. So share it with a friend. When you get that email, that first one, you can forward it to people that you think might like it. But if you have a moment now to hit the five stars in whatever your podcast player of choice is. Rebecca, I don't know if you've ever done this. I want to talk about our. The mood, the tone of this particular episode a little bit different, which we're, you know, reflecting a little bit about what we've done so far. I don't know if you ever did this in college. I think it's mostly a college thing. Maybe people do it in high school or middle school. I think there's maybe some reasons they don't, which you'll hear about in a second. Sometimes the professor would have you to their house for the last class of the semester. Did you ever do one of these?
- [04:06]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes. Yeah, I talked about this a little bit on the secret history episode.
- [04:10]
Jeff O'Neill
Oh, yes, right. Exactly.
- [04:12]
Rebecca Schinsky
I took an incredible, truly life changing seminar my freshman year of college. I went to a Jesuit college and it was this big multidisciplinary the class. I think we got six credits a semester for it. And it crossed philosophy, theology, history and literature. All the four professors, one from each specialty. They took turns. We read a bunch of the great books. And then you were in a discussion section led by one of those professors. And the professor that I had was just incredible. I think he was the. Like, he was the one you wanted. I just got lucky. You just wanted to be in his section. Yeah, right. We. Everybody was, like, a little bit obsessed with him. Like, he always wore bow ties. The class got together and gifted him a special bow tie at the end of the semester. And his treat to, like, the 15 of us was that he had us over to his house at the end of the semester. He and his wife cooked us dinner. And it was this, like, oh, my God. He was this larger than life figure for all of us, who then gave this lovely toast about, you've all worked so hard and you've had this formative experience, and I'm so proud of you. And he and his wife, I'm sure they told the same stories at this dinner every year. No. And I also, like, this was 2002 when this would have happened. I don't know if they still do this today, but it was really lovely.
- [05:31]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. When I was in grad school, this happened in college a couple times. And once in high school is more of a. We dropped off our final paper at our AP Civics teacher's house, and she had, like, donuts inside her and you could hang out for a few minutes. It was great. But in classes where the last thing wasn't a test. Right. Because if it's an exam or something, you don't have another class. But if you're turning in your paper, you could have this weird sort of liminal space of where you're still technically in class, but it's done. And usually, you know, everyone loosens up a little bit. Like, the teachers or professors would loosen up, the students would loosen up. You could joke about what's happened. You can talk about the foibles. You can also talk about what matters. And I always found that really wonder. I love. I wish I could, you know, keep the spirit of that the whole year through. We just came off recording A Christmas Carol, and I think that's the spirit we're going to proceed in here a little bit of, like, this isn't over. We've learned a lot, but we all kind of loosen up and give some real talk and real experience, and then we have some funny stuff to do as well, here we're going to start with some reflections because I think, Rebecca, I don't think I'll speak for both of us. You can tell me how far afield I am for you. We were excited to re encounter these books and return to books that are a little more outside of the hurly burly of publishing or mass culture even so far as exists now and then look at them with different kinds of eyes for a different kind of reason. But I think we were both surprised at what that actually yielded to us. Am I wrong?
- [06:58]
Rebecca Schinsky
No, no, you're not wrong at all. Like, we've been reading books and talking about them with each other for 15 years almost. And this has. And this is not the first time that we've read like a great book and so book clubbed it with each other. But to do it in this structure, to do 14 books basically over 14 weeks and to have this, it's been a much more intense reading experience. But it has really shifted how I read, how I'm thinking about my reading, what I want from reading. And I think when we start started the project, I was coming from the place of like this will be really fun and interesting. It's a different kind of thing than we've done before. Yes, you and I both like the beginnings of new projects and we had like our book Riot podcast is pretty inside baseball and we're doing like stuff that people who are paying like really close attention to what's happening in the back of the industry are doing. But we wanted to do something where we could just talk to readers more like a much more broad mainstream reach readers to talk about books that we can all connect around and that's more likely to happen. It's easier to do around these kinds of books that people are exposed to when they're young, when they're, when they're in school, and then maybe as an adult you like, have some nostalgia for it. It's been just a much bigger experience than I expected it to be.
- [08:20]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
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- [10:30]
Rebecca Schinsky
Marshall's buyers are hustling hard to get amazing new gifts into stores right up to the last minute. Like a designer perfume for that friend who never RSVP'd wishlist topping toys for her kids who came too. Belgian chocolates for the neighbor, a cozy scarf for your boss and a wool jacket for your husband that you definitely did not almost forget. Marshalls, we get the deals, you give the good stuff even at the last minute. Find a Marshall's near you.
- [10:59]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I think it's just so. It's such a different reading moment and there's no wrong or right time to pick up. I'm gonna spoil. I don't. I'm just keeping the thing we just recorded. I gotta go back a couple episodes because we've got some things in the can, you know, why is anyone in a particular moment who's not in school have a reason to pick up Oedipus to try it right there's no wrong time to do it, but there's no particular reason to do it. And it gave us sort of, on a personal level, a motivation to go pick up something that might seem out of date. But also, you know, we cover the business and we work with new releases so much and current authors and what's going on in award season, and we enjoyed that. But I think it is so meaningful to have the ballast of time and to see what has survived. And the march of history in the arts is not a meritocracy. And don't let what I'm about to say show that it isn't. But sometimes something that sticks around does do something different, that does have a diff. It does give you an opportunity and a challenge that is unlike other things coming out in the moment. And sometimes it's even just the time that's. That's passed. But to encounter these works that have endured that represent in a lot of ways, the peak of what can be done in this medium for people like us who care about it. I mean, what else is there? That's what I keep thinking. Why do anything else than this?
- [12:29]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. And we've said that, I think, on the Midnight's Children episode, Like, why are we ever reading anything else? Like, partially because it would be exhausting to just read the way that Rushdie writes all the time.
- [12:40]
Jeff O'Neill
We've had a run of a couple that's like, whoa. Yeah.
- [12:43]
Rebecca Schinsky
You know, this summer, when I sat down to read Gatsby for the pilot episode of this, I got the first inkling of, like, oh, this is going to be something. Like, I'm in for a ride here. Like that. It hit in a way that I didn't expect it to hit. I felt like. I think what I expected was that we'd be going into these older books and that I would feel like I was having an encounter with older art and looking into the past. And some of them have felt that way. But how present and relevant most of these books still feel and how useful they can still be has been a great surprise and a real eye opener for me. Kind of an attitude adjustment for myself about what we talk about when we talk about classics. Like, I just kind of got a cosmic, like, buckle up, sister, when I sat down with Fitzgerald in June. And it has. It's continued to feel that way. Like, we initially conceived of the show as, like, semesters. Like, we would do the fall semester. We would take a couple weeks off. We would come back in January to do a winter spring semester. We're Just gonna like go for it. We're doing a full send now. But I felt like I was, oh, this semester is gonna be something that I hadn't anticipated. And that's like, I mean, my poor husband has heard me say it with like every book we've read of like, wow, this really still hits. And it's become a joke in the house of like, guess what? Great books are great.
- [14:09]
Jeff O'Neill
Well, and I think we, we, we were very intentional about the kind of episodes we wanted to make, which is some combination of, you know, history, close reading, book club, discussion, a good undergraduate seminar, a panel. But not either. Not. It's not any one of those things. Like it's a mixture where we're trying to encounter them as ourselves and individuals in the moment, but also hold that alongside of the historical moment to hold that aside, the other work to hold that alongside the actual words on the page by themselves. And I felt, I felt good and sustained by that mixture where we take a multi perspective approach and you could take any one of those threads and build and knit a whole new sweater out of it. If you want to be more academic, you want to have more of a freewheeling personal reflection. I like this. I didn't like this. But I think for what we want to do, it's a combination of what it means to us in the moment, how to understand its historical importance and then what's actually happening on the page on a readerly and writerly point of view. And I've been super happy with just the container that we've built and the attitude we've brought to it. I will endeavor to keep that through. I can left to my own devices become super language and history wonky. But I can also don't want to lose that at the same time. So we're going to endeavor to do that and as you all have feedback for us, let us know. Zero to well. Read. Com. That's one of those things we asked early because we were getting some of the early Apple reviews from people new to us in the show, which is great. Saying there's too much history and too much context when we actually ask the people listening, like, no, that's what we like. So we're going to kind of keep the mix where we are. But I think I've been especially happy with sort of the reading position that we found. It feels sustainable and interesting and I learned something from it rather than just like trying to tell people what I know or think.
- [15:58]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. And of course, one of the log lines for the show is part Book club, part English class.
- [16:03]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah.
- [16:04]
Rebecca Schinsky
And I. I've experienced it and I hope listeners experience it as kind of like if your English class was more like a book club.
- [16:10]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah.
- [16:10]
Rebecca Schinsky
Like where you're reading from the. I find myself reading from like, the posture of a student. And that's a different kind of approach to a book than, like, than when I just sit down to read a new release to see what it's all about, or when I'm reading something for fun or for entertainment. But approaching a book, like, with a pen in my hand, with the lens on of, like, what is this author trying to do? How successful are they in doing it? Why does this book matter? How has it influenced other works? What other works was it influenced by? One of the things that's been a great surprise through this season is how in conversation these books have been with each other when that was not planned at all. We picked 12 books initially to start with that we just thought would be an interesting, well rounded thesis statement on what we're doing here. Some classics, some contemporary stuff, some underappreciated things, some books that have big adaptations coming out. Like, it's the whole breadth of book riotiness, but that, like, that Gatsby shows up in the Secret History and the Greeks show up in the Secret History and Hamlet shows up in fucking everything.
- [17:20]
Jeff O'Neill
Yes, that's true.
- [17:25]
Rebecca Schinsky
That's been kind of a like, fizzy bubbly champagne feeling for me of like, we get to keep reading this way. And even when you're not trying to make it happen, these books are in connection and conversation with each other because great writers are also great readers and they're referring to each other and responding to each other and like writing into the spaces that each other have created. And that's been so much fun to dig into.
- [17:50]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. You go to a bookstore or library and you can see books on the shelves and it feels like they're in the same collection. But when you start reading like this. And again, we're picking these books because the ones that also the readers, the writers have read. Right. There's a reason we're not. They do speak to each other. Because everyone read Shakespeare, so many people read Oedipus, then every modern writer essentially has read Gatsby or wants to read Gatsby or thinks they should have read Gatsby. But there's actually more than just the book sitting next to them at the shelves. There's more than just a chronology. Like, there's internal connections, illusions and connectivity that you have to do the work of reading it to really see. And I think just that that's one thing that struck me is that normally when we're talking about books on the book riot Pod or we're doing roundups, we don't have the opportunity, reason, or really the motivation to do time reading individual lines and passages. And it's just the best it's always been. Maybe my favorite thing to do is to look closely at something and think about what it means and tease out possibilities and contradictions. You know, have a couple of ideas. You know, try to offer someone something that maybe they didn't get on their own if they just sort of move their eyes over it. And that's something you don't do with more casual reading. And frankly, even most modern professional reasoning doesn't. Reading doesn't afford that kind of check this idea out or look, isn't this weird or strange because it requires more of a judgment and a yes, no, or what list or recommendation can it go on? I think people, they haven't. Even if you haven't noticed as a listener, we're not talking about whether or not this is our favorite book of all time. Where does this rank on the best of whatever? I don't want to say beyond. We're beyond that, Rebecca, but maybe we're. Maybe we're beyond that in a kind of way.
- [19:30]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think we're trying to be outside of it. Like, I think the things we appreciate about each book come through. But we've said from the beginning that we're not interested in this being. I liked it. I didn't like it. It was good. It was bad.
- [19:45]
Jeff O'Neill
We have good reads for that. Good reads. You can get all that you want and more.
- [19:49]
Rebecca Schinsky
And. And there's so much subject, like the Internet is just made of subjectivity. And certainly not that we are objective by any stretch. We're subjective people like anybody else. But to try to step back and read from the place of like, what is this about? What is it trying to do? What can I take from it? What can you. Even if you don't like it?
- [20:12]
Jeff O'Neill
Yes.
- [20:14]
Rebecca Schinsky
What if reading. My goal is not to like something? What if my goal with reading is to get something out of it, to derive. Derive some meaning or to learn something or to be challenged or stretched in some way. Like, I find that to be really liberating and exciting and a fun. That is a fun way for me to read. What if it's not about, like, scratching my own personal reading itches, right?
- [20:36]
Jeff O'Neill
Getting to move from trying to move from judging and ranking to understanding and building on I think would might be one way of thinking about it there. Other reflections. I think we're kind of circling around a core of sensibility. But what else do you want to mention specifically?
- [20:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, you know, I mean, the oldest thing that we read this season was Oedipus Aeschylus, like more than 2,000 years old. And then we also read Hamnet, which is only five years old. Granted set a couple hundred years ago. But in more than 2,000 years worth of fiction, there are these common threads that it was kind of grounding to be like, oh, humans, like, we just are who we. Like humans just are who we are. There's not that much that has changed about like the core questions, the issues people face, the universal experiences of being a person and watching great writers deal with that. Over 2,500 years worth of writing has been. That's felt expansive and exciting to me.
- [21:40]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, I guess at the same time, much like that there is so much more available context and supplementary material that is so easily accessed now. Like even when I was a student and again, I feel like myself has been that long, but it's been 20 years since I was a student of a real kind. But the digital agent sort of happened already. And there's a lot to bemoan about the Internet. But I'll tell you what, being able to find video interviews with authors and scholars on YouTube, it's incredible. Is not one of the things that's bad about the Internet. Like you can find. You can. There's rabbit holes within rabbit holes you could go down. And it's very tempting. And that's one of the things we want to link to in the newsletter. Stuff that we found that maybe we took one thing from or maybe we didn't watch. But can you believe this exists? You can create yourself a reading list within one of these or a watch list or a scroll list or whatever. But there's so much that's out there. There's also a lot that's not available, like in paywalled or libraries, which is no different than how it used to be. You can find that it exists, but like you can really get into the. The secret history and fans and tart and essays. And so much of it's available that it's. It's frankly a little daunting to try to figure out where to stop, how much to do.
- [22:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
I mean, those have been interesting emails to get from listeners or messages to get of like, how could you have talked about this book and not have talked about this component or this thing or this, like, element of the book's fandom and especially the more modern stuff. Like there is just too much these episodes to be seven hours long.
- [23:09]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. Yeah. And it's just a Google away for most of you. And ignore Gemini. That's when it gets stuff wrong so often, especially when it comes to this kind of. It's amazing how wrong it is there. What else? Before we move on from the reflections, Rebecca?
- [23:21]
Rebecca Schinsky
That's true. I think that's it for me. I'm ready for. You've got some structured categories for us.
- [23:27]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. You know, superlatives. Questions that I was just. These aren't really rankings, but we have gone out of our way to not judge. But now that we have a few in our rear view mirror, I think it would help. Like, what kind of sticks out is how I'm thinking about this. What was the biggest surprise? It doesn't have to be that you liked it or whatever. Just like the big. The thing that felt like it was the biggest surprise to you. And I guess we should limit to the things that are out. We've recorded some things that aren't. We can include Christmas Carol because that will have been out at this point. But of the things that we have covered by December 23rd. Rebecca, what sticks out to you as being a surprise?
- [24:04]
Rebecca Schinsky
A couple of things. First, I think the biggest one was how fun the big, unruly books can be when you're reading through the lens of trying to make sense of it, especially Pynchon and Rushdie. This season it was fun because I wasn't sitting down expecting to just flip through something and have it be easy reading on a Saturday afternoon. I wasn't like, this is my vacation reading. I'm sitting on the beach. But I knew that I was gonna be doing some work. And doing the work for it was fun. And just how in awe I was of some of these writers for, like, the ways that their brains work and the things that they create. Also how differently Gatsby hits as an adult really blew my mind. Like, it's. We read that book when we're 16 because that's when high schools have us as captive audiences. But that is a book for. You are old enough to have some regrets and you're old enough to have seen people do things that people do. And reading it in my early 40s like that, that really, really hit. I think if you have not approached these books since you were a teenager, bringing your adult self to them will be gratifying and exciting in ways that you haven't expected, but it was Gatsby and Gatsby and like Rusty for me, I think. What about you?
- [25:22]
Jeff O'Neill
I think Oedipus not because I didn't know, sort of it's Titanic, Wade. And there's the first mover element of like inventing the third. Like, let's add a third actor, let's just add a third act. Like, we can still do this. I taught Oedipus a few times and it always went okay. But I was a little apprehensive of it being like a museum piece. And I don't know if it's just the way we approached it or seeing with fresh eyes how revolutionary and strange it is and how far we are from like the moment of the performance and how different the idea of culture is. I don't know. I guess it just. It had. It had more depth to thinking about Oedipus and then this, like what Aeschylus was doing and how the Greeks did or didn't think or how we can. I don't know, I just found it to be transporting. And the closest thing to time travel is we really have access to. To try to imagine a third of Athens showing up and letting people out of jail for the day. And it's only performed once and. And there was something about contextualizing it and imagining the people who knew the story. But this was a take on it. And it's some blend of politics and art and religion. It feels. I don't know, it feels like a die. It feels like if. What if you got to see a T. Rex, but you actually kind of do for a moment.
- [26:44]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
Yeah.
- [26:45]
Jeff O'Neill
I don't know. That was the biggest. I keep thinking about that.
- [26:48]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
Yeah.
- [26:48]
Jeff O'Neill
There. Okay, here's one. If you had to pick from one of these for someone getting into great books or back into great books, which would you pick?
- [27:00]
Rebecca Schinsky
The Secret History. But it almost feels like cheating.
- [27:03]
Jeff O'Neill
Why is it cheating?
- [27:05]
Rebecca Schinsky
I mean, it's just so good and so sticky and it has the like, you know, like they've murdered their friend and you find out on page one and like, so you get kind of the mystery element. It's very suspenseful. Also, it's just like booze and drug soaked. Also it's packed with book nerd stuff. But you don't lose anything really if you don't pick up every book nerd reference that she's making. And it's a 450ish, 500 page book that you plow through. It's just like imminently readable. And such a great Time that. I mean, that feels kind of like cheating to me. Gatsby is maybe the other answer here because it's short. It's so much juicier than you remember. Like, I just remember saying on that episode, it's messy as hell. And I did not remember that. And just like, how fun that is.
- [27:58]
Jeff O'Neill
I think. I think you're right on both counts. But maybe for a slightly different kind of person getting back into quote, unquote, great books, which is, if you are a reader but you're coming from, I don't know, some other kind of reading, maybe especially genre reading or more straight up pleasure reading. The Secret History is ironically a gateway drug into maybe more complexity and depth because it's there. But it's also Donna Tartt we talked about in the episode. She wants to write a great story that people get enveloped in, but she also wants to have, you know, references to ancient Greek stuff. And then I think if you are not reading at all and you really want to make it a part of your consistent practice or life or whatever, I don't think I can recommend it because it's so long. And I think if I go from there, I think it is Gatsby, because you will. You will get references. There are modern adaptations. The lines are good. It'll feel a little bit more familiar. I think we don't yet have the pick yet out there. I don't think any one of them is a home run. And I don't know what a home run looks like. I'm not sort of satisfied with either answer, I guess, is what I would say right now, which is.
- [29:02]
Rebecca Schinsky
Okay, I would like listener emails on that.
- [29:05]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
Like what?
- [29:07]
Rebecca Schinsky
From the wide. The wide ocean of great books. If you've got to pick one that helps somebody get back into reading or start reading this kind of thing. What are you recommending them?
- [29:15]
Jeff O'Neill
0 to well read book riot.com most memorable scene, Rebecca. A scene itself that. That sticks in your mind. They can blur. We've done a lot. We don't. Yeah, we think about. We think about scenes. We tend to think about ideas and passages more than individual scenes. That's how we've. We've proceeded to some degree. But having said that, is there a moment from any one of the books that you can latch onto if you. If you scan through them quickly or.
- [29:43]
Rebecca Schinsky
You think about what's yours? I want you to go first on this one.
- [29:48]
Jeff O'Neill
I keep thinking about Marmee. Oh, damn it. That's not out yet. I can't even say that.
- [29:54]
Rebecca Schinsky
Spoilers.
- [29:55]
Jeff O'Neill
Spoilers. If you know what that is, you deserve to do that. So that's one that stuck with me. And again, that's been a few weeks outside of that one. I do think about. I do think about Hamlet, of course. Always am thinking about Hamlet. But because of the Hamnet.
- [30:12]
Rebecca Schinsky
You are always thinking about Hamlet. It's just true.
- [30:15]
Jeff O'Neill
I think because we did Hamnet as well and that's already out. The. The wonder of Shakespeare and the moments where. And I said this on the show. I imagine there's a part of me that wants to imagine that Hamlet realizes he's in a play and he goes. He sort of shuts it down once he kills Polonius. And he's like, there's special providence in the fall of a sparrow. The readiness is all. I think about the readiness is all a lot and I'm not even sure I know what it means. But Hamlet moving from where he feels like he may have some control over events and he also doesn't give up. This is not him giving up. Like I'm just, you know, whatever's going to happen is going to happen. But it's also is that I find myself beguiled by the readiness is all. And I don't know what to do with it. And I think that's why it sticks with me. I feel like there's something there. But it's inexhaustibly interesting to me to think about the most creative, the most inventive character by the most creative and most inventive playwright at the moment in which they have a realization of some kind. It is to sort of step outside of themselves. But I don't know what to do with that. Rebecca. So that's why I keep coming back to it. Is that gibberish? Did anyone follow that? I have no idea.
- [31:34]
Rebecca Schinsky
That's why Hamlet still hits. This is why we're still reading Shakespeare 400 years later. Is that feeling exactly?
- [31:41]
Jeff O'Neill
That's right.
- [31:41]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think for me it's more of an image than a scene. Or there's multiple scenes of it. But Janie and the Janie hanging out on the porch of the shop in their eyes were watching God. And the banter and the storytelling and how sharp those moments are that like you can feel like the southern night air. I really loved that. The, like it's tied. There's a three way tie though. The other ones are the afternoon, the summer afternoon when everybody's drunk in the hotel in Gatsby and you're just like, this is the. What are these people doing?
- [32:17]
Jeff O'Neill
We can have A power ranking of drunk in the hotel. Because there's a wonderful drunk in the. I mean, the denouement of the secret history is also drunk in a hotel, which is also a reference to Gatsby. I mean, anyway, they go back and forth.
- [32:27]
Rebecca Schinsky
And then the scene in Midnight's Children where Salim Sinai is hiding in the laundry basket.
- [32:33]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah.
- [32:33]
Rebecca Schinsky
And his mother comes into the bathroom and he sees all kinds of things happen, but he describes her butt as the black mango. And this encounter that he has with the black mango, like, shapes the rest of his life. It's just so. It's like vivid and wild and zany and just funny. And you're like, is this happening? Like, is this really what's happening right now to this character? Just, I'm going to be thinking about that forever. Like, when I'm on drugs for some medical procedures someday, I'm probably going to be like uttering gibberish about the black mango and the laundry basket.
- [33:13]
Jeff O'Neill
This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and Old no. 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee.
- [33:39]
Rebecca Schinsky
At New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner, however you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what running is all about. Run your way@newbalance.com running.
- [34:08]
Jeff O'Neill
You know, the one that I think about a lot too is from a Never Let Me Go. When they finally go to sort of confront the administrators, teachers, and they sort of ask them the truth and they tell them the truth.
- [34:20]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
Truth.
- [34:21]
Jeff O'Neill
And I think any moment when truth telling happens, I'll have to save this for another one because there's another scene where like the truth actually they have it out. We must have it out. I may even be quoting that directly anytime people have it out at the Secret History or Gatsby. But this moment where they actually go confront their childhood teachers who are part of this bio industrial complex and they. They have to reckon with the truth and all of their invented mythologies fall away. It's just unbelievable.
- [34:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
I mean, it's so heartbreaking. I think that's the book from this season that I've read the most.
- [34:59]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah.
- [35:00]
Rebecca Schinsky
And that Scene is really sticky.
- [35:05]
Jeff O'Neill
How about characters that jumped off the page, Characters that stuck out in the moment. They could be forever characters. I've got one, but I can lead off again. You want me go first?
- [35:16]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, take it.
- [35:17]
Jeff O'Neill
Atticus Finch is a weirdo. Like, in a great. And like, in a way better way than, like, than.
- [35:25]
Rebecca Schinsky
Than I think standing for Atticus Finch in that.
- [35:28]
Jeff O'Neill
Well, I'm not even saying. But like, that he sits by himself and he's a weirdo. Outlier, sort of. Barely. Not an outcast. Like, he's weird. He is not. I don't think he is the version of Gregory Peck. And it's been a while since I've watched the version of that, which is more like kind of almost like a Martin Sheen, Josiah Bartlett, like a paragon of, like, everything that's good and fantastically great about a certain kind of male liberal positionality. But he's pretty odd. He doesn't fit in. And it's because. And I think it's because of that he does what he does. But I keep thinking of how strange Atticus Finch is that that's one that keeps.
- [36:10]
Rebecca Schinsky
Scout Finch was on here, too, that she's so much funnier than I. Than I remembered. I hadn't read To Kill a Mockingbird since, like, early in education. 7th, 7th grade, 9th grade, something like that. And it's just. She's charming and funny and so much sharper than I recalled. And I loved Zoid Wheeler in Vineland.
- [36:30]
Jeff O'Neill
Yes.
- [36:31]
Rebecca Schinsky
And folks like, if you have been scrolling in the zero to well Read feed and you have seen Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, and you're like, why are they doing a Pynchon book I've never heard of? That's the book that inspired One Battle After Another that's out right now. Gonna be up for a bunch of Oscars. And the opening scene when Zoid is like, he's gotta go do his annual trans fenestration jump through a window to demonstrate that he's still crazy so that he can get the government support. And all of the reporters are gonna, like, show him. It just sets the scene for. Okay, you're in for a ride here. What's happening? I had never read that before. I'd never read Pynchon before. And it was a real, like, that was also a buckle up moment. But I loved Z in that moment. And really through the whole book. And the seeds of him that are in Leonardo DiCaprio's character Bob in one battle After Another are really fun to trace.
- [37:22]
Jeff O'Neill
Scenes about making a Scene are always fun too, because you get, you get a lot of that in Hamlet when he puts on his antic disposition. And then as we talked about with hamnet, the last 10 or 15 pages of hamnet, which she's going to the play and then sees the play and he sees that Will has trained the character playing Hamlet to have the man. I mean, come on.
- [37:39]
Rebecca Schinsky
On.
- [37:40]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, come on. Let's see. What kinds of books and authors are you more or less interested in adding to the show lineup?
- [37:50]
Rebecca Schinsky
I mean, I think a lot of the stuff that we read as teens, but that's really meant to be for adults. That feels like the richest field of exploration to me.
- [38:00]
Jeff O'Neill
I keep thinking about perks of being a wallflower. Yeah, I know that's an important book to you and we've talked about that. I think over the years. I see it show up way higher up on like most rated. Like that book still hit. I'd be so curious to see it because it's kind of like the secret history for tweens a little bit. Like there's some. Or the Great Gatsby for gentlemen, that kind of stuff.
- [38:22]
Rebecca Schinsky
I'm interested in doing some more drama. Like we did Shakespeare this season. We did Oedipus, but doing some more.
- [38:28]
Jeff O'Neill
I mean, I obviously want to do a stopper. I mean, that's clearly the answer.
- [38:32]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, yeah. And doing some poetry. I think one of the things that I'm excited to do as we transition into knowing that this is going to be a weekly thing and not just like inside a couple seasons through the year is more diversity of format and.
- [38:47]
Jeff O'Neill
Like we have more at bats, Rebecca. So we can swing at some weird pitches.
- [38:51]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
Yeah.
- [38:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
And it'll give us like, like, you know, if we're reading a 500 page book one week, we can do a play or we can do some poetry the next week and give ourselves some variety in that way too. But I'm really excited to do that. Yeah, we have something.
- [39:04]
Jeff O'Neill
Oh, go ahead.
- [39:05]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. And also just to see like how listeners respond, like looking at the download stats for this season has also been kind of interesting and surprising of which episode, as far as those are a measure of what books people are interested in visiting or checking out has been really fun. What's on your list?
- [39:20]
Jeff O'Neill
I mean, I think I'm the one that made a case to include Oedipus or something from antiquity. Because just thinking about what people think about, I was like, I think people are gonna. They want. Or they may want that because that's what we think about when we like, you know, look at a great books course and like the Greeks and I think again, it's certainly possible all of these works are singular in their way, but they're kind of singular in similar ways as we find. I would like more, I want to go back into the deep, older vault because if you look at sort of the median age of what we've done, it's younger than you might get from a normal thing. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But I think that episode and our experience of it suggests that we could look at, you know, Catullus or, you know, we could look at this. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius or Montaigne's essay. Yeah. So we're gonna. I want to do more of that and I think we can mix it in. But I also think I like something you said about mixing in different kinds of work. You know, we have on the document. I don't want to spoil it here. Things that are not literature in the conventional way of looking at. At it. Speeches, doc. Other kinds of documents. I think there's stuff we could do around those moments of language, I guess is a way of thinking about that that are, you know, you probably wouldn't read in a literature literary history course, but certainly are works of language that are worth looking to for their language moments, but then also have historical and political context that are super interesting as well. Maybe you can guess what we might be doing a little bit that way. I guess we weren't sure how the Twilight experience was good. There were certain some people that didn't like just the idea that it would be in the feed. And I think people noped out about it. And I don't care about that.
- [41:06]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
That's fine.
- [41:07]
Jeff O'Neill
I am very interested in taking on the big cultural works that would never appear in a great books course and dealing with them on their terms, of what they meant and what they do and don't do.
- [41:16]
Rebecca Schinsky
And one of the things I've been thinking about for that is how much time to let pass or to wait, to require has passed before a cultural moment makes it into the zero to well read threshold. Hard to tell when a phenomenon is happening that like it's actually going to be something that's important to readers 10 or 15 or 50 years down the line. And Twilight is 20 years old and has stayed in the conversation and stayed relevant. So I've been thinking about, like, what are other things that are about that old or that had big cultural moments before that that we might fill in the gaps on. But that was. That was fun. And, like, one of the interesting pieces of feedback was someone saying, I wish they had had, like, a real Twilight fan on it. Because I think some folks felt like by virtue of the fact that none of us were super into the book, we were knocking on it. And that wasn't my experience at all. I hope we're going into all of these, trying to genuinely ask, why was this book important? What did it do? And there are plenty of other big, like, pop culture moments that we can have those conversations about. If you're looking for a like, and we loved this. Or here's your fan representation. This is probably just not the right.
- [42:29]
Jeff O'Neill
I think we're going to play as it lays. Like, we're going to see how the golf ball lays and hit it the best we can to make something interesting out of it. I thought that was interesting too. And I can see how some people might want that. I think for a book like that, I was perfectly open to the idea of, you know what this is. I really vibed with this. I didn't think that was going to happen. But we ourselves are fans of other kinds of popular literature that certainly wouldn't appear on the page. We eventually will probably do the Da Vinci Code, for example.
- [42:59]
Rebecca Schinsky
Oh, we will absolutely do the Da Vinci Code.
- [43:02]
Jeff O'Neill
And we. But I think we are who we are and we have who we have. And I think you could probably find fans of. Of Twilight elsewhere. Yeah. I think it also can be hard if you are truly sort of a fan of something, to do what we do with some of these works. Am I a Shakespeare fan? I guess insofar as a thing could exist. But I think when someone says a Twilight fan, they're thinking of a different kind of relationship.
- [43:23]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. I mean, I think fan fand is a different thing than like, appreciating or finding value in. It's related to, but it has a different quality to, like. I love a lot of the books that we talked about this season. I'm not sure that I would call myself a fan. Like, in. In all the ways we.
- [43:40]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
Like.
- [43:41]
Rebecca Schinsky
I don't know, there's a weight and like, a certain connotation, a context to fandom. Yeah.
- [43:45]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. I'm sort of not a fan of everything in my DNA. Like, I just. I don't participate in that kind of enthusiasm. It's kind of weird.
- [43:52]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. You really don't.
- [43:53]
Jeff O'Neill
I don't like that. And that's not. It's just not right for me. Favorite episode that we've done so far.
- [44:00]
Rebecca Schinsky
I'm really proud of the Bluest Eye episode. That was one of the harder ones to do just because the subject matter is so difficult with Toni Morrison and what she's wrestling with. It's also one of the only ones that I, like, made myself listen back to the whole episode after we did it.
- [44:17]
Jeff O'Neill
Why I don't do this. I hate listening to myself. I can listen to you.
- [44:20]
Rebecca Schinsky
I. I just wanted to know, like, I gave it a couple weeks, and then I wanted to know, like, how do I feel? Did we do our job there? Was there. We're going to talk about Morrison again at some point on the show. That one just. It felt also. I really want to do right by Toni. You know, like, we can't mess up Toni Morrison's legacy, but her work means a lot to me, and I really just wanted to do right by it. So from meaningful. It was the Bluest Eye. I think I had the most fun with the Secret History.
- [44:50]
Jeff O'Neill
That was a good one.
- [44:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
We just had a great time that day.
- [44:54]
Jeff O'Neill
I think that was the most fun. I also think it. I think we were. We had a few reps at it, and we had one that we knew was going to be fun to do, and it. It straddles the classical antiquity great books and patri pulp stuff in a way that I think we both find pleasurable.
- [45:13]
Rebecca Schinsky
And it gave us the moment of you imagining Miss Piggy committing murder, which iconic. Apparently a lot of messages about it.
- [45:22]
Jeff O'Neill
Piggy's not gonna beat the.
- [45:23]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
She would.
- [45:23]
Rebecca Schinsky
Piggy's ruthless.
- [45:25]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. If you could snap your fingers and get listeners to read one of the books we have covered. Which it would be. Which would it be? Gosh, there's a weird question.
- [45:34]
Rebecca Schinsky
It is a weird question because the podcast exists to get listeners to read all.
- [45:38]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, but like. But like. Like, you could say, okay, I mean, genie, and people will read that.
- [45:44]
Rebecca Schinsky
Maybe never let me go. And I don't know why. It's just the feeling I have right now.
- [45:50]
Jeff O'Neill
I think maybe for the same reason we enjoyed the episode, which it kind of does. It does do a lot of different things. Well, yeah.
- [45:57]
Rebecca Schinsky
I mean, he has a Nobel Prize for a reason, and it feels like that Just really in good hands.
- [46:03]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah.
- [46:03]
Rebecca Schinsky
The premise.
- [46:04]
Jeff O'Neill
And it's a living doc. This is a living author. This is a segue maybe into my next one. Like, this is the premise in our living room. Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. I think if I. If I do a wrinkle on my own, I would like people to go See a Hamlet production, like a theatrical. I mean move. The movies are good and they can do a thing. But if I'm gonna be genie myself and I can snap people into a Royal Shakespeare Company or the Oregon Shakespeare Festival or like a serious good production of Hamlet. And for people that haven't done that again, you may not vibe with it, but it's kind of like the seven Wonders of the World. Like, you go see the Pyramids if you can. You go see Shakespeare if you can sometime in your life. So that's me. Think, think aloud time. Speaking of Ishiguro, we have done episodes about the work of living authors. We have not yet considered including them in some way. We have more on the docket will in the future. The living authors that we've gotten are kind of tough ass. Donna Tartt, Thomas Pynchon, maybe the hardest ass there is, an issue guru who's won a Nobel Prize. But not all of them will be that way. There are books on our list in the future where we could conceivably get them on the horn for all or part of this. And I think it's a testament to what we enjoy doing about that. This not. It's not a fade complete that we're going. We should. We're not trying to do it from like prestige version. On the other hand, it seems sort of dumb not to talk to 25 minutes of. You hear what I'm getting at, Rebecca here. What would that look like? And are people interested in that? That's sort of for the listeners to let us know. But what do you think about this?
- [47:41]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think. Well, I think the show as it is, I love this format and having these conversations. And it would be very awkward to have this whole, like a whole conversation about a book with an audience.
- [47:53]
Jeff O'Neill
I agree with that completely. We can't do the whole thing.
- [47:55]
Rebecca Schinsky
I don't want to do that. I don't want to be like, come sit next to me while we talk about your book for an hour. Yeah, but something that brings the authors into the close reading. Maybe you've done a bit on the first edition podcast before where you've like pulled out one great sentence from the book and used that as a jumping off point for a conversation with an author. I think something like that or like a close reading with the author of a line or a scene would be the place that I would be interested in going.
- [48:25]
Jeff O'Neill
I think. I think you're. I think I'm. I'm thinking along the same lines, maybe slightly differently. Certainly they can't we don't want them for the full 90 minutes. We want to be able to say things about. Again, we're not slagging anyone, but we want to have a conversation amongst ourselves with the teacher outside of the room. Like that's an important part of the process. But they do. They could give us things that maybe we would uniquely be interested that don't exist elsewhere. I mean about the origins, the influences, the, you know, know what was the hardest part, which is the part you like. I think the actual moment of creation of these stories and these characters and these ideas. We can find an interview, but we could also do the perfect zero to l interview that we then reference into. So I almost think that maybe we could do an interview with them about like the big bang of this particular work and then incorporate that it somehow, you know, use clips or maybe we use the whole thing, edited version of it. It's like, okay, how did this thing come to be? Well, we have Dan Brown with us. Okay, Dan, come in.
- [49:23]
Rebecca Schinsky
Speak that. Jeff, I need you for the next two minutes to believe in manifesting for a second so that we can get Dan Brown to come talk.
- [49:32]
Jeff O'Neill
Well, but there's a lot of people and you know, people I've interviewed in other places that could come to and, you know, that's one thing I was super nervous about when I first doing it. But I. I find authors to be extremely interested and humble about talking about this thing that became something. If you're interested. I talked to Coletto Saini about the kite.
- [49:50]
Rebecca Schinsky
I'm just gonna reference that.
- [49:51]
Jeff O'Neill
And I love that conversation. And he was so warm and generous too. But like to know about. They can tell us stories and other people haven't asked about, like, what was it like when you saw the book? What was the moment you knew this was a thing? Like, what piece of criticism? And maybe we wouldn't use it all, but I think there'd be a lot there for us and the listeners as well. So I'm kind of thinking we're not. We certainly can't do it for all of them, nor do we want to, but I think there's a. That's a club that we could get out of the bag.
- [50:15]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, I think that could be fun and special.
- [50:18]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. Mailbag time. Rebecca, we're going to try to go through some of these. Thank you so much for listening. I guess we'll take turns reading.
- [50:24]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
Yeah.
- [50:24]
Rebecca Schinsky
The first question is somebody who's wondering if the content warning puts you off of the bluest eye. What's the best starting place with Morrison.
- [50:36]
Jeff O'Neill
There. There. I mean, it's not a lot better. Rebecca. I mean, there's not. It's. It's. I don't know. It might be the most intense, but there's not a Christmas Carol. But for Morrison, it just doesn't exist.
- [50:46]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, I mean, the content warning. I wish that I could email this person and be like, tell me more about the parts of the content warning. Because the broad content warning with the Bluest Eye is sexual assault, but it's very specifically child sexual assault. And so, like, there are some, like, if it's. There's some shades to like, could you read this? Could you not read this other thing? I think, Sula, that's what I was gonna say.
- [51:09]
Jeff O'Neill
That's exactly what I was gonna say. But it is not safe. Just because it's the safest does not mean it is safe.
- [51:13]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, you're still in the land of Morrison. But Sula, I think, is the safest. And also it's her second novel. It's after the Bluest Eye, the most accessible. Like, she's starting to do some Morrison weird stuff. But you're not in the land of a really challenging read yet. It's relatively short. Like, do your own due diligence, do your Googles and find out a little bit more about the specifics of those content warnings.
- [51:39]
Jeff O'Neill
But I think I might even suggest recitative, because, I mean, it came out, it's a short story. You can get his own. At least it's quick. You know, it still deals a lot of Morrison things, but it's not. You're not going to dwell for 10 pages in chattel slavery like you're going to do in Beloved, or really, the. The most difficult scenes to even talk about now, I think are in the Bluest Eye that we've. We've tackled so far. Recitative gives you a little dip of Morrison, and the current version has a Zadie Smith introduction, which is wonderful. So, again, short stories are often a good place to start. Morrison just has the one, so you could start there as well. This is from Jen. Are you considering covering any longer? Books go the other way. I know time is limited, but there are so many long classes. I would love to hear you discuss and analyze Moby Dick, Bleakhouse, Ulysses, Karamazov, quixote, middlemarch, march, etc. Long. I mean, we've done some long books, but this is even. I think it's not even just the number of pages, because the longest book we've done so far is Midnight's Children. Midnight's Children, which 600, I don't think Karamazov's. That's is 800 pages long. The rest are. We're trying to figure this ourselves because we cannot do Quixote in one 90 minute episode.
- [52:50]
Rebecca Schinsky
Right.
- [52:52]
Jeff O'Neill
We cannot do Ulysses in a lifetime. There are book clubs that read Ulysses.
- [52:57]
Rebecca Schinsky
It took them like 20 years.
- [52:59]
Jeff O'Neill
We have some ideas. There are books, there are long works coming out that warrant more than one encounter. We are thinking about this.
- [53:08]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [53:08]
Jeff O'Neill
But to do 90 minutes on war and Peace is a fool's errand. And fools we may be, but we know enough to wonder about that.
- [53:19]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, I think, think the thing that I'm chewing on for that is that breaking the books up into like Bleak House Part one, Bleak House Part two or something is the way that you would do it in a class or a book club, but doesn't actually lend itself super well to podcast episodes or to like a serialized sort of conversation.
- [53:42]
Jeff O'Neill
Right.
- [53:43]
Rebecca Schinsky
I imagine that it's probably more of a like, like context and setting conversation and then an episode that gets into like specific scenes and quotes and then I don't know, something else about like the influence and impact of those works down the line. I feel comfortable telling listeners we're. We're considering doing something around the Odyssey for next summer and we are actively trying to figure out the way that we want to approach it. And that would be. Be fun and interesting and well rounded.
- [54:18]
Jeff O'Neill
But compared to Moby Dick or Quixote or Ulysses, the Odyssey is a spinning rack page turner in terms of length because it's. You can get, you can get the. Just number of hours to prep is hard for some of these others. Again, I think this question is, is understandable and one we're having and certainly to do a lineup of like if you got all the books we're going to do for the whole course of the run and put them next to each other and they were missing some of these, you would notice the omission. But how to include them is a. As a logistical and critical question.
- [54:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think whatever the book is on your personal wish list for this show, like we, we want to know the books that folks are interested in, please do email us. But in terms of like answering all of those specific questions, just assume it's on the long list. Yes, and it is. The long list is long.
- [55:08]
Jeff O'Neill
I would also think from a listener, I can understand this, and I would understand this as a listener myself, but our principal goal is to make good episodes and we have plenty of books we can make Good episodes about that don't include these. So that's another weird way of thinking about it as well. But the lack thereof would seem odd given enough time.
- [55:29]
Rebecca Schinsky
We will figure something out. Well, I think we'll all figure it out together, honestly, how we're going to do these big ones.
- [55:35]
Jeff O'Neill
All right.
- [55:35]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think the next from Jessica. She's wondering if a different kind of episode might be something in the future, like a top five or top ten of a genre or a podcast version of a reading journey, or we call them reading pathways at Book Riot. Like, so you want to get into Toni Morrison. Here's your reading pathway.
- [55:53]
Jeff O'Neill
I don't. I am very much not interested in top fives and top tens in this particular space.
- [56:01]
Rebecca Schinsky
I agree. But I can see doing, like, maybe we do a run of a mini season of sci fi books in a row, or we incorporate a bunch of the best romances over the course of a season. I think the best version is to just sprinkle those through. I think so, too, that at some point we work in a groundbreaking work of science fiction. At some point we do one of the biggest big, you know, blockbuster romances that took romance mainstream. We do a big, groundbreaking mystery. But I would like to just thread those into the fabric of the show rather than setting them aside. I also think part of our ethos at Book Riot and part of the ethos of this show is that genre, like the greats of genre, are just part of the great books.
- [56:49]
Jeff O'Neill
Yes.
- [56:49]
Rebecca Schinsky
And they have not got. They've gotten short shrift. They have not been given credit for that historically in the way that we talk about great books. But we definitely want to do that. We didn't do those big genre hits in the first 12, you know, episode season here because we were. We're trying to set a foundation. But I do anticipate that we'll do those and we'll thread them through also.
- [57:12]
Jeff O'Neill
Logistically and sort of listening experience, too. Just to come at it from the other side of the mic is if you did a run of five in whatever genre, you would lose listeners because there are a certain percentage of listeners that don't want that. And after five weeks of it, they will forget to come back and listen. Look at it. It's. It's. It's much more sustainable. It's like we would assume that everyone's not listening to every single episode. But I don't want you to go more than one or two episodes without, like, something that can grab you, which means we need to kind of move around in A we need to do a different kind of a dance that doesn't. That moves to a different beat than just episode to episode continuity might make sense. You know, if we were done this two years ago and we were coming into Jane Austen's 250th birthday this year, I could imagine us doing like a year of Austin, which we cover like six over the course of the year. But we wouldn't cluster them for that reason. You know, there might be other reasons to do special events, stuff like that. Would you consider this is from Benji or Benj? Would you consider reading the Golden Compass at the beginning of a series? Which probably takes away from the appeal for this show, but it was and still remains a staple in books and literature. This is an obvious. Yes, we will consider all of these. Yeah. Yes, Twilight was the beginning of one. Golden Compass didn't hit the heights in terms of mass appeal, but Golden Compass is very much in the wheelhouse of what we'd like to do. Right.
- [58:27]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. And I think I just want to correct the assumption that being the first in a series takes away from the appeal for the show that, like, if the series has been important, it's the first book that we're going to talk about here. Even if the adaptation that's coming out is an adaptation of the fifth book in the series, or even if we're like the publishing is marking the publication of the seventh book in a series, we will take the most moment to talk about the book where the series began. It's much less likely that we're going to be doing here the first, second and third books in a series.
- [58:56]
Jeff O'Neill
I think the beginning book of any. I mean, things that are coming out next year. You know, Gerwig's Narnia, Sunrise at the Reaping. Those are wonderful times to like, let's take the first one of these because that's where the context and how those things can be applied there. Doing the third book in the series after you've done the first two for us is probably not something we're going to do even if the third book is.
- [59:16]
Rebecca Schinsky
Is.
- [59:17]
Jeff O'Neill
I'm trying to think of an example like something in the Sherlock Holmes series or one of those other series where people care about them, but, like, we're just not going to probably be talking about Mockingjay by itself, but we probably will do the Hunger Games at some point.
- [59:29]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, the. Where it all began and how this. How this thing that started in this place grew into being an important series or a cultural phenomenon or whatever that's that the starting point is always interesting.
- [59:39]
Jeff O'Neill
Yep. I think the next one's you.
- [59:41]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's from Amelia. What are things to consider when choosing between different translations for works that are not originally written in English or for finding annotated versions or guides for older or reference heavy works. For example, I'm interested in the Tale of Genji and I picked up a beautiful two volume hardcover, but the translation is older than Jeff and I are. And while it has some footnote, some footnotes on the allusions in the poetry, I would love more explanatory material. This is a really good question.
- [60:08]
Jeff O'Neill
I mean, I think Amelia's onto it. Like if you, if, if you want one with more, get one with more. If they exist. I mean, this is, I mean Thriftbooks has sponsored us, but go look at used online sites to see what all the different possibilities are. This is one where going into your local bookstore might be great. Yes, but you might not be able to find things that exist without going online and looking at one of the big. Thriftbooks has everything, you know, the Amazons of the world. But go look because for things. There have been dozens of editions of all of these. Well, not all of the books, but certainly something that's been out like Tale of the Genji. You can find all kinds of stuff. Stuff I think for translation, I think it's very interesting to look for the most recent translation there is.
- [60:49]
Rebecca Schinsky
I agree.
- [60:51]
Jeff O'Neill
Now that doesn't mean you have to do that one, but you might read them side by side if they're available on your, you know, Kindle or library or something else to see. The more modern translations tend to have more explanatory material and they'll just have more of the telescoping nature of time to tell you what's going on in the life of that work.
- [61:07]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think this is also a place where reviews can be helpful. Goodreads might even be helpful of like, what do you get from this annotated version versus another annotated version? Tale of the Genji might be a little obscure to find like compare, like ABC comparison articles. But for other things, like for the Odyssey, you can easily find articles or blogs posts where someone does comparisons of the Fitzgerald translation versus Emily Wilson's translation versus somebody Fagels, whoever else. So sometimes looking for that is helpful. But like, if you can get to like your local bookstore and you're looking at something that they have different versions of, I think being able to like hold the books and flip through them and look for yourself is, is super helpful. But for anything else like I would look online to try to figure out out how useful was this for other readers. What kind of annotations are you looking for? But then you can kind of like a work this old. You can also roll your own supplementary material pretty easily by like follow the rabbit holes from the Wikipedia page. Look at who like whoever did the annotations or the introduction. Actually this is a shout out for Penguin Classics because like half of the books I read this season I read the Penguin Classics edition of like read the introduction and then look at the bibliography for the introduction and pull like some of those. Go to some of those articles or some of those books and you can just sort of like follow that as far down the path as you want to. But I like your suggestion to find the something really old. Find the newest translation as a good starting point.
- [62:44]
Jeff O'Neill
Another idea. And I know budget can be a thing and you decide but there is no reason you need only one edition. I have multiple editions of Whitman because they have different things and he published a billion different editions and the. The but if you have one that you like the translation of but has no good supplementary stuff, buy that one and then buy the one that's a good supplementary stuff.
- [63:01]
Rebecca Schinsky
Or you, you know, like this person is mentioning they got this original book at the Friends of the Library sale. Like you could request a bunch of different editions from your local library, do the interlibrary loan, spread them all out, look at what you want to find and then buy the one for your for your home library. That. That rings the most bells.
- [63:19]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. We're gonna end with an email from my dad who emailed me personally. He did not email into the 0 to l read. I love this email. Beloved figure in so my dad is a wonderful reader and a lot of the reasons I'm the reader I am today is because he cared about books and reading. And I remember distinctly for no particular reason, he picked up Plutarch's Lives to read it when I was a kid. He, you know, he wanted to do I think a lot that's in the spirit of this is have an encounter with the great books. And he cares about ideas and history. And so I a special place for my dad's email to me. I'm not gonna read the whole thing, but I'll read some of it. Just listen to zero to well read on Hamnet. Really good. Also I saw the movie last Sunday, fell asleep in the first fourth of the show but was blown away by the last 30 minutes. Jessie Buckley must get the Academy Award for leading actress. She was excellent. Also, I had trouble hearing the dialogue, but the director, Chloe Zach said she didn't catch all the words either as the actors were so good that you didn't need to hear all the dialogue. And she was right. Happy holidays. Love dad. Thanks dad. An amazing good job, dad.
- [64:20]
Rebecca Schinsky
Thank you. I think I saw or read the same Chloe Zhao interview that your dad went around.
- [64:25]
Jeff O'Neill
Michelle sent it to me. A couple people sent it to me. So I have seen that it's a good, it's a good thing. She's basically saying, oh go ahead, you can.
- [64:31]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's also, it's a good discourse on Shakespeare. Also like when Shakespeare is performed well, you don't have to know what all of the vocabulary words mean because the meaning comes across in the way that it is performed in the intonation and the rhythm of the language and the the actor's carriage. Like Paul Mescal doing Hamlet is stellar or doing he's playing, you know, Shakespeare playing Hamlet's father. But it's really incredible.
- [64:57]
Jeff O'Neill
Next week we have one more non title episode sort of in this holiday window here we'll return with a fully formed formed really fun episode for January 6th. I think it turned out for both of us to be a lot more fun than we were even anticipating. In the meantime, you can wait for that. You can also patreon.com 02 well read for detailed show notes, free newsletter and other membership options. You can follow us on Instagram, tick tock and YouTube@02 well read. Just look in your podcatcher right now. The links will be right there to the patreon, to the YouTube TikTok and other places is you can shoot us an email. 0towellread bookrat.com 0to well read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast network, Rebecca. Good work and thank you. This was fun. I enjoyed this brief look back a a pause and looking over our shoulder for work done.
- [65:47]
Rebecca Schinsky
Little semester evaluation for ourselves.
- [65:49]
Jeff O'Neill
That's right. There's coffee here on the table for everyone. We have scones. Enjoy and happy holidays.
- [65:54]
Rebecca Schinsky
Thanks for being here with us Sam.