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

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 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 for 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 rewards 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. And I'm Rebecca Shinsky. 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 a 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 Podcast and Spotify, that's made a huge difference. It's helped other folks discover us. If you've not done that yet and you'd like to give us a little boost, just, you know, tap that five star button. Yeah, we're going to get annoying when it gets to around 800 ratings on Apple Podcast again. What? Because we did it. Remember, we did the drive to get to like, 150 and folks blew by that. So you and I as stat watchers who like a nice round number will come back to that. What's what's fun about this kind of mail bag and we haven't done with four zero to well read, of course, our other show, the Book Riot podcast is much more news oriented. So it says 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 to 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 mail bag today is really going all. I think almost all the way back to the beginning. Do we have some Gatsby stuff? Somebody does mention Gatsby. Yes. 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 to 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? 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 Midwesterness. So we'll just do a general thanks right now to everyone for your kind words. 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, 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 the only thing we any of us have to begin on evaluating a process is our own reaction to it. There is no way that I'm 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. 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. Correct. 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, a Vineland, which has a lot of plot, but also not in a conventional way, a lot of plot or character that may not 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 sort of well read scores. Give me some data points that I'm going to look to every single time when I'm talking about a book, because that gives me some fixed points. 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 big 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 to do it. Right? Where else do we go? 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 path. 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 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 talk 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, 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. Yeah. You know, something else to say there, we can talk about this and we'll try to move along here. I think you are 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 recur or be, I don't know, a one off? And then also one of the places that you're not responding to. And then look at those seriously in their own way. Like, OK, what's going on 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 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. So 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 is 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. What's right there? Like painting, like, I guess those are the colors like that Vasco's. But I have no idea how they got that brushstroke. This is ABC space. ABC, like you can see it just in the 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. Today's episode is brought to you by 11 Reader, an award winning audio app with more than 100,000 premium titles, plus any PDF article or document you bring. So 11 Reader is having us rethink what we know about audiobooks in a good way. The new award winning audiobook app comes with more than 100,000 premium titles and the ability to turn any text you want into natural sounding audio. That means ebooks, PDFs, docs, articles, research papers, anything can become an audiobook. 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Teas and seas apply. 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 cube based more or less on Wim, but I never know when I should quit. Is it optimizing if I stick with a book I'm bored of or proof that I have the mental capacity? Please discuss. I need to know I'm not alone. 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 in, 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 to 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 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 related for someone that is not me? 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 going to come down and say, but that's one you really should have finished. Right. Yeah. 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 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 it, I'm trying to pick it, you know, to get there before a bunch of people have read it and 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 of trusted sources. Like, usually I try to keep myself pure from reviews. But sometimes when I'm on the fence, I will go just try 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 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 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. Yeah. And the reason you're reading in 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 I 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 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 of their 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 and 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 sense of accomplishment. It gives you a goal and 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 might might mean that you've got to buckle up and just get through it and experience some discomfort for a little while. 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? 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 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'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. What whether I want to read more or not, I usually end up between one hundred and twenty five and one hundred and fifty 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 the initial I should say is are we reading people that don't look like us 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 OK. 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 ten 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 percent. 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. Our bias 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 esophagus 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 don't want everything that's new. So I think that's one thing in our feed that you can see different. Some other feeds that do this is. Twilight and Herodotus. I'm not sure, Rebecca, to we haven't done herodotus. We will have that. Twilight and 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, D.I. type stuff, which is to think about time and think about location and think about scale and import and across people's reading lives from a kid to an adult to an older. 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 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 percent more than you did last year? And then do you layer on some other thing? I'd like to read 10 percent more and I'd like to do X with them. Volume by itself can be good. But what are you doing? Yeah, inside your book selection for Olga, it's reading in multiple languages that she's learning to speak. Olga is goals, apparently. Right. Can't spell goals without Olga. Really admirable from from Olga and nice work there. Yes, thank you very much. Let's move on. Let's see. This next one is from Kate from Toronto. Also speaking to. 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 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, 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 unwrung. I guess it's the 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 going to hurt anybody is like, where the craw dad sing with a few years ago. And not our favorite book that we've ever read. We wouldn't have read it ourselves, but it became such a phenomenon. 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 the giant phenomenons that seem like they come out of nowhere, like the romantics, the twilight, the 50 shades of grays, the Harry Potter's, even something like the coloring books are freed in McFadden, like these things are 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 strange is 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. And 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 am 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 snobbyist, 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 what is it about this book that people are responding to? Because it shows you something with the lack of that representation calling 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 the ends with us. Like there wasn't seemingly something for a lot of people's attention, care, interest, experience to latch on to. And that became a thing for a bunch of. Yeah, I love this literary anthropologist phrase. I wish that we had come onto it like 15 years ago. But 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 deck, like by our opinion of this isn't a good book and think that it must map on to 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 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'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 paying attention, that curiosity can get you a long way. This is another one about goals and reading intentionalities from Carol. Thank you, Carol. I'm going to pick out a couple of pieces here. Carol reads a lot already, 140 to 200. So she's reading at the top end or more than I do. Very top end. 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 reading we'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. But 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? Yeah. Okay. What can, how can I connect with something in the larger world? I really like this idea. 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 War with the Mother's Sons by Isabel Wilkerson, like, magisterial work of nonfiction. If you have not read it, it's super readable. Sharifa, 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 interviewer, 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. Yeah, it's a great idea. So best of luck, Carol. That sounds like a cool reading. We're already in the March. So maybe you've done some of this already. Feel free to write in and let us know. Yeah, I'd love to know your parents. 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 Scrivener. It has a Melville short collection, standard eBooks.org. It has weathering heights in there. I think this is cool. I've looked at this. I need to spend like six minutes figuring out a workflow to get it onto the 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. Can 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. That'd be cool. In addition to checking out thriftbooks.com, of course, if you want to print thing. But if you were a digital reader, there's really no reason to pay eight ninety nine for a digital version of a book. I found the audio books 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 should just email zero to well read at book right.com, if you know. But I think there are some public domain audio books 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 dot. It's a great resource. Thanks for writing that into us. We are now entering the portion of the mail bag that I'm calling. Are you ever going to do X? Yes. 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 club tied to the books we're discussing? I also responded to Anne saying, so what do you mean, Anne? And Anne 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 ten 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 life, so it's like a book club, like, well, it depends on what you mean by book club necessarily. I think what Anne 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 of what we put into a particular episode, but a different kind of experience around their book, where a book club, I think, is relational, right? Anne 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. 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, or you hated it, or something like that. 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, we're going to do a book. I love that Herodotus has become our go to example. Well, I like Herodotus. I want to get there someday. But like, you know, 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 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. 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 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 player. They're always there waiting for you. Yeah. Right. You can decide I'm going to bring her out at it like the, oh, the, 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 has made content strategy around this is that to maintain, 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 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. 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 for people think they're getting some what would you charge and what would the experience be? I don't really know the answer to that. I don't really know the answer to that. I love the idea of like a seminar, right? 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 going to dwell in 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. So I mean, I think this is also part of the reason why the big celebrity book clubs are just called book clubs. Yeah, they're all they're all right. 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. That's not a book club. I mean, it's not a book club. Different places like understand it like Anna's asking about. Right. 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 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. Right. OK. Let's see. We want we skipped one. I'm going to go one ahead, one back. This is about being well read. This is from KDP. Well, this is the same person. This is the same one. This is the end of the remarks from the person with the standard ebooks. 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 fiction, 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. Yeah. 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 the wear the well read pin. Doesn't exist. No one cares. Yeah, you're not going to get a trophy descending from the heavens. Much as I love a trophy, it's 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. Yes. Take us there. 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. Steven 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 is someone if you're going to be a zero to well read feed prognosticator, if there's a major adaptation of something coming out, I would ratchet ratchet up your calcium 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 weathering heights? Are they going to be think about Project Hail Mary? Are you 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? Where was that in your bag? 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? Which listen, those two things may not be as different as people really. I don't think they are like shouts to Mr. Huntsley. I like I had a wonderful experience and 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 to 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. Yes. 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 pension because one battle after another was getting so much heat and then we did Hamnet as well. And Hamnet was not in our original plan. But once it became such a hit and people were so excited about it, we were seeing the 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, so we're going to have to have that experience together. I'm curious from you because he also asked about A Tale of Two Cities. There are 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? I mean, this is my sense of it. And I didn't look at Goodreads ratings or 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 is 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 exaggeration. There's a lot of threads and they come together. 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 to Cities. This goes back to your point you made a second ago. We read the whole thing aloud in my eighth grade class. Miss Wilbur was elderly then. And I can't imagine that 30 years she's still around. But if she is poor one out for Miss 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 to ask. We it guaranteed that you read it, right? Because you're reading it together in class and took the whole year. Right. So we did a few pages a day for the whole year. So I have a lot of affection for it. Yeah, it's the best of times and 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've 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 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, is my Dickens power ranking grossly correct to you? I'm looking at good reads because I was just curious. A Tale of Two Cities has more than a million ratings. Great Expectations is eight hundred and seventy nine thousand. OK, maybe I'm wrong. And those are the two highest by a long shot. Poor Bleak House down here with one hundred and fourteen thousand. That's where the real heads, the Dickens nerds love Bleak House. Chance to be with 47. I haven't read Nicholas, Nicholas, I don't know. 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 Miss Havisham. Yes. But I'd be I'll be happy to do any of them. I think they're they're pretty similar name recognition. And I don't, as you were saying, don't fully trust good reads 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 Good Reads was around. But the answer is a surprise that Tale of Two Cities is number one. But yeah, for sure. 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. Yeah, Great Expectations and David 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 age very strangely. I love this when I was a kid. I still refer to like I'm getting sick. I know this. I know this adaptation. Can I have some more? Yes, I can do this all the time. Yeah. And hot sausage and mustard. Yeah. Mm hmm. I know that's a 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. There's a really bad Scarlet Letter adaptation with Demi Moore. Oh, yes, where she's Hester Prynne. So bad that came out in the 90s. I think like when I was in high school. Yeah. When we do Scarlet Letter, I will be making a full-throated pitch for easy A with Emma Stone. Hmm. I like that. All right. Margot is pitching us a few things. Middle March. I don't know what it is about Middle March because the Middle March stands stand hard. Like it's the greatest novel of all time. I don't know. And I don't know a few. 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 Middle March a great deal. I didn't resonate to me where I'm going to like put a Middle March book cover on a banner and like march into into war with it. But there's so many people I know that is very close to their hearts. Absolutely will be something we do someday. Someday. Yeah. 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 Middle March. Fine. You know, I just doesn't want to mind. Yeah. I like the idea here that Margot 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 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 I will experiment with it. And the the bonus episodes, the stuff over in office hours on Patreon is probably the place where those experiments will happen. Yeah, Beowulf is into it goes other pitch. Seamus Haney's version. Yeah, I like Beowulf. 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 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 translation, what's out there that people can buy and pick up? It's probably the Haney. That would be my my pick as well. Although a couple of 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 that 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 Beowulf. That is not what I'm looking for either. Yeah, I let's 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 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 of Anne 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 or the summer break. And I picked up a copy of diary of Anne Frank and was flipping through it and just reading a few sentences. It is not. I think there's a lot of people who read 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 later. And she she's precarious in ways that are shocking the publication history of it, with 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 and say any time that like the idea of a book has yes, yes, actual reading of the book itself, we're interested in getting in there. 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. Me neither. The Wethering 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 Hayworth's Percitage, where Bronte was raised. So I think that's cool. I don't know. Is that a lot of sound and fury out of nothing? I'm not sure. I like the idea of it. Kind of an exquisite course, but you know what you're going to get at the end. I think that's cool to see at the same time. Yeah, 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 he's written several. Fifteen ninety nine is my favorite of them about his exquisite year. Fifteen ninety nine a year in Shakespeare's life. I think that's what this one is, too. I could be confused. The one we recommend here is a year in the life of William Shakespeare. I think that super title is fifteen ninety nine. But there's a whole bunch of other ones. And he is terrific and much more readable than Stephen Greenblatt. Greenblatt taking a stray out here and not as pompous. Double shot, double tap. Boy, I really am watching the Sopranos. So there you go. I will second, secondly, recommend the work of James Shapiro for people want to read more about William Shakespeare. 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. Yes. 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 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 Iridian hatches. Rylan 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. 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 I don't know, maybe even if Andy Weir wasn't thinking, some readers were 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 it, found this to be a meaningful and interesting idea. So thank you for sharing that with us. Very cool. 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 an 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 we're Indians 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 are loaded. All of those represent a different kind of a pro 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. Weir 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 central, important or even known to them. And yet they're still should be considered people of value in being. And Rylan Grez 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. This is what the personal is political means. Yes, right. That everything about our daily lives is described in 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. Yeah, 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? 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 Chakofsky. Eileen, thank you for writing in. It's got Space Comas, Space Spiders, Science Dude, who keeps waking up. Not knowing what 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. Like just did you see right there? It's up there. It's in the ether. Yeah, this will go into my immediately for my husband, who's a big sci-fi audience fan. Yeah, Bob can can report back to us on how it goes. Speaking of Bob, no one has written in to ask us if we're going to do Master and Commander someday. But I mean, Bob can write in, shoot him an email. He can he could submit. He can Mr. Zero to Wellread. Yeah, right. One, two, three at gmail.com. Yeah. Got a nice tip also from Kristen, 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. Cool. 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 D, 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 Hazel'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've done Word of Peace. They're doing the Wolf Hall trilogy. If you are looking for a little bit more like a steady drip, drip, drip, and then we'll be here for you with the full episode when you're done with that big reading experience. Yeah. And we got a couple of Joy Luck Club anecdotes. So you can see 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 watched it at 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. It's I mean, it's such a mother's and daughter's story. I can understand a male viewer having a feeling less connected to it. 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. Kids are loving it. 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 Lee Wood and worked at the Barnes and Nobles in high school. And you and I have a lot of affection for the Barnes and Noble on the Plaza in Kansas City. Who knows, Karen? Who knows if you saw a tall a tall kid with a bushy blonde hair and pleated khaki shorts and a braided leather belt, could have been me. Could have been me. 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. Yes. 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 founded in local libraries of Melbourne, Cape Town and a small Swiss village, all of the copies were well worn and stamped. So thank you, Janon, who is a Swiss living in Cape Town. Very interesting. Like it these books that become like this definitely have what what did we learn in COVID in our value and are greater than one? And some of I. I don't mean this as a slog to any of these books that achieve this escape velocity because they they are doing something different. There's a reason that they are even eligible to get that R plus one 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 in like 100 years of Toledo feels like a challenge. It's super memorable at the same time. I was overhearing in pals 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 like to know. 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 a lot for a long, long time. So it happens like. There's a bit of a chicken and 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 doesn't allow room for other things or it's circulating in ideas that we're not as interested in. 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. Yeah, so a lot of little women love. I think what I didn't understand was how many people read it, not not on 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 can you can easily move around your your 18 or 19th century stuff. And then, yeah, I just that had 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. 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 smarter because the kids are performing Hamlet for fun. Learning defense to perform. Yeah, 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. 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 was a sell out by Paul Baby, Commonwealth by Anne Patchett and Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin. I miss her bookshelf. You should, Katie. That's a great roommate. That's a really good one. Also, Katie's supported along another historical fiction recommendation that gets out of the World War Two bubble. She's recommending Lisa C. So the Snow Flower 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. We love that. This one is next directly for you. You had a stray thought during the Little Women episode. I wondering when swimming pools became a backyard swimming pools became a 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. No, I can't. Is recommending for you a book called Contested Waters, a social history of swimming pools in America by Jeff Wiltsie. 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. No, I because I had looked at it before because it's kind of expensive. It's an academic title. I'm looking on Thrift Books right now, Thrift.com sponsoring 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. No doubt. A good that this person really has seen you. So I hope 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 the person who invented swing pools as a luxury item in like 1911 or something? I mean, I almost always want a long New Yorker thing. 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. I love that we now know you're not alone because someone else has also read a book about the history of swimming pools. Yeah, for those of you 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 to people. I think this is just going to do this again. No, we're not doing we're not doing this right now. Last one for us. 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 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 favorites? But for real, this book has had such a slow burn for me and is now truly fascinating 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 what the book is going to be. So thank you for sharing that with us, Sebastian. We always find, too, this goes back to what we were talking about, 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. It could be us, could be your book club, could be a class that you had. But, you know, kind of like they say, hunger is 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 100 percent likelihood will make you appreciate that book and read the experience more. I cannot remember a time where I ever taught a 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. Yeah, you know, 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 talked about it. It kind of makes me think about all the folks wanting a book club. Like some of this is personal bias. I'm 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 ten people. 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 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, a book buddy. 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 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 what we were, we just recorded that much to do about nothing episode to the merry war of intellect is 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. You could have one month, I think with two with two people would feel like a lot. And maybe you want that, but it could feel like a lot. Yeah. Well, this was 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 you zero to well read. Zero to well read at book. Book. Boy, oh boy, I'm going to 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 access. At patreon.com slash zero to well read. Rebecca, thank you so much. And as always, we are a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network.