1
00:00:04,100 --> 00:00:08,340
Yeah, she was very disapproving of the idea of my becoming a novelist.

2
00:00:08,460 --> 00:00:10,000
It's like, you're gonna lie for a living?

3
00:00:12,060 --> 00:00:14,460
That this was a portrait of an asshole.

4
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That Josef K.

5
00:00:17,040 --> 00:00:18,800
is a royal asshole.

6
00:00:19,980 --> 00:00:21,820
Kids are not innocent little creatures.

7
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It does seem a shame to spend a lot of time, when you have a lot of choices and there are a lot of good books, to spend time reading crap.

8
00:00:33,160 --> 00:00:38,280
It's like, I'm alive when I'm writing a novel, and part of me is not really alive when I'm not.

9
00:00:38,400 --> 00:00:44,820
I remember getting the knife.

10
00:00:44,960 --> 00:01:00,420
It was 10 years ago, Christmas 2013 or so, and I was trying to make the case to stuff a 576 page book into Leslie and I's carry-on bag before we went on a beach trip with her grandparents and extended family for a week over the Christmas holidays.

11
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She's like, you only have 100 pages left, are you sure you don't want to just read this when we get home?

12
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And I was like, I was so deep into reading The Corrections, and it was like something I'd never read before.

13
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I had to go get the knife, a steak knife with a wooden handle and big serrations.

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And as you can see here, if you're watching this on YouTube, and if you're not, you can kind of picture it, I sawed down the spine of the book and took the last 100 pages with me on the trip.

15
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Now, the deep blasphemous pain that I felt slicing the paperback spine and carving off the last 100 pages was far away by the exquisite suite of pleasures I had slowly savoring the book on the beach all week.

16
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I had never read anything like The Corrections before, with such a clarity of character, wildly spinning plot, and unique three-dimensional realness that just page by page, twist by twist, left pits in my stomach, lumps in my throat, and tears in my eyes.

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I read Freedom, which came out in 2010, about the same way.

18
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Purity, 2014, the same way.

19
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Crossroads, my most recent Jonathan Franzen read, came out in 2021 the same way, with equal parts admiration, fascination, and a psychologically transporting feeling of just living outside of myself for a while.

20
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Jonathan Franzen is one of the most successful, accomplished, and decorated writers in the world.

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He is a Fulbright Scholar, National Book Award winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist, PEN/Faulkner finalist, two-time Oprah Book Club pick, voted to Time's 100 Most Influential, as well as gracing the Time cover as the Great American Novelist, and much, much more.

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The New York Mag calls his books works of total genius, and Chuck Klosterman, writing in GQ, says Franzen is the most important fiction writer in America, and, if viewed from a distance, perhaps the only important one.

23
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That is tall praise.

24
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There is just nothing, though, like reading a Jonathan Franzen novel, and it was a sheer delight going deep with the deep master to discuss writing advice, the magic of the written word, what heroes look like today, competing with David Foster Wallace, the best that we can do for the climate, and, of course, Jon's three most formative books.

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Are you ready to flip the page into Chapter 137 now?

26
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Let's go.

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Jon, thank you so much for coming on 3 Books.

28
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It is such an honor to have you on the show.

29
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I have been, as you know, inviting you for many years.

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I have read, in order, The Corrections, then Freedom, then Purity, you know, then Crossroads, and a dabbling of your nonfiction throughout.

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Not a ton of your nonfiction, but Why Birds Matter was one of the massive tipping points for me to become a birder, and I am just so grateful to you for coming on the show.

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So, thank you.

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Thank you so much for doing this.

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It is a pleasure.

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I actually have a lot of questions about you and 3 Books, and my natural mode is more of a question asker than a question answerer, but I will submit to your questions.

36
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Well, I am very open to them.

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I want to just say to our listeners, you know, most of whom do listen to us.

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This is a show that has started in audio format.

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I think of it like theater of the mind.

40
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I have very reluctantly come to this, like, you know, must-be videotaped format.

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It is pretty new for me, but I will say for those listening, who I think are most of us, most people listening, you know, I am speaking to you today from Vancouver.

42
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I just got invited out here and did not want to reschedule us, so I messed up with the local library.

43
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I was going to have this in the West Vancouver Library, but when I gunked up the invitation, they got full, and so a friend of mine, Matt Ballez, here in West Vancouver, has kindly, literally moved his piano lessons and his roofer and everything out of the house so that I can have full reign of the house.

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It is a light gray day here with a gentle drizzle, and I am speaking to you on a nice afternoon in Vancouver.

45
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I am in a room that is long.

46
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It has a bookshelf on one side with a ton of interesting, you know, novels and first editions, and there are old Kafkas on the shelf, and I can see The Power Broker here in Barney's version, and A Tale of Two Cities, and like, you know, one of those big hardcovers that comes in its own sleeve.

47
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I have got a blue lamp on my left with a nice, you know, kind of yellowish light coming in and a little oil painting of some chopped up oranges above my face.

48
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I wondered if, for the listeners, you might also describe your scene for us.

49
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I am in my office, which is, as you can see, dark, terrible picture quality.

50
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I am basically sitting in the light of a little reading lamp I have on my desk, which is in a corner of the room.

51
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You see my blackout curtain over there.

52
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There are more blackout curtains to my right.

53
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It is fairly chilly.

54
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66 is the temperature I keep it set at, and it is a nice, quiet day.

55
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We are having some heavy showers in Santa Cruz.

56
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I am in Santa Cruz, California.

57
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What else can I tell you?

58
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Books of my own are behind me.

59
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I finally have a permanent office after, oh, 25 years of itinerant borrowing of various offices.

60
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I have now a set of glass cabinets where I was able to take out all the editions of my books and put them under lock and key, so I am not tempted to actually do that really dismal thing of going and reading my own work when the new work is not going well.

61
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There you have it.

62
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I am wearing—thank you for that—heavy rain.

63
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I love your weather descriptions.

64
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I should say, page one of The Corrections, the madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.

65
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You could feel it:

66
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Something terrible was going to happen.

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The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star, gust after gust of disorder.

68
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Of course, page one of Crossroads, your most recent novel, the sky broken by the bare oaks and elms of new prospect was full of moist promise, a pair of frontal systems grayly colluding to deliver a white Christmas.

69
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I feel like you have this ability to touch and cajole and describe weather in such a unique way.

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I work at it.

71
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It doesn't come easily.

72
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Weather is, of course, incredibly important.

73
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I think it was Faulkner who said a person is nothing but the sum of his experiences of weather.

74
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Who are you at your core?

75
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It's the weather you remember.

76
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Of course, in Faulkner's case, that would have been the hot, hot summers in Mississippi and the gray, drizzly winters.

77
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If you're trying to create a world as a novelist and you want to put people in the world, you're trying to tap into a shared body of experiences of weather.

78
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The trick is to do it in a way that hasn't been done before, to write a sentence no one has written about the weather before without trying too hard and showing you're trying to write such a sentence.

79
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I work on that stuff and I can feel I need a sentence about weather.

80
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It might take half a day to get a good sentence about weather.

81
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Wow.

82
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Wow.

83
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That is incredible.

84
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It makes so much sense for the descriptions that we're reading in many of your books.

85
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Just before we started recording, you said, I will submit, although I have many questions about you and 3 Books.

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Just to help our orientation here, if you have anything you want to ask me, feel free.

87
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I'm very happy to answer.

88
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I got 10 pages of questions for you.

89
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The least I can do is offer the same.

90
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You can ask me anything you want if you want to get to know the show.

91
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I'll ask you one question.

92
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I also work as a journalist.

93
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As I was saying before we started recording, I'm in many ways more comfortable as a question asker.

94
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But I'll restrict myself to one question, which was, where did this notion of three books for this now rather lengthy series come from?

95
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How did you settle on that?

96
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Yeah.

97
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Well, I was inspired by basically three quotes that I read.

98
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I will read you the quotes because you just quoted a bit of Faulkner to me.

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The three quotes were George R.

100
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R.

101
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Martin's famous Game of Thrones quote, which is, A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.

102
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The man who never reads lives only one.

103
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The Seneca quote from On the Shortness of Life, which is, Of all people, only those who are at leisure, who make time for philosophy, only those are really alive.

104
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For they not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but they annex every age to theirs.

105
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And finally, a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

106
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And I am often fed up with the present.

107
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And so I thought that one way to tell people's stories in an interesting way, that's not just a chitchat, would be to ask them which three books most shaped their lives.

108
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I can tell a lot by the pause I get before people answer.

109
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You know, if they answer in 10 seconds, that tells you something.

110
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And the books are all from two years ago.

111
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That tells you something.

112
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But if they are thoughtful about it, then it lends itself to a great conversation.

113
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And I get to sort of design it so that the side benefit of the research is I get to read more.

114
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And typically, I get to read stuff I never heard of before, or I haven't read before.

115
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In your case, I read all three of your books.

116
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And I'm sorry to say, I probably wouldn't have.

117
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There's just too many books.

118
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And so it allows me to design a style of research that I really like.

119
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I'm able to spend typically 40 to 60 hours reading someone's books, reading every interview, listening to every interview.

120
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And then I get these conversations, which I think are unique enough that it also enables me, because I do believe in this principle that different is better than better.

121
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So it enables me to, I think, land guests of a stature who I may not otherwise entice, if the conversation wasn't something they haven't been asked before.

122
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And so when I

123
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lobbed into that the principle of no ads, no sponsors, no promotions, no commercials,

124
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no interruptions, I'm trying to create like a sacrosanct, like a space that

125
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is special and precious and rare and antithetical to a lot of the stuff I don't like about the

126
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world, which is that it's short, it's interrupted with ads, it really is ads, you know, with a

127
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little bit of content in the middle.

128
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And it's not about stuff that lasts forever.

129
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It's about stuff that just happened.

130
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And so it's just me trying to gently push myself into a lot of things that I know I like, but I wouldn't naturally encounter, I think.

131
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That's a good, full explanation.

132
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Thank you.

133
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Well, I know I'm talking to the good, full explanation master.

134
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And so I at least got to come to the plate with a paragraph so that I can hopefully encourage you to keep doing the same with me.

135
00:13:00,650 --> 00:13:06,690
You've been very generous to go through the depths of your experiences in your life, Jon.

136
00:13:06,990 --> 00:13:14,990
And I think the first thing you said to me was, you know, I've been reading for 60 plus years, and I believe you're 64 now.

137
00:13:15,810 --> 00:13:18,150
So this will be hard, but okay.

138
00:13:18,430 --> 00:13:21,030
And you went through your life.

139
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You came up with three formative books.

140
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I've got them here beside me.

141
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But before I jump into them, I also took a look deep into everything I could find that you've ever said or written about reading or writing.

142
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And from those collected quotes, of which there are many, I've picked out a few to kind of be a bit of an appetizer to this conversation.

143
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I'll offer them to you.

144
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And I invite you to expand, explain, elucidate, or as George Saunders told us in Chapter 75, deny, if you would like to, the quote.

145
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So here they are.

146
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First off, I believe from The Corrections in 2001, you wrote, Fiction is a solution, the best solution to the problem of existential solitude.

147
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Yeah, I said that.

148
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It was a bit of a compromise position.

149
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Came out of a multi-year, mostly via letter conversation I was having with my friend David Wallace.

150
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We were trying to figure out something we could agree on to answer the question, why bother writing fiction?

151
00:14:37,920 --> 00:14:45,240
And if I were to say that now, I would probably leave out the word existential.

152
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I might say it in a plainer way.

153
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We read to connect.

154
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There is a magic to the written word, and particularly the written word in a novel, where you, as a writer, put a vision on the page into this very limited alphabet, 26 letters and a couple of punctuation points.

155
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And somebody decodes that, and they could be decoding it down the street, or they could be decoding it 150 years later.

156
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And from that code comes this whole world, and with it, the person who created that world initially.

157
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And the traces of the person who created the book are all over the place.

158
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It's there in the tone.

159
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It's there in the particular observation.

160
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It's mentioning things that hadn't been mentioned before that you recognize as true.

161
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You recognize, I've experienced this myself.

162
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I'm seeing characters who are behaving in ways I've witnessed people behave.

163
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I'm also understanding that behavior in a way I might not have had I not read it in this form.

164
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And that creates this amazing sense of communality, if that's a word, between the writer and the reader.

165
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It's a joint thing.

166
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Everything is happening through this medium of ink on a page, and yet you don't feel alone.

167
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You feel like somebody has been there experiencing the world the way I have.

168
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Wow, beautiful.

169
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Thank you.

170
00:16:56,980 --> 00:17:07,740
And so many things I want to jump off on, but I'll hold myself back because I have questions about Dave Wallace, of course, and about the magic of the written word, but we're going to get into that.

171
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That's a great one.

172
00:17:10,220 --> 00:17:11,839
I think I'll just say one more.

173
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I mean, we actually, I just assumed not talk too much about Dave.

174
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That's all become rather water under the bridge, but I think he was very alone.

175
00:17:26,480 --> 00:17:48,260
And when I say that we kind of worked out a compromise position to answer our questions so we didn't have to write letters about it anymore, and I think the emphasis on loneliness grew out of his own existential loneliness, which was really, really profound.

176
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He was a deeply isolated person.

177
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In a way, I don't feel myself to be so much.

178
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I'm more somebody who nonetheless likes company.

179
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What do you mean a compromised position?

180
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Well, I would say, hey, maybe the reason to write fiction is this, and he'd say, no, no, no, no, no.

181
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Maybe it's this, and we would just go back and forth, and it just continued in this sort of ping pong way until he said, well, maybe what you're trying to say is, and I say, yeah, that's close enough.

182
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Maybe we can agree on that and stop talking about it, which is what we did.

183
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Interesting.

184
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Interesting.

185
00:18:29,340 --> 00:18:39,600
Okay, I'll avoid asking more about Dave, but obviously, I'm a big fan of a lot of stuff he wrote.

186
00:18:40,960 --> 00:18:48,860
1996 Harper's essay, Perchance to Dream, you said, when a writer says publicly that the novel is doomed, it's a sure bet his new book isn't going well.

187
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I did say that.

188
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I stand by that.

189
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I would.

190
00:18:55,840 --> 00:19:04,540
I don't know if it's in that essay, which was subsequently made better and shorter and retitled, Why Bother?

191
00:19:06,900 --> 00:19:10,000
It appears in my first essay collection.

192
00:19:11,380 --> 00:19:27,120
Maybe in that essay, maybe somewhere else, I also said that a writer's estimate of the number of serious readers in the culture tracks very closely with the number of copies of their last book sold.

193
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Oh, that's a great one.

194
00:19:35,300 --> 00:19:36,200
I couldn't find it.

195
00:19:36,200 --> 00:19:37,480
It was particularly striking.

196
00:19:37,640 --> 00:19:40,060
I mean, Philip Roth used to say it over and over.

197
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There are about 100,000 serious readers in America, and I swear, you go and look at his book sales and be like, oh, yeah, it's about 100.

198
00:19:47,820 --> 00:19:52,460
Well, basically, a serious reader is defined as somebody who buys Philip Roth's book.

199
00:19:52,480 --> 00:19:53,420
Oh, that's too funny.

200
00:19:53,680 --> 00:19:58,200
So then he changes his tack when he has a big book, I guess, or something.

201
00:19:59,000 --> 00:19:59,360
Maybe.

202
00:19:59,600 --> 00:19:59,700
Yeah.

203
00:20:00,500 --> 00:20:01,080
I did.

204
00:20:01,680 --> 00:20:01,920
Yeah.

205
00:20:01,980 --> 00:20:02,680
Well, exactly.

206
00:20:02,820 --> 00:20:02,920
Yeah.

207
00:20:02,980 --> 00:20:15,340
So famously, your first two books were critically well-reviewed, but then your third novel, The Corrections, was sort of the big amplification, 1.5 million copies sold, according to some records online, which I don't know if it's true.

208
00:20:15,700 --> 00:20:16,820
In the US?

209
00:20:16,920 --> 00:20:18,440
Yeah, that sounds right.

210
00:20:18,840 --> 00:20:19,060
Yeah.

211
00:20:19,080 --> 00:20:20,520
Which is big.

212
00:20:21,000 --> 00:20:21,500
Which is big.

213
00:20:22,160 --> 00:20:37,360
The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read, colon, where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?

214
00:20:38,180 --> 00:20:38,860
Question mark.

215
00:20:38,860 --> 00:20:40,560
I think that's from Why Bother as well.

216
00:20:41,920 --> 00:20:42,020
Yeah.

217
00:20:42,180 --> 00:20:42,360
Okay.

218
00:20:44,360 --> 00:20:53,460
Again, those were kind of transitional worries of mine when I actually thought it was important to engage with the culture.

219
00:20:54,560 --> 00:21:04,680
When I had, I was still burdened with a vestigial notion that writing should be socially useful.

220
00:21:06,060 --> 00:21:10,700
It should be perhaps a critique of the society we live in.

221
00:21:11,940 --> 00:21:15,520
It should have some beneficial effect.

222
00:21:15,760 --> 00:21:19,560
And of course, you can't have a beneficial effect on the culture if you're not engaging with it.

223
00:21:21,820 --> 00:21:36,260
And in the 90s, with the advent of the third screen, following the movie screen and the TV screen, when computers were really taking over in the 90s, we were seeing the beginnings of internet culture.

224
00:21:38,440 --> 00:21:51,200
The rather familiar notion that we were distracting ourselves to death, kind of a Neil Postman critique of modern culture also.

225
00:21:55,260 --> 00:22:03,880
Anyway, a long list of people who had been making that point before, but there was a, there was, this was kind of an echo of something.

226
00:22:04,420 --> 00:22:06,040
Here I am talking about Philip Roth again.

227
00:22:06,120 --> 00:22:14,660
I'm not even that big a Philip Roth fan, but he had written an essay in the early 60s, I want to say 1961, called Writing American Fiction.

228
00:22:15,720 --> 00:22:30,020
And in it, he was saying like, how do you satirize an American culture that is going to be more ridiculous and amazing and extreme than anything you could possibly make up?

229
00:22:31,840 --> 00:22:43,500
30 years later, the problem seemed to be the sense that I had in my 30s that, wow, this is a really diseased country.

230
00:22:43,660 --> 00:22:44,900
This is a diseased culture.

231
00:22:45,740 --> 00:22:53,260
And I want to bring news of that disease, but the disease consists in the fact that nobody's listening to people like me.

232
00:22:53,280 --> 00:22:54,080
Right, exactly.

233
00:22:55,140 --> 00:23:05,300
Again, all of it sort of in hindsight, the somewhat self-serving complaints of somebody whose second novel hadn't done well, and he was struggling with his third novel.

234
00:23:05,540 --> 00:23:05,860
Interesting.

235
00:23:06,740 --> 00:23:10,980
But you no longer feel like the writing should be socially useful.

236
00:23:12,000 --> 00:23:13,400
No, I gave that up.

237
00:23:16,680 --> 00:23:24,140
I mean, I try to be helpful to someone or something when I go to nonfiction, particularly my journalism.

238
00:23:24,400 --> 00:23:36,280
I am trying to, in some probably necessarily small way, make a difference in what I choose to write about and how I choose to write it.

239
00:23:37,280 --> 00:23:43,580
But the novel, no, I jettisoned all notion of social responsibility.

240
00:23:44,860 --> 00:23:45,600
I was liberated.

241
00:23:48,270 --> 00:24:06,860
So much so that I called my fourth novel Freedom, which was partly referred to that sense of liberation from this, oh, partly Midwestern, partly angry young man's feeling that I had a job to do.

242
00:24:06,960 --> 00:24:12,740
And the job was to expose everything that was wrong in the country and get people to take up arms against it.

243
00:24:14,100 --> 00:24:21,440
Nevermind the fact that it was very hard to find novels anywhere in the history of the novel that had caused such a mass uprising.

244
00:24:21,980 --> 00:24:27,260
Nevertheless, I somehow had it in my head for way too long that novels should be doing that.

245
00:24:27,260 --> 00:24:29,460
I got a couple more, two more quotes still.

246
00:24:30,160 --> 00:24:36,580
On your 2023 interview on the Reading the Room podcast, you said, I'm competitive, period.

247
00:24:36,800 --> 00:24:41,820
I don't like being ignored at the expense of writers who I think are bad, period.

248
00:24:42,060 --> 00:24:43,140
That irks me.

249
00:24:47,700 --> 00:24:49,020
Apparently I did say that.

250
00:24:52,940 --> 00:24:53,500
Yeah.

251
00:24:53,980 --> 00:24:57,960
Well, I mean, doesn't it irk you?

252
00:24:59,200 --> 00:25:00,560
Well, wouldn't it irk you?

253
00:25:00,560 --> 00:25:02,200
I guess I don't, yeah.

254
00:25:02,500 --> 00:25:03,040
Go ahead.

255
00:25:04,800 --> 00:25:06,280
Well, yeah.

256
00:25:06,380 --> 00:25:12,260
I mean, I could put that in a less hostile way.

257
00:25:13,520 --> 00:25:19,360
I could speak of a sadness and even apply it to myself.

258
00:25:20,300 --> 00:25:24,380
We have finite lives and very finite time for reading.

259
00:25:24,740 --> 00:25:33,760
And there are five to eight orders of magnitude more books than I could ever read in my lifetime.

260
00:25:36,400 --> 00:25:46,060
And it does seem a shame to spend a lot of time when you have a lot of choices and there are a lot of good books to spend time reading crap.

261
00:25:47,620 --> 00:25:53,520
So I don't tend to read crap because it's almost physically painful.

262
00:25:54,080 --> 00:25:54,180
Yeah.

263
00:25:55,720 --> 00:25:57,820
The crap is subjective though.

264
00:25:57,880 --> 00:26:00,720
I mean, one man's crap is another man's treasure.

265
00:26:03,260 --> 00:26:04,460
Maybe, yeah.

266
00:26:04,520 --> 00:26:05,700
You think there's objective crap?

267
00:26:06,580 --> 00:26:06,820
Yeah.

268
00:26:09,930 --> 00:26:11,750
No, I think...

269
00:26:16,430 --> 00:26:19,250
Do we really even need to have that conversation?

270
00:26:19,630 --> 00:26:38,650
I mean, I can find a crap book for you and I can walk you through sentence by sentence, word choice by word choice, character by character, story term by story term, how unbelievably lazy and cliched everything is.

271
00:26:41,910 --> 00:26:47,730
And this is not to say that lazy, cliched work doesn't have its uses.

272
00:26:49,270 --> 00:26:51,490
Sometimes that's exactly what you want.

273
00:26:51,570 --> 00:26:53,190
You want the familiar trope.

274
00:26:56,890 --> 00:27:01,770
It's tiring to be challenged in sentence after sentence to actually think.

275
00:27:02,270 --> 00:27:03,470
Maybe you don't want to think.

276
00:27:04,590 --> 00:27:11,510
Maybe you don't even want a fresh way to say, you know, quiet as a mouse.

277
00:27:11,670 --> 00:27:13,910
Maybe quiet as a mouse is exactly what you want to read.

278
00:27:14,030 --> 00:27:16,490
Nevertheless, it is objectively crap to say that.

279
00:27:17,510 --> 00:27:18,970
Yeah, I think it's...

280
00:27:18,970 --> 00:27:20,050
So I relate to this.

281
00:27:20,310 --> 00:27:30,350
And the way I relate to it though is when I feel like in the books world, there's more, a higher and higher percentage of books that are not books first or books only.

282
00:27:30,670 --> 00:27:36,750
They're books to something else, or on its way to something else, or they're part of a giant marketing...

283
00:27:36,750 --> 00:27:39,330
It's like the person that's in the news suddenly has a book.

284
00:27:39,630 --> 00:27:46,430
They just have the book because that was one area that they hadn't covered in their marketing camp.

285
00:27:46,570 --> 00:27:47,910
That's the stuff that bothers me.

286
00:27:48,330 --> 00:27:55,070
It's the sort of changing what I think of as books into a thing to a word's another end.

287
00:27:55,270 --> 00:27:56,810
That's sort of bothering me.

288
00:27:58,570 --> 00:28:00,030
At any rate, yes.

289
00:28:00,150 --> 00:28:05,950
So there's a sadness that people are spending time reading crap.

290
00:28:06,010 --> 00:28:07,710
And I'm not competitive only on my own behalf.

291
00:28:07,790 --> 00:28:14,870
I'm competitive on behalf of my many fellow writers who are doing strong original work and who take care with every sentence.

292
00:28:15,490 --> 00:28:25,190
And it irks me when I see someone reading a bad book instead of one of our books.

293
00:28:27,790 --> 00:28:30,490
Um, thank you for that expansion there.

294
00:28:30,550 --> 00:28:36,570
And the last one I have is from your 2016 interview on the Other People podcast, People Spell PPL.

295
00:28:37,210 --> 00:28:42,810
This isn't about writing particularly, but I thought you were talking about it in terms of writing.

296
00:28:42,890 --> 00:28:48,950
And you said, the ambition to dwell in the complicated middle has been shown to be unprofitable.

297
00:28:51,930 --> 00:28:58,290
Wow, I sound more interesting to myself than I actually experienced myself to be.

298
00:29:00,170 --> 00:29:02,090
That's a nicely turned phrase.

299
00:29:03,870 --> 00:29:04,990
Well, yes.

300
00:29:05,010 --> 00:29:07,110
And it goes to what I was just talking about.

301
00:29:13,560 --> 00:29:19,240
It is a luxury to engage with things in a complicated way.

302
00:29:20,760 --> 00:29:22,300
Simplicity is comforting.

303
00:29:22,300 --> 00:29:26,580
Um, bad television is comforting because it's simple.

304
00:29:27,300 --> 00:29:53,160
And, uh, there was a time when I thought it was a moral failing that you didn't want to engage with complicated art, nuanced art, moral ambiguity, uh, contradictions in character, uh, books or movies with no heroes and no villains, just people who are kind of a mix of the two.

305
00:29:53,280 --> 00:29:53,820
All of that.

306
00:29:54,160 --> 00:30:06,220
I used to think, um, I used to look down on people, honestly, in my youthful arrogance who, who, uh, who weren't into that kind of thing.

307
00:30:06,380 --> 00:30:16,980
And I came to feel this was mean of me to look down on them because who was I to judge really?

308
00:30:17,620 --> 00:30:35,720
Um, I, I've come to the conclusion that it's actually a luxury to read literature, um, literature being defined by its defiance of cliche, including the cliche of, oh, here's a virtuous hero and here's an evil villain.

309
00:30:36,000 --> 00:30:37,560
Um, total cliche.

310
00:30:38,020 --> 00:30:42,880
Uh, and you don't find that in a good literary novel.

311
00:30:43,600 --> 00:30:58,620
Um, but that's a luxury when you, you know, when you've had a bad day at a bad job, um, and you've got kids and you've got a problematic spouse and you've got the mother-in-law and the house is falling apart.

312
00:30:58,740 --> 00:31:14,500
I mean, like, who am I to tell you, you are wrong to not feel like getting into a really complicated story of where, uh, some people who seem good are not good.

313
00:31:14,540 --> 00:31:36,700
Um, and, you know, the, just the whole, the whole landscape of, uh, moral and social and intellectual complexity, uh, who am I to judge you for just wanting at the end of the day to identify with someone who's good and is being, has bad stuff being inflicted on them by bad people?

314
00:31:36,940 --> 00:31:38,880
I mean, I get it.

315
00:31:39,640 --> 00:31:54,040
Uh, and, and so it has really been brought home to me that the kind of work I do is for a small percentage of the population.

316
00:31:55,120 --> 00:32:00,580
It's not for an economically privileged small percentage of the population.

317
00:32:01,680 --> 00:32:09,120
I doubt that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are reading good books either.

318
00:32:09,920 --> 00:32:15,640
Um, so they have plenty of leisure if they want it.

319
00:32:16,040 --> 00:32:21,600
Um, uh, they're not threatened by anything they could, they just don't because that's not their thing.

320
00:32:22,440 --> 00:32:31,420
Uh, and if you go to a prison, you'll find that like 3% of the people there are not reading Michael Connelly.

321
00:32:31,500 --> 00:32:33,400
They're, you know, reading George Saunders.

322
00:32:33,820 --> 00:32:43,360
It's a small percentage, but it's kind of, it's a, it's a, it's the same percentage across the population, um, without regard to social or economic status.

323
00:32:43,960 --> 00:32:48,900
It's, it's, it is a matter of, it's, it's a privilege of how you were born.

324
00:32:49,280 --> 00:32:55,360
It's a privilege of not having to see the world in terms of your own victimhood.

325
00:32:55,920 --> 00:32:56,020
Wow.

326
00:32:56,640 --> 00:32:57,120
Wow.

327
00:32:57,500 --> 00:32:57,920
Wow.

328
00:32:58,040 --> 00:32:58,400
Wow.

329
00:32:58,620 --> 00:33:02,080
It is a luxury to engage with things in a complicated way.

330
00:33:02,740 --> 00:33:05,400
Literature defined by its defiance of cliche.

331
00:33:06,760 --> 00:33:09,760
Um, you mentioned George Saunders by the way,

332
00:33:09,820 --> 00:33:14,820
and I, I, I won't take the bait on Dave Wallace again, but I did, you know, he gave that eulogy

333
00:33:14,820 --> 00:33:19,260
at Dave Wallace's funeral, and there was that last paragraph there, and I reached out to him,

334
00:33:19,320 --> 00:33:24,400
told him I was going to be speaking to you, and he said, um, because I asked him what you think

335
00:33:24,400 --> 00:33:28,440
Dave would make of these times, and he said, uh, I don't know what Dave would make of these times.

336
00:33:28,540 --> 00:33:30,260
It's hard to guess what Dave would make of these times.

337
00:33:30,320 --> 00:33:32,460
He was always surprising and enlightening me with his thoughts.

338
00:33:32,560 --> 00:33:34,020
That's one thing I really appreciate about him.

339
00:33:34,340 --> 00:33:36,960
He was an uncommon thinker, always ahead of the curve.

340
00:33:37,380 --> 00:33:44,200
Please tell Jon, he's one of the kindest people I've ever met, in addition to being a literary giant and a genius and an ongoing inspiration.

341
00:33:44,360 --> 00:33:47,780
Tell him we miss him and Kathy, just to let you know.

342
00:33:48,100 --> 00:33:49,960
Well, that's awfully nice of George.

343
00:33:50,240 --> 00:33:55,440
George is, I love George and our friendship goes back many years now.

344
00:33:55,520 --> 00:33:57,880
I think we were actually introduced via Dave.

345
00:33:57,900 --> 00:34:11,380
It was Dave who first put George on the radar for me with a tiny story called, I think Isabella, that was in a, um, in the front part of, uh, Harper's, which was just readings that had appeared in a small magazine.

346
00:34:12,440 --> 00:34:19,320
And Dave, Dave recognized George as the genius he is, uh, very early on.

347
00:34:19,520 --> 00:34:21,460
Um, and I'm grateful today for that.

348
00:34:21,520 --> 00:34:28,159
And I think he kind of brokered our first meeting in person, maybe 20, 25 years ago in New York.

349
00:34:28,300 --> 00:34:29,000
Um, yes.

350
00:34:29,040 --> 00:34:32,639
And he and Paula did live for a little while in Santa Cruz.

351
00:34:32,860 --> 00:34:42,460
Um, and it was like, Hey, got one of my old writer friends in town, but they have since, uh, relocated for good reason to Southern California.

352
00:34:42,880 --> 00:34:43,139
Yeah.

353
00:34:43,219 --> 00:34:43,679
Wow.

354
00:34:44,120 --> 00:34:50,560
Well, nice little, um, circle, uh, there and how beautiful that Dave introduced the two of you.

355
00:34:50,580 --> 00:34:53,600
And, um, you know, we'd loved having him on 3 Books.

356
00:34:53,659 --> 00:34:56,520
It was very nice of him to come on the show as well.

357
00:34:57,020 --> 00:35:01,780
Um, and he picked all short, he picked all readable, he picked like you, he picked all readable books.

358
00:35:01,960 --> 00:35:05,920
So it was a Chekhov and a Christmas Carol.

359
00:35:06,300 --> 00:35:08,620
And, uh, it was, it was a wonderful getting into those with him.

360
00:35:09,420 --> 00:35:10,760
So I could have picked those two.

361
00:35:10,880 --> 00:35:13,880
And frankly, the trial is not the most readable book.

362
00:35:14,140 --> 00:35:16,640
I mean, no, no it's not.

363
00:35:17,040 --> 00:35:22,540
And, and, and, and, and interestingly, well, we're sorry.

364
00:35:22,700 --> 00:35:23,880
Have I, have I just said something?

365
00:35:24,000 --> 00:35:24,680
No, it's okay.

366
00:35:24,680 --> 00:35:25,180
It's okay.

367
00:35:25,980 --> 00:35:26,140
Yes.

368
00:35:26,400 --> 00:35:35,340
Well, I'll come back to the Christmas Carol because, um, because that pertains to my second, the second book I chose.

369
00:35:35,640 --> 00:35:36,180
Ah, okay.

370
00:35:36,200 --> 00:35:39,120
So I will, I will bring that back up when we get into your second book.

371
00:35:39,280 --> 00:35:41,740
Now we've wet our palette.

372
00:35:41,900 --> 00:35:43,660
We've wet our mental palette.

373
00:35:43,800 --> 00:35:48,140
You have given us some wonderful, juicy kind of wide thinking.

374
00:35:48,260 --> 00:36:03,180
This is a luxury to be able to engage with things in a complicated way as we are doing right now, as we delve into your three most formative books for each one, I'm going to try to describe the book as if the listener is holding it in their hands in a bookstore.

375
00:36:03,700 --> 00:36:09,520
So I'll do about a 60 second spiel, and then I'll ask you to tell us about your relationship with each book.

376
00:36:09,600 --> 00:36:11,960
And then I have a few jumping off questions from there.

377
00:36:12,700 --> 00:36:14,100
So let's begin.

378
00:36:14,300 --> 00:36:24,820
Your very first formative book is Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis, originally published by Jeffrey Bless, uh, by Jeffrey Bless publishing in 1951.

379
00:36:25,280 --> 00:36:27,640
Um, the original cover is not the one I have.

380
00:36:27,720 --> 00:36:33,540
The original cover is Navy blue with a cream circle in the center and a hand-drawn picture of the four pens at Pennsylvania children.

381
00:36:33,540 --> 00:36:37,760
I believe holding hands in a circle, wearing flowing robes.

382
00:36:37,900 --> 00:36:56,180
C.S. Lewis, my cover, by the way, which we'll get into is the movie tie in addition, which was founded Doug Miller books, uh, in Korea in Toronto was the only cover he had, but I took it because I thought, let me support the local independent secondhand bookstore, regardless of what version they have.

383
00:36:56,320 --> 00:36:57,920
Although I wouldn't normally have grabbed the movie cover.

384
00:36:58,800 --> 00:37:02,100
Um, C.S. Lewis lived from 1898 to 1963.

385
00:37:02,520 --> 00:37:13,600
He was the Irish born author of over 40 books with his greatest legacy being the Chronicles of Narnia, a series of seven children's fantasy books that have sold over 120 million copies.

386
00:37:14,340 --> 00:37:15,240
What's it about?

387
00:37:15,500 --> 00:37:25,120
This Prince Caspian is the second of the seven novels in the Chronicles of Narnia Narnia where animals talk, trees walk, and a battle is about to begin.

388
00:37:25,420 --> 00:37:31,960
A Prince denied his rightful throne gathers an army in a desperate attempt to rid his land of a false King.

389
00:37:32,240 --> 00:37:38,700
But in the end, it is a battle of honor between two men alone that will decide the fate of an entire world.

390
00:37:38,700 --> 00:37:43,840
Dewey decimal heads file this one under 823.91 for literature slash English and old English.

391
00:37:43,960 --> 00:37:49,780
Jon, please tell us about your relationship with Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis.

392
00:37:51,820 --> 00:37:54,320
I'm wondering where that ad copy came from.

393
00:37:54,540 --> 00:38:01,980
Um, I would certainly not describe it as a novel that builds to hand to hand combat.

394
00:38:02,140 --> 00:38:02,640
good reads.

395
00:38:04,980 --> 00:38:05,500
But yeah. Yeah.

396
00:38:05,540 --> 00:38:07,960
I mean, I guess it is technically a fantasy novel.

397
00:38:10,420 --> 00:38:25,280
You know, there are dungeons and dragons and, you know, it all has that middle ages feel that so many fantasy novels have.

398
00:38:28,120 --> 00:38:35,090
But that's not what the Narnia books really are.

399
00:38:35,630 --> 00:38:38,750
Um, they're a weird thing.

400
00:38:39,210 --> 00:38:42,390
They, um, they have children at the center of them.

401
00:38:44,150 --> 00:39:07,450
And, uh, in the first of the novels, and we'll put a little asterisk on the numbering of the novels because the copyright holder publisher has made a disastrous decision to reorder the novels in a way that makes absolutely no sense and is abhorrent to any Narnia fan.

402
00:39:08,190 --> 00:39:09,470
Um, what are they thinking?

403
00:39:09,630 --> 00:39:12,930
I don't know, but it's a bad thought.

404
00:39:13,130 --> 00:39:14,970
Um, end of asterisk.

405
00:39:16,490 --> 00:39:24,810
Uh, in the first novel, these, uh, four siblings find their way.

406
00:39:25,830 --> 00:39:43,090
Well, the lion, the witch in the first, um, they find their way to this other world by way of a wardrobe in their, um, uncle's house.

407
00:39:43,730 --> 00:39:50,430
Um, uh, one of the it's, it's classic, it's, it's everything a child wants.

408
00:39:50,650 --> 00:39:54,010
Children love going in closets and secret little places.

409
00:39:54,010 --> 00:40:01,350
And the notion that you could go into that secret wardrobe and kind of get lost in the coats.

410
00:40:01,550 --> 00:40:19,250
And instead of finding the back of the wardrobe, you find yourself in the middle of a dark wood in winter, uh, where there's nothing around except a glowing gas light right in the middle of this dark frozen wood.

411
00:40:19,630 --> 00:40:27,810
It's like, that is every child's like, why would you go into a wardrobe if that's not what you're looking for?

412
00:40:28,930 --> 00:40:31,190
Um, well, yeah.

413
00:40:31,250 --> 00:40:41,850
So it turns out, um, they, they find their way to this other world called Narnia and, uh, things are not good there.

414
00:40:41,990 --> 00:40:43,130
It's eternal winter.

415
00:40:43,530 --> 00:40:48,830
Uh, there's a witch in charge and the witch is basically banished.

416
00:40:49,890 --> 00:40:50,850
Mild seasons.

417
00:40:51,990 --> 00:41:04,210
Um, and it turns out they're just, they're just what, uh, was needed to restore Narnia to its proper self and vanquish the witch.

418
00:41:04,210 --> 00:41:11,390
Uh, and, and then they go home and no better than that.

419
00:41:12,630 --> 00:41:24,450
They, um, they are rightly celebrated for having liberated Narnia and they proceed to live an entire life there.

420
00:41:24,750 --> 00:41:31,370
They are, they, they don't ever seem to get into sex and kids so much.

421
00:41:31,370 --> 00:41:34,290
It's like they just become older, bigger versions of themselves.

422
00:41:34,570 --> 00:41:38,990
A king and a queen and a prince and a princess or two boys and two girls.

423
00:41:39,970 --> 00:41:47,950
Um, and then one day they go home and they climb out of the wardrobe and it's like one minute later.

424
00:41:49,430 --> 00:42:08,430
Um, so in terms of a, a metaphorical rendering of what it is like as a child to sink into a book, um, and then emerge from a book, you can't really do better than that.

425
00:42:08,730 --> 00:42:17,870
That, that Lewis is one of the, one of the many reasons why that's an enduringly popular book is it basically describes what it's like.

426
00:42:18,030 --> 00:42:32,390
If you're a kid who has learned to read, has learned that you just pick up a book and you're sitting on this ugly sofa and your parents' blah living room and you are just transported to another world and you live there and you, and you, and in fact you experienced an entire lifetime.

427
00:42:32,390 --> 00:42:37,330
If you sit on the sofa long enough and read the entire book, you might experience an entire lifetime.

428
00:42:37,730 --> 00:42:41,590
And then it's like, oops, suddenly you're back in this blah living room and it's time to go to bed.

429
00:42:44,310 --> 00:42:46,990
Um, so that was the first book.

430
00:42:47,530 --> 00:42:53,870
Um, and I don't know if he intended to write seven from the start.

431
00:42:53,990 --> 00:42:56,890
I'm actually not a great student of his biography.

432
00:42:57,490 --> 00:43:04,430
I did see a movie, um, about his late love, uh, played by Deborah Winger.

433
00:43:04,630 --> 00:43:06,610
He was played, I believe by Anthony Hopkins.

434
00:43:07,110 --> 00:43:08,430
Um, it was a pretty good movie.

435
00:43:08,770 --> 00:43:14,390
At any rate, I don't know if he was intending to write seven books, but he wrote a sequel and Prince Caspian was that sequel.

436
00:43:15,250 --> 00:43:39,290
And although it doesn't have that like perfect pair of iconic metaphors, one going into the closet and emerging in a different world and the other being replicating the experience of reading a novel, um, it, it's the one that really, really stays with me.

437
00:43:40,530 --> 00:43:50,890
So very briefly, um, the four Pevensie kids are on a train platform in England.

438
00:43:51,210 --> 00:44:11,660
I think they're either coming back from, um, boarding school or they're on their way back to boarding school and they're to school and suddenly they're just like, they get sucked away and they find themselves on this desert Island, totally forested.

439
00:44:12,640 --> 00:44:17,440
Um, who knows where they are and they blunder around and they find ruins.

440
00:44:17,440 --> 00:44:28,280
They find a ruined castle and they're kind of like, they're, they're freaked out, but they're not completely innocent because they've had the experience of getting sucked into another world before.

441
00:44:28,420 --> 00:44:29,360
So it's like their game.

442
00:44:29,620 --> 00:44:30,580
Let's see what's up here.

443
00:44:31,740 --> 00:44:38,880
And there's this, and, and right away, one of the key things for the book is they're, they're just looking at this ruined castle.

444
00:44:38,940 --> 00:44:40,300
It's been ruined for hundreds of years.

445
00:44:40,440 --> 00:44:41,820
It's completely overgrown.

446
00:44:42,420 --> 00:44:45,580
Um, and, and fall, I mean, there's no roofs.

447
00:44:45,580 --> 00:44:49,160
It's just, it's just rubble and, and cellars and stuff like that.

448
00:44:49,640 --> 00:44:51,320
It starts to dawn on them.

449
00:44:52,060 --> 00:44:52,700
Wait a minute.

450
00:44:53,520 --> 00:44:54,480
We lived here.

451
00:44:55,440 --> 00:44:57,080
This was the, this was our palace.

452
00:44:57,220 --> 00:44:58,300
This must be Caravelle.

453
00:44:58,400 --> 00:45:07,800
This is where, this is where we ruled as King and Queen and Prince and Princess and had all those parties and went hunting and riding and swimming and all of that.

454
00:45:07,880 --> 00:45:10,160
We had, we had this amazing, and look at it now.

455
00:45:10,600 --> 00:45:11,540
How can this be?

456
00:45:11,800 --> 00:45:17,040
I mean, it's only a few months later for us and it seems to be like a millennium later here.

457
00:45:17,440 --> 00:45:34,860
And that dawning sense of deep time of, of something is really, really weird here that, um, that this thing that we knew so well is now almost completely ruined to the point of being almost unrecognizable.

458
00:45:34,860 --> 00:45:39,300
So that's the first uncanny moment, uh, in the book.

459
00:45:39,880 --> 00:46:05,420
And, and it remains uncanny, which is to say, I can't give you a good, um, uh, discursive account of why that is such an amazing effect to achieve, but it, it, it, it's hard as a child to connect to the depth of time.

460
00:46:06,320 --> 00:46:21,480
Um, and, and the notion that like St. Louis, where I grew up, that once upon a time, this was forested and Native Americans hunted here and there was a civilization across the river.

461
00:46:21,660 --> 00:46:23,260
Now we're ruined, the Coquia Downs.

462
00:46:23,300 --> 00:46:33,440
You could see that, but, but, but to really grasp the depth of the, the centuries that it passed, um, actually it turned out to be easier by reading a novel.

463
00:46:34,480 --> 00:46:40,640
Um, so I'll just say maybe only one other thing.

464
00:46:41,040 --> 00:46:45,570
Um, well, two other things.

465
00:46:47,210 --> 00:47:03,810
So going back to the lion and the witch in the wardrobe, I mentioned two things that make it the classic children's story, but there's a third thing that I think also accounts for its enduring popularity with children.

466
00:47:04,870 --> 00:47:10,510
And that is that one of the Pevensie kids, Edmund, is bad.

467
00:47:14,150 --> 00:47:20,670
He, he is sort of split up from the other kids while on that winter time visit to Narnia.

468
00:47:22,830 --> 00:47:33,510
And he finds himself, um, getting entertained by a witch who gives him something which I've tried.

469
00:47:33,630 --> 00:47:41,570
It's a candy that was perhaps still is popular in England, Turkish delight, Turkish delight.

470
00:47:42,110 --> 00:47:42,990
And he loves it.

471
00:47:43,070 --> 00:47:44,190
I've, I've tried it.

472
00:47:44,250 --> 00:47:48,050
It's not good, but you know, there's no accounting for what kids liked.

473
00:47:48,670 --> 00:47:51,710
I liked all sorts of things as a kid myself, weren't good.

474
00:47:52,370 --> 00:47:55,550
Um, anyway, although this, even as a kid, I wouldn't have touched this stuff.

475
00:47:55,610 --> 00:47:58,710
It was, it's kind of white and has little bits of nut in it.

476
00:47:58,770 --> 00:47:59,370
It's just awful.

477
00:48:00,110 --> 00:48:09,890
Um, uh, anyway, and he gets seduced by the endless supply of Turkish delight.

478
00:48:10,890 --> 00:48:17,110
And he basically is asked to betray his siblings.

479
00:48:18,430 --> 00:48:22,870
Um, and he says, can I have more Turkish delight?

480
00:48:23,590 --> 00:48:25,530
And the answer is, well, yes, of course you can.

481
00:48:25,610 --> 00:48:26,810
You can have as much as you want.

482
00:48:26,870 --> 00:48:32,030
If you'll just do me this little favor and get rid of those annoying siblings of yours.

483
00:48:32,530 --> 00:48:36,530
And he goes for it and he's really very bad.

484
00:48:38,190 --> 00:48:46,910
And it's not so in, in the bad novel of the sort we were talking about earlier, he would be identified right up front.

485
00:48:47,070 --> 00:48:47,270
Okay.

486
00:48:47,490 --> 00:48:48,470
This is a troubled kid.

487
00:48:49,490 --> 00:48:52,290
He's going to cause trouble and he's going to be, and nobody likes him.

488
00:48:52,830 --> 00:48:56,450
And, and he's a bully and, and not to be trusted.

489
00:48:56,450 --> 00:48:57,890
And you recognize that right away.

490
00:48:57,950 --> 00:49:02,550
Instead, we're totally in his point of view and it's all making perfect sense.

491
00:49:03,030 --> 00:49:09,430
We're also in his point of view when he starts to have qualms and said, Hmm, maybe this thing I'm doing is not so good.

492
00:49:09,930 --> 00:49:14,230
And you're what, what, what, what Lewis is doing.

493
00:49:14,390 --> 00:49:27,350
And he does again and again in the Narnia books is he's putting you into the psychology, into the emotional world of a child who knows that there are things he does or she does that are, that are just not right.

494
00:49:27,510 --> 00:49:28,310
They're bad.

495
00:49:28,890 --> 00:49:30,810
Kids are not innocent little creatures.

496
00:49:31,190 --> 00:49:33,550
Kids are full of all sorts of bad stuff.

497
00:49:35,010 --> 00:49:36,630
They're greedy and selfish.

498
00:49:36,910 --> 00:49:38,550
They, they want to have the toy.

499
00:49:38,610 --> 00:49:40,190
They don't want the sibling to have the toy.

500
00:49:40,250 --> 00:49:41,190
They want to have the toy.

501
00:49:41,770 --> 00:49:45,030
Um, and they'll actually go to considerable lengths to get what they want.

502
00:49:45,290 --> 00:49:52,350
I mean, if they're not sociopaths, they will grow out of it, but, um, the kids are bad and they experience real remorse.

503
00:49:52,830 --> 00:49:53,710
It's pop.

504
00:49:53,910 --> 00:49:58,650
And for that, and they also kind of live with this awful sense of how bad they are.

505
00:49:59,910 --> 00:50:11,190
And it takes a literary writer like CS Lewis to have the courage to go there and give you a character you're going to sympathize with who's actually not good.

506
00:50:12,070 --> 00:50:14,630
Um, and that was, that was a huge revelation.

507
00:50:16,030 --> 00:50:20,910
There's a little bit of that is actually less of it in Prince Caspian and Prince Caspian.

508
00:50:21,710 --> 00:50:28,130
Uh, what you have instead is three of the siblings behaving kind of badly.

509
00:50:28,890 --> 00:50:44,870
Uh, because the youngest, Lucy, who's the most dear of the kids, um, they're blundering around in the woods, trying to find help, um, or trying to be of help.

510
00:50:45,370 --> 00:50:48,230
Uh, and she sees the lion.

511
00:50:48,690 --> 00:50:51,730
Well, the lion of course is central to the Narnia books.

512
00:50:51,870 --> 00:50:52,770
That would be Aslan.

513
00:50:53,890 --> 00:51:10,890
Um, and Aslan is pretty obvious Christ figure who, who's, who was actually killed, uh, in the first novel, but somehow he's still alive.

514
00:51:10,970 --> 00:51:16,450
They all saw him killed just like some of the people in the Bible.

515
00:51:16,610 --> 00:51:19,010
They saw, yeah, Jesus definitely dead.

516
00:51:19,590 --> 00:51:22,510
No, it turns out maybe he's still alive.

517
00:51:23,110 --> 00:51:32,270
Lucy sees him and she's like, oh my God, Aslan, the, the person I love more than anything in the world, it's Aslan.

518
00:51:32,810 --> 00:51:37,530
And she tells the others and they say, nah, can't be, you didn't.

519
00:51:37,830 --> 00:51:38,850
She said, no, no, I think I did.

520
00:51:38,910 --> 00:51:39,250
I did.

521
00:51:39,930 --> 00:51:44,730
And so it's, there's this kind of, again, it's about this sort of private life of a child.

522
00:51:45,350 --> 00:51:48,710
She is seeing something that no one else is seeing.

523
00:51:49,030 --> 00:51:59,410
And she feels incredibly alone and incredibly frustrated, but also really rather determined because she is seeing this thing that the others are denying and denying and denying.

524
00:52:00,450 --> 00:52:06,390
Um, so even though there's not really a bad character, the siblings are bad because they don't listen to their sister.

525
00:52:06,510 --> 00:52:10,010
They probably should listen to her, um, because they know her to be a good kid.

526
00:52:10,290 --> 00:52:12,430
Um, and she's telling him, no, God damn it.

527
00:52:12,470 --> 00:52:14,570
I mean, not God damn it, but you know, gosh, darn it.

528
00:52:15,110 --> 00:52:19,290
I saw, I saw Aslan and he wants us to go this way, not that way.

529
00:52:20,030 --> 00:52:24,010
Um, again, you know, kind of religious, wants us to go this way, not that way.

530
00:52:25,050 --> 00:52:30,150
Christ-like lion, um, saying don't go that, don't do that when you're on the wrong path.

531
00:52:30,330 --> 00:52:31,230
Here's the right path.

532
00:52:31,750 --> 00:52:34,610
It's the youngest, the most innocent child who sees that blah, blah, blah.

533
00:52:34,670 --> 00:52:41,530
You can do all this sort of, um, kind of Christian symbolic, um, symbology off it, but not, not really the point.

534
00:52:41,610 --> 00:52:46,410
The point is again, the private interior, emotional and moral life of a child.

535
00:52:47,290 --> 00:52:54,530
Um, and I, at least as a, as a kid responded to that, I was the youngest people didn't listen to me.

536
00:52:54,950 --> 00:52:59,950
Um, and I also knew I had done bad things and I felt terrible remorse about that.

537
00:52:59,990 --> 00:53:00,910
So all of that is there.

538
00:53:01,010 --> 00:53:01,890
So that's the second thing.

539
00:53:01,950 --> 00:53:10,070
The third thing is when the kids go back and see the ruins of Narnia 1300 years after they were last there.

540
00:53:11,290 --> 00:53:11,730
Yeah.

541
00:53:11,730 --> 00:53:13,270
That's the, that's the year spot on.

542
00:53:13,330 --> 00:53:13,710
That's right.

543
00:53:14,330 --> 00:53:14,550
Yeah.

544
00:53:14,690 --> 00:53:14,810
Yeah.

545
00:53:14,810 --> 00:53:18,730
The first, the first book takes place in the year 1000 to 1015 in Narnia.

546
00:53:18,930 --> 00:53:22,650
The second book, Prince Caspian takes place in the year 2303 in Narnia.

547
00:53:24,250 --> 00:53:24,690
Yeah. I, I not even that suggests a depth of research that I have not

548
00:53:24,770 --> 00:53:33,170
Well you nailed it.

549
00:53:33,270 --> 00:53:47,450
Um, I, no, I, uh, well, I just remembered the number 1300 from somewhere, but anyway, uh, they go back there and Narnia has been taken over by these alien people, not aliens, but just people from somewhere else.

550
00:53:47,650 --> 00:53:59,550
Uh, it's been overrun with, um, people who don't believe in the things that the Narnians believed in and they persecute anyone who thinks, Oh, animals can talk.

551
00:53:59,590 --> 00:54:00,250
Are you kidding me?

552
00:54:00,710 --> 00:54:09,730
Oh, by the way, yet another thing about the Narnia books, animals talk, um, not all animals, but the talking animals talk.

553
00:54:10,030 --> 00:54:18,570
So, I mean, again, just like the ultimate dream of a child to go to a place where the animals even actually talk to them.

554
00:54:18,770 --> 00:54:28,330
That's like he hit, he hit every important trope, um, right out of the gate in Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe.

555
00:54:28,570 --> 00:54:34,150
Anyway, there are still a few talking animals in, uh, Narnia, but they've been driven underground.

556
00:54:35,290 --> 00:54:46,630
Um, and, and the good spirits, I mean, there are various like Nyads and Dryads and even the tree, so tree spirits and, and there are good dwarves.

557
00:54:47,050 --> 00:54:55,090
Um, and they've all basically been persecuted and have had no recourse, but to take refuge deep in the woods.

558
00:54:57,270 --> 00:55:10,590
And I have to say that of all the, all the things I love about Prince Caspian, the thing that I responded to most was this notion of this small embattled community in exile.

559
00:55:12,310 --> 00:55:16,110
Um, it is a classic David and Goliath story.

560
00:55:16,250 --> 00:55:17,780
They are the weak, they are the persecuted.

561
00:55:18,320 --> 00:55:26,220
Um, and they also, and there, and there's something very sweet about them and they take care of each other.

562
00:55:26,900 --> 00:55:30,920
Uh, and the rest of the world doesn't like them.

563
00:55:31,040 --> 00:55:58,320
Well, if you're a reader, if you're kind of a, kind of a difficult kid who maybe experienced some social difficulty later in junior high and, uh, partly because you spent so much time reading, um, maybe even as a little kid, uh, you, you, you felt apart from the social crowd.

564
00:55:58,840 --> 00:56:09,500
Um, and to this, this idea that there was this, you, there might be other people like you hiding underground in the woods.

565
00:56:09,840 --> 00:56:20,080
Um, that sense of incredible gratitude and discovery when you found somebody else who had the secret of reading the same as you did.

566
00:56:20,840 --> 00:56:26,040
Um, that's really, really hooked me with this book.

567
00:56:26,300 --> 00:56:43,710
The, the, the notion of a, um, uh, of a band of exiles, really exiled from the, from the dominant culture, um, oppressed by the dominant culture.

568
00:56:43,850 --> 00:56:49,270
That's, that's how the world came to seem to me in my twenties and my thirties.

569
00:56:49,870 --> 00:57:25,470
Um, and it's still actually informs my notion, although as we discussed earlier, I no longer think that these exiles are morally superior, but nonetheless, even today, when I go out and do a reading on a rainy night in Cincinnati or wherever, and 150 people come in out of the rain, um, kind of all shapes and sizes, uh, all ages, male, female, black, white, um, other ethnicities.

570
00:57:25,850 --> 00:57:31,710
It's a, it's a kind of motley group has come out on a rainy night to hear a read, to hear a reading.

571
00:57:32,630 --> 00:57:44,730
Um, it, I still feel like I'm with those that, that, that motley crew in the woods, uh, in Prince Caspian.

572
00:57:44,990 --> 00:57:45,350
Wow.

573
00:57:46,230 --> 00:57:46,730
Wow.

574
00:57:47,610 --> 00:57:48,550
Because they don't match.

575
00:57:48,890 --> 00:57:49,690
That's the thing.

576
00:57:49,750 --> 00:57:59,410
I mean, when, when, even in the, even in the drawings and the, um, the editions of the book that I read, there's something very uniform about the monarch, the dominant culture.

577
00:57:59,630 --> 00:58:02,330
They're all in uniform and they all kind of are drawn the same way.

578
00:58:02,430 --> 00:58:06,730
And then you see the, you know, the table where people are talking about things.

579
00:58:06,970 --> 00:58:07,170
Yeah.

580
00:58:08,050 --> 00:58:14,590
Um, it's just a complete, like there's a rabbit and then there's like a satyr next to the rabbit.

581
00:58:14,610 --> 00:58:21,110
It's just like, that's, that is a picture of what it's like to go to a literary reading.

582
00:58:22,810 --> 00:58:24,070
What's a satyr?

583
00:58:24,190 --> 00:58:25,130
I don't even know what that is.

584
00:58:25,130 --> 00:58:29,910
Satyr has, I think it doesn't, it's a satyr is a, um, is it a goat?

585
00:58:30,070 --> 00:58:30,910
Oh, I see.

586
00:58:31,010 --> 00:58:31,270
Yes.

587
00:58:31,390 --> 00:58:32,570
Right, right, right, right, right.

588
00:58:32,610 --> 00:58:33,610
It's next to the rabbit.

589
00:58:33,770 --> 00:58:33,930
Yeah.

590
00:58:33,950 --> 00:58:34,570
The half goat.

591
00:58:34,570 --> 00:58:35,010
Right, right.

592
00:58:35,630 --> 00:58:36,470
Yes, exactly.

593
00:58:36,770 --> 00:58:37,070
Right.

594
00:58:37,230 --> 00:58:37,830
The dwarf.

595
00:58:38,410 --> 00:58:38,830
Yes.

596
00:58:39,130 --> 00:58:39,350
Okay.

597
00:58:39,490 --> 00:58:39,710
Yeah.

598
00:58:39,710 --> 00:58:52,570
That is so, what a, what an amazing metaphor, um, for, for readings in bookstores and, uh, the small and battle community in exile, the private emotional life and moral life of a child.

599
00:58:52,570 --> 00:58:54,710
This is, this is, so I can see why it's formed.

600
00:58:54,810 --> 00:58:57,770
So it sounds like you were like, you said later in junior high.

601
00:58:57,850 --> 00:59:00,270
So I'm guessing you were nine or 10 or so when you read this.

602
00:59:01,450 --> 00:59:01,550
Yeah.

603
00:59:01,590 --> 00:59:10,610
It's also, I mean, I think these are some of the very first novels I, like real novels, novels you could enjoy as an adult that I remember reading.

604
00:59:11,530 --> 00:59:24,380
Um, my mother was not particularly approving of reading novels, um, because they were not true.

605
00:59:24,580 --> 00:59:25,860
They were made up.

606
00:59:27,080 --> 00:59:33,340
Um, and I saw a lot of my first reading, I was reading nonfiction.

607
00:59:33,460 --> 00:59:45,880
I was reading biographies and just, they were, they were, she wasn't approving cause they were made up with the belief that that meant that they were, they were lies.

608
00:59:46,360 --> 00:59:47,300
Oh, they were lies.

609
00:59:47,820 --> 00:59:48,540
They were lies.

610
00:59:48,760 --> 00:59:52,720
She was very disapproving of the idea of my becoming a novelist.

611
00:59:52,840 --> 00:59:54,360
It's like, you're going to lie for a living.

612
00:59:57,680 --> 00:59:59,060
That doesn't sound right.

613
01:00:00,240 --> 01:00:06,260
I read a quote recently that there's more truth in fiction than there is, you know, uh, in nonfiction or something along those lines.

614
01:00:06,260 --> 01:00:08,360
And I would try to make that case to her.

615
01:00:09,440 --> 01:00:25,020
But it also goes back to what I was saying about social utility and that, and that what I was in the grip of really well into my thirties, this notion that the novel had to be useful.

616
01:00:25,580 --> 01:00:31,640
Um, that, that came from that Midwestern notion of social utility that I definitely got from my parents.

617
01:00:32,480 --> 01:00:50,720
Um, at any rate, I did start, I think I might've started with the Dr. Dolittle books, which basically checked almost none of the amazing boxes that the Narnia books did, uh, checked, but didn't check one important box talking to animals.

618
01:00:54,180 --> 01:01:03,580
So, um, but I really, I mean, there were, there were really two books in grade school that, um, that I felt formed me.

619
01:01:03,640 --> 01:01:11,480
I could have just as easily chosen Harriet the spy as, as, as a novel that, that shaped me, um, as Prince Caspian.

620
01:01:11,880 --> 01:01:19,240
Um, and there again, uh, different kind of romance, present day romance.

621
01:01:19,720 --> 01:01:31,080
Um, but the notion of being a child who sneaks around through alleys and climbs walls and spies on people, uh, and then writes about them, um, that had its own romance.

622
01:01:31,100 --> 01:01:49,960
Uh, but the, but the, but the main thing there, and this is why I think both of both the Narnia books and also Harriet the spy by Louise Fitzhugh and her wonderful followup to that, um, the long secret, why they were so particularly formative was that they did not portray children as good.

623
01:01:50,740 --> 01:01:51,140
Right.

624
01:01:51,720 --> 01:01:52,120
Right.

625
01:01:52,440 --> 01:01:52,740
Right.

626
01:01:52,840 --> 01:02:06,060
Which is how you, which is, which is, which, if you want it, if you actually want to hook a child, I think don't show them nice sunny pictures of happy kids who only want the best and are trying to make a better world and blah, blah, blah.

627
01:02:06,180 --> 01:02:12,080
No, it's like you, you put a kid in trouble, trouble of their own making because they didn't behave well.

628
01:02:12,700 --> 01:02:15,620
Um, and they're not very about it.

629
01:02:15,840 --> 01:02:16,060
Right.

630
01:02:16,520 --> 01:02:19,620
And on happiness is of course, it's not such a much better story.

631
01:02:20,380 --> 01:02:35,820
So, um, stepping back, it was, these were the first, what I would call adult novels I read, even though they might now be both classed as YA novels, um, Prince Caspian and Harriet the spy.

632
01:02:35,940 --> 01:02:41,200
They were adult in the sense that they were, they had a real nuance to them.

633
01:02:41,540 --> 01:02:46,260
Um, they had a moral dimension and the morality was by no means straightforward.

634
01:02:47,280 --> 01:02:47,380
Wow.

635
01:02:47,560 --> 01:02:48,040
Wow.

636
01:02:48,120 --> 01:02:49,180
That was unbelievable.

637
01:02:49,520 --> 01:02:54,160
That was such a rich, uh, thoughtful, uh, explanation.

638
01:02:54,580 --> 01:03:02,000
Um, on your point about, about children, I'm reminded of that, you know, no good, very bad, terrible day.

639
01:03:02,080 --> 01:03:09,520
You know, that book that I, the title is just looking for me, you know, that everybody loves going through the day.

640
01:03:09,600 --> 01:03:13,660
Um, lots of things I want to ask you about, about here.

641
01:03:14,320 --> 01:03:21,820
Heroes is one topic, you know, in Narnia in 2303, Prince Caspian is described as noble.

642
01:03:22,040 --> 01:03:24,920
And I guess we have to check where I get the copy from, but this is from online.

643
01:03:25,040 --> 01:03:25,600
I'm from Wikipedia.

644
01:03:25,880 --> 01:03:29,100
He's described as noble, handsome, brave, and Mary.

645
01:03:29,280 --> 01:03:33,400
He strives for fairness and justice at all times and is a devoted King.

646
01:03:33,420 --> 01:03:35,060
My movie tie in cover.

647
01:03:35,260 --> 01:03:36,920
I mean, you know.

648
01:03:36,920 --> 01:03:38,060
Horrible. Don't show that to me again.

649
01:03:40,610 --> 01:03:46,150
Movie, by the way, came out in 2008, $225 million budget and made 420 million at the box office as a side note.

650
01:03:46,290 --> 01:03:51,950
But then the movie cover has this, you know, this white male teen heartthrob with shoulder length, brown hair, chiseled features.

651
01:03:52,110 --> 01:03:53,370
We're talking in 2024.

652
01:03:53,710 --> 01:03:57,290
And I want to ask you, what does a hero look like today?

653
01:04:00,010 --> 01:04:03,070
Oh gosh, we were having a nice conversation.

654
01:04:03,250 --> 01:04:05,630
And then you'd have to go and ask a question like that.

655
01:04:06,370 --> 01:04:10,990
Um, I will say that Prince Caspian is not a very interesting character.

656
01:04:12,750 --> 01:04:21,950
Um, I believe he reappears, uh, as a very old man in the next Narnia novel, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

657
01:04:22,910 --> 01:04:29,850
Um, and he's, uh, and he's now an aged King and he wants to try to sail beyond the end of the world.

658
01:04:30,850 --> 01:04:33,970
Um, yes, that's right.

659
01:04:33,970 --> 01:04:40,130
He's deaf and like, and he has an ear trumpet.

660
01:04:40,470 --> 01:04:41,870
This is all just from memory, I haven't,

661
01:04:42,010 --> 01:04:42,890
yeah, no, that's right.

662
01:04:42,950 --> 01:04:45,290
I just, I'm looking at the reading order now.

663
01:04:45,470 --> 01:04:46,090
That's exactly right.

664
01:04:46,850 --> 01:04:52,450
And, uh, we introduce a new Pevensie character, uh, I believe a cousin named Eustace.

665
01:04:52,670 --> 01:05:00,210
And I, the line I remember is him being introduced to old King Caspian and Caspian said, useless.

666
01:05:00,210 --> 01:05:02,030
You say he's useless. Um, that's really the first moment when Caspian becomes an interesting character when he's an irritating and irritable old King. Um, he's, he's kind of a nullity as the hero in,

667
01:05:02,690 --> 01:05:11,270
his titular book.

668
01:05:11,430 --> 01:05:24,010
His titular book, his eponymous book.

669
01:05:24,270 --> 01:05:28,550
Um, I love that word nullity.

670
01:05:29,330 --> 01:05:30,490
He's just a kid.

671
01:05:30,610 --> 01:05:41,490
I mean, probably the only interesting thing about him, um, is that he's, he's arguably corrupted by his professor.

672
01:05:42,250 --> 01:05:52,430
Um, there is a character in Prince Caspian, Dr. Cornelius, who has a bit of the supernatural in his genealogy.

673
01:05:52,430 --> 01:05:55,650
As I recall, he might be part dwarf or elf.

674
01:05:55,810 --> 01:05:55,930
Yeah.

675
01:05:55,970 --> 01:05:57,150
He's half, he's half dwarf.

676
01:05:57,350 --> 01:05:57,690
That's right.

677
01:05:57,750 --> 01:05:58,510
Half dwarf.

678
01:05:58,710 --> 01:06:05,570
Anyway, he's, um, he's been entrusted by the King to educate young Dr. Cornelius.

679
01:06:05,710 --> 01:06:06,050
Exactly.

680
01:06:07,250 --> 01:06:10,750
So like it's, it's every school board's nightmare.

681
01:06:11,450 --> 01:06:25,530
Dr. Cornelius, they're not teaching Caspian to be a good, obedient member of the dominant culture, but he's whispering to him, you know what, you know what?

682
01:06:26,790 --> 01:06:28,470
There was an old Narnia.

683
01:06:28,730 --> 01:06:29,970
Things were different there.

684
01:06:32,530 --> 01:06:34,370
There were animals who talked.

685
01:06:35,410 --> 01:06:36,430
Um, and you know what?

686
01:06:36,570 --> 01:06:39,390
I think there might still be a few of them out there.

687
01:06:40,210 --> 01:06:42,210
Um, and it was much better.

688
01:06:42,950 --> 01:06:46,130
People were nicer and more interesting.

689
01:06:46,890 --> 01:06:51,570
This dominant culture that you're being educated to play a part in.

690
01:06:52,610 --> 01:07:07,430
Um, there is a complication in that actually he's going to be killed because his uncle in a sort of Hamlet move has killed Caspian's father and usurped the throne and Caspian is now an inconvenience.

691
01:07:07,570 --> 01:07:09,270
That's sort of a plot thing.

692
01:07:09,630 --> 01:07:14,410
The real issue here is that Cornelius is whispering forbidden knowledge.

693
01:07:15,010 --> 01:07:28,810
Um, so to the hero and the hero is heroic in my book, this hero, to the extent that he actually listens to the teacher and says, Hey, I'd like to know more about these talking animals.

694
01:07:28,970 --> 01:07:30,950
Can you like set us up?

695
01:07:31,390 --> 01:07:41,650
Um, and that, uh, so what does a teacher look, what does a hero look like in 2023?

696
01:07:41,650 --> 01:07:50,730
It looks like a teacher in a Florida school teaching forbidden books.

697
01:07:50,930 --> 01:07:53,050
That's what it looks like.

698
01:07:53,130 --> 01:07:59,470
It looks like Dr. Cornelius with a shorter beard.

699
01:08:00,610 --> 01:08:01,810
Why'd you say Florida?

700
01:08:03,550 --> 01:08:07,970
Oh, just because it's governor DeSantis's war on school boards.

701
01:08:07,970 --> 01:08:08,310
Right.

702
01:08:08,510 --> 01:08:08,850
Right.

703
01:08:08,910 --> 01:08:11,210
Teaching forbidden books in a Florida school.

704
01:08:11,430 --> 01:08:12,650
Oh, that's, that's nice.

705
01:08:13,330 --> 01:08:16,210
Um, I want to talk to you about movies.

706
01:08:16,310 --> 01:08:18,130
I won't show you the movie cover again.

707
01:08:18,210 --> 01:08:20,590
We've, we've, we agree that it's horrid. Um, but I will say

708
01:08:20,950 --> 01:08:27,189
No offense to the actors, I'm sure they are nice people.

709
01:08:28,029 --> 01:08:29,510
You don't have to, it's okay.

710
01:08:30,010 --> 01:08:33,910
Um, I got in trouble by the way, cause I have values for this show, right?

711
01:08:33,990 --> 01:08:36,229
I really want it to be a values based podcast.

712
01:08:36,450 --> 01:08:40,149
So I have, I have values like, you know, no book shame, no book guilt.

713
01:08:40,149 --> 01:08:43,630
I have values like librarians are doctors of the mind.

714
01:08:43,689 --> 01:08:48,290
And I had one value that I got a lot of flack for Jon, which was real books have real pages.

715
01:08:48,870 --> 01:08:54,029
And I, and then I had, I had a semicolon that said eBooks and audio books are beautiful mutants.

716
01:08:54,250 --> 01:08:55,609
Now people don't like that.

717
01:08:55,729 --> 01:09:02,390
I got a lot of flack for real books have real pages, but if I'm honest, it's still a value of this show.

718
01:09:02,550 --> 01:09:11,450
I mean, I I'm in Vancouver, my bag is extremely heavy and I will not, I will not like, I just, I just will not go to audio and eat.

719
01:09:11,569 --> 01:09:15,330
I just have to have a bag full of bulky pulsing.

720
01:09:15,430 --> 01:09:17,510
You know, that's my way of, that's part of me.

721
01:09:17,670 --> 01:09:18,970
That's part of what the show is.

722
01:09:19,010 --> 01:09:19,910
So that's what it is.

723
01:09:19,990 --> 01:09:20,950
Take it or leave it.

724
01:09:21,630 --> 01:09:26,290
No, well I share your preference, but let's not make it into a virtue.

725
01:09:27,010 --> 01:09:27,490
Okay.

726
01:09:27,710 --> 01:09:28,130
Yes.

727
01:09:28,450 --> 01:09:29,510
It's just a preference.

728
01:09:29,609 --> 01:09:29,950
Yes.

729
01:09:30,090 --> 01:09:31,330
Preference, not virtue.

730
01:09:31,430 --> 01:09:31,810
Thank you.

731
01:09:31,870 --> 01:09:32,729
So books as movies.

732
01:09:32,830 --> 01:09:40,550
I want to talk to you about books as movies, just as a concept books, as movies, as a concept, we live in a screens over everything world today.

733
01:09:40,670 --> 01:09:48,670
The American time you study has been tracking what percent of Americans do not read a single book in a year since the early eighties.

734
01:09:48,710 --> 01:09:57,190
And that number is now depending where you look between 53 and 57% higher than ever and tipping into the majority now really for the first time.

735
01:09:58,930 --> 01:10:02,330
And so there's this thing that is true.

736
01:10:02,470 --> 01:10:04,550
If I'm honest, I mentioned David Mitchell in chapter 58.

737
01:10:04,610 --> 01:10:06,010
Well, how did I discover David Mitchell?

738
01:10:06,130 --> 01:10:09,070
I went to see this movie I'd never heard of called cloud Atlas.

739
01:10:09,130 --> 01:10:12,270
And it said at the end of it, I was like, who's this guy, David Mitchell.

740
01:10:12,270 --> 01:10:15,950
And it pulled me onto all of his work and I discovered his whole thing.

741
01:10:16,010 --> 01:10:21,250
And then, and I know the movie is like the trigger for like a lot of people into the books.

742
01:10:21,590 --> 01:10:28,470
And I was curious for somebody who sold millions of copies of many books, why you have no movies based on your books.

743
01:10:28,550 --> 01:10:36,730
And so I went deep into the history and I found the 2018 New York times magazine profile of you, which has this quote that actually stunned me.

744
01:10:36,770 --> 01:10:52,430
And so I want to get your thought on that quote today, you know, six years later, if you still agree with this and also what your philosophy is on sort of the books as like, I don't let my kids watch Harry Potter movies period till they've read all the books.

745
01:10:52,630 --> 01:10:57,190
Like that's a thing in my house, which I take a lot of flack from, from my kids.

746
01:10:57,250 --> 01:11:00,050
I'm trying to make that a preference, not a virtue, but that's the way it is here.

747
01:11:00,430 --> 01:11:01,710
And here's the quote from you.

748
01:11:02,310 --> 01:11:07,150
And it's a, it's, it was, it was a three sentences throughout a long paragraph.

749
01:11:07,270 --> 01:11:09,050
So I'm going to stitch them as if it's one long quote here.

750
01:11:09,150 --> 01:11:09,570
Here we go.

751
01:11:11,210 --> 01:11:22,030
You have to remember what a partisan of the novel I am and that it had long been one of my ambitions to have my novels defeat all attempts to put them on the screen.

752
01:11:22,710 --> 01:11:32,290
A big part of me would be very proud never having anything of mine adapted, because if you want the real experience, there's only one way to get it.

753
01:11:32,550 --> 01:11:34,650
You're going to actually have to be a reader.

754
01:11:38,460 --> 01:11:47,640
Yeah, part of me, but it would be cool to, to see a good adaptation.

755
01:11:50,110 --> 01:12:01,370
It'd be interesting because you know, I'm, I'm the sole creator of my little kingdom of the world of whichever novel.

756
01:12:04,150 --> 01:12:06,210
And I know a lot.

757
01:12:11,640 --> 01:12:19,220
Every once in a while I talk to book groups and they, they come up with some cockeyed interpretation or something that's just like not supportable.

758
01:12:19,320 --> 01:12:23,120
And it's like, you've had me over to your book club.

759
01:12:25,080 --> 01:12:27,880
I am more of an expert in this text than you are.

760
01:12:28,260 --> 01:12:32,960
Would you like me to tell you why, why that is an insupportable interpretation?

761
01:12:33,460 --> 01:12:41,720
I can, I can tell you exactly why, because I, it takes me a long time to write these and I basically end up with the entire thing memorized and that stays with you.

762
01:12:42,540 --> 01:12:49,100
And now I'm feeling self-conscious about saying that people are entitled to their own interpretations, but it has to be like textually supportable.

763
01:12:50,120 --> 01:13:01,160
So the point was, I have like random access memory for these things I've created.

764
01:13:01,400 --> 01:13:06,660
And in no cases, it taken me less than four years to create it.

765
01:13:07,540 --> 01:13:09,520
And it's only whatever, 500 pages.

766
01:13:09,920 --> 01:13:12,320
So that's a, that's a lot of time per page.

767
01:13:12,380 --> 01:13:13,140
And I know it well.

768
01:13:13,420 --> 01:13:16,180
And it's like, it has no secrets from me.

769
01:13:17,080 --> 01:13:39,360
Nevertheless, it is possible to imagine an actor reading a good actor, reading a book or reading a screenplay based on the book and having a different idea and doing something that totally is consistent and works, but is nothing like I imagined.

770
01:13:40,240 --> 01:13:41,420
And that would be cool.

771
01:13:42,020 --> 01:13:52,360
I think too, when you, when you get, when you get additional great artists involved in a project, interesting things can happen.

772
01:13:53,320 --> 01:13:58,180
So I'm not, it's really, yes, I'm a partisan of the novel.

773
01:13:58,500 --> 01:14:07,900
And yes, if my books defeated all attempts to adapt them, I would be secretly rather pleased, but I'm not hostile to adaptation.

774
01:14:08,780 --> 01:14:10,520
So it's a, it's a possibility in the future.

775
01:14:12,240 --> 01:14:12,780
Yeah.

776
01:14:13,060 --> 01:14:13,280
Yeah.

777
01:14:13,340 --> 01:14:21,150
No, they're adaptations are in the work on three different fronts for three books as we, as we speak.

778
01:14:22,050 --> 01:14:22,470
Yeah.

779
01:14:24,090 --> 01:14:26,470
But these are all, these are all limited series.

780
01:14:27,730 --> 01:14:28,150
Yeah.

781
01:14:28,150 --> 01:14:31,170
There's no way you can do a feature film from one of these things.

782
01:14:31,270 --> 01:14:40,290
It just doesn't, they're not, they don't, they're too multivalent to, to, to fit into even a two hour and 45 minute format.

783
01:14:41,470 --> 01:14:42,170
Oh, okay.

784
01:14:42,190 --> 01:14:42,530
I see.

785
01:14:42,630 --> 01:14:43,190
I understand.

786
01:14:43,390 --> 01:14:48,290
And so, but just philosophically, you know, when my kids say, why don't you let us watch Harry Potter?

787
01:14:48,350 --> 01:15:09,410
I say, because I can't picture Harry Potter anymore because when Daniel Radcliffe was cast as Harry Potter, he was, you know, everywhere and you couldn't not look at him because he was on every billboard and every magazine and every, and so my vision internally of Harry Potter was plastered over by his face.

788
01:15:09,870 --> 01:15:15,490
And it bothers me that I can't see it anymore as I used to.

789
01:15:15,670 --> 01:15:23,730
And so I want to preserve the, what I think of as a wider imaginative world that you get from reading.

790
01:15:23,970 --> 01:15:27,470
But I know it's an unusual thing that I, you know, force my kids to read.

791
01:15:27,470 --> 01:15:27,950
No, that's fair.

792
01:15:28,110 --> 01:15:29,090
I totally get it.

793
01:15:29,510 --> 01:15:35,090
I, I resisted watching the Lord of the Rings for that reason.

794
01:15:36,390 --> 01:15:48,490
And finally reached the point, well, finally reached the point of having a lot of time in hotel rooms and not being able to find much else to watch.

795
01:15:49,570 --> 01:16:00,910
I don't think I've ever watched even one of those movies straight through, but I've watched them in overlapping pieces enough that I think I've probably seen the entire thing on TV.

796
01:16:01,930 --> 01:16:07,350
But that was a point when I no longer really cared about preserving my idea of what Aragorn looked like.

797
01:16:07,970 --> 01:16:11,610
And frankly, Viggo Mortensen, pretty good.

798
01:16:12,390 --> 01:16:13,890
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

799
01:16:14,110 --> 01:16:14,290
Okay.

800
01:16:14,570 --> 01:16:15,770
It does look like Aragorn.

801
01:16:17,130 --> 01:16:17,770
All right.

802
01:16:17,810 --> 01:16:22,170
Your second formative book is of course, The Trial by Franz Kafka.

803
01:16:22,290 --> 01:16:25,730
That's K-A-F-K-A, originally published by Verlag de Schmid.

804
01:16:25,850 --> 01:16:26,610
I'm sure I mispronounced that.

805
01:16:26,730 --> 01:16:28,110
In Berlin in 1925.

806
01:16:28,510 --> 01:16:41,110
The cover I have is a 1954 hardcover with a rough white and gray pencil drawing of a man sitting at a small table with a man in a gray suit standing beside him and a courthouse gallery watching them from above.

807
01:16:41,490 --> 01:16:47,810
The is in about a 30-point all-cap serif font with Trial in about a 120-point font just below.

808
01:16:47,950 --> 01:16:59,210
Franz Kafka was the German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist and short story writer based in Prague who lived from 1883 to 1924 and is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th century literature.

809
01:16:59,630 --> 01:17:01,010
What's this book about?

810
01:17:01,110 --> 01:17:10,530
The Trial tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote inaccessible authority with the nature of its crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader.

811
01:17:10,890 --> 01:17:22,750
Whether read as an existential tale, parable, or prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, The Trial has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers.

812
01:17:23,250 --> 01:17:29,290
Dewey Decimal heads file this one under 833.912 for literature slash German literature slash 1900 to 1945.

813
01:17:29,750 --> 01:17:34,730
Jon, please tell us about your relationship with The Trial by Franz Kafka.

814
01:17:35,730 --> 01:17:38,470
I think I tried to read this book when I was in high school.

815
01:17:38,990 --> 01:17:44,790
I took it out of my library in Webster Groves, Missouri, and I didn't get very far with it.

816
01:17:46,630 --> 01:17:49,490
It needed more paragraph breaks and dialogue.

817
01:17:51,870 --> 01:17:59,030
I was a sci-fi reader, and even though there was a sort of sci-fi premise, it had a kind of futuristic feel.

818
01:18:00,550 --> 01:18:02,050
I wasn't that into it.

819
01:18:05,820 --> 01:18:08,960
Really by accident, I became a German major in college.

820
01:18:10,020 --> 01:18:12,120
Wasn't the language from my family.

821
01:18:12,340 --> 01:18:13,640
We have no German blood.

822
01:18:15,740 --> 01:18:21,520
In my last year of college, I took a course in modern German prose.

823
01:18:23,260 --> 01:18:27,580
One of the important titles we read was The Trial.

824
01:18:32,950 --> 01:18:44,070
I think I read quite a bit of it in German, but I found it tedious and frustrating, and so I read the rest of it in English.

825
01:18:46,270 --> 01:18:52,750
We've been reading these other books that were also challenging, but kind of more relatable.

826
01:18:53,650 --> 01:18:58,530
This was about the poor man who's arrested for no reason.

827
01:19:01,810 --> 01:19:14,950
The opening line of the book is, somebody must have been telling lies about Josef K., because one morning, without his having done anything wrong, some people came to his apartment and he was arrested.

828
01:19:19,170 --> 01:19:20,250
One fine morning.

829
01:19:24,500 --> 01:19:27,560
It was like, okay, yes, yes, yes.

830
01:19:29,380 --> 01:19:37,140
The oppressive modern state and the plight of the everyman who's unjustly persecuted, this reminds us of Stalinist Russia.

831
01:19:37,400 --> 01:19:40,700
It certainly reminds us of excesses of the Nazis.

832
01:19:43,620 --> 01:19:46,080
I just didn't get it.

833
01:19:47,620 --> 01:19:52,300
He writes a beautiful German, and it's also just so weird.

834
01:19:55,730 --> 01:20:01,510
He's in this office building, and he hears something in the closet, and he opens the closet.

835
01:20:01,850 --> 01:20:08,870
Again, sort of like Why I'm the Witch in the Wardrobe, that turns out to be a rather roomy closet, because there are two men in there beating somebody.

836
01:20:14,190 --> 01:20:16,910
He's like, shut that door.

837
01:20:17,790 --> 01:20:18,510
No, thank you.

838
01:20:19,650 --> 01:20:25,950
Then it's a week later, he's walking down the hall, and he hears something coming from the same door, and he opens it.

839
01:20:27,150 --> 01:20:29,930
It's the exact same people, and they're still beating this guy.

840
01:20:31,610 --> 01:20:32,770
It's like, hey, wait a minute.

841
01:20:33,650 --> 01:20:34,770
That's not realistic.

842
01:20:34,770 --> 01:20:36,070
That doesn't work.

843
01:20:36,250 --> 01:20:37,510
It doesn't work.

844
01:20:37,610 --> 01:20:44,030
It's like, oh, it's sort of dreamlike, I guess, but it's boring to hear about people's dreams.

845
01:20:50,360 --> 01:20:54,620
It also doesn't really end.

846
01:20:54,800 --> 01:21:04,780
Kafka never finished it, but basically, it's the story of a man who feels himself to be unjustly accused of a crime.

847
01:21:04,880 --> 01:21:06,280
He doesn't know what the crime is.

848
01:21:07,100 --> 01:21:12,820
He tries to get answers, can't get answers, tries to enlist people to help him.

849
01:21:13,200 --> 01:21:14,200
They're not very helpful.

850
01:21:15,120 --> 01:21:17,240
Then the book kind of trails off, and that's that.

851
01:21:19,000 --> 01:21:24,140
I was like, okay, so I guess this is important world literature.

852
01:21:24,880 --> 01:21:25,860
What do you want me to say?

853
01:21:28,160 --> 01:21:32,660
I said this when the professor asked me in the little seminar.

854
01:21:33,120 --> 01:21:34,940
There are never very many German majors.

855
01:21:35,200 --> 01:21:36,220
That was one of the nice things.

856
01:21:36,320 --> 01:21:37,380
It was only six of us.

857
01:21:41,440 --> 01:21:46,150
This is the greatest professor I ever had.

858
01:21:46,590 --> 01:21:47,950
He was my Dr. Cornelius.

859
01:21:52,430 --> 01:21:57,570
His name was George Avery, senior year at Swarthmore College, 1981.

860
01:21:58,470 --> 01:22:00,990
Actually, fall of 1980, this particular class.

861
01:22:02,170 --> 01:22:06,370
He was very long-winded.

862
01:22:07,070 --> 01:22:09,490
We didn't know he was a great professor.

863
01:22:09,490 --> 01:22:12,730
Many people thought he was the worst professor they'd ever had.

864
01:22:13,310 --> 01:22:23,130
He went into this long thing about, there are three schools of interpretation.

865
01:22:23,610 --> 01:22:30,330
He cited some piece of secondary literature, and it was the policy of mine never to read secondary literature, ever.

866
01:22:33,550 --> 01:22:36,010
It had been on the syllabus, and I, of course, hadn't read it.

867
01:22:36,990 --> 01:22:41,150
He said, there are three universes of interpretation about this book.

868
01:22:41,970 --> 01:22:46,590
One is that Josef K. is innocent of all crimes.

869
01:22:48,230 --> 01:22:54,340
One is that his guilt can't really be determined from the text.

870
01:22:56,080 --> 01:22:59,080
One of them is he's guilty.

871
01:23:00,460 --> 01:23:02,160
I'm like, wait a minute.

872
01:23:02,280 --> 01:23:02,860
No, no.

873
01:23:03,300 --> 01:23:04,460
I was offended.

874
01:23:04,840 --> 01:23:05,460
He's guilty?

875
01:23:05,460 --> 01:23:06,080
Come on.

876
01:23:06,600 --> 01:23:08,000
We all know what this story is.

877
01:23:08,040 --> 01:23:14,380
It's an innocent man unjustly persecuted by this soulless bureaucracy.

878
01:23:16,780 --> 01:23:20,060
He said, yeah, maybe you should take another look at that book.

879
01:23:21,900 --> 01:23:23,620
Maybe you should go back and read it carefully.

880
01:23:25,480 --> 01:23:27,380
I was just trying to find the plot.

881
01:23:27,380 --> 01:23:30,840
You know, Kafka is not great on plot.

882
01:23:33,200 --> 01:23:36,000
I went back and looked at it.

883
01:23:38,680 --> 01:23:46,850
I read the first, I think just the first chapter, paying attention.

884
01:23:49,290 --> 01:24:16,060
I realized that this was a portrait of an asshole, that Josef K. is a royal asshole, and that I hadn't noticed it because Kafka's so much in his point of view that we're seeing everything through Josef K.'s eyes, and Josef K., of course, feels himself to be innocent.

885
01:24:16,200 --> 01:24:17,160
All assholes do.

886
01:24:20,270 --> 01:24:23,130
He's super creepy with women.

887
01:24:24,530 --> 01:24:29,830
He's kind of abusive to his landlady.

888
01:24:32,290 --> 01:24:34,070
He's all over the map.

889
01:24:34,170 --> 01:24:35,030
He's out of control.

890
01:24:35,250 --> 01:24:37,230
He's a weird, sick dude.

891
01:24:38,290 --> 01:24:42,810
If you read every sentence, speaks to that fact.

892
01:24:42,950 --> 01:25:02,350
If you start paying attention and you don't come in with this preconception that it's an innocent guy, and that the genius is in how closely Kafka sticks to his point of view, he's telling you something about the way we all work.

893
01:25:02,610 --> 01:25:07,610
We all go through the world feeling like we're the innocent victim persecuted unjustly.

894
01:25:10,310 --> 01:25:18,690
Okay, so I fell hook, line, and sinker for the third school of interpretation, which is that Josef K. is totally guilty.

895
01:25:20,170 --> 01:25:33,850
In fact, in succeeding decades, I've recognized that it's one of the reasons the book has this enduring power, is that all of those interpretations are simultaneously in play.

896
01:25:35,650 --> 01:25:44,530
But at the time, what it amounted to was, I've read this book, I've read that chapter at least three times.

897
01:25:44,610 --> 01:25:45,530
I read it in high school.

898
01:25:46,970 --> 01:25:54,810
I read it again in German, and then quickly to prepare for the first of two weeks of talking about the book, I read it again in English.

899
01:25:54,950 --> 01:26:00,930
I read this book three times, this chapter at least, three times, and I understood absolutely nothing.

900
01:26:01,370 --> 01:26:04,730
And it was there in plain sight all the time.

901
01:26:04,990 --> 01:26:14,990
If you actually just stepped back and looked at what was happening, you would say, this guy is not behaving well at all.

902
01:26:19,710 --> 01:26:23,830
And that was kind of when the coin dropped for me with what literature can do.

903
01:26:24,670 --> 01:26:26,770
It's hiding in plain sight.

904
01:26:28,470 --> 01:26:36,650
And you can read what you thought was read, and you're not reading at all.

905
01:26:36,930 --> 01:26:37,950
You're not getting it.

906
01:26:37,950 --> 01:26:39,370
You're not seeing it.

907
01:26:40,730 --> 01:27:11,030
And I mean, the magic of literature is right there, which is somehow, these words, the words haven't changed, but your relationship to the words, your ability to decode the words, the sophistication, or at least the clue you need to decode those words changes.

908
01:27:12,270 --> 01:27:25,810
And that got me fired up about this thing called literature, which until then, I was kind of like, I was at a good college, and I was bright, and I got A's.

909
01:27:26,490 --> 01:27:34,270
And I could figure out what the meaning of this text was, and I could write a nice paper saying, this is the meaning of the text.

910
01:27:34,410 --> 01:27:36,610
And I ran smack into Kafka.

911
01:27:36,750 --> 01:27:39,310
It's like, I don't know anything.

912
01:27:41,730 --> 01:27:44,910
I'm going to have to get serious about this thing called literature.

913
01:27:47,130 --> 01:27:53,990
And those were the weeks, those were the months when I was, I'd always thought it'd be cool to be a writer.

914
01:27:54,850 --> 01:28:03,750
You have lots of free time, and sit around, make stuff up, and you get paid for it, and you become famous.

915
01:28:03,870 --> 01:28:04,770
That sounded great.

916
01:28:05,090 --> 01:28:06,450
I wanted to do that.

917
01:28:07,450 --> 01:28:11,390
But I didn't imagine myself as a literary writer.

918
01:28:12,990 --> 01:28:16,990
I just thought, nice work if you can get it.

919
01:28:17,010 --> 01:28:19,030
And I hope to get it, because I was good with language.

920
01:28:21,410 --> 01:28:32,090
So my ambition as a novelist began when George Avery said, you need to go back and read every sentence.

921
01:28:40,670 --> 01:28:41,570
A lot to learn.

922
01:28:41,570 --> 01:28:42,930
That really was a life-changing book.

923
01:28:43,030 --> 01:28:51,010
I mean, there was, I can really specify that afternoon when George says, you're not getting it.

924
01:28:52,330 --> 01:28:55,350
And I go back to my room, and then I get it.

925
01:28:55,650 --> 01:28:58,850
That was a kind of, that was a revelation.

926
01:28:59,390 --> 01:28:59,630
Yeah.

927
01:29:00,270 --> 01:29:00,750
Yeah.

928
01:29:01,150 --> 01:29:01,630
Yeah.

929
01:29:01,670 --> 01:29:06,070
You're reminding me when I picked up by accident, the annotated version of Lolita.

930
01:29:06,450 --> 01:29:19,370
And were it not for the annotations, I wouldn't have got any, like, I realized how valuable it was for me to have read the annotated book when I was reading it with all these notes explaining all this stuff.

931
01:29:19,410 --> 01:29:23,410
I was like, wow, like, I would never have noticed all this stuff.

932
01:29:25,170 --> 01:29:33,330
I have some questions here, but I did also want to remind us both that you wanted to tie a Christmas carol here, I think.

933
01:29:34,330 --> 01:29:34,730
Oh, right.

934
01:29:34,930 --> 01:29:35,250
Yes.

935
01:29:35,610 --> 01:29:52,190
So that was fall semester when I went home for Christmas, which was a very consequential Christmas for me, because I'd learned how to see through reading these great German writers.

936
01:29:53,590 --> 01:29:57,830
I was no longer just seeing the surface, I was seeing what was going on under the surface.

937
01:29:58,910 --> 01:30:00,410
And my whole family was there.

938
01:30:00,790 --> 01:30:03,910
And I'd been part of that family for 20 plus years.

939
01:30:04,530 --> 01:30:06,910
And suddenly, I could see what was going on.

940
01:30:07,190 --> 01:30:11,230
It was just like all, it was like, I had been seeing in two dimensions.

941
01:30:11,230 --> 01:30:13,690
And now I had 3D vision, I could see it.

942
01:30:14,550 --> 01:30:28,530
And one of the things we did, my mother was a dutiful subscriber to the local repertory theater at what was then Webster College, it was now Webster University.

943
01:30:28,910 --> 01:30:36,520
And we went to see a stage version of a Christmas carol.

944
01:30:37,040 --> 01:30:41,920
Stepping back, the name of the trial in German is Der Prozess.

945
01:30:41,920 --> 01:30:46,910
And that's a beautifully ambiguous word in German.

946
01:30:47,910 --> 01:30:49,790
It's equivalent to our word process.

947
01:30:50,630 --> 01:30:57,090
And I think you can't speak of a legal process, but we no longer use that word, we use a trial.

948
01:30:57,570 --> 01:30:59,150
And you have to pick one as a translator.

949
01:30:59,310 --> 01:31:02,530
So you're going to call it the trial, but it could just as well be called the process.

950
01:31:04,250 --> 01:31:17,850
And what I had seen as I went back and re-engaged with Der Prozess was that this was a process, an internal process that Josef K.

951
01:31:17,910 --> 01:31:18,750
was undergoing.

952
01:31:19,370 --> 01:31:27,590
He was getting drawn deeper into his own personal culpability, resisting it.

953
01:31:28,190 --> 01:31:30,610
But things were getting ever more complicated.

954
01:31:30,750 --> 01:31:34,010
The deeper he went, the more complicated things got.

955
01:31:35,150 --> 01:31:42,490
And that maybe this had to do with some of the ways that Kafka's own life had been in process.

956
01:31:43,110 --> 01:31:53,670
Anyway, we went to see a Christmas carol and it blew me away because it was the trial before the trial was written.

957
01:31:55,630 --> 01:32:05,650
It's not bureaucrats who come to arrest Scrooge, it's these ghosts, four ghosts, I think.

958
01:32:07,090 --> 01:32:16,590
And he too, kind of like Josef K., pretty satisfied with himself.

959
01:32:18,310 --> 01:32:24,350
And he goes through this process where it's like layer after layer gets peeled away.

960
01:32:25,350 --> 01:32:27,730
And he's finally left crying.

961
01:32:30,910 --> 01:32:35,870
So it's a very different, it's a 19th century view.

962
01:32:36,010 --> 01:32:38,150
There's not really a lot of ambiguity in Dickens.

963
01:32:40,810 --> 01:32:47,710
He's working with a sort of pre-Freudian notion of what a person is.

964
01:32:48,250 --> 01:32:52,990
Nevertheless, I was really, it was like, oh my God, this is the same story.

965
01:32:54,910 --> 01:32:58,570
Of course it has a happy ending, it being Dickens.

966
01:33:00,670 --> 01:33:06,710
Scrooge recognizes that he has been the world's biggest asshole and he sets out to correct it.

967
01:33:07,070 --> 01:33:13,860
Well, not to spoil anything, but there is an ending of the trial.

968
01:33:14,120 --> 01:33:19,700
It doesn't match up to what comes before it, but there is an ending and it's safe to say it's not a happy ending.

969
01:33:21,760 --> 01:33:24,280
What happens to Josef K.?

970
01:33:24,280 --> 01:33:28,760
Just a little spoiler there.

971
01:33:29,520 --> 01:33:35,580
But nevertheless, yeah, that's what I wanted to say about Christmas Carol.

972
01:33:36,920 --> 01:33:47,160
It's interesting that George picked that as one of his three books, because that's the deepest Dickens there is, I think.

973
01:33:47,160 --> 01:33:47,900
Yeah.

974
01:33:48,320 --> 01:33:48,760
Yeah.

975
01:33:48,980 --> 01:33:49,420
Interesting.

976
01:33:50,220 --> 01:34:05,720
One of the points George made about it, by the way, is that he had an image of Dickens writing it in a sort of slapdashery type of manner, which he came to recognize as a part of himself that he wanted to kind of blossom in his writing.

977
01:34:06,760 --> 01:34:09,860
Not to put words in his mouth, but that's one part of the conversation I recall.

978
01:34:10,900 --> 01:34:12,060
It really stands out.

979
01:34:12,100 --> 01:34:13,340
It's not like any other Dickens.

980
01:34:13,440 --> 01:34:14,220
Yeah, exactly.

981
01:34:14,340 --> 01:34:15,880
I was blown away when I read it.

982
01:34:15,940 --> 01:34:18,240
I was like, wow, I had no idea this was so good.

983
01:34:18,740 --> 01:34:18,880
Yeah.

984
01:34:20,580 --> 01:34:23,940
And frankly, a much more accessible book than the trial.

985
01:34:24,400 --> 01:34:25,480
And like a hundred pages.

986
01:34:26,800 --> 01:34:30,840
I'm a big believer in this idea of reading two pages of fiction a night.

987
01:34:31,000 --> 01:34:33,780
And the reason I espouse that is to get people back into reading.

988
01:34:33,940 --> 01:34:49,740
And one thing I do is I have this list of books that are a hundred pages or less, like The Old Man and the Sea, or Foster, or Animal Farm, just to make it feel like you can get it.

989
01:34:51,100 --> 01:34:52,500
I want to talk to you about motivation.

990
01:34:52,680 --> 01:34:56,640
You mentioned about half an hour ago, we were talking about Caspian.

991
01:34:56,800 --> 01:34:59,020
You said Kafka never published this book.

992
01:34:59,080 --> 01:35:01,680
He died at age 40 in obscurity.

993
01:35:02,160 --> 01:35:03,880
He had written chapters in different notebooks.

994
01:35:04,020 --> 01:35:07,420
He asked his friend Max in his will to burn all his books that were not published.

995
01:35:07,800 --> 01:35:08,480
Max didn't.

996
01:35:08,600 --> 01:35:10,700
He stitched it together and published them.

997
01:35:10,980 --> 01:35:14,420
So the question I have around that is just around motivation.

998
01:35:14,620 --> 01:35:18,380
Can you relate to this desire to have written something and wanting it burned, first of all?

999
01:35:18,460 --> 01:35:19,240
What's behind that?

1000
01:35:19,620 --> 01:35:25,700
And then how does that go against the feeling to publish and to want it to be out there and to be big?

1001
01:35:26,300 --> 01:35:33,060
And then how does your motivation or how has your motivation to write been changing?

1002
01:35:33,280 --> 01:35:34,180
Or has it changed?

1003
01:35:34,420 --> 01:35:42,060
If it has, since you first started, got published, got big books published, et cetera, over time?

1004
01:35:44,980 --> 01:35:45,960
That's a big question.

1005
01:35:54,600 --> 01:35:58,980
I can imagine Kafka feeling, I didn't finish that book.

1006
01:36:01,700 --> 01:36:03,680
I had some great stuff.

1007
01:36:03,760 --> 01:36:05,380
I didn't quite know what to do with it.

1008
01:36:08,440 --> 01:36:11,240
He was essentially a writer of fragments.

1009
01:36:15,530 --> 01:36:17,490
He did publish a few things.

1010
01:36:17,490 --> 01:36:32,190
He published stories and he published, most famously, the Metamorphosis, another unfortunate title translation.

1011
01:36:32,410 --> 01:36:37,190
I think transformation would be a more literal translation and probably a better one.

1012
01:36:39,530 --> 01:36:47,390
And so he was capable when he knew he had fully realized the project, publishing it.

1013
01:36:48,290 --> 01:36:55,190
And I think he felt that none of the novels was he able to get back to and make what he wanted of them.

1014
01:36:57,770 --> 01:37:03,450
I think his motivations will forever remain shrouded in mystery.

1015
01:37:05,490 --> 01:37:11,610
What exactly he was thinking when he gave that instruction to Brode.

1016
01:37:13,430 --> 01:37:20,990
If he did indeed give that instruction to Brode, because of course, maybe he only hinted at it or said it in a lighthearted way.

1017
01:37:21,050 --> 01:37:22,670
Oh, Max, you should just burn all that stuff.

1018
01:37:24,470 --> 01:37:32,430
It makes Max Brode into more of a hero, makes up for his own more or less failed literary career.

1019
01:37:33,890 --> 01:37:35,750
Nobody reads Max Brode anymore.

1020
01:37:37,150 --> 01:37:43,650
If he was the person who single-handedly rescued Kafka's work.

1021
01:37:44,330 --> 01:37:45,330
So we don't really know.

1022
01:37:46,150 --> 01:37:52,010
My motivation, yeah, it's changed.

1023
01:37:53,050 --> 01:37:57,770
I mean, I wanted to show what I could do.

1024
01:37:58,590 --> 01:38:02,210
And I wanted to show my parents that I could actually make a living as a writer.

1025
01:38:02,910 --> 01:38:04,170
Those were early motivations.

1026
01:38:05,210 --> 01:38:11,150
I also wanted to change the course of American literature, like every 23-year-old does.

1027
01:38:14,410 --> 01:38:16,430
I wanted to be famous.

1028
01:38:18,190 --> 01:38:26,030
Didn't really expect to make that much money, but I would probably get a good teaching job eventually, at least.

1029
01:38:27,830 --> 01:38:37,510
And I also, as we've discussed in this already very long conversation, I wanted to change the world.

1030
01:38:38,110 --> 01:38:43,270
I wanted to be socially effective and so forth.

1031
01:38:47,160 --> 01:38:54,040
At a certain point, it really became writing just because that's what I am.

1032
01:38:54,080 --> 01:38:54,600
I'm a writer.

1033
01:38:56,440 --> 01:39:05,100
Coupled with competition, I had a really good friend, David Wallace, who was also very talented.

1034
01:39:06,040 --> 01:39:08,160
And I wanted to beat him.

1035
01:39:10,360 --> 01:39:18,420
I wanted to crush my opponents, my fellow players on the field of literature.

1036
01:39:22,770 --> 01:39:26,410
In the same way, if you're a football player, you want to crush the opponent.

1037
01:39:26,750 --> 01:39:27,710
Doesn't mean you hate them.

1038
01:39:27,770 --> 01:39:28,690
You shake hands afterwards.

1039
01:39:28,810 --> 01:39:29,390
You're good friends.

1040
01:39:30,010 --> 01:39:32,690
You're all playing for the same team of the NFL and so forth.

1041
01:39:32,770 --> 01:39:37,210
But as we're all playing for the same team of literature, nevertheless, in the course of a game, you want to win.

1042
01:39:41,330 --> 01:39:42,390
But that has really...

1043
01:39:43,270 --> 01:39:45,970
All of those motivations have fallen away.

1044
01:39:49,790 --> 01:39:50,950
Now I just do it for the money.

1045
01:39:55,240 --> 01:39:56,360
Well, 90%.

1046
01:39:56,360 --> 01:39:59,500
It's nice to get paid.

1047
01:40:00,280 --> 01:40:09,770
But I honestly do it now because people are looking for a good book to read.

1048
01:40:10,390 --> 01:40:18,050
And I feel like I'm part of a community of readers and writers.

1049
01:40:19,330 --> 01:40:23,510
Part of the writer's job in that community is to write good books.

1050
01:40:24,430 --> 01:40:26,310
And I would say that's my motivation now.

1051
01:40:35,120 --> 01:40:36,840
It's better than having no motivation.

1052
01:40:39,820 --> 01:40:40,800
I mean, okay.

1053
01:40:42,920 --> 01:40:46,960
I'll mention this, the most important thing, but it's not necessarily a motivation.

1054
01:40:48,900 --> 01:40:51,060
Motivation having to do with exterior forces.

1055
01:40:51,060 --> 01:40:57,400
I want to write a novel because I'm happy when I'm writing a novel.

1056
01:40:58,880 --> 01:41:00,040
It's not a motivation.

1057
01:41:02,680 --> 01:41:05,280
It's like I'm alive when I'm writing a novel.

1058
01:41:05,520 --> 01:41:08,680
And part of me is just not really alive when I'm not.

1059
01:41:09,580 --> 01:41:15,300
It is the story of my life that I've spent most of it not writing novels, therefore not really fully alive.

1060
01:41:18,370 --> 01:41:18,890
Wow.

1061
01:41:19,290 --> 01:41:19,810
Wow.

1062
01:41:20,310 --> 01:41:20,730
Wow.

1063
01:41:20,730 --> 01:41:20,830
Wow.

1064
01:41:21,970 --> 01:41:42,670
Because you mentioned community and being part of what David Mitchell called the Republic of Letters in an earlier conversation with us, I might go to the question I have here about the fact that on the back of my book, it says specifically Kafka is from a well-to-do family, which I thought was interesting.

1065
01:41:44,330 --> 01:41:48,650
A Jewish merchant class is what it's sort of pegged as.

1066
01:41:49,170 --> 01:41:57,750
And it seems to me that staying grounded, connected with people is just so vital as part of being a writer and a novelist.

1067
01:41:58,090 --> 01:42:03,870
I have found your ear for dialogue uncannily pitch perfect.

1068
01:42:04,290 --> 01:42:06,450
Your books are so sound.

1069
01:42:06,950 --> 01:42:08,510
They're a real conversation.

1070
01:42:08,770 --> 01:42:15,250
I feel like I'm listening to Ian Fraser in Great Plains.

1071
01:42:15,350 --> 01:42:19,750
He transcribes the people he bumps into on the way or David Sedaris and his diary.

1072
01:42:19,990 --> 01:42:21,890
It just sounds like it's right there.

1073
01:42:22,890 --> 01:42:25,510
And I wonder how you mentioned the money.

1074
01:42:26,070 --> 01:42:28,810
Obviously, you've been very successful with your work.

1075
01:42:30,070 --> 01:42:36,830
But my question is around, I have a question and I have two comments from you to give you to help, if it helps.

1076
01:42:37,350 --> 01:42:39,170
My question is, how do you stay of the people?

1077
01:42:39,430 --> 01:42:48,930
How do you carry with you that ear for real dialogue when you, I'm assuming, inevitably become somewhat bubbled?

1078
01:42:49,950 --> 01:42:58,350
And the two quotes I have from you to feed into this are a 2010 Guardian quote, where you said, I always want to be an amateur.

1079
01:42:58,790 --> 01:43:00,370
A professional is too slick.

1080
01:43:01,010 --> 01:43:06,170
And a 2015 Financial Times quote, where you said, I am a poor person with money.

1081
01:43:13,540 --> 01:43:19,680
Yes, I put in mind of Flannery O'Connor, you can't be any poorer than dead.

1082
01:43:25,040 --> 01:43:34,020
And, you know, I'm a human animal who will die soon, just like everybody else.

1083
01:43:34,380 --> 01:43:36,340
So there, you know, we keep that in mind.

1084
01:43:36,620 --> 01:43:40,320
It's not that hard to remain grounded in some way.

1085
01:43:42,620 --> 01:43:49,340
You know, I do feel, to some extent, bubbled and particularly bubbled in my age group.

1086
01:43:52,790 --> 01:43:59,870
I did have a young character, some young characters in Purity, which was written not that long ago, 10 years ago.

1087
01:44:01,650 --> 01:44:14,030
I think I would be, it would be, I'd have to do some work to develop an ear for the way 18-year-olds talk in 2024.

1088
01:44:14,770 --> 01:44:23,150
But I would also note that dialogue is more art than science.

1089
01:44:24,030 --> 01:44:27,110
People don't actually speak the way they do in my books.

1090
01:44:29,190 --> 01:44:31,230
It's a little magic trick.

1091
01:44:32,510 --> 01:44:40,210
There are things you do to give the impression that you're hearing realistic dialogue, but it's actually not the way people talk.

1092
01:44:40,910 --> 01:44:42,870
It's a very artful thing.

1093
01:44:45,090 --> 01:44:51,290
And yeah, and so it, and being an artful thing, you can make artful fakes and get away with it.

1094
01:44:53,450 --> 01:44:59,330
If you, if you can hear the language, a little goes a long way.

1095
01:44:59,950 --> 01:45:06,130
Like you hear, and this is a, this is a larger point about being isolated.

1096
01:45:07,090 --> 01:45:15,470
It is an isolating job being a writer, spend a lot of time alone, but you don't need that much.

1097
01:45:17,450 --> 01:45:20,830
You don't need to be following a hundred feeds.

1098
01:45:22,130 --> 01:45:29,110
Two feeds will do, because you're never going to put the whole thing in the book anyway.

1099
01:45:31,130 --> 01:45:46,410
You're going to, you're just going to use little teeny pieces of the little bit that gets through to you and then kind of use your instincts to create something that feels like complete picture, but it's absolutely not a complete picture.

1100
01:45:46,830 --> 01:45:55,030
So the third and final book is Reason in a Dark Time by Dale Jamieson, J-A-M-I-E-S-O-N.

1101
01:45:55,190 --> 01:46:00,250
The subtitle is Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed and What It Means for Our Future.

1102
01:46:00,370 --> 01:46:03,230
Published by Oxford University Press in 2014.

1103
01:46:03,930 --> 01:46:07,430
The cover has dark stormy clouds over a yellow gray horizon.

1104
01:46:07,570 --> 01:46:12,030
The title's in an all caps sans serif font with the letters getting darker as they go down the page.

1105
01:46:12,330 --> 01:46:18,170
Dale Jamison's born in Iowa in 1947, and I believe he still teaches environmental studies, philosophy, and law at NYU.

1106
01:46:18,410 --> 01:46:19,210
What's the book about?

1107
01:46:19,790 --> 01:46:27,290
From the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference, there was a concerted international effort to stop climate change.

1108
01:46:27,450 --> 01:46:33,990
And yet, greenhouse gas emissions increased, atmospheric concentrations grew, and global warming became an observable fact of life.

1109
01:46:34,130 --> 01:46:39,750
Jamison explains what climate change is, why we have failed to stop it, and why it still matters what we do.

1110
01:46:40,170 --> 01:46:48,110
File this one, Dewey Decimal Heads, under 363.738 for social sciences slash social problems slash environmental problems slash pollutants.

1111
01:46:48,310 --> 01:46:53,830
Jon, please tell us about your relationship with Reason in a Dark Time by Dale Jamison.

1112
01:46:59,990 --> 01:47:23,790
Yeah, some reader I'd met somewhere and had a little bit of an email correspondence with, I think, knew Dale and said, I think I might have been talking about conservation with her, this email friend, and she said, you really ought to read Dale's book.

1113
01:47:24,070 --> 01:47:26,130
It just came out, Reason in a Dark Time.

1114
01:47:29,310 --> 01:47:33,530
And I looked it up, and I said, oh my god, this is going to make me feel really depressed.

1115
01:47:34,350 --> 01:47:35,570
I don't want to do that.

1116
01:47:36,430 --> 01:47:44,050
Nevertheless, I ordered it, and then it sat on the shelf for six months.

1117
01:47:45,970 --> 01:47:59,510
And I don't know what, I think I just felt like I could tell from the cover, the phrase on the cover, why the fight against climate change failed past tense.

1118
01:48:00,730 --> 01:48:03,210
In other words, it's over, baby.

1119
01:48:03,730 --> 01:48:04,710
We failed.

1120
01:48:07,790 --> 01:48:12,870
I felt it might have had to do with the drought here in Santa Cruz.

1121
01:48:14,430 --> 01:48:20,870
We'd had a very dry winter, and it was just oppressively hot, sunny day after oppressively hot, sunny day.

1122
01:48:22,430 --> 01:48:28,850
And for whatever reason, I said, okay, I don't want to consider myself a fearful person.

1123
01:48:29,330 --> 01:48:31,150
I'm going to pick up this book, and I'm going to read it.

1124
01:48:33,880 --> 01:48:35,880
And I did.

1125
01:48:37,710 --> 01:48:42,250
And I found it disturbing.

1126
01:48:42,250 --> 01:48:58,090
Of course, it's depressing to contemplate how profoundly we've ruined the planet, and also to understand why we are doing it and why we won't stop doing it.

1127
01:48:58,710 --> 01:49:00,510
But it was also exhilarating.

1128
01:49:03,510 --> 01:49:17,600
I read with great excitement and a weird sense of comfort, because he was explaining something that I didn't even want to think about, but I knew in my bones.

1129
01:49:19,140 --> 01:49:27,000
And he was doing it in this very, very lovely, almost Buddhist way.

1130
01:49:27,620 --> 01:49:29,940
He was basically not judging.

1131
01:49:30,380 --> 01:49:50,480
He was laying out very, very limpidly eight different reasons why this problem, climate change, is unlike anything the species has ever faced before, and eight different reasons why why attempts to do something about it have been futile.

1132
01:49:52,980 --> 01:50:04,680
And it was intellectually exhilarating, but it was also, it's like you've spent years clenched with fear about something.

1133
01:50:05,420 --> 01:50:18,950
And that moment when you finally just open up to what you're afraid of, it's painful, and there's a lot of grief that comes with that.

1134
01:50:19,990 --> 01:50:29,590
But it's also very liberating, and it kind of eases the soul to just finally let it in and inhabit the awful reality.

1135
01:50:33,070 --> 01:50:42,730
And so, yeah, that, and it really set me, so I've had the second career as a nonfiction writer.

1136
01:50:44,010 --> 01:50:57,830
Starting in 1994, I published a long piece of journalism in The New Yorker, and I'd been an essayist, and a sometime journalist, and a memoirist.

1137
01:51:00,870 --> 01:51:03,770
And along the way, I'd also become very interested in birds.

1138
01:51:03,930 --> 01:51:11,250
I'd become a bird lover, serious birder, and that had led me into conservation.

1139
01:51:12,070 --> 01:51:26,730
And I think the whole reason Dale's book came up in the first place was that there's a lot of frustration in the conservation community that the only environmental issue anyone can talk about is climate.

1140
01:51:27,890 --> 01:51:46,330
Whereas we have this second crisis that's happening right in front of us, which is the sixth extinction, the crisis of biodiversity, and the breakdown of all of these natural systems associated with biodiversity, and no one is talking about that anymore.

1141
01:51:46,530 --> 01:51:59,290
All the big environmental NGOs have basically begun 100% climate all the time, and people are shutting down conservation projects because, well, none of that matters if we don't solve climate change.

1142
01:52:01,290 --> 01:52:03,870
So I was kind of angry about that.

1143
01:52:04,530 --> 01:52:37,030
And reading Dale's book and being able to borrow his arguments about why we failed to stop it, and why we will probably continue to fail to stop it, it energized me to start writing about climate myself and to speak up on behalf of wild animals, really, and wild nature.

1144
01:52:38,230 --> 01:52:40,810
And I don't necessarily mean the deep Amazon.

1145
01:52:41,090 --> 01:52:45,750
I mean the wild nature that I could look out my window and see in that field over there.

1146
01:52:45,890 --> 01:52:49,890
It's still happening, and those animals still need our help.

1147
01:52:52,830 --> 01:53:23,000
It is a lot like really, really wrapping your mind around your own mortality to wrap your mind around the mortality of this nice, familiar world we live in that is going to be horribly stressed in the coming years and decades, and will probably be unrecognizable a century from now.

1148
01:53:26,160 --> 01:53:39,210
And although I've been doing these nonfiction pieces for 20-plus years, when I started writing about climate, I felt like I was doing something else.

1149
01:53:39,270 --> 01:53:42,230
I felt like I really had a mission with that.

1150
01:53:43,610 --> 01:54:00,750
I'd had a little mission trying to talk about why people might want to write and read novels, and I'd written some essays about that, but this one felt bigger, and it had nothing to do with my novels, really.

1151
01:54:01,510 --> 01:54:03,490
Essentially zero to do with my novels.

1152
01:54:05,510 --> 01:54:25,330
I had some stuff about climate change in The Corrections, which was written in whatever, 1998, but basically non-intersecting, and so a kind of different, much smaller, but nonetheless significant kind of life started up when I started writing about climate.

1153
01:54:25,650 --> 01:54:47,550
I found myself speaking to a very different kind of audience, being invited to speak to a very different kind of audience, think tanks in Italy and sober collections of German climate scientists and German climate journalists and all of that.

1154
01:54:49,430 --> 01:54:55,430
In that sense, for a single book, I felt I had to mention it.

1155
01:54:55,790 --> 01:54:59,150
I wanted to mention it also because I think it's an under-recognized book.

1156
01:54:59,890 --> 01:55:22,070
If you are in that clenched position of feeling things are really bad and I don't want to think about them, it can be a curiously positive book to read, but it doesn't often happen that a single book changes the direction of my life in a significant way.

1157
01:55:23,110 --> 01:55:26,670
Yeah, yeah, it sounds like this one absolutely did.

1158
01:55:27,550 --> 01:55:46,450
Just for the people listening that don't have as close a view as you have developed, could you just, it doesn't have to be long, but could you just paint a portrait of the next few years and coming decades as you've hinted at, if you don't mind, just bring us up to speed with where you are?

1159
01:55:47,250 --> 01:56:04,230
Well, so we've known for more than 30 years pretty conclusively that our carbon emissions are changing the global climate.

1160
01:56:05,250 --> 01:56:06,890
We are warming the earth.

1161
01:56:08,790 --> 01:56:42,150
In spite of knowing this and in spite of many distinguished people meeting in nice hotel conference rooms around the world, the involvement of the United Nations, the concerted efforts of the world, environmental community, visionary politicians, and the Greta Thunbergs of the world, our carbon emissions will be higher this year than they've ever been before.

1162
01:56:43,970 --> 01:56:56,480
So you know you're doing a bad thing, and for 30 plus years you've done nothing but do even more of the bad thing.

1163
01:56:57,320 --> 01:56:58,560
That's a weird one.

1164
01:57:02,540 --> 01:57:06,480
And what Dale's book really sets out to do is explain why that is.

1165
01:57:07,200 --> 01:57:16,180
But you asked about what the consequences of these unchecked carbon emissions will be.

1166
01:57:20,960 --> 01:57:40,300
I think the climate bureaucracy has a pretty well-established record of underestimating the effects of issuing predictions which are in hindsight rather rosy.

1167
01:57:43,720 --> 01:57:49,780
The quick answer is we're making the climate much more unstable.

1168
01:57:50,820 --> 01:58:10,120
The parts of the world that are already dangerously hot will become unlivably hot, and the rest of the world will experience increased climate instability, increase in wildfires, increase in destructive flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, all of that.

1169
01:58:10,520 --> 01:58:26,240
Because the atmosphere gets hot, and that means there's a lot of energy in the atmosphere, and some of that gets absorbed by the oceans, but that's kind of a mixed blessing because more heat in the oceans also energizes the oceans in unpredictable but mostly bad ways.

1170
01:58:27,320 --> 01:58:37,920
And this is going to put an enormous amount of stress on what we consider the world order.

1171
01:58:40,100 --> 01:58:54,360
We're already seeing the beginnings of it in Europe and North America, the notion of a climate refugee when instead of hundreds of thousands or a few million climate refugees, you have hundreds of millions.

1172
01:58:55,000 --> 01:58:56,380
What does that world look like?

1173
01:58:57,060 --> 01:58:59,400
It doesn't look very good geopolitically.

1174
01:59:00,960 --> 01:59:10,800
I mean, that's a cruel way to talk about the levels of human suffering we're talking about and human desperation we're talking about.

1175
01:59:12,400 --> 01:59:27,200
And if you take a kind of dim view of humanity, think we're kind of good but also kind of bad, the historical record isn't very promising about what happens when you increase stress on a system.

1176
01:59:30,260 --> 01:59:34,420
And so you're going to have pressure on everything that makes the world livable.

1177
01:59:34,560 --> 01:59:35,880
You're going to have pressure on agriculture.

1178
01:59:36,080 --> 01:59:37,240
You're going to have pressure on trade.

1179
01:59:37,340 --> 01:59:40,100
You're going to have pressure on borders, huge pressure on borders.

1180
01:59:40,200 --> 01:59:52,020
You're going to have pressure on political institutions, both in the most direly affected countries, obviously, but also on the countries that people might want to immigrate to.

1181
01:59:53,760 --> 02:00:01,880
You see this strong streak of nativism and defensive nationalism arising in various countries in Europe.

1182
02:00:01,960 --> 02:00:22,500
And of course, in our own U.S. politics, immigration is the issue for the nationalist side of our body politic, recognizing that this is a dangerous world and it's going to become more unstable.

1183
02:00:24,160 --> 02:00:28,060
So it's not like the world's going to end in fire.

1184
02:00:28,280 --> 02:00:30,500
It could still end in nuclear war.

1185
02:00:30,980 --> 02:00:32,960
Never discount that possibility.

1186
02:00:33,780 --> 02:00:51,820
And again, our systems of command and control for nuclear weapons and the political alliances that have kept us or systems of detente that have kept us miraculously safe since 1945, those are also going to be stressed.

1187
02:00:52,780 --> 02:01:06,940
But barring that or barring the singularity when machines take over the world, which I'm not very impressed with the possibility of, what you're instead is going to see just ever worse crises.

1188
02:01:09,420 --> 02:01:14,940
Sorry, you're not very impressed by the possibility of machines taking over?

1189
02:01:15,500 --> 02:01:17,280
No, I'm not terribly worried about that.

1190
02:01:17,600 --> 02:01:18,200
Oh, you're not?

1191
02:01:18,580 --> 02:01:18,920
No.

1192
02:01:19,720 --> 02:01:21,320
Why did I suspect you would be?

1193
02:01:21,760 --> 02:01:22,580
No, no.

1194
02:01:23,640 --> 02:01:24,540
I don't know.

1195
02:01:25,780 --> 02:01:27,840
I liked sci-fi when I was 17.

1196
02:01:30,440 --> 02:01:30,800
Okay.

1197
02:01:31,160 --> 02:01:32,080
No, that's great.

1198
02:01:32,140 --> 02:01:33,360
That's a great, great, great update.

1199
02:01:33,480 --> 02:01:34,820
I want to be sensitive of time.

1200
02:01:34,920 --> 02:01:36,320
I'm going to give you a choose your own adventure.

1201
02:01:36,420 --> 02:01:37,200
I've got five questions.

1202
02:01:37,300 --> 02:01:38,540
Here's the five thematic pieces.

1203
02:01:38,640 --> 02:01:39,420
You can pick your own.

1204
02:01:39,520 --> 02:01:50,980
It's either on collective action, on being small in a big world, on individual action, on navigating forebodingness, or on birds.

1205
02:01:51,160 --> 02:01:53,960
Those are the five questions I have for you.

1206
02:01:54,060 --> 02:01:56,900
And we'll just do one and then I'll do fast money to finish this off.

1207
02:01:56,900 --> 02:01:57,660
Okay.

1208
02:01:58,700 --> 02:01:59,700
Individual action.

1209
02:02:00,180 --> 02:02:00,940
Individual action.

1210
02:02:01,060 --> 02:02:01,240
Okay.

1211
02:02:01,320 --> 02:02:10,360
So the book spends a lot of time on the feeling of helplessness most people have about climate change, with the problem for many people feeling like it doesn't matter what I do.

1212
02:02:10,960 --> 02:02:18,120
To your point on page 105 of the book, Jamieson writes, climate change poses the world's largest collective action problem.

1213
02:02:18,280 --> 02:02:23,440
Each of us acting on our own desires contributes to an outcome that we neither desire nor intend.

1214
02:02:24,320 --> 02:02:29,860
Page 145 of the book really stood out to me where he talks about the alliance of small member states.

1215
02:02:29,980 --> 02:02:45,220
I did not realize that there's 42 countries like Cuba, Singapore, Seychelles, Maldives, Haiti, who emit less than half of 1% of the world's greenhouse gases, less than a quarter of the greenhouse gases per capita, but are essentially the ones who are about to disappear.

1216
02:02:45,360 --> 02:02:47,400
Like it's them that get hit.

1217
02:02:47,480 --> 02:02:49,360
They're going to be swallowed up by the sea.

1218
02:02:49,360 --> 02:02:50,660
It's, you know, soon.

1219
02:02:51,040 --> 02:02:56,840
So on individual action, the book closes with seven priorities, but the priorities are big.

1220
02:02:56,940 --> 02:03:03,460
They're like protecting carbon sinks, full cost energy accounting, raising the price of emitting greenhouse gases.

1221
02:03:03,960 --> 02:03:11,480
But I just have to ask, I know it's a general question, I know it's a repeated question, but how do you answer the question, what do I do?

1222
02:03:16,790 --> 02:03:22,590
Well, this is a point that Dale makes and that I have really hammered on myself.

1223
02:03:24,790 --> 02:03:26,990
You're riding a bike to work instead of driving.

1224
02:03:30,050 --> 02:03:31,050
Change is nothing.

1225
02:03:32,290 --> 02:03:33,170
Absolutely nothing.

1226
02:03:33,990 --> 02:03:39,470
So we have this global problem and you can feel like, oh yeah, well, I can do my part.

1227
02:03:39,610 --> 02:03:40,450
I'll ride a bike to work.

1228
02:03:40,550 --> 02:03:47,070
Well, in fact, you might as well not, because if you drive a Hummer to work, it's all the same.

1229
02:03:47,790 --> 02:03:53,950
Your contribution is too infinitesimal to have any effect on the larger systems.

1230
02:03:54,630 --> 02:04:04,310
And for some, that could be an invitation to just do what you want.

1231
02:04:04,570 --> 02:04:06,970
Keep on over-consuming, over-emitting.

1232
02:04:08,010 --> 02:04:11,770
That is kind of collectively the choice that the United States has made.

1233
02:04:12,330 --> 02:04:16,710
But even at the individual level, it's like, well, it doesn't matter anyway, why not?

1234
02:04:17,870 --> 02:04:30,530
And of course, it is a collection of several billion people thinking that way that has gotten us in the fix we're in, but why should I go live in a yurt when the rest of the world's not going to live in a yurt?

1235
02:04:32,490 --> 02:04:37,910
And anyway, I'm in Iowa and we're going to be fine.

1236
02:04:38,910 --> 02:04:41,570
And yeah, my grandkids will have to figure it out, whatever.

1237
02:04:43,330 --> 02:04:52,270
So you could take the futility of individual action as permission to behave however you want.

1238
02:04:53,890 --> 02:05:06,610
I would argue that it doesn't make it right to do that, and that it's good to try to live your life the way you wish everyone else did.

1239
02:05:07,050 --> 02:05:11,150
That is a cousin of the categorical imperative.

1240
02:05:16,070 --> 02:05:21,190
And what's more, it's just, yeah.

1241
02:05:21,650 --> 02:05:34,390
So there's, even if it's not going to make a difference still to live your life in a way that is as right as you can make it, there's an argument for that.

1242
02:05:35,270 --> 02:05:50,910
But more, the argument that means more to me is that there are things you can do locally within your own reach that do make a difference.

1243
02:05:52,190 --> 02:06:14,070
And the reason when you asked me, how is this going to play out in the coming years and decades that I answered in terms of stressing systems, is that I think it's really important to recognize that anything you can do to make the world a kinder and more stable place is a climate action.

1244
02:06:15,970 --> 02:06:50,670
And if it's effective to participate in your local city government to make things a little better, to show up at city council meetings and raise a point, to go campaign for people who have sensible ideas about what to do in your local community, those, I would argue, are climate actions because we need resilient communities in the face of increasing stresses on all systems.

1245
02:06:52,130 --> 02:06:57,090
But even if it weren't a climate action, it's still a good thing to do.

1246
02:06:57,750 --> 02:06:59,970
And you actually can make something better.

1247
02:07:00,490 --> 02:07:07,970
And you have, in climate change, a situation that nothing you can do could possibly make any better.

1248
02:07:08,690 --> 02:07:11,510
Elon Musk personally cannot make it better.

1249
02:07:12,850 --> 02:07:15,130
No individual can affect that.

1250
02:07:16,470 --> 02:07:22,670
And so you despair and you say, well, God, we're screwed and the world's going to hell.

1251
02:07:23,590 --> 02:07:31,130
And you may just shut down or you may even go the opposite direction and drive your Hummer to work.

1252
02:07:33,790 --> 02:07:39,930
Or you can say, well, yeah, but the world isn't over yet and I'm not dead yet.

1253
02:07:40,470 --> 02:07:45,790
And maybe I can go help somebody, help something, try to make something better.

1254
02:07:47,430 --> 02:08:03,050
And instead of being so fixed on this terrible future and so obsessed with an unsolvable problem, maybe try to introduce some solvable problems in your life.

1255
02:08:04,330 --> 02:08:06,270
And that's really what I espouse.

1256
02:08:09,190 --> 02:08:11,070
Introduce solvable problems.

1257
02:08:11,990 --> 02:08:12,270
Yeah.

1258
02:08:17,500 --> 02:08:18,060
Thank you.

1259
02:08:18,820 --> 02:08:19,400
Thank you.

1260
02:08:19,540 --> 02:08:24,200
This was a wide ranging actually much longer conversation than I expected, Neil.

1261
02:08:24,300 --> 02:08:27,920
But I guess I hadn't talked for a while.

1262
02:08:28,020 --> 02:08:28,200
Okay.

1263
02:08:28,220 --> 02:08:29,200
You're showing me something.

1264
02:08:29,460 --> 02:08:32,640
I'm showing you five fast money questions that should take you 30 seconds.

1265
02:08:32,820 --> 02:08:33,260
Okay.

1266
02:08:33,500 --> 02:08:36,660
Let's close off with hardcover, paperback, audio, or e?

1267
02:08:40,070 --> 02:08:40,530
Paperback.

1268
02:08:40,530 --> 02:08:42,790
How do you organize your books on your bookshelf?

1269
02:08:45,770 --> 02:08:50,750
Pretty randomly, although there is some basic division between fiction and nonfiction.

1270
02:08:51,650 --> 02:08:53,790
What is your book lending policy?

1271
02:08:55,310 --> 02:08:57,610
I've learned not to expect to get a book back.

1272
02:08:58,070 --> 02:09:00,950
Do you have a favorite bookstore, living or dead?

1273
02:09:05,830 --> 02:09:06,090
Yes.

1274
02:09:06,170 --> 02:09:08,790
Well, I have to mention Bookshop Santa Cruz here in Santa Cruz.

1275
02:09:09,090 --> 02:09:12,270
It's not the best bookstore in the world, but it is a great bookstore.

1276
02:09:13,030 --> 02:09:20,870
And what's one final hard fought piece of wisdom or advice you might share it with aspiring novelists?

1277
02:09:23,750 --> 02:09:33,000
Take a hard look at every sentence, shake it, shake it again.

1278
02:09:34,540 --> 02:09:36,960
I guarantee you it can't be better.

1279
02:09:43,880 --> 02:09:47,620
Jonathan Franzen, thank you so much for coming on 3 Books.

1280
02:09:47,700 --> 02:09:49,500
This has been a real joy.

1281
02:09:49,880 --> 02:09:51,180
I'm really grateful to you.

1282
02:09:51,220 --> 02:09:52,020
Thank you so much.

1283
02:09:52,380 --> 02:09:52,840
My pleasure.

1284
02:09:53,200 --> 02:09:54,080
Nice talking to you, Neil.

1285
02:09:55,120 --> 02:09:56,180
Hey, everybody.

1286
02:09:56,400 --> 02:10:06,320
It's just me, just Neil again, hanging out in my basement, listening back to the wonderful conversation we just had with Jon Franzen.

1287
02:10:06,580 --> 02:10:17,580
Slow, peaceful, thoughtful, introspective, deep, like a rich, creamy dessert that you don't want to end.

1288
02:10:17,720 --> 02:10:21,240
I felt like I could have talked to Jon all day for many days.

1289
02:10:21,380 --> 02:10:27,700
I had piles and piles of questions I didn't even get to because I had so much I wanted to ask him.

1290
02:10:27,700 --> 02:10:31,200
But there's so many quotes that jump out of the conversation.

1291
02:10:31,380 --> 02:10:32,300
Did you write some down?

1292
02:10:32,400 --> 02:10:33,300
I wrote some down.

1293
02:10:33,680 --> 02:10:34,440
I highlighted some.

1294
02:10:34,580 --> 02:10:43,760
As always, the quotes will appear over at 3books.co. But some of my favorite ones were, I share your preference, but let's not make it into a virtue.

1295
02:10:43,980 --> 02:10:51,080
When I was going on that rant about real books have real pages, which I know I should probably get off that high horse about that, audio books and eBooks there.

1296
02:10:51,140 --> 02:10:54,880
But just the way he said that, I share your preference, but let's not make it into a virtue.

1297
02:10:54,880 --> 02:11:01,440
How about this one when he said, it is a luxury to engage with things in a complicated way.

1298
02:11:03,060 --> 02:11:06,360
I can relate to that feeling so much.

1299
02:11:06,460 --> 02:11:07,560
I forget that too.

1300
02:11:08,000 --> 02:11:17,020
I'm like, here we are having deep, rich, long form conversations with novelists.

1301
02:11:17,520 --> 02:11:19,440
We get to do that.

1302
02:11:19,520 --> 02:11:23,720
It's a luxury to be able to engage with things in a complicated way.

1303
02:11:25,100 --> 02:11:28,700
I like also the humility baked into that quote.

1304
02:11:29,000 --> 02:11:34,860
There is a gentleness around people that just might want to relax and read a Garfield or read whatever.

1305
02:11:35,080 --> 02:11:36,220
There's no judgment on that.

1306
02:11:36,280 --> 02:11:42,860
But when you want to read kind of something big and deep and challenging, that is a luxury and we should look at it that way for sure.

1307
02:11:43,540 --> 02:11:44,260
I like this quote.

1308
02:11:44,300 --> 02:11:45,980
What does a hero look like in 2023?

1309
02:11:46,260 --> 02:11:50,820
It looks like a teacher in Florida teaching forbidden books.

1310
02:11:51,080 --> 02:11:53,100
I like the small scale approach.

1311
02:11:53,200 --> 02:11:55,040
The world just feels so big.

1312
02:11:55,120 --> 02:12:00,600
If you read the big newspapers, of course, they start to talk about global issues above everything else.

1313
02:12:00,800 --> 02:12:11,800
You can feel a bit disconnected from your local community and the local differences you can make by picking up a piece of garbage on the park or saying hi to someone on the street.

1314
02:12:12,740 --> 02:12:18,540
Teaching a forbidden book, I guess, in Florida was a wonderful way to talk about what a hero looks like today.

1315
02:12:19,360 --> 02:12:20,020
How about this one?

1316
02:12:20,260 --> 02:12:26,120
Anything you can do to make the world a kinder and more stable place is a climate action.

1317
02:12:27,400 --> 02:12:28,160
I love that.

1318
02:12:28,300 --> 02:12:41,100
Anything you can do to make the world a kinder and more stable place is a climate action, as Jon and his formative book paints the picture of what the world might look like in the next 50 to 100 years.

1319
02:12:41,280 --> 02:12:46,960
But coming fast, we're already seeing plastic islands in the sea.

1320
02:12:47,620 --> 02:12:50,440
It seems to me like you can't predict the weather anymore.

1321
02:12:50,700 --> 02:12:57,760
Even the hourly forecast now with that level of detail in the morning, it's totally wildly unpredictable.

1322
02:12:58,020 --> 02:13:00,820
Climate change is just discombobulating the earth.

1323
02:13:01,140 --> 02:13:05,580
Anything we can do to make the world a kinder and more stable place, that's a climate action.

1324
02:13:06,640 --> 02:13:09,880
Then when I asked him about staying grounded, I just like the way he phrased it.

1325
02:13:10,300 --> 02:13:13,360
I'm a human animal who will die soon like everyone else.

1326
02:13:13,480 --> 02:13:16,040
You keep that in mind and it's not hard to stay grounded.

1327
02:13:17,180 --> 02:13:17,800
That's true.

1328
02:13:18,040 --> 02:13:19,640
It's not hard to stay grounded if you keep that in mind.

1329
02:13:20,000 --> 02:13:21,640
However, it is hard to keep that in mind.

1330
02:13:22,280 --> 02:13:29,600
As we get embroiled in the trivialities of our daily existence, it's hard to keep in mind the fact that you're going to die soon.

1331
02:13:29,660 --> 02:13:32,780
This comes back to the stoic principle of memento mori.

1332
02:13:33,480 --> 02:13:36,440
I share a fondness for On the Shortness of Life by Seneca.

1333
02:13:36,660 --> 02:13:43,400
Some people like Tim Ferriss keep skulls around their house as a daily remembrance of death.

1334
02:13:43,660 --> 02:13:46,800
Feel its proximity so you don't fear its proximity.

1335
02:13:47,960 --> 02:13:49,260
Those are five quotes.

1336
02:13:49,320 --> 02:13:52,740
I usually do three, but those quotes jumped out to me from Jon Franzen.

1337
02:13:52,980 --> 02:13:53,520
You know what?

1338
02:13:53,580 --> 02:14:00,980
Big thanks to him for adding three more books to our top 1,000, including number 601, Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis.

1339
02:14:01,880 --> 02:14:07,380
All right, we now have two C.S. Lewis books on the top 1,000, including The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

1340
02:14:07,720 --> 02:14:11,880
Number 600, The Trial by Franz Kafka, K-A-F-K-A.

1341
02:14:12,000 --> 02:14:14,220
That is the first Kafka book we have on here.

1342
02:14:14,640 --> 02:14:16,660
A nice bingo there on number 600.

1343
02:14:17,200 --> 02:14:20,340
And then finally, number 599, we're getting close to the halfway point.

1344
02:14:20,380 --> 02:14:21,700
I won't say close, we're getting closer.

1345
02:14:22,460 --> 02:14:24,960
Reason in a Dark Time by Dale Jamieson.

1346
02:14:25,160 --> 02:14:28,200
I read and enjoyed all three of these books.

1347
02:14:28,260 --> 02:14:30,920
Sometimes I get a phone call saying, you didn't tell us what you thought of the books, Neil.

1348
02:14:31,020 --> 02:14:32,540
I actually loved all three of these books.

1349
02:14:33,700 --> 02:14:43,540
Although I would say I would recommend the annotated version of The Trial because I realized how much I missed when I was researching the book after and talking to Jon about it.

1350
02:14:44,320 --> 02:14:50,140
I had no idea that Josef was a bit of a dick.

1351
02:14:50,460 --> 02:14:56,060
You couldn't pick that up as easily as he made it sound.

1352
02:14:56,140 --> 02:15:00,000
I know his professor and teacher was teaching him that, but there's a lot of dynamics there.

1353
02:15:00,080 --> 02:15:02,180
Same thing when I read Lolita by Nabokov.

1354
02:15:02,440 --> 02:15:04,160
I was lucky to pick up the annotated version.

1355
02:15:04,280 --> 02:15:09,740
So if you get a chance to buy the annotated version, it's like they just explain everything that the writer's doing in the back the whole time.

1356
02:15:10,260 --> 02:15:11,780
And that is just the way I want to read.

1357
02:15:11,920 --> 02:15:13,740
I need somebody over my shoulder to help me.

1358
02:15:14,140 --> 02:15:16,940
So huge thanks to Jon Franzen for coming on 3 Books.

1359
02:15:17,000 --> 02:15:18,340
It was a delightful conversation.

1360
02:15:18,460 --> 02:15:19,520
I hope you all enjoyed it.

1361
02:15:23,290 --> 02:15:24,010
All right.

1362
02:15:24,190 --> 02:15:25,290
Are you still here?

1363
02:15:25,390 --> 02:15:27,090
Did you make it past the three second pause?

1364
02:15:27,190 --> 02:15:31,190
If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club.

1365
02:15:31,210 --> 02:15:36,810
One of three clubs that we have for 3 Books listeners, i.e. three bookers, including the cover to cover club.

1366
02:15:36,930 --> 02:15:40,050
That's anybody who attempts to listen to all 333 chapters of the show.

1367
02:15:40,150 --> 02:15:42,370
Email me if you want your name added to the list on our website.

1368
02:15:42,510 --> 02:15:43,650
We're starting to slowly add to that.

1369
02:15:44,190 --> 02:15:45,870
And number two, and that was number two.

1370
02:15:45,930 --> 02:15:47,530
Number three is the secret club members.

1371
02:15:47,610 --> 02:15:53,790
I can't say more about the club other than it's entirely analog based and you can get a clue to joining by calling our phone number.

1372
02:15:54,110 --> 02:15:55,570
Our phone number is 1 8 3 3.

1373
02:15:55,670 --> 02:15:56,210
Read a lot.

1374
02:15:56,350 --> 02:15:57,310
Yes, it is a real number.

1375
02:15:58,530 --> 02:16:03,310
Let's start off as we always do by kicking off and going to the phones.

1376
02:16:06,060 --> 02:16:07,440
This is Emily here.

1377
02:16:07,560 --> 02:16:18,020
I'm calling from Aotearoa, New Zealand, from Te Whanganui-a-Tara, which is Wellington, the capital city, um, where I live is very beautiful.

1378
02:16:18,140 --> 02:16:21,480
My walk to work is basically a 40 minute walk along the harbour.

1379
02:16:22,100 --> 02:16:28,320
Um, the water is sometimes super clear and you can see schools of fishes.

1380
02:16:29,180 --> 02:16:35,080
Um, the hills envelope the harbour and the further back ones are kind of muted.

1381
02:16:35,719 --> 02:16:43,620
The clouds often hang low over the hills and the way that the light illuminates the clouds in the evening is incredibly beautiful.

1382
02:16:44,200 --> 02:16:48,639
Um, your podcast is great and a couple of things stand out for me.

1383
02:16:48,860 --> 02:17:06,299
First is that your values are something that I really resonate with, even if I didn't know that I resonated with them, especially, um, authenticity leading to greatness and like fulfillment is something I never knew I did resonate with.

1384
02:17:07,020 --> 02:17:12,580
Um, but I would like to kind of engage with that more.

1385
02:17:12,959 --> 02:17:23,299
And another one that I didn't know that I wanted to have as a value was the scarcity and curation being of high value, just wonderful work.

1386
02:17:23,760 --> 02:17:26,760
Keep doing what you're doing and thank you so much.

1387
02:17:27,620 --> 02:17:33,080
Oh, thank you so much to Emily from Wellington, New Zealand for calling 1-833-READALOT.

1388
02:17:33,200 --> 02:17:38,340
Actually, I got an email from Emily saying I couldn't get 1-833-READALOT to work.

1389
02:17:38,559 --> 02:17:41,240
So here's a voice note that I'm emailing to you.

1390
02:17:41,280 --> 02:17:42,320
You can always do that.

1391
02:17:42,400 --> 02:17:51,600
My email is on threebooks.co. If you're in a place of the world where the phone number's not working, although it's supposed to work everywhere, maybe it's just, you know, there's always a series of digits you got to dial in advance.

1392
02:17:52,360 --> 02:17:54,639
Um, then feel free to send me a voice note.

1393
02:17:54,700 --> 02:17:56,540
So lots of stuff to respond there.

1394
02:17:56,620 --> 02:17:59,940
Uh, in an era of infinite choice, the value of curation skyrockets.

1395
02:18:00,059 --> 02:18:03,260
One of the principles underpinning the show is that there's just too many books to read.

1396
02:18:03,360 --> 02:18:04,459
Jon said it himself, right?

1397
02:18:04,520 --> 02:18:06,219
There's just way too many books to read.

1398
02:18:06,459 --> 02:18:07,540
I'll never get there.

1399
02:18:07,940 --> 02:18:13,879
And so what is one way we can come up with to curate a pile of books?

1400
02:18:14,000 --> 02:18:19,719
Well, ask 333 inspiring people which three books most changed their life and hopefully we'll get some great ones there.

1401
02:18:19,799 --> 02:18:28,160
So you can always head over to threebooks.co slash the top 1000, threebooks.co slash the top 1000 to find a list of every formative book discussed on the show.

1402
02:18:28,280 --> 02:18:29,900
A good jumping off point.

1403
02:18:30,020 --> 02:18:34,440
If you're looking for reading material, there's a little number besides you can see who picked it as well.

1404
02:18:35,139 --> 02:18:40,320
And then I like that point on the graveyard book by Neil Gaiman being a formative to you because it scared you so much.

1405
02:18:40,400 --> 02:18:44,040
I, I read the dark half by Stephen King in seventh grade.

1406
02:18:44,500 --> 02:18:55,480
I was 12 and I still can feel like the chills I got from that book, but more than anything else that taught me how powerful books could be that you could feel such deep sense senses from books.

1407
02:18:55,580 --> 02:18:57,139
So thank you so much, Emily.

1408
02:18:57,260 --> 02:19:00,879
And we will add your name to the cover to cover club list for sure.

1409
02:19:01,420 --> 02:19:02,959
And thanks for the confidence about chapter one.

1410
02:19:03,059 --> 02:19:03,379
All right.

1411
02:19:03,879 --> 02:19:06,860
And now let's head over to the letter of the chapter.

1412
02:19:07,540 --> 02:19:11,459
And this chapter's letter comes from Ketan Dedhiya.

1413
02:19:12,000 --> 02:19:13,540
Hope I said your name, right?

1414
02:19:14,180 --> 02:19:14,620
Hi, Neil.

1415
02:19:14,680 --> 02:19:18,080
This is a message due from my end for a long time.

1416
02:19:18,160 --> 02:19:21,340
I'm a cover to cover listener of your podcast 3 Books.

1417
02:19:21,940 --> 02:19:25,020
And before your podcast, I came across your TED talk, three days of awesome.

1418
02:19:25,120 --> 02:19:27,480
I even listened to it today when I needed to lift myself up.

1419
02:19:27,879 --> 02:19:31,459
I came across your podcast in the summer of 2020, when my world was going through a lot.

1420
02:19:31,600 --> 02:19:38,080
And personally, I was trying to find answers after my mother's passing the previous year with renewed inspiration from your podcast.

1421
02:19:38,299 --> 02:19:46,500
I found new purpose and meaning with books and explored them with my daughter, who's an avid reader herself, uh, and different from different bookstores in New Jersey and New York.

1422
02:19:46,980 --> 02:19:50,060
And we bought many books only to read, but to share with others as well.

1423
02:19:50,120 --> 02:19:57,260
I celebrated my 50th birthday last December and to celebrate, I gifted more than 50 books to my loved ones in the US and India.

1424
02:19:57,820 --> 02:20:01,520
Earlier this week, I got an opportunity to attend two conferences in Las Vegas.

1425
02:20:02,300 --> 02:20:07,300
And they mentioned the conferences a few years back when I intended HR tech conferences for the first time, I was reserved.

1426
02:20:07,440 --> 02:20:11,920
I wasn't interacting with people much, but this time I started conversing with people with no hesitation.

1427
02:20:12,100 --> 02:20:15,540
I had a really good conversation, not only from my industry, but even other industries.

1428
02:20:15,640 --> 02:20:21,120
Listening to my conversation with a stranger at Starbucks, a person in front of me was so surprised that she applauded and was happy with their interaction.

1429
02:20:21,240 --> 02:20:24,180
I had a good conversation with her later the next day and learn different things.

1430
02:20:24,480 --> 02:20:27,080
On Friday, I strike to conversation with the person while leaving one of the sessions.

1431
02:20:27,140 --> 02:20:28,920
And we ended up talking for more than an hour and a half.

1432
02:20:29,320 --> 02:20:30,380
We found a lot of common connections.

1433
02:20:30,480 --> 02:20:33,820
He was very gentle with his time, answer many questions I had about his work.

1434
02:20:34,240 --> 02:20:40,900
And again, to my own surprise, I gave him the covenant of water by Abraham Verghese, which I was reading in flight and spare time from the conferences.

1435
02:20:41,120 --> 02:20:44,160
I couldn't let him go without mentioning 3 Books as well.

1436
02:20:44,160 --> 02:20:50,480
I believe your podcast talks, books, and my reading habit, which found new life with your resources and my meditation practice as well.

1437
02:20:50,580 --> 02:20:58,940
Since my mom's passing, I've had something to do with this transformational change that I hope to continue for the rest of my life and only make a difference in my life, but many other people's as well.

1438
02:20:59,300 --> 02:21:00,660
Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

1439
02:21:00,720 --> 02:21:08,520
I'm going to end with one idea, which is what do you think about having a silent conference or a place where no one's allowed to speak?

1440
02:21:08,580 --> 02:21:18,880
There are no speeches, there are no cell phones, and there are no devices that would distract people, but just simply to display inspiring stories in the form of pictures and words of good things people are doing in this world.

1441
02:21:19,080 --> 02:21:28,540
With a room full of books to read, plenty of space for people to ponder with their thoughts, whether in the form of meditation or prayers or gratitude in their beliefs.

1442
02:21:29,000 --> 02:21:30,460
From Ketan Dedhiya.

1443
02:21:30,540 --> 02:21:32,600
Oh my gosh, what a cool idea.

1444
02:21:32,720 --> 02:21:36,940
It sounds like an art exhibition.

1445
02:21:37,180 --> 02:21:41,960
You can go in, you can't talk to anybody, but you're surrounded by books, right?

1446
02:21:42,040 --> 02:21:45,760
There's that old Borges quote, I cannot sleep unless I'm surrounded by books.

1447
02:21:46,160 --> 02:21:47,120
I like that idea.

1448
02:21:47,200 --> 02:21:49,040
I love the feeling of reading together.

1449
02:21:49,340 --> 02:21:55,900
I think I go up to people, when I see someone reading at a bar on the subway, I'm always like, I gravitate towards them.

1450
02:21:56,060 --> 02:21:57,280
I want to know what they're reading.

1451
02:21:57,380 --> 02:21:58,140
I find them interesting.

1452
02:21:58,300 --> 02:21:59,080
I find them more interesting.

1453
02:21:59,360 --> 02:22:09,740
I feel like instead of just talking to someone with their own brain, I'm talking to somebody with another brain and another thought, and we're annexing conversations from around the world and around history and around time into today.

1454
02:22:09,940 --> 02:22:11,120
It's so beautiful to do that.

1455
02:22:11,920 --> 02:22:13,060
Books let us do that.

1456
02:22:13,400 --> 02:22:19,660
3 Books is a reminder and a passageway for us to keep finding stories that resonate with us.

1457
02:22:20,280 --> 02:22:21,580
A wonderful letter.

1458
02:22:21,740 --> 02:22:28,260
As always, if I read your letter on the air, drop me a line afterwards with your address so I can send you a signed book to say thanks.

1459
02:22:30,160 --> 02:22:31,860
We're almost done here now.

1460
02:22:32,000 --> 02:22:32,760
We've got a letter.

1461
02:22:32,900 --> 02:22:34,280
We've played a voicemail.

1462
02:22:34,400 --> 02:22:35,640
We've talked about some favorite quotes.

1463
02:22:35,740 --> 02:22:44,080
Now let's finish off by going back to Mr. Jon Franzen for a word cloud of the best words used in this chapter.

1464
02:22:44,420 --> 02:22:46,920
Let's pick one out and make it our word of the chapter.

1465
02:22:47,020 --> 02:22:47,500
Here we go.

1466
02:22:48,740 --> 02:22:53,880
25 years of itinerant borrowing is abhorrent to any Narnia fan.

1467
02:22:54,360 --> 02:22:55,460
Discursive account.

1468
02:22:55,740 --> 02:22:56,960
Satyr, next to the rabbit.

1469
02:22:57,100 --> 02:22:59,100
It's kind of a nullity eponymous book.

1470
02:22:59,380 --> 02:23:00,480
They're too multivalent.

1471
02:23:00,480 --> 02:23:02,560
Streak of nativism is what I espouse.

1472
02:23:03,860 --> 02:23:04,740
Oh boy.

1473
02:23:04,900 --> 02:23:08,960
There are a lot of incredible, interesting words to choose from.

1474
02:23:09,060 --> 02:23:12,780
Of course, from Jon Franzen, we're going to get a lot of beauties.

1475
02:23:13,620 --> 02:23:17,320
Satyr was one of them that I had written down that I was thinking about.

1476
02:23:18,040 --> 02:23:19,340
Eponymous, I loved.

1477
02:23:19,440 --> 02:23:21,300
I also really love nullity.

1478
02:23:22,160 --> 02:23:22,680
Nullity.

1479
02:23:23,560 --> 02:23:24,080
Nullity.

1480
02:23:24,280 --> 02:23:26,260
N-U-L-L-I-T-Y.

1481
02:23:26,360 --> 02:23:28,420
Why don't we make that the word of the chapter?

1482
02:23:29,240 --> 02:23:36,440
Definition with Merriam-Webster is the quality or state of being null, especially a legal invalidity.

1483
02:23:37,040 --> 02:23:43,980
1B is nothingness, insignificance, a non-entity to a one or a person that is null.

1484
02:23:45,040 --> 02:23:47,360
This is a really interesting word.

1485
02:23:47,520 --> 02:23:49,800
I like the way it's described.

1486
02:23:50,120 --> 02:23:53,220
It sounds so insulting, but in a funny way.

1487
02:23:53,660 --> 02:24:01,380
According to Merriam-Webster, intellectuals may speak of a book or a film as a nullity, claiming it possesses nothing original enough to justify its existence.

1488
02:24:01,800 --> 02:24:03,540
Legal scholars also use the word.

1489
02:24:03,860 --> 02:24:06,580
A law passed by a legislature may be called a nullity.

1490
02:24:06,860 --> 02:24:10,680
If, for example, it's so obviously unconstitutional, it's going to be shot down by the courts.

1491
02:24:11,260 --> 02:24:20,020
And if you're in an unkind mood, you're also free to call a person a nullity if you're not instead calling him a nobody, a non-entity, or a zero.

1492
02:24:20,780 --> 02:24:24,380
Nullity first appeared in 1543.

1493
02:24:25,160 --> 02:24:40,120
Nearly 500 years later, we are now using it in the form of a cross space, a cross time, deep rich conversation with maybe the deepest richest or certainly one of the deepest richest writers we have in the entire world.

1494
02:24:40,260 --> 02:24:46,800
It was a treat and a pleasure to share space with you and with Mr. Jonathan Franzen in this chapter of 3 Books.

1495
02:24:46,900 --> 02:24:48,340
I hope you enjoyed the conversation.

1496
02:24:49,180 --> 02:24:53,880
And until the next full moon, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read.

1497
02:24:54,240 --> 02:24:56,740
Keep turning that page, everybody, and I'll talk to you soon.

1498
02:24:57,120 --> 02:24:57,460
Take care.