Yeah, she was very disapproving of the idea of my becoming a novelist.
It's like, you're gonna lie for a living?
That this was a portrait of an asshole.
That Josef K.
is a royal asshole.
Kids are not innocent little creatures.
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.
It's like, I'm alive when I'm writing a novel, and part of me is not really alive when I'm not.
I remember getting the knife.
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.
She's like, you only have 100 pages left, are you sure you don't want to just read this when we get home?
And I was like, I was so deep into reading The Corrections, and it was like something I'd never read before.
I had to go get the knife, a steak knife with a wooden handle and big serrations.
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.
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.
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.
I read Freedom, which came out in 2010, about the same way.
Purity, 2014, the same way.
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.
Jonathan Franzen is one of the most successful, accomplished, and decorated writers in the world.
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.
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.
That is tall praise.
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.
Are you ready to flip the page into Chapter 137 now?
Let's go.
Jon, thank you so much for coming on 3 Books.
It is such an honor to have you on the show.
I have been, as you know, inviting you for many years.
I have read, in order, The Corrections, then Freedom, then Purity, you know, then Crossroads, and a dabbling of your nonfiction throughout.
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.
So, thank you.
Thank you so much for doing this.
It is a pleasure.
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.
Well, I am very open to them.
I want to just say to our listeners, you know, most of whom do listen to us.
This is a show that has started in audio format.
I think of it like theater of the mind.
I have very reluctantly come to this, like, you know, must-be videotaped format.
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.
I just got invited out here and did not want to reschedule us, so I messed up with the local library.
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.
It is a light gray day here with a gentle drizzle, and I am speaking to you on a nice afternoon in Vancouver.
I am in a room that is long.
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.
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.
I wondered if, for the listeners, you might also describe your scene for us.
I am in my office, which is, as you can see, dark, terrible picture quality.
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.
You see my blackout curtain over there.
There are more blackout curtains to my right.
It is fairly chilly.
66 is the temperature I keep it set at, and it is a nice, quiet day.
We are having some heavy showers in Santa Cruz.
I am in Santa Cruz, California.
What else can I tell you?
Books of my own are behind me.
I finally have a permanent office after, oh, 25 years of itinerant borrowing of various offices.
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.
There you have it.
I am wearing—thank you for that—heavy rain.
I love your weather descriptions.
I should say, page one of The Corrections, the madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.
You could feel it:
Something terrible was going to happen.
The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star, gust after gust of disorder.
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.
I feel like you have this ability to touch and cajole and describe weather in such a unique way.
I work at it.
It doesn't come easily.
Weather is, of course, incredibly important.
I think it was Faulkner who said a person is nothing but the sum of his experiences of weather.
Who are you at your core?
It's the weather you remember.
Of course, in Faulkner's case, that would have been the hot, hot summers in Mississippi and the gray, drizzly winters.
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.
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.
I work on that stuff and I can feel I need a sentence about weather.
It might take half a day to get a good sentence about weather.
Wow.
That is incredible.
It makes so much sense for the descriptions that we're reading in many of your books.
Just before we started recording, you said, I will submit, although I have many questions about you and 3 Books.
Just to help our orientation here, if you have anything you want to ask me, feel free.
I'm very happy to answer.
I got 10 pages of questions for you.
The least I can do is offer the same.
You can ask me anything you want if you want to get to know the show.
I'll ask you one question.
I also work as a journalist.
As I was saying before we started recording, I'm in many ways more comfortable as a question asker.
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?
How did you settle on that?
Yeah.
Well, I was inspired by basically three quotes that I read.
I will read you the quotes because you just quoted a bit of Faulkner to me.
The three quotes were George R.
R.
Martin's famous Game of Thrones quote, which is, A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.
The man who never reads lives only one.
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.
For they not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but they annex every age to theirs.
And finally, a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.
And I am often fed up with the present.
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.
I can tell a lot by the pause I get before people answer.
You know, if they answer in 10 seconds, that tells you something.
And the books are all from two years ago.
That tells you something.
But if they are thoughtful about it, then it lends itself to a great conversation.
And I get to sort of design it so that the side benefit of the research is I get to read more.
And typically, I get to read stuff I never heard of before, or I haven't read before.
In your case, I read all three of your books.
And I'm sorry to say, I probably wouldn't have.
There's just too many books.
And so it allows me to design a style of research that I really like.
I'm able to spend typically 40 to 60 hours reading someone's books, reading every interview, listening to every interview.
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.
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.
And so when I
lobbed into that the principle of no ads, no sponsors, no promotions, no commercials,
no interruptions, I'm trying to create like a sacrosanct, like a space that
is special and precious and rare and antithetical to a lot of the stuff I don't like about the
world, which is that it's short, it's interrupted with ads, it really is ads, you know, with a
little bit of content in the middle.
And it's not about stuff that lasts forever.
It's about stuff that just happened.
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.
That's a good, full explanation.
Thank you.
Well, I know I'm talking to the good, full explanation master.
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.
You've been very generous to go through the depths of your experiences in your life, Jon.
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.
So this will be hard, but okay.
And you went through your life.
You came up with three formative books.
I've got them here beside me.
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.
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.
I'll offer them to you.
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.
So here they are.
First off, I believe from The Corrections in 2001, you wrote, Fiction is a solution, the best solution to the problem of existential solitude.
Yeah, I said that.
It was a bit of a compromise position.
Came out of a multi-year, mostly via letter conversation I was having with my friend David Wallace.
We were trying to figure out something we could agree on to answer the question, why bother writing fiction?
And if I were to say that now, I would probably leave out the word existential.
I might say it in a plainer way.
We read to connect.
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.
And somebody decodes that, and they could be decoding it down the street, or they could be decoding it 150 years later.
And from that code comes this whole world, and with it, the person who created that world initially.
And the traces of the person who created the book are all over the place.
It's there in the tone.
It's there in the particular observation.
It's mentioning things that hadn't been mentioned before that you recognize as true.
You recognize, I've experienced this myself.
I'm seeing characters who are behaving in ways I've witnessed people behave.
I'm also understanding that behavior in a way I might not have had I not read it in this form.
And that creates this amazing sense of communality, if that's a word, between the writer and the reader.
It's a joint thing.
Everything is happening through this medium of ink on a page, and yet you don't feel alone.
You feel like somebody has been there experiencing the world the way I have.
Wow, beautiful.
Thank you.
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.
That's a great one.
I think I'll just say one more.
I mean, we actually, I just assumed not talk too much about Dave.
That's all become rather water under the bridge, but I think he was very alone.
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.
He was a deeply isolated person.
In a way, I don't feel myself to be so much.
I'm more somebody who nonetheless likes company.
What do you mean a compromised position?
Well, I would say, hey, maybe the reason to write fiction is this, and he'd say, no, no, no, no, no.
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.
Maybe we can agree on that and stop talking about it, which is what we did.
Interesting.
Okay, I'll avoid asking more about Dave, but obviously, I'm a big fan of a lot of stuff he wrote.
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.
I did say that.
I stand by that.
I would.
I don't know if it's in that essay, which was subsequently made better and shorter and retitled, Why Bother?
It appears in my first essay collection.
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.
Oh, that's a great one.
I couldn't find it.
It was particularly striking.
I mean, Philip Roth used to say it over and over.
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.
Well, basically, a serious reader is defined as somebody who buys Philip Roth's book.
Oh, that's too funny.
So then he changes his tack when he has a big book, I guess, or something.
Maybe.
Yeah.
I did.
Yeah.
Well, exactly.
Yeah.
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.
In the US?
Yeah, that sounds right.
Yeah.
Which is big.
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?
Question mark.
I think that's from Why Bother as well.
Yeah.
Okay.
Again, those were kind of transitional worries of mine when I actually thought it was important to engage with the culture.
When I had, I was still burdened with a vestigial notion that writing should be socially useful.
It should be perhaps a critique of the society we live in.
It should have some beneficial effect.
And of course, you can't have a beneficial effect on the culture if you're not engaging with it.
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.
The rather familiar notion that we were distracting ourselves to death, kind of a Neil Postman critique of modern culture also.
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.
Here I am talking about Philip Roth again.
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.
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?
30 years later, the problem seemed to be the sense that I had in my 30s that, wow, this is a really diseased country.
This is a diseased culture.
And I want to bring news of that disease, but the disease consists in the fact that nobody's listening to people like me.
Right, exactly.
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.
Interesting.
But you no longer feel like the writing should be socially useful.
No, I gave that up.
I mean, I try to be helpful to someone or something when I go to nonfiction, particularly my journalism.
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.
But the novel, no, I jettisoned all notion of social responsibility.
I was liberated.
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.
And the job was to expose everything that was wrong in the country and get people to take up arms against it.
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.
Nevertheless, I somehow had it in my head for way too long that novels should be doing that.
I got a couple more, two more quotes still.
On your 2023 interview on the Reading the Room podcast, you said, I'm competitive, period.
I don't like being ignored at the expense of writers who I think are bad, period.
That irks me.
Apparently I did say that.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, doesn't it irk you?
Well, wouldn't it irk you?
I guess I don't, yeah.
Go ahead.
Well, yeah.
I mean, I could put that in a less hostile way.
I could speak of a sadness and even apply it to myself.
We have finite lives and very finite time for reading.
And there are five to eight orders of magnitude more books than I could ever read in my lifetime.
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.
So I don't tend to read crap because it's almost physically painful.
Yeah.
The crap is subjective though.
I mean, one man's crap is another man's treasure.
Maybe, yeah.
You think there's objective crap?
Yeah.
No, I think...
Do we really even need to have that conversation?
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.
And this is not to say that lazy, cliched work doesn't have its uses.
Sometimes that's exactly what you want.
You want the familiar trope.
It's tiring to be challenged in sentence after sentence to actually think.
Maybe you don't want to think.
Maybe you don't even want a fresh way to say, you know, quiet as a mouse.
Maybe quiet as a mouse is exactly what you want to read.
Nevertheless, it is objectively crap to say that.
Yeah, I think it's...
So I relate to this.
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.
They're books to something else, or on its way to something else, or they're part of a giant marketing...
It's like the person that's in the news suddenly has a book.
They just have the book because that was one area that they hadn't covered in their marketing camp.
That's the stuff that bothers me.
It's the sort of changing what I think of as books into a thing to a word's another end.
That's sort of bothering me.
At any rate, yes.
So there's a sadness that people are spending time reading crap.
And I'm not competitive only on my own behalf.
I'm competitive on behalf of my many fellow writers who are doing strong original work and who take care with every sentence.
And it irks me when I see someone reading a bad book instead of one of our books.
Um, thank you for that expansion there.
And the last one I have is from your 2016 interview on the Other People podcast, People Spell PPL.
This isn't about writing particularly, but I thought you were talking about it in terms of writing.
And you said, the ambition to dwell in the complicated middle has been shown to be unprofitable.
Wow, I sound more interesting to myself than I actually experienced myself to be.
That's a nicely turned phrase.
Well, yes.
And it goes to what I was just talking about.
It is a luxury to engage with things in a complicated way.
Simplicity is comforting.
Um, bad television is comforting because it's simple.
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.
All of that.
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.
And I came to feel this was mean of me to look down on them because who was I to judge really?
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.
Um, total cliche.
Uh, and you don't find that in a good literary novel.
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.
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.
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?
I mean, I get it.
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.
It's not for an economically privileged small percentage of the population.
I doubt that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are reading good books either.
Um, so they have plenty of leisure if they want it.
Um, uh, they're not threatened by anything they could, they just don't because that's not their thing.
Uh, and if you go to a prison, you'll find that like 3% of the people there are not reading Michael Connelly.
They're, you know, reading George Saunders.
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.
It's, it's, it is a matter of, it's, it's a privilege of how you were born.
It's a privilege of not having to see the world in terms of your own victimhood.
Wow.
It is a luxury to engage with things in a complicated way.
Literature defined by its defiance of cliche.
Um, you mentioned George Saunders by the way,
and I, I, I won't take the bait on Dave Wallace again, but I did, you know, he gave that eulogy
at Dave Wallace's funeral, and there was that last paragraph there, and I reached out to him,
told him I was going to be speaking to you, and he said, um, because I asked him what you think
Dave would make of these times, and he said, uh, I don't know what Dave would make of these times.
It's hard to guess what Dave would make of these times.
He was always surprising and enlightening me with his thoughts.
That's one thing I really appreciate about him.
He was an uncommon thinker, always ahead of the curve.
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.
Tell him we miss him and Kathy, just to let you know.
Well, that's awfully nice of George.
George is, I love George and our friendship goes back many years now.
I think we were actually introduced via Dave.
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.
And Dave, Dave recognized George as the genius he is, uh, very early on.
Um, and I'm grateful today for that.
And I think he kind of brokered our first meeting in person, maybe 20, 25 years ago in New York.
Um, yes.
And he and Paula did live for a little while in Santa Cruz.
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.
Yeah.
Wow.
Well, nice little, um, circle, uh, there and how beautiful that Dave introduced the two of you.
And, um, you know, we'd loved having him on 3 Books.
It was very nice of him to come on the show as well.
Um, and he picked all short, he picked all readable, he picked like you, he picked all readable books.
So it was a Chekhov and a Christmas Carol.
And, uh, it was, it was a wonderful getting into those with him.
So I could have picked those two.
And frankly, the trial is not the most readable book.
I mean, no, no it's not.
And, and, and, and, and interestingly, well, we're sorry.
Have I, have I just said something?
No, it's okay.
It's okay.
Yes.
Well, I'll come back to the Christmas Carol because, um, because that pertains to my second, the second book I chose.
Ah, okay.
So I will, I will bring that back up when we get into your second book.
Now we've wet our palette.
We've wet our mental palette.
You have given us some wonderful, juicy kind of wide thinking.
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.
So I'll do about a 60 second spiel, and then I'll ask you to tell us about your relationship with each book.
And then I have a few jumping off questions from there.
So let's begin.
Your very first formative book is Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis, originally published by Jeffrey Bless, uh, by Jeffrey Bless publishing in 1951.
Um, the original cover is not the one I have.
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.
I believe holding hands in a circle, wearing flowing robes.
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.
Although I wouldn't normally have grabbed the movie cover.
Um, C.S. Lewis lived from 1898 to 1963.
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.
What's it about?
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.
A Prince denied his rightful throne gathers an army in a desperate attempt to rid his land of a false King.
But in the end, it is a battle of honor between two men alone that will decide the fate of an entire world.
Dewey decimal heads file this one under 823.91 for literature slash English and old English.
Jon, please tell us about your relationship with Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis.
I'm wondering where that ad copy came from.
Um, I would certainly not describe it as a novel that builds to hand to hand combat.
good reads.
But yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I guess it is technically a fantasy novel.
You know, there are dungeons and dragons and, you know, it all has that middle ages feel that so many fantasy novels have.
But that's not what the Narnia books really are.
Um, they're a weird thing.
They, um, they have children at the center of them.
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.
Um, what are they thinking?
I don't know, but it's a bad thought.
Um, end of asterisk.
Uh, in the first novel, these, uh, four siblings find their way.
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.
Um, uh, one of the it's, it's classic, it's, it's everything a child wants.
Children love going in closets and secret little places.
And the notion that you could go into that secret wardrobe and kind of get lost in the coats.
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.
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?
Um, well, yeah.
So it turns out, um, they, they find their way to this other world called Narnia and, uh, things are not good there.
It's eternal winter.
Uh, there's a witch in charge and the witch is basically banished.
Mild seasons.
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.
Uh, and, and then they go home and no better than that.
They, um, they are rightly celebrated for having liberated Narnia and they proceed to live an entire life there.
They are, they, they don't ever seem to get into sex and kids so much.
It's like they just become older, bigger versions of themselves.
A king and a queen and a prince and a princess or two boys and two girls.
Um, and then one day they go home and they climb out of the wardrobe and it's like one minute later.
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.
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.
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.
If you sit on the sofa long enough and read the entire book, you might experience an entire lifetime.
And then it's like, oops, suddenly you're back in this blah living room and it's time to go to bed.
Um, so that was the first book.
Um, and I don't know if he intended to write seven from the start.
I'm actually not a great student of his biography.
I did see a movie, um, about his late love, uh, played by Deborah Winger.
He was played, I believe by Anthony Hopkins.
Um, it was a pretty good movie.
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.
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.
So very briefly, um, the four Pevensie kids are on a train platform in England.
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.
Um, who knows where they are and they blunder around and they find ruins.
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.
So it's like their game.
Let's see what's up here.
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.
It's been ruined for hundreds of years.
It's completely overgrown.
Um, and, and fall, I mean, there's no roofs.
It's just, it's just rubble and, and cellars and stuff like that.
It starts to dawn on them.
Wait a minute.
We lived here.
This was the, this was our palace.
This must be Caravelle.
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.
We had, we had this amazing, and look at it now.
How can this be?
I mean, it's only a few months later for us and it seems to be like a millennium later here.
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.
So that's the first uncanny moment, uh, in the book.
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.
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.
Now we're ruined, the Coquia Downs.
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.
Um, so I'll just say maybe only one other thing.
Um, well, two other things.
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.
And that is that one of the Pevensie kids, Edmund, is bad.
He, he is sort of split up from the other kids while on that winter time visit to Narnia.
And he finds himself, um, getting entertained by a witch who gives him something which I've tried.
It's a candy that was perhaps still is popular in England, Turkish delight, Turkish delight.
And he loves it.
I've, I've tried it.
It's not good, but you know, there's no accounting for what kids liked.
I liked all sorts of things as a kid myself, weren't good.
Um, anyway, although this, even as a kid, I wouldn't have touched this stuff.
It was, it's kind of white and has little bits of nut in it.
It's just awful.
Um, uh, anyway, and he gets seduced by the endless supply of Turkish delight.
And he basically is asked to betray his siblings.
Um, and he says, can I have more Turkish delight?
And the answer is, well, yes, of course you can.
You can have as much as you want.
If you'll just do me this little favor and get rid of those annoying siblings of yours.
And he goes for it and he's really very bad.
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.
Okay.
This is a troubled kid.
He's going to cause trouble and he's going to be, and nobody likes him.
And, and he's a bully and, and not to be trusted.
And you recognize that right away.
Instead, we're totally in his point of view and it's all making perfect sense.
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.
And you're what, what, what, what Lewis is doing.
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.
They're bad.
Kids are not innocent little creatures.
Kids are full of all sorts of bad stuff.
They're greedy and selfish.
They, they want to have the toy.
They don't want the sibling to have the toy.
They want to have the toy.
Um, and they'll actually go to considerable lengths to get what they want.
I mean, if they're not sociopaths, they will grow out of it, but, um, the kids are bad and they experience real remorse.
It's pop.
And for that, and they also kind of live with this awful sense of how bad they are.
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.
Um, and that was, that was a huge revelation.
There's a little bit of that is actually less of it in Prince Caspian and Prince Caspian.
Uh, what you have instead is three of the siblings behaving kind of badly.
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.
Uh, and she sees the lion.
Well, the lion of course is central to the Narnia books.
That would be Aslan.
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.
They all saw him killed just like some of the people in the Bible.
They saw, yeah, Jesus definitely dead.
No, it turns out maybe he's still alive.
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.
And she tells the others and they say, nah, can't be, you didn't.
She said, no, no, I think I did.
I did.
And so it's, there's this kind of, again, it's about this sort of private life of a child.
She is seeing something that no one else is seeing.
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.
Um, so even though there's not really a bad character, the siblings are bad because they don't listen to their sister.
They probably should listen to her, um, because they know her to be a good kid.
Um, and she's telling him, no, God damn it.
I mean, not God damn it, but you know, gosh, darn it.
I saw, I saw Aslan and he wants us to go this way, not that way.
Um, again, you know, kind of religious, wants us to go this way, not that way.
Christ-like lion, um, saying don't go that, don't do that when you're on the wrong path.
Here's the right path.
It's the youngest, the most innocent child who sees that blah, blah, blah.
You can do all this sort of, um, kind of Christian symbolic, um, symbology off it, but not, not really the point.
The point is again, the private interior, emotional and moral life of a child.
Um, and I, at least as a, as a kid responded to that, I was the youngest people didn't listen to me.
Um, and I also knew I had done bad things and I felt terrible remorse about that.
So all of that is there.
So that's the second thing.
The third thing is when the kids go back and see the ruins of Narnia 1300 years after they were last there.
Yeah.
That's the, that's the year spot on.
That's right.
Yeah.
The first, the first book takes place in the year 1000 to 1015 in Narnia.
The second book, Prince Caspian takes place in the year 2303 in Narnia.
Yeah. I, I not even that suggests a depth of research that I have not
Well you nailed it.
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.
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.
Are you kidding me?
Oh, by the way, yet another thing about the Narnia books, animals talk, um, not all animals, but the talking animals talk.
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.
That's like he hit, he hit every important trope, um, right out of the gate in Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe.
Anyway, there are still a few talking animals in, uh, Narnia, but they've been driven underground.
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.
Um, and they've all basically been persecuted and have had no recourse, but to take refuge deep in the woods.
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.
Um, it is a classic David and Goliath story.
They are the weak, they are the persecuted.
Um, and they also, and there, and there's something very sweet about them and they take care of each other.
Uh, and the rest of the world doesn't like them.
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.
Um, and to this, this idea that there was this, you, there might be other people like you hiding underground in the woods.
Um, that sense of incredible gratitude and discovery when you found somebody else who had the secret of reading the same as you did.
Um, that's really, really hooked me with this book.
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.
That's, that's how the world came to seem to me in my twenties and my thirties.
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.
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.
Um, it, I still feel like I'm with those that, that, that motley crew in the woods, uh, in Prince Caspian.
Wow.
Because they don't match.
That's the thing.
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.
They're all in uniform and they all kind of are drawn the same way.
And then you see the, you know, the table where people are talking about things.
Yeah.
Um, it's just a complete, like there's a rabbit and then there's like a satyr next to the rabbit.
It's just like, that's, that is a picture of what it's like to go to a literary reading.
What's a satyr?
I don't even know what that is.
Satyr has, I think it doesn't, it's a satyr is a, um, is it a goat?
Oh, I see.
Yes.
Right, right, right, right, right.
It's next to the rabbit.
Yeah.
The half goat.
Right, right.
Yes, exactly.
Right.
The dwarf.
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
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.
This is, this is, so I can see why it's formed.
So it sounds like you were like, you said later in junior high.
So I'm guessing you were nine or 10 or so when you read this.
Yeah.
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.
Um, my mother was not particularly approving of reading novels, um, because they were not true.
They were made up.
Um, and I saw a lot of my first reading, I was reading nonfiction.
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.
Oh, they were lies.
They were lies.
She was very disapproving of the idea of my becoming a novelist.
It's like, you're going to lie for a living.
That doesn't sound right.
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.
And I would try to make that case to her.
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.
Um, that, that came from that Midwestern notion of social utility that I definitely got from my parents.
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.
So, um, but I really, I mean, there were, there were really two books in grade school that, um, that I felt formed me.
I could have just as easily chosen Harriet the spy as, as, as a novel that, that shaped me, um, as Prince Caspian.
Um, and there again, uh, different kind of romance, present day romance.
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.
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.
Right.
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.
No, it's like you, you put a kid in trouble, trouble of their own making because they didn't behave well.
Um, and they're not very about it.
Right.
And on happiness is of course, it's not such a much better story.
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.
They were adult in the sense that they were, they had a real nuance to them.
Um, they had a moral dimension and the morality was by no means straightforward.
Wow.
That was unbelievable.
That was such a rich, uh, thoughtful, uh, explanation.
Um, on your point about, about children, I'm reminded of that, you know, no good, very bad, terrible day.
You know, that book that I, the title is just looking for me, you know, that everybody loves going through the day.
Um, lots of things I want to ask you about, about here.
Heroes is one topic, you know, in Narnia in 2303, Prince Caspian is described as noble.
And I guess we have to check where I get the copy from, but this is from online.
I'm from Wikipedia.
He's described as noble, handsome, brave, and Mary.
He strives for fairness and justice at all times and is a devoted King.
My movie tie in cover.
I mean, you know.
Horrible. Don't show that to me again.
Movie, by the way, came out in 2008, $225 million budget and made 420 million at the box office as a side note.
But then the movie cover has this, you know, this white male teen heartthrob with shoulder length, brown hair, chiseled features.
We're talking in 2024.
And I want to ask you, what does a hero look like today?
Oh gosh, we were having a nice conversation.
And then you'd have to go and ask a question like that.
Um, I will say that Prince Caspian is not a very interesting character.
Um, I believe he reappears, uh, as a very old man in the next Narnia novel, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
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.
Um, yes, that's right.
He's deaf and like, and he has an ear trumpet.
This is all just from memory, I haven't,
yeah, no, that's right.
I just, I'm looking at the reading order now.
That's exactly right.
And, uh, we introduce a new Pevensie character, uh, I believe a cousin named Eustace.
And I, the line I remember is him being introduced to old King Caspian and Caspian said, useless.
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,
his titular book.
His titular book, his eponymous book.
Um, I love that word nullity.
He's just a kid.
I mean, probably the only interesting thing about him, um, is that he's, he's arguably corrupted by his professor.
Um, there is a character in Prince Caspian, Dr. Cornelius, who has a bit of the supernatural in his genealogy.
As I recall, he might be part dwarf or elf.
Yeah.
He's half, he's half dwarf.
That's right.
Half dwarf.
Anyway, he's, um, he's been entrusted by the King to educate young Dr. Cornelius.
Exactly.
So like it's, it's every school board's nightmare.
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?
There was an old Narnia.
Things were different there.
There were animals who talked.
Um, and you know what?
I think there might still be a few of them out there.
Um, and it was much better.
People were nicer and more interesting.
This dominant culture that you're being educated to play a part in.
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.
That's sort of a plot thing.
The real issue here is that Cornelius is whispering forbidden knowledge.
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.
Can you like set us up?
Um, and that, uh, so what does a teacher look, what does a hero look like in 2023?
It looks like a teacher in a Florida school teaching forbidden books.
That's what it looks like.
It looks like Dr. Cornelius with a shorter beard.
Why'd you say Florida?
Oh, just because it's governor DeSantis's war on school boards.
Right.
Teaching forbidden books in a Florida school.
Oh, that's, that's nice.
Um, I want to talk to you about movies.
I won't show you the movie cover again.
We've, we've, we agree that it's horrid. Um, but I will say
No offense to the actors, I'm sure they are nice people.
You don't have to, it's okay.
Um, I got in trouble by the way, cause I have values for this show, right?
I really want it to be a values based podcast.
So I have, I have values like, you know, no book shame, no book guilt.
I have values like librarians are doctors of the mind.
And I had one value that I got a lot of flack for Jon, which was real books have real pages.
And I, and then I had, I had a semicolon that said eBooks and audio books are beautiful mutants.
Now people don't like that.
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.
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.
I just have to have a bag full of bulky pulsing.
You know, that's my way of, that's part of me.
That's part of what the show is.
So that's what it is.
Take it or leave it.
No, well I share your preference, but let's not make it into a virtue.
Okay.
Yes.
It's just a preference.
Yes.
Preference, not virtue.
Thank you.
So books as movies.
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.
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.
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.
And so there's this thing that is true.
If I'm honest, I mentioned David Mitchell in chapter 58.
Well, how did I discover David Mitchell?
I went to see this movie I'd never heard of called cloud Atlas.
And it said at the end of it, I was like, who's this guy, David Mitchell.
And it pulled me onto all of his work and I discovered his whole thing.
And then, and I know the movie is like the trigger for like a lot of people into the books.
And I was curious for somebody who sold millions of copies of many books, why you have no movies based on your books.
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.
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.
Like that's a thing in my house, which I take a lot of flack from, from my kids.
I'm trying to make that a preference, not a virtue, but that's the way it is here.
And here's the quote from you.
And it's a, it's, it was, it was a three sentences throughout a long paragraph.
So I'm going to stitch them as if it's one long quote here.
Here we go.
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.
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.
You're going to actually have to be a reader.
Yeah, part of me, but it would be cool to, to see a good adaptation.
It'd be interesting because you know, I'm, I'm the sole creator of my little kingdom of the world of whichever novel.
And I know a lot.
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.
And it's like, you've had me over to your book club.
I am more of an expert in this text than you are.
Would you like me to tell you why, why that is an insupportable interpretation?
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.
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.
So the point was, I have like random access memory for these things I've created.
And in no cases, it taken me less than four years to create it.
And it's only whatever, 500 pages.
So that's a, that's a lot of time per page.
And I know it well.
And it's like, it has no secrets from me.
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.
And that would be cool.
I think too, when you, when you get, when you get additional great artists involved in a project, interesting things can happen.
So I'm not, it's really, yes, I'm a partisan of the novel.
And yes, if my books defeated all attempts to adapt them, I would be secretly rather pleased, but I'm not hostile to adaptation.
So it's a, it's a possibility in the future.
Yeah.
No, they're adaptations are in the work on three different fronts for three books as we, as we speak.
Yeah.
But these are all, these are all limited series.
Yeah.
There's no way you can do a feature film from one of these things.
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.
Oh, okay.
I see.
I understand.
And so, but just philosophically, you know, when my kids say, why don't you let us watch Harry Potter?
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.
And it bothers me that I can't see it anymore as I used to.
And so I want to preserve the, what I think of as a wider imaginative world that you get from reading.
But I know it's an unusual thing that I, you know, force my kids to read.
No, that's fair.
I totally get it.
I, I resisted watching the Lord of the Rings for that reason.
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.
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.
But that was a point when I no longer really cared about preserving my idea of what Aragorn looked like.
And frankly, Viggo Mortensen, pretty good.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Okay.
It does look like Aragorn.
All right.
Your second formative book is of course, The Trial by Franz Kafka.
That's K-A-F-K-A, originally published by Verlag de Schmid.
I'm sure I mispronounced that.
In Berlin in 1925.
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.
The is in about a 30-point all-cap serif font with Trial in about a 120-point font just below.
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.
What's this book about?
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.
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.
Dewey Decimal heads file this one under 833.912 for literature slash German literature slash 1900 to 1945.
Jon, please tell us about your relationship with The Trial by Franz Kafka.
I think I tried to read this book when I was in high school.
I took it out of my library in Webster Groves, Missouri, and I didn't get very far with it.
It needed more paragraph breaks and dialogue.
I was a sci-fi reader, and even though there was a sort of sci-fi premise, it had a kind of futuristic feel.
I wasn't that into it.
Really by accident, I became a German major in college.
Wasn't the language from my family.
We have no German blood.
In my last year of college, I took a course in modern German prose.
One of the important titles we read was The Trial.
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.
We've been reading these other books that were also challenging, but kind of more relatable.
This was about the poor man who's arrested for no reason.
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.
One fine morning.
It was like, okay, yes, yes, yes.
The oppressive modern state and the plight of the everyman who's unjustly persecuted, this reminds us of Stalinist Russia.
It certainly reminds us of excesses of the Nazis.
I just didn't get it.
He writes a beautiful German, and it's also just so weird.
He's in this office building, and he hears something in the closet, and he opens the closet.
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.
He's like, shut that door.
No, thank you.
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.
It's the exact same people, and they're still beating this guy.
It's like, hey, wait a minute.
That's not realistic.
That doesn't work.
It doesn't work.
It's like, oh, it's sort of dreamlike, I guess, but it's boring to hear about people's dreams.
It also doesn't really end.
Kafka never finished it, but basically, it's the story of a man who feels himself to be unjustly accused of a crime.
He doesn't know what the crime is.
He tries to get answers, can't get answers, tries to enlist people to help him.
They're not very helpful.
Then the book kind of trails off, and that's that.
I was like, okay, so I guess this is important world literature.
What do you want me to say?
I said this when the professor asked me in the little seminar.
There are never very many German majors.
That was one of the nice things.
It was only six of us.
This is the greatest professor I ever had.
He was my Dr. Cornelius.
His name was George Avery, senior year at Swarthmore College, 1981.
Actually, fall of 1980, this particular class.
He was very long-winded.
We didn't know he was a great professor.
Many people thought he was the worst professor they'd ever had.
He went into this long thing about, there are three schools of interpretation.
He cited some piece of secondary literature, and it was the policy of mine never to read secondary literature, ever.
It had been on the syllabus, and I, of course, hadn't read it.
He said, there are three universes of interpretation about this book.
One is that Josef K. is innocent of all crimes.
One is that his guilt can't really be determined from the text.
One of them is he's guilty.
I'm like, wait a minute.
No, no.
I was offended.
He's guilty?
Come on.
We all know what this story is.
It's an innocent man unjustly persecuted by this soulless bureaucracy.
He said, yeah, maybe you should take another look at that book.
Maybe you should go back and read it carefully.
I was just trying to find the plot.
You know, Kafka is not great on plot.
I went back and looked at it.
I read the first, I think just the first chapter, paying attention.
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.
All assholes do.
He's super creepy with women.
He's kind of abusive to his landlady.
He's all over the map.
He's out of control.
He's a weird, sick dude.
If you read every sentence, speaks to that fact.
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.
We all go through the world feeling like we're the innocent victim persecuted unjustly.
Okay, so I fell hook, line, and sinker for the third school of interpretation, which is that Josef K. is totally guilty.
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.
But at the time, what it amounted to was, I've read this book, I've read that chapter at least three times.
I read it in high school.
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.
I read this book three times, this chapter at least, three times, and I understood absolutely nothing.
And it was there in plain sight all the time.
If you actually just stepped back and looked at what was happening, you would say, this guy is not behaving well at all.
And that was kind of when the coin dropped for me with what literature can do.
It's hiding in plain sight.
And you can read what you thought was read, and you're not reading at all.
You're not getting it.
You're not seeing it.
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.
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.
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.
And I ran smack into Kafka.
It's like, I don't know anything.
I'm going to have to get serious about this thing called literature.
And those were the weeks, those were the months when I was, I'd always thought it'd be cool to be a writer.
You have lots of free time, and sit around, make stuff up, and you get paid for it, and you become famous.
That sounded great.
I wanted to do that.
But I didn't imagine myself as a literary writer.
I just thought, nice work if you can get it.
And I hope to get it, because I was good with language.
So my ambition as a novelist began when George Avery said, you need to go back and read every sentence.
A lot to learn.
That really was a life-changing book.
I mean, there was, I can really specify that afternoon when George says, you're not getting it.
And I go back to my room, and then I get it.
That was a kind of, that was a revelation.
Yeah.
You're reminding me when I picked up by accident, the annotated version of Lolita.
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.
I was like, wow, like, I would never have noticed all this stuff.
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.
Oh, right.
Yes.
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.
I was no longer just seeing the surface, I was seeing what was going on under the surface.
And my whole family was there.
And I'd been part of that family for 20 plus years.
And suddenly, I could see what was going on.
It was just like all, it was like, I had been seeing in two dimensions.
And now I had 3D vision, I could see it.
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.
And we went to see a stage version of a Christmas carol.
Stepping back, the name of the trial in German is Der Prozess.
And that's a beautifully ambiguous word in German.
It's equivalent to our word process.
And I think you can't speak of a legal process, but we no longer use that word, we use a trial.
And you have to pick one as a translator.
So you're going to call it the trial, but it could just as well be called the process.
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.
was undergoing.
He was getting drawn deeper into his own personal culpability, resisting it.
But things were getting ever more complicated.
The deeper he went, the more complicated things got.
And that maybe this had to do with some of the ways that Kafka's own life had been in process.
Anyway, we went to see a Christmas carol and it blew me away because it was the trial before the trial was written.
It's not bureaucrats who come to arrest Scrooge, it's these ghosts, four ghosts, I think.
And he too, kind of like Josef K., pretty satisfied with himself.
And he goes through this process where it's like layer after layer gets peeled away.
And he's finally left crying.
So it's a very different, it's a 19th century view.
There's not really a lot of ambiguity in Dickens.
He's working with a sort of pre-Freudian notion of what a person is.
Nevertheless, I was really, it was like, oh my God, this is the same story.
Of course it has a happy ending, it being Dickens.
Scrooge recognizes that he has been the world's biggest asshole and he sets out to correct it.
Well, not to spoil anything, but there is an ending of the trial.
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.
What happens to Josef K.?
Just a little spoiler there.
But nevertheless, yeah, that's what I wanted to say about Christmas Carol.
It's interesting that George picked that as one of his three books, because that's the deepest Dickens there is, I think.
Yeah.
Interesting.
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.
Not to put words in his mouth, but that's one part of the conversation I recall.
It really stands out.
It's not like any other Dickens.
Yeah, exactly.
I was blown away when I read it.
I was like, wow, I had no idea this was so good.
Yeah.
And frankly, a much more accessible book than the trial.
And like a hundred pages.
I'm a big believer in this idea of reading two pages of fiction a night.
And the reason I espouse that is to get people back into reading.
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.
I want to talk to you about motivation.
You mentioned about half an hour ago, we were talking about Caspian.
You said Kafka never published this book.
He died at age 40 in obscurity.
He had written chapters in different notebooks.
He asked his friend Max in his will to burn all his books that were not published.
Max didn't.
He stitched it together and published them.
So the question I have around that is just around motivation.
Can you relate to this desire to have written something and wanting it burned, first of all?
What's behind that?
And then how does that go against the feeling to publish and to want it to be out there and to be big?
And then how does your motivation or how has your motivation to write been changing?
Or has it changed?
If it has, since you first started, got published, got big books published, et cetera, over time?
That's a big question.
I can imagine Kafka feeling, I didn't finish that book.
I had some great stuff.
I didn't quite know what to do with it.
He was essentially a writer of fragments.
He did publish a few things.
He published stories and he published, most famously, the Metamorphosis, another unfortunate title translation.
I think transformation would be a more literal translation and probably a better one.
And so he was capable when he knew he had fully realized the project, publishing it.
And I think he felt that none of the novels was he able to get back to and make what he wanted of them.
I think his motivations will forever remain shrouded in mystery.
What exactly he was thinking when he gave that instruction to Brode.
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.
Oh, Max, you should just burn all that stuff.
It makes Max Brode into more of a hero, makes up for his own more or less failed literary career.
Nobody reads Max Brode anymore.
If he was the person who single-handedly rescued Kafka's work.
So we don't really know.
My motivation, yeah, it's changed.
I mean, I wanted to show what I could do.
And I wanted to show my parents that I could actually make a living as a writer.
Those were early motivations.
I also wanted to change the course of American literature, like every 23-year-old does.
I wanted to be famous.
Didn't really expect to make that much money, but I would probably get a good teaching job eventually, at least.
And I also, as we've discussed in this already very long conversation, I wanted to change the world.
I wanted to be socially effective and so forth.
At a certain point, it really became writing just because that's what I am.
I'm a writer.
Coupled with competition, I had a really good friend, David Wallace, who was also very talented.
And I wanted to beat him.
I wanted to crush my opponents, my fellow players on the field of literature.
In the same way, if you're a football player, you want to crush the opponent.
Doesn't mean you hate them.
You shake hands afterwards.
You're good friends.
You're all playing for the same team of the NFL and so forth.
But as we're all playing for the same team of literature, nevertheless, in the course of a game, you want to win.
But that has really...
All of those motivations have fallen away.
Now I just do it for the money.
Well, 90%.
It's nice to get paid.
But I honestly do it now because people are looking for a good book to read.
And I feel like I'm part of a community of readers and writers.
Part of the writer's job in that community is to write good books.
And I would say that's my motivation now.
It's better than having no motivation.
I mean, okay.
I'll mention this, the most important thing, but it's not necessarily a motivation.
Motivation having to do with exterior forces.
I want to write a novel because I'm happy when I'm writing a novel.
It's not a motivation.
It's like I'm alive when I'm writing a novel.
And part of me is just not really alive when I'm not.
It is the story of my life that I've spent most of it not writing novels, therefore not really fully alive.
Wow.
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.
A Jewish merchant class is what it's sort of pegged as.
And it seems to me that staying grounded, connected with people is just so vital as part of being a writer and a novelist.
I have found your ear for dialogue uncannily pitch perfect.
Your books are so sound.
They're a real conversation.
I feel like I'm listening to Ian Fraser in Great Plains.
He transcribes the people he bumps into on the way or David Sedaris and his diary.
It just sounds like it's right there.
And I wonder how you mentioned the money.
Obviously, you've been very successful with your work.
But my question is around, I have a question and I have two comments from you to give you to help, if it helps.
My question is, how do you stay of the people?
How do you carry with you that ear for real dialogue when you, I'm assuming, inevitably become somewhat bubbled?
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.
A professional is too slick.
And a 2015 Financial Times quote, where you said, I am a poor person with money.
Yes, I put in mind of Flannery O'Connor, you can't be any poorer than dead.
And, you know, I'm a human animal who will die soon, just like everybody else.
So there, you know, we keep that in mind.
It's not that hard to remain grounded in some way.
You know, I do feel, to some extent, bubbled and particularly bubbled in my age group.
I did have a young character, some young characters in Purity, which was written not that long ago, 10 years ago.
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.
But I would also note that dialogue is more art than science.
People don't actually speak the way they do in my books.
It's a little magic trick.
There are things you do to give the impression that you're hearing realistic dialogue, but it's actually not the way people talk.
It's a very artful thing.
And yeah, and so it, and being an artful thing, you can make artful fakes and get away with it.
If you, if you can hear the language, a little goes a long way.
Like you hear, and this is a, this is a larger point about being isolated.
It is an isolating job being a writer, spend a lot of time alone, but you don't need that much.
You don't need to be following a hundred feeds.
Two feeds will do, because you're never going to put the whole thing in the book anyway.
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.
So the third and final book is Reason in a Dark Time by Dale Jamieson, J-A-M-I-E-S-O-N.
The subtitle is Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed and What It Means for Our Future.
Published by Oxford University Press in 2014.
The cover has dark stormy clouds over a yellow gray horizon.
The title's in an all caps sans serif font with the letters getting darker as they go down the page.
Dale Jamison's born in Iowa in 1947, and I believe he still teaches environmental studies, philosophy, and law at NYU.
What's the book about?
From the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference, there was a concerted international effort to stop climate change.
And yet, greenhouse gas emissions increased, atmospheric concentrations grew, and global warming became an observable fact of life.
Jamison explains what climate change is, why we have failed to stop it, and why it still matters what we do.
File this one, Dewey Decimal Heads, under 363.738 for social sciences slash social problems slash environmental problems slash pollutants.
Jon, please tell us about your relationship with Reason in a Dark Time by Dale Jamison.
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.
It just came out, Reason in a Dark Time.
And I looked it up, and I said, oh my god, this is going to make me feel really depressed.
I don't want to do that.
Nevertheless, I ordered it, and then it sat on the shelf for six months.
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.
In other words, it's over, baby.
We failed.
I felt it might have had to do with the drought here in Santa Cruz.
We'd had a very dry winter, and it was just oppressively hot, sunny day after oppressively hot, sunny day.
And for whatever reason, I said, okay, I don't want to consider myself a fearful person.
I'm going to pick up this book, and I'm going to read it.
And I did.
And I found it disturbing.
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.
But it was also exhilarating.
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.
And he was doing it in this very, very lovely, almost Buddhist way.
He was basically not judging.
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.
And it was intellectually exhilarating, but it was also, it's like you've spent years clenched with fear about something.
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.
But it's also very liberating, and it kind of eases the soul to just finally let it in and inhabit the awful reality.
And so, yeah, that, and it really set me, so I've had the second career as a nonfiction writer.
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.
And along the way, I'd also become very interested in birds.
I'd become a bird lover, serious birder, and that had led me into conservation.
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.
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.
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.
So I was kind of angry about that.
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.
And I don't necessarily mean the deep Amazon.
I mean the wild nature that I could look out my window and see in that field over there.
It's still happening, and those animals still need our help.
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.
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.
I felt like I really had a mission with that.
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.
Essentially zero to do with my novels.
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.
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.
In that sense, for a single book, I felt I had to mention it.
I wanted to mention it also because I think it's an under-recognized book.
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.
Yeah, yeah, it sounds like this one absolutely did.
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?
Well, so we've known for more than 30 years pretty conclusively that our carbon emissions are changing the global climate.
We are warming the earth.
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.
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.
That's a weird one.
And what Dale's book really sets out to do is explain why that is.
But you asked about what the consequences of these unchecked carbon emissions will be.
I think the climate bureaucracy has a pretty well-established record of underestimating the effects of issuing predictions which are in hindsight rather rosy.
The quick answer is we're making the climate much more unstable.
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.
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.
And this is going to put an enormous amount of stress on what we consider the world order.
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.
What does that world look like?
It doesn't look very good geopolitically.
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.
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.
And so you're going to have pressure on everything that makes the world livable.
You're going to have pressure on agriculture.
You're going to have pressure on trade.
You're going to have pressure on borders, huge pressure on borders.
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.
You see this strong streak of nativism and defensive nationalism arising in various countries in Europe.
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.
So it's not like the world's going to end in fire.
It could still end in nuclear war.
Never discount that possibility.
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.
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.
Sorry, you're not very impressed by the possibility of machines taking over?
No, I'm not terribly worried about that.
Oh, you're not?
No.
Why did I suspect you would be?
No, no.
I don't know.
I liked sci-fi when I was 17.
Okay.
No, that's great.
That's a great, great, great update.
I want to be sensitive of time.
I'm going to give you a choose your own adventure.
I've got five questions.
Here's the five thematic pieces.
You can pick your own.
It's either on collective action, on being small in a big world, on individual action, on navigating forebodingness, or on birds.
Those are the five questions I have for you.
And we'll just do one and then I'll do fast money to finish this off.
Okay.
Individual action.
Okay.
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.
To your point on page 105 of the book, Jamieson writes, climate change poses the world's largest collective action problem.
Each of us acting on our own desires contributes to an outcome that we neither desire nor intend.
Page 145 of the book really stood out to me where he talks about the alliance of small member states.
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.
Like it's them that get hit.
They're going to be swallowed up by the sea.
It's, you know, soon.
So on individual action, the book closes with seven priorities, but the priorities are big.
They're like protecting carbon sinks, full cost energy accounting, raising the price of emitting greenhouse gases.
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?
Well, this is a point that Dale makes and that I have really hammered on myself.
You're riding a bike to work instead of driving.
Change is nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
So we have this global problem and you can feel like, oh yeah, well, I can do my part.
I'll ride a bike to work.
Well, in fact, you might as well not, because if you drive a Hummer to work, it's all the same.
Your contribution is too infinitesimal to have any effect on the larger systems.
And for some, that could be an invitation to just do what you want.
Keep on over-consuming, over-emitting.
That is kind of collectively the choice that the United States has made.
But even at the individual level, it's like, well, it doesn't matter anyway, why not?
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?
And anyway, I'm in Iowa and we're going to be fine.
And yeah, my grandkids will have to figure it out, whatever.
So you could take the futility of individual action as permission to behave however you want.
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.
That is a cousin of the categorical imperative.
And what's more, it's just, yeah.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But even if it weren't a climate action, it's still a good thing to do.
And you actually can make something better.
And you have, in climate change, a situation that nothing you can do could possibly make any better.
Elon Musk personally cannot make it better.
No individual can affect that.
And so you despair and you say, well, God, we're screwed and the world's going to hell.
And you may just shut down or you may even go the opposite direction and drive your Hummer to work.
Or you can say, well, yeah, but the world isn't over yet and I'm not dead yet.
And maybe I can go help somebody, help something, try to make something better.
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.
And that's really what I espouse.
Introduce solvable problems.
Yeah.
Thank you.
This was a wide ranging actually much longer conversation than I expected, Neil.
But I guess I hadn't talked for a while.
Okay.
You're showing me something.
I'm showing you five fast money questions that should take you 30 seconds.
Okay.
Let's close off with hardcover, paperback, audio, or e?
Paperback.
How do you organize your books on your bookshelf?
Pretty randomly, although there is some basic division between fiction and nonfiction.
What is your book lending policy?
I've learned not to expect to get a book back.
Do you have a favorite bookstore, living or dead?
Yes.
Well, I have to mention Bookshop Santa Cruz here in Santa Cruz.
It's not the best bookstore in the world, but it is a great bookstore.
And what's one final hard fought piece of wisdom or advice you might share it with aspiring novelists?
Take a hard look at every sentence, shake it, shake it again.
I guarantee you it can't be better.
Jonathan Franzen, thank you so much for coming on 3 Books.
This has been a real joy.
I'm really grateful to you.
Thank you so much.
My pleasure.
Nice talking to you, Neil.
Hey, everybody.
It's just me, just Neil again, hanging out in my basement, listening back to the wonderful conversation we just had with Jon Franzen.
Slow, peaceful, thoughtful, introspective, deep, like a rich, creamy dessert that you don't want to end.
I felt like I could have talked to Jon all day for many days.
I had piles and piles of questions I didn't even get to because I had so much I wanted to ask him.
But there's so many quotes that jump out of the conversation.
Did you write some down?
I wrote some down.
I highlighted some.
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.
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.
But just the way he said that, I share your preference, but let's not make it into a virtue.
How about this one when he said, it is a luxury to engage with things in a complicated way.
I can relate to that feeling so much.
I forget that too.
I'm like, here we are having deep, rich, long form conversations with novelists.
We get to do that.
It's a luxury to be able to engage with things in a complicated way.
I like also the humility baked into that quote.
There is a gentleness around people that just might want to relax and read a Garfield or read whatever.
There's no judgment on that.
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.
I like this quote.
What does a hero look like in 2023?
It looks like a teacher in Florida teaching forbidden books.
I like the small scale approach.
The world just feels so big.
If you read the big newspapers, of course, they start to talk about global issues above everything else.
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.
Teaching a forbidden book, I guess, in Florida was a wonderful way to talk about what a hero looks like today.
How about this one?
Anything you can do to make the world a kinder and more stable place is a climate action.
I love that.
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.
But coming fast, we're already seeing plastic islands in the sea.
It seems to me like you can't predict the weather anymore.
Even the hourly forecast now with that level of detail in the morning, it's totally wildly unpredictable.
Climate change is just discombobulating the earth.
Anything we can do to make the world a kinder and more stable place, that's a climate action.
Then when I asked him about staying grounded, I just like the way he phrased it.
I'm a human animal who will die soon like everyone else.
You keep that in mind and it's not hard to stay grounded.
That's true.
It's not hard to stay grounded if you keep that in mind.
However, it is hard to keep that in mind.
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.
This comes back to the stoic principle of memento mori.
I share a fondness for On the Shortness of Life by Seneca.
Some people like Tim Ferriss keep skulls around their house as a daily remembrance of death.
Feel its proximity so you don't fear its proximity.
Those are five quotes.
I usually do three, but those quotes jumped out to me from Jon Franzen.
You know what?
Big thanks to him for adding three more books to our top 1,000, including number 601, Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis.
All right, we now have two C.S. Lewis books on the top 1,000, including The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Number 600, The Trial by Franz Kafka, K-A-F-K-A.
That is the first Kafka book we have on here.
A nice bingo there on number 600.
And then finally, number 599, we're getting close to the halfway point.
I won't say close, we're getting closer.
Reason in a Dark Time by Dale Jamieson.
I read and enjoyed all three of these books.
Sometimes I get a phone call saying, you didn't tell us what you thought of the books, Neil.
I actually loved all three of these books.
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.
I had no idea that Josef was a bit of a dick.
You couldn't pick that up as easily as he made it sound.
I know his professor and teacher was teaching him that, but there's a lot of dynamics there.
Same thing when I read Lolita by Nabokov.
I was lucky to pick up the annotated version.
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.
And that is just the way I want to read.
I need somebody over my shoulder to help me.
So huge thanks to Jon Franzen for coming on 3 Books.
It was a delightful conversation.
I hope you all enjoyed it.
All right.
Are you still here?
Did you make it past the three second pause?
If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club.
One of three clubs that we have for 3 Books listeners, i.e. three bookers, including the cover to cover club.
That's anybody who attempts to listen to all 333 chapters of the show.
Email me if you want your name added to the list on our website.
We're starting to slowly add to that.
And number two, and that was number two.
Number three is the secret club members.
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.
Our phone number is 1 8 3 3.
Read a lot.
Yes, it is a real number.
Let's start off as we always do by kicking off and going to the phones.
This is Emily here.
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.
My walk to work is basically a 40 minute walk along the harbour.
Um, the water is sometimes super clear and you can see schools of fishes.
Um, the hills envelope the harbour and the further back ones are kind of muted.
The clouds often hang low over the hills and the way that the light illuminates the clouds in the evening is incredibly beautiful.
Um, your podcast is great and a couple of things stand out for me.
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.
Um, but I would like to kind of engage with that more.
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.
Keep doing what you're doing and thank you so much.
Oh, thank you so much to Emily from Wellington, New Zealand for calling 1-833-READALOT.
Actually, I got an email from Emily saying I couldn't get 1-833-READALOT to work.
So here's a voice note that I'm emailing to you.
You can always do that.
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.
Um, then feel free to send me a voice note.
So lots of stuff to respond there.
Uh, in an era of infinite choice, the value of curation skyrockets.
One of the principles underpinning the show is that there's just too many books to read.
Jon said it himself, right?
There's just way too many books to read.
I'll never get there.
And so what is one way we can come up with to curate a pile of books?
Well, ask 333 inspiring people which three books most changed their life and hopefully we'll get some great ones there.
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.
A good jumping off point.
If you're looking for reading material, there's a little number besides you can see who picked it as well.
And then I like that point on the graveyard book by Neil Gaiman being a formative to you because it scared you so much.
I, I read the dark half by Stephen King in seventh grade.
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.
So thank you so much, Emily.
And we will add your name to the cover to cover club list for sure.
And thanks for the confidence about chapter one.
All right.
And now let's head over to the letter of the chapter.
And this chapter's letter comes from Ketan Dedhiya.
Hope I said your name, right?
Hi, Neil.
This is a message due from my end for a long time.
I'm a cover to cover listener of your podcast 3 Books.
And before your podcast, I came across your TED talk, three days of awesome.
I even listened to it today when I needed to lift myself up.
I came across your podcast in the summer of 2020, when my world was going through a lot.
And personally, I was trying to find answers after my mother's passing the previous year with renewed inspiration from your podcast.
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.
And we bought many books only to read, but to share with others as well.
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.
Earlier this week, I got an opportunity to attend two conferences in Las Vegas.
And they mentioned the conferences a few years back when I intended HR tech conferences for the first time, I was reserved.
I wasn't interacting with people much, but this time I started conversing with people with no hesitation.
I had a really good conversation, not only from my industry, but even other industries.
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.
I had a good conversation with her later the next day and learn different things.
On Friday, I strike to conversation with the person while leaving one of the sessions.
And we ended up talking for more than an hour and a half.
We found a lot of common connections.
He was very gentle with his time, answer many questions I had about his work.
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.
I couldn't let him go without mentioning 3 Books as well.
I believe your podcast talks, books, and my reading habit, which found new life with your resources and my meditation practice as well.
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.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
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?
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.
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.
From Ketan Dedhiya.
Oh my gosh, what a cool idea.
It sounds like an art exhibition.
You can go in, you can't talk to anybody, but you're surrounded by books, right?
There's that old Borges quote, I cannot sleep unless I'm surrounded by books.
I like that idea.
I love the feeling of reading together.
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.
I want to know what they're reading.
I find them interesting.
I find them more interesting.
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.
It's so beautiful to do that.
Books let us do that.
3 Books is a reminder and a passageway for us to keep finding stories that resonate with us.
A wonderful letter.
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.
We're almost done here now.
We've got a letter.
We've played a voicemail.
We've talked about some favorite quotes.
Now let's finish off by going back to Mr. Jon Franzen for a word cloud of the best words used in this chapter.
Let's pick one out and make it our word of the chapter.
Here we go.
25 years of itinerant borrowing is abhorrent to any Narnia fan.
Discursive account.
Satyr, next to the rabbit.
It's kind of a nullity eponymous book.
They're too multivalent.
Streak of nativism is what I espouse.
Oh boy.
There are a lot of incredible, interesting words to choose from.
Of course, from Jon Franzen, we're going to get a lot of beauties.
Satyr was one of them that I had written down that I was thinking about.
Eponymous, I loved.
I also really love nullity.
Nullity.
N-U-L-L-I-T-Y.
Why don't we make that the word of the chapter?
Definition with Merriam-Webster is the quality or state of being null, especially a legal invalidity.
1B is nothingness, insignificance, a non-entity to a one or a person that is null.
This is a really interesting word.
I like the way it's described.
It sounds so insulting, but in a funny way.
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.
Legal scholars also use the word.
A law passed by a legislature may be called a nullity.
If, for example, it's so obviously unconstitutional, it's going to be shot down by the courts.
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.
Nullity first appeared in 1543.
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.
It was a treat and a pleasure to share space with you and with Mr. Jonathan Franzen in this chapter of 3 Books.
I hope you enjoyed the conversation.
And until the next full moon, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read.
Keep turning that page, everybody, and I'll talk to you soon.
Take care.