Today I’m joined by two readers to discuss what it means to be well-read these days, what that phrase even means, and why it’s a concept worth exploring.
Rebecca Schinsky and Jeff O’Neal of the Book Riot podcast Zero to Well-Read are my guests today. Together we’ll dive into this conversation, exploring how each of us thinks about what it means to be well-read, and how our personal working definitions have evolved over the years.
The reading life is a journey, and today’s conversation goes beyond what being well-read and reading well means: it also explores the ways that deciding what well-read means to you can help you cultivate readerly satisfaction, combat distraction, and even build community.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on what it means to read well or be well-read: please share a comment below.
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REBECCA SCHINSKY: Now we're committed to the metaphor, Anne.
JEFF O'NEAL: I'm the [panelist?] out of it. I'm working on something. You guys keep going. I'll figure this out.
ANNE BOGEL: Okay, we're just whiteboarding this as we go.
Hey readers, I'm Anne Bogel, and this is What Should I Read Next?. Welcome to the show that's dedicated to answering the question that plagues every reader, what should I read next? We don't get bossy on this show. What we will do here is give you the information you need to choose your next read.
Today, I'm joined by two readers to discuss what it means to be well-read these days. Is that even a thing, what that phrase might mean, what the idea brings to our own reading lives and why it's worth exploring.
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Readers, today I'm joined in conversation by Rebecca Schinsky and Jeff O'Neal of the Book Riot Podcast: Zero to Well-Read, as we take a deep dive into what that phrase means. This is a topic I've been thinking about a lot in recent years, and I'm thrilled to host this conversation today.
[00:02:34] After hearing a bit about Rebecca, Jeff, and their respective reading lives, we explore how each of us thinks about what it means to be well-read and how our personal working definitions have evolved through the years. We reflect on the idea of literature as an ongoing conversation, what it means to feel at home in that world of literature, and how reading well and being well-read are related but distinct concepts. Plus, we share plenty of favorite titles along the way.
The reading life is a journey, and one I would say almost all of us here are on together. We're not just talking about what being well-read and reading well means to us or what they mean abstractly, but also about how deciding what well-read means to you and what kind of vision you have for your own reading life can help you cultivate readerly satisfaction, combat distraction, choose what to read next, and even build community. This is a great conversation with something for every reader. Let's get to it.
Jeff and Rebecca, welcome to the show.
REBECCA: Thanks so much for having us.
JEFF: Thank you for having us, Anne.
[00:03:37] ANNE: Oh, the pleasure is mine. Thanks for coming on. The idea of being well-read is a concept that we love to talk about in our community, and I've been thinking about a lot lately, so I'm so excited to have this conversation with you all today. I'm sure some of our audience members are regular listeners of yours, but others are meeting you for the first time, so would you just give us a little glimpse of who you are? We do this with all our guests. Rebecca, start us off.
REBECCA: Sure. I'm Rebecca Schinsky. I'm the chief of staff at Book Riot. Jeff and I have been hosting the Book Riot podcast together for 14 years, I believe, where we talk about news in the world of books and reading, and just a little bit over a year ago, we launched Zero to Well-Read, which we're here to talk about with you today.
My background was originally I intended to be a psychologist, but I dropped out of grad school and became a bookseller just at the right time, and around 2008, I started a book blog, which is how I eventually met Jeff online in the days when Twitter was actually good.
ANNE: Oh, when Twitter was good.
[00:04:34] REBECCA: It was a beautiful and brief time.
JEFF: That's how old we are, Rebecca. That's how long we've been doing this, Anne, is when Twitter was good.
ANNE: And I told my mom I was going to meet somebody I'd met on Twitter, and she was afraid I was going to get murdered.
REBECCA: Totally remember that.
ANNE: But it was good then.
JEFF: It was good.
REBECCA: It was good. We met in person for the first time at a Book Expo America, back also when that was a thing, before BookCon.
ANNE: What year was I there? Did I pass you in the hallway?
REBECCA: 2010, I believe. I think it was the spring of 2010.
ANNE: I think 2015 was the first year I went.
REBECCA: Book Riot launched in 2011, so we've been working together ever since, talking about what's happening in the world of books and reading, new releases, recommendations, all the things that we're passionate about. Book Riot tries to cover all of the areas of the reading world, so you get the literary fiction, but also all the genres, categories, young adult, all that good stuff.
So I'm mostly a literary fiction reader. I read a lot of also narrative nonfiction. I love a memoir, celebrity memoirs, great memoirs by people you've never heard of, the whole gamut. That's me.
ANNE: All right, Jeff, tell us about yourself.
[00:05:36] JEFF: I'm an old academic by trade, believe it or not, a long time ago. I started my book blog in 2010 largely so I could write about books in a way that wasn't happening in my formal education, colloquially and with a certain passion and personality and individuality that I was really missing. I met Rebecca and a bunch of other people and was looking to get out of academia, frankly. And my friend Clint Cabler had been reading both of our blogs. I had been writing every year to my friends and family at 10 books to read from this year, as a Christmas card. And Clint and I met in college, and he had been reading the books that I was recommending every year, including Bolaño's 2666, which he won't let me let down.
REBECCA: You will never live that down.
JEFF: I'm never going to live that down. So I started writing that blog, met some other people. Clint was coming off another gig, and he's like, "You know, what if we got some of these people together and put them under one banner?" Because there's a different kind of energy around book blogging. It's hard to remember now in this era, but it was the New York Times and book review sections in 2010 to 2011.
[00:06:38] And people weren't taking romance seriously in the way they're taking it now, or a young adult or even popular fiction of that time. And we did. So we gave ourselves six months to see if it was a thing, and it's become Book Riot state and became a thing.
At those old days, we had, what, three to five posts on the site. Rebecca, and I was writing two to four of them in any given day between my teaching gigs and having two young children. But eventually it gained steam, and I could slough off the teaching that I was doing and take it on full time. So it's been terrific. So it's been a real thrill. And I'm grateful to Rebecca and everyone that's been with us for a long time. We've had readers who have been there since the very beginning.
This particular show, to segue, is something I think Rebecca and I have been germinating on for a while, where there's all kinds of readers, but the core of what someone thinks about when they think about reading is the great books. And we can talk about what the great books are, aren't or should or should not be. But people want to know what they are, want to have read them, or want to have some experience with them. And yet there are so many, and it can feel so daunting. Why is today the day I'm going to pick up Dostoyevsky? Today, literally today, why would I go pick up Dostoyevsky even if I wanted to?
[00:07:43] One thing Rebecca and I found, too, is we like talking to each other about books. We do book clubs on individual, more contemporary fiction on the regular show, kind of as a one-off. But we had this feeling that there was something there for a longer-form show — our shows are about 90 minutes, typically — that is for all kinds of readers, whether you've read the book recently or you're never going to read the book but you know something about it that's entertaining and educational. But it's also about ideas, it's interpretive at the same time.
So you're going to know a little something about Cormac McCarthy or you're going to know something about Toni Morrison in the course of the show and what that book is about in the publication history. But then you'll get into part English class, part book club, I believe is the phrase Rebecca came up with that we use a lot of the time because people do want to have that kind of experience around a book that can sustain that kind of a conversation, but they don't have time to take a community college class. Their book club may not pick up these kind of books unless you find yourself in a classics or great books kind of a situation.
[00:08:45] We don't limit it to just great books. We're talking about contemporary things, things that maybe were influential in their own way. I picked up Twilight for the first time in the course of this so that we could talk about the Twilight phenomenon as part of our reading. But people want to be... they want to strive towards the thing they understand to be well-read. I know we're going to talk about that contract there today. But I found too that in our algorithmic-driven universe there's something really cool about reading something that's not trending and talking about it in a long-form way that's not amenable to getting sliced up into 30 or 60-second bits.
REBECCA: I think the timing has been really important for us. That we were feeling it individually and we were hearing it from readers, from book people. That they were feeling like their attention spans were fragmented. They were having a hard time connecting deeply to books. They wanted to be doing less scrolling. They wanted to be reading deeply. And we wanted to respond to that. And frankly, we wanted to give it to ourselves an excuse to really sink deeply into books, either books that we had loved a long time, books that one of us has loved and the other one has never read, books that we've been wanting to approach but we're just never going to have the excuse in our busy personal and professional lives to get to. But it felt like the right moment for exploring this kind of reading together.
[00:10:04] ANNE: I'm chuckling because from where I sit, I well understand how the work you're doing publicly really impacts the way you read privately.
REBECCA: Yes, I bet you do, Anne.
ANNE: Jeff, you use the word striving and thinking about reading a certain kind of books. But first I want to get more of a... I don't know if it's a starting point or a baseline exactly, is a vital information for the composite picture of Jeff and Rebecca as individuals, as readers. On What Should I Read Next? We are always asking our guests to share three books they love. Without explanation, without qualification, not necessarily the top three, but three books you love for your own reasons. And I'd love to hear y’all’s. Who wants to go first?
REBECCA: Just the list, not a lot of-
ANNE: Tell us a little bit. Tell us three sentences about each.
JEFF: This is the hardest thing I've ever been asked, Anne, just to say the books and say nothing about them. Didn't you just hear what we were doing on Zero to...? Okay, I got you.
[00:10:58] ANNE: Well, see what I tell myself to make myself feel better when I have to answer a question like this is the answer could be different tomorrow or next month or actually 20 minutes from now. It could be different after you got hungry or had a snack or went for a run or I don't know, had a good night's sleep. Looked at your bookshelves and were reminded of something.
REBECCA: I've made this list like seven times over the last 24 hours since you told us you were going to ask us this today. And I was like, should it be faves? Should it be things I loved recently that were surprising to me? And I think I'm going to go that route. Jeff and I are on the record in so many places about our longtime favorites that I love to be surprised by a book.
I think three that really did that for me in the last few years were The Fraud by Zadie Smith. I almost didn't read it because the pitch really put me off. And thank goodness that Jeff sent me a text that was basically like, "Bro, don't miss this." And we read it, we book clubbed it together.
[00:11:58] Matrix by Lauren Groff. I love Lauren Groff, but I was like, "I don't know, nuns in the 13th century?" Groff tends to write in, or had been tending to write in really contemporary moments. And I'm so glad that I picked that up. I thought it was the beginning of a new era and a very exciting era of Lauren Groff.
And The Road by Cormac McCarthy was recently my most surprising and reading experience of the last several years. I had never read it. We just read it together for Zero to Well-Read. And the gap between what I expected the book to be and what it actually was and how much it moved me was just... there was an ocean of difference between my expectations and what the book turned out to be. And there's almost nothing better in a reading life, I think, than that kind of discovery.
JEFF: I'm going to go... there's so many, as you could say, but these maybe are more specific and revealing about me. I'll go with something that I first read when it was out of print because I was actually reading the wrong book, Anne.
REBECCA: You gotta tell them this story.
ANNE: You gotta tell us what happened.
[00:13:01] JEFF: Rebecca knows which book. It's The Orchard by Adele Crockett Robertson. It's a memoir written by Adele Crockett Robertson who was managing her family's apple orchard during the Depression. She was actually working as a young journalist when her father became ill, and the family apple orchard maybe was going to fall out of the family. So she leaves her job, I believe it was in Boston, moves up back to the family farm in Maine, and tries to make a go of running an apple orchard. So I love a memoir about a job. That's something I just really enjoy. It's one of the great ways of finding out about the world is to someone who can write a sentence and then also tell you about how the thing is done.
But there's a meta story around it too where she wrote this thing and then put it under her bed. And not until she died did her daughter discover this whole story and the manuscript. So then she published it later ex post facto. Holt was the original publisher. Then it went out of print for a while and now it's back in print. I'm thrilled to say, but you can find it wherever you can get used books. You can find a new one too if you're out there looking for it.
[00:14:01] I don't know if there's an audio. We talked about this with you before, Anne, that I love a memoir on audio specifically. I did this in print. I love the story. I thought it was beautiful writing in a really tender story, and I love the meta story about it. I like a meta story. I like a book about reading. I like to know things about the people. So that one's fascinating too.
The book that I was probably the most blown away by the last few years is Solito by Javier Zamora, which is his chronicle of migrating from South America to the U.S. as I believe eight or nine. Do you guys remember? He was eight or nine years old.
REBECCA: He was really young.
JEFF: Really young.
REBECCA: Before teenage years, for sure.
JEFF: Yeah, before teenage years. And he grew up to become a poet, and this was his memoir of that time. Told with a beautiful unadornment where he really lets the bare experience of the story tell the story. A remarkable restraint for a poet, though I guess one thing poetry is about is restraint to some degree. But I think about that book a lot. I've recommended it a lot.
[00:15:07] And then Rebecca's also heard it, and listeners of our show have heard me say my pick for the book of the 20th century in America at least is Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. It does all the things to use a contemporary description. It is a synthesis of his own life's work. His own backstory about it is fascinating. But the story of a young Black man trying to make in his world. It's a bildungsroman. It's a roman à clef. It's a satire. It's a parody. It's a horror movie. It's social satire. It's a political novel and it's avant-garde art writing all right into one. It is the American odyssey/inferno that really is delving into the great American political question of: how do we think about race and how do we deal with it?
Someday we'll get to it on Zero to Well-Read. We really have to eat our Wheaties because I find it so difficult... I feel like I'm ever doing it justice even in talking about it for 30 seconds. So those are my three.
ANNE: All right, you thought that was a difficult question, but I would love to hear, why do you read? When you pick up a book, what are you looking for? And not looking for an exhaustive answer, but just give us a glimpse of what you find in books and reading that you don't find elsewhere or that you want more of from your books and reading.
JEFF: I'll go first.
[00:16:17] REBECCA: We're just going to stare each other down until one of us goes first.
JEFF: I think one of the reasons we've podcasted together for so long is I think we're looking for a similar thing so maybe we can improvise and go back and forth here a little bit. But the world is so rich, Anne. It's a big world out there, but it's difficult to experience much of it, any of it, even if you're a big traveler like Rebecca is. And even if you do, the interior of other people's lives is largely inaccessible to you, even for people you know quite well.
To my mind, there is no art form like books for getting inside the interior of another person. We just don't have access to it in any different kind of way. So that when you read, you are really doing emotional education, as Susan Sontag described reading. You are getting a sense of how other people think and feel even if there's fictional because even that fictionality is, to use Alison's phrase, it's transmuted through the alembic of the writer's genius into something that we can understand.
[00:17:13] It's kinda like Neo plugging that thing into the back of his head in the Matrix and learning how to be a helicopter pilot. That's the closest we have. I could never be an orchard keeper during the Great Depression. But if I read a really good memoir about it, I sort of was maybe for a little while or as close as I'm ever going to get. And I find that to be as rich of a way of encountering the world as is available to us here on this mortal coil. So that's me.
REBECCA: I think similarly for me. Obviously, everyone who reads reads for multiple reasons. There are moments in my reading life that are about entertainment. There are moments that are about escape. But it's mostly I want something new and alive and transcendent. Like Jeff is talking about, a book that gives me a new lens on the world or on what it means to be a person on the varieties of experience and how we relate to and understand each other, and those moments of... I keep describing them to Jeff on the show lately. It's like, well, I just want to lean back and throw my hands in the air, be like, Art. You know, where you read something that is so moving that you can't believe that someone was able to actually put words to that part of the human experience or to capture this feeling that you've had that you could never articulate, but you thought maybe you were the only one who felt that way or thought that way, but an author is able to articulate it. That both reflection of the experience and the opening of the lens to... there are so many other ways that people are in the world and so many experiences.
[00:18:52] And I think also just the consistency of the human experience has been really validating to read as we've done this show and gone back into great books from hundreds and hundreds of years ago to be like, oh, we've been worried about the same things. People are always worried about the same things. And it's, can I connect? Do other people understand me? Am I good? And will my life have had meaning? And that those through lines are in almost every work of art, but that they come across... they can be expressed in so many different ways is really exciting to me.
ANNE: I'm jotting down how I love books that both express how I know it to be in the world, but also help me discover what it could be like to be in the world or what it's like for other people. So we have the idea of well-read lingering out there on the horizon and your show is called Zero to Well-Read. And I want to talk about both those elements, the zero and also the well-read.
[00:19:50] One of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you all is in our spaces, like What Should I Read Next?, Modern Mrs Darcy Book Club, on the blog, so many of us are clearly captivated by: what does it mean? Is it true today? What does it look like? Am I well-read? How can I be well? When I say I'm well-read, what am I even saying? And there's so much to discuss there and discover, but I'd love to know what do you find interesting about this idea? What makes you think, yes, let's talk about that for hundreds of hours on a podcast for years.
JEFF: I think for me... maybe a little bit origin story about the idea for the show that goes back to, I wrote this post a while ago and it did really well on the site. And I think it was called Zero to Well-Read, Rebecca. Is that what it was called, the actual post?
REBECCA: It was Zero to Well-Read in a Hundred Books. And I think the setup was you could be like an alien who landed here.
[00:20:43] JEFF: If they came down today and they wanted to be well-read, and they could only read a hundred books, here are the books. These would be my picks. This is not definitive. I'm just one person. But that was the thought exercise. I think inherent in that, you can see the tensions within the idea of Zero to Well-Read or the idea of being well-read because a hundred... some people would say that's way too many and some people are going to say you're not even starting. Right? So I think the breadth of people's own definitions of it is part of the game.
I'd also like to distinguish, if I can, between being well-read and reading well. I think those are connected, but maybe distinct kinds of ideas. If you have never read a book at all, let's say you're starting to, you are this alien who happens to know English or it's something that can be translated into the language you speak from world literature, you're not going to be well-read. But you can start reading well today.
[00:21:31] And that's one thing Rebecca and I are trying to do for ourselves and maybe model a little bit is what does it mean to read well? Because that's the yellow brick road to this mythical Oz of being well-read is to read well, to read with attention, to know something about literary history, to know something about the author, to have some felicity with understanding how literature can work, what to look for, to pay close attention to specifics, to also look at themes.
I think you can probably get a primer in how to read a book and start reading better, and reading well in an hour or two wouldn't take that much time. So that's not the problem. The problem is doing it while you're actually reading, right? How are you approaching these books you're reading?
There are certain kinds of books that we read because we're trying to pass 90 minutes waiting for a plane. That's a great use of books, wonderful use of books. That's not what I'm looking for most of the time for me. And you can get that feeling Rebecca had of throwing your head back and saying, "All right, and that's wonderful." But also, I think you want to take some of that with you to understand that something like what went into it, because it's not magic, believe it or not. There's this "books are magic" thing, which I understand why people say that, but this is the work of humans trying to make something for other humans in a long line of people making things for other humans.
[00:22:41] And having some sense of that history helps you understand and get more out of. And that's the ultimate goal for me. It's not that you're ticking off some box at your A-levels at Oxford. It's that you yourself are getting more out of your reading experience. And whatever that more looks like can be different.
And if you're the kind of reader that I am and Rebecca is, and it sounds like you are at least some of the time, and you can tell me if I'm wrong, is you want to feel connected to the great big whatever, right? And that is enriched by knowing how the thing is made, and what in that sequence of words you're reading one after another contributes to the making of that thing.
I think it's actually a bit flipping rather than a specific series of practices to try to read well. I don't think you're going to go a checklist, like check your oil, check your temperature gauge, all that. It's more of a "I'm going to read with a different kind of eye where I'm interested in looking at this specifically, looking at details and seeing how they comprise the whole and what it does to me and what my reaction to them are". So that's reading well. I guess maybe I'll throw it to Rebecca to talk about the latent anxiety people have about-
[00:23:41] REBECCA: We hear about this from several angles. And for me personally, what's interesting about the idea of well-read is very much that it's a journey and not a destination. Even the title of the show is kind of a joke because there's never a day that the trophy descends from the heavens and they're like, "Jeff O'Neill, you've done it. Now you're well read. The race is over." Someday, maybe on the next anniversary of the show, I'll send you a trophy.
And there's this, I guess to pull Jeff's word from earlier, striving is, I think, part of it for some people. For me, what's interesting is seeing the ways that the great books are connected to each other and the iterations of literature over time. That everyone refers to the Greeks. Everybody refers to Shakespeare. When you pick up The Secret History by Donna Tartt, which is only like 30 years old, not even 30 years old, she's referring to everybody. And that book is the OG of dark academia. It's not a big, classic, super difficult work. But that, quote unquote, serious literature builds on itself and that the writers are in conversation with each other.
[00:24:56] Toni Morrison was in conversation with Faulkner. Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright are in conversation with each other. Hemingway and Fitzgerald are in conversation with each other. A lot of people writing today are in conversation with those guys. And it enriches the reading experience to pick up those references and to see the scaffolding behind everything.
The anxiety that we hear from readers is that, what if I go to a cocktail party someday and people want to know my take on Dostoyevsky? This is the joke we make. That doesn't really exist, but people feel that way. Or that in the comics world, they would joke about it as "name five Robins". It's like, "Oh, you're into comics, name five of the Robins." These tests don't really exist, but readers feel like they do. And we want to help fill in those gaps for people. You want to understand why this book was a big deal or why it's important.
But we also get messages from the flip side of people who are like, "Well-read isn't a thing. And anybody who cares about it is a total snob." I think that that comes from this literary insecurity that you're talking about as well. There's not a moral valence to reading the great books that I spent last week reading, I don't know, East of Eden. It doesn't make me a better person than someone who has been reading popular hits or who reads a lot of genres.
[00:26:16] But there is a social commentary that people ascribe to the idea of being well-read. And they think that maybe if you care about being well-read, you're inherently judging their reading choices. And we are actively working against that. Read whatever you want. You don't have to care about being well-read in our definition of it.
And there are many areas of the reading world where we're not well-read. Neither of us is an expert on science fiction or fantasy or horror. There are many corners where we are... actually we are conversant in a couple of corners. We are not conversant in most of the corners. And I think that's true for anyone, anybody who has their pockets of reading interest, even any experts, that we're trying to say, "Okay, so if you're interested in reading in this particular way, we want to talk about the great books, but we also want to help you be conversant in pop culture phenomena."
[00:27:07] Like Jeff was saying, we've covered Twilight. Right now we're reading The Shining by Stephen King. We will do some of those big pop culture hits that have been important to readers along the way. That's part of being conversant in the literary landscape as well.
ANNE: Now, I've heard you say great books a couple of times. I hate to ask this question, but we have to, as a point for conversation. And readers, I just want to say, I hear from a lot of you that you want to know definitions of things and how they work. And there are no answers from the sky, from on high for so many of these questions. But there are interesting topics where we can define things as a starting point to discuss them.
So I'd love to hear y'all's working definition of what it means to be well-read. And in our conversations, among the readers I know and my team and even y'alls, because I was on Jeff and Rebecca's podcast, we'll make sure that you have links to each show available to you, I've been thinking about the idea of well-read ever since, and I've realized how much my own working definition has really altered, has evolved in the past 10 or so years. But what is your working definition of well-read right now?
[00:28:16] REBECCA: I think it's some combination of familiarity with the classic canon, the kind of English class staples. Plus, for us, the Book Riot philosophy that that old canon that's mostly dead white guys, we support those books. We're interested in those. They're important to the history of literature, and they're not the only thing. So how do we update the canon with representation of a variety of voices, familiarity with more contemporary kinds of stories, and that being conversant with big contemporary pop culture hits. Like understanding what's important in the world of books and reading, why the world turns as it does, and being conversant and familiar with the hits of the past as part of that.
When Jeff talked about that post that he had written of Zero to Well-Read in 100 Books, this podcast is kind of a melding of that idea that he had. And I had been nurturing this long, but kinda simmering on this idea for a long time of something around the modern canon and what would be 21st century books that would help you become well read and that trouble the idea of the traditional canon that bring in more voices. We're both interested in that.
[00:29:31] But the idea for the show clicked when we realized that we should merge those two things, merge the caring about classics and the books that have defined literary history with an equal interest in more contemporary and a more diversified reading landscape.
JEFF: That initial list did include... I think it had Fifty Shades of Grey on it, for that reason.
REBECCA: It did. People were mad.
JEFF: And I think this is important to say, too, is that we're not making policy here. We're not really making an argument for what you believe as being well-read should be. This is really a descriptive one of what we're trying to do, and what we're interested in, and that includes, I think, probably a more traditional idea of well-read, which is sort of Oedipus, you know, Homer to... Oh, Morrison maybe, you know? Like you sort of stop somewhere in there.
[00:30:21] But I am interested in understanding what actual readers are doing now, sort of almost anthropologically. So Rebecca and I, on the main show and personally, will take on, you know, I read Theo of Golden. Not my favorite book in the world, but I wanted to know what was going on with Theo of Golden because I find that interesting.
And that will change. Every year we have a different list of like, okay, here's a couple, just have a sense of what people are reading and caring about what's going on. But for me to be well-read, I do have, you know, probably the stuff you've heard of. Like, what you imagine would be on my list is on my list. It's Shakespeare, it's Homer, it's Virginia Woolf, it's Jane Austen, it's Sophocles. I'm an Americanist by trade, so it's more into the present and into the future, into the contemporary.
And I think Rebecca and I also are really interested in doing a little prognostication about what books are coming out now or what writers are working now that may survive the slaughterhouse that is time when it comes to culture. Most of the things die. Most of the things will not survive.
REBECCA: Almost everything.
[00:31:21] JEFF: Almost everything doesn't survive in terms of people caring about it. But some of it does. Is that going to be Ishiguro? Is that going to be Jesmyn Ward? Is it going to be Murakami? Is it going to be Sarah J. Maas? You know, we don't know, but we find that very interesting.
And having some familiarity with that conversation is built into my definition. So it's much more of a chronologically holistic idea than I think most people hear when they hear great books or they hear well-read. They think, you know, mahogany books and leather armchairs and respiratory diseases from pipes. I like to think of it as a living document, a living canon rather than a past canon.
REBECCA: Yeah, it's not the checklist out of the back of the Harold Bloom book that Jeff found at Barnes & Noble when he was 15.
JEFF: Though I did start there. That is where it started.
ANNE: Although a list like that is a good place, a good way to get you thinking.
JEFF: You got to start somewhere. I think that's the idea of the show, too, Anne, is like, people are like, "I want to be well-read. Where do you start?" Like, "I'm not really sure."
[00:32:15] REBECCA: I mean, we hear from readers all the time, our listeners, who are like, "When are you going to do this book? How come not this one?" I program the podcast and the task of making the list of the first 50 books we were going to talk about and making it as, like, what's important to us, what's important historically, but also what has a big adaptation coming out because people will be interested in that, or what's hitting an important anniversary. You can read the Zero to Well-Read episode list as a checklist, but it's definitely not prioritized. It's not like we started with the most important book or the least important, and we're working our way to the most important. They're all in the mix, but each one of them has something to say and is important for a different reason.
JEFF: Can I throw a question, Anne? I have a hypothetical for you. I've thought about this before. I don't think Rebecca's even heard me say this, which is something.
ANNE: Love a hypothetical. As long as you're not going to ask me to choose 50.
[00:33:07] JEFF: No, no, no. Rather than think of a definition, I imagine a scenario. When someone who has this literary anxiety and they want to be well-read, but they're freaked out about it, I imagine that what they want is something like this, is if someone could ask them if they read a certain book, and they would say yes, and they'd have at least something somewhat interesting to say about it in 30 seconds. That is my sense of what people actually kind of, quote, "want" if they have an anxious or internalized desire to be well-read at some point. That they could do something like that, that they will never be caught with their literary pants down, for lack of a better term.
ANNE: What's the question? I have thoughts.
JEFF: Does that sound right to you? I mean, when you hear people being worried about being well-read for themselves, like they don't want to have someone ask them, "Have you read Baudelaire?" And they're like, "Oh, no, I haven't."
[00:34:01] ANNE: I mean, when we're wrapping our heads around a concept and a state of being, because I have come to think more of being well-read as a way of existing in the literary world. And like even more than that, in the world. It's like who you are as a reader and a thinker, as a person. But you can't plot that on a chart. You can't check that off in your journal.
But now I really think of being well-read as stepping into the... ooh, what's a good metaphor? Maybe you already have one. For now we're going to go with river Stepping into the river of literature, capital L literature, as one long, millennia-long conversation. And there's no getting caught with your pants down if you are someone who's learned to speak this language, who's comfortable in this ongoing stream of literature. There's only curiosity and interest. And like, "No, I haven't read that, but tell me more." That is a way to be part of the conversation.
[00:35:06] And something I'm really intrigued by, and have been thinking about a lot for years now, not just because of this conversation, is how I think being well-read does mean able to read well. To have the accumulated skills to navigate difficult texts, and also background context to understand things that you as a reader would have missed 5, 10, 20, 30 years ago. But that idea of reading well and being well-read is circular, I believe, to a large degree.
I remember 10 years ago reading Middlemarch, and... look, this has happened with plenty of other texts. Maybe it would have happened sooner if I hadn't gotten such a grounding in Shakespeare in high school and college. But reading Middlemarch and being like, "Oh, I can finally see the root source of all these allusions I can instantly see I've been missing in all my reading life." Like, I didn't know what it meant for somebody to be called a Casaubon or they talk about a Dorothea or the way Aphrodite's cited in that book. They just went clear over my head because I hadn't read it. I wasn't familiar with the source material. I didn't know.
[00:36:08] That's just one way that reading one of those canonical works changed the way I read going forward. Like, I was that much further into the river. I hate that metaphor. We'll adjust it later. But would you talk to me about this idea how reading well begets being well-read, ad infinitum?
REBECCA: I think it's really grounded in curiosity. I'm so glad that you brought that word into the conversation, because there are people in the world who do the thing that Jeff described of like, "Oh, you haven't read Baudelaire. You don't count as well read." But I don't think that that person-
ANNE: How could one claim?
REBECCA: Right. I don't think that that person is engaged in the same-
JEFF: No, they're not.
REBECCA: ...pursuit that we're engaged in.
JEFF: No.
REBECCA: Because in my experience, and I think I can speak for Jeff on this too, the more that you stand in this river, because now we're committed to the metaphor, Anne. The more that you-
JEFF: I'm the panelist out of it. I'm working on something. You guys keep swimming, I'll figure...
ANNE: Okay. We're just whiteboarding this as we go.
[00:37:01] REBECCA: But the more that you exist in this way, where you're trying to practice reading well, so you're picking up books that you understand to have some important piece of context in the literary pantheon, and you're trying to apply your skills and to sharpen them, the more aware you are of how much there is that you haven't read and that you'll never get to, and that this is a never-ending pursuit.
Again, we never arrive at well-read, but for every 100 classic books that we talk about on this podcast, there are thousands that we'll never get to, and there are millions that have been lost to time that at some point were important to somebody. So I find it to be like a curiosity and a humility of that there is this... Like, it's exciting that we get to build up our own knowledge and understanding in these ways, but every book we pick represents like thousands of books that we're not talking about, thousands of books that we're not reading. Most of them are lost to time.
[00:38:01] Go back and look at the National Book Award nominees from even 30 years ago, and you will not recognize almost any of the titles. Very few books stand the test of time. But those books were important in their moment. In 1997, people were pointing at those titles and saying, like, "Some of these are going to be it, and some of these are part of being well-read." And to be open and exploratory about it rather than prescriptive.
I find that it's, to go back to your original question, the circle of reading well and being well-read, I do find that it feeds itself because you pick up on something in a book and you feel like, "Oh, I just sharpened this skill." And that skill comes with you into the next book that you read, and then you feel gradually over time like you can take on more challenging books or maybe the books that you've been daunted by or intimidated by in the past.
[00:38:52] I had a really intimidating reading experience with Salman Rushdie my freshman year of college, scared me off of his fiction for like 25 years. And I didn't saddle up to do Rushdie again until the first season of Zero to Well-Read, where I thought, Partially I've had 25 years of reading since then. I've developed a lot more tools. I'll have a great buddy with Jeff. But then when you climb that mountain, you've read something that was previously too difficult for you, there's no better way to bust your literary imposter syndrome. Like, okay, what's next? Like, what else seems hard?
JEFF: I go, "I'm going to live forever. I can do anything."
REBECCA: Art.
ANNE: I think there's a real interesting tension here where I think being well-read as a way of being, to me, speaks so much to being comfortable in the world and at ease, and feeling confident that you can read for understanding and be confident in your own understanding and have some freedom from the question that plagued so many of us for years, decades, that is, Am I doing this right? Do I get what's really happening?" And that you're confident to poke at ideas and challenge assumptions, and look deeply into the surface of what the author's trying to say and contribute your own ideas.
[00:40:07] But also being so not at ease in other ways. Like recognizing that some new but also classic canonical works are bewildering and strange. And maybe you don't understand them, but why and what's going on there? And for all these questions, how can reading in community deepen your understanding of the texts and push you to notice things that you didn't notice on your own, and in those ways help you become a better reader and a better-read reader as well.
JEFF: I do think it's very difficult to be the kind of reader I think a lot of people want to be without having to articulate something about your reading experience, whether verbally or written or some other ways. Because I think the first obstacle people have, if this is something they're wanting to engage in or trying to engage in, is getting out of the "I like this, I didn't like this" paradigm. That is largely how we talk about books in a casual way online and other ways. "Did you read that?" "Yeah, I liked it." And that's kinda what people generally are looking for.
[00:41:06] That's not to say your own experience of a text isn't germane. It is. But liking something and not liking something can get in the way of... Not get in the way of. It can become a substitute for engaging with that text in some other kind of a way. And the best way to engage with something like this is, like, I'm a thinking talker. Most of us get our best ideas and understand what we think when we're writing or when we're speaking, because in that process of articulation, you have to crystallize and consolidate and organize what this internal roiling thing you might be thinking or feeling is.
So, you know, reading Vineland by Thomas Pynchon by yourself is a different experience than talking with someone about it, writing something about it. And that's hard to do individually, and that's one reason we have the show. But then listening to other people have a conversation, I'm like this when I'm listening to a pod, I'm like the ghost joining in the conversation. It's articulating and clarifying my own thinking there.
[00:42:08] So having some other venue, I guess what I'm saying, Anne, to sort of process that reading experience you just had. It can also then cement it into your memory. That certainly does it for me when Rebecca and I talk about something.
But here's another thing. The Q rating of any book that we do on the show goes up about 5,000% if we talked about it for 90 minutes. We did not love Wuthering Heights. I'll just say that. You know, at our reading experience together, I'll speak for you, Rebecca-
REBECCA: I suffered.
JEFF: But after talking about it for 90 minutes, I'm not sure that it's one of my favorite books of all time, but I got something out of it, and it was that reading experience was enriched and deepened just for that. I think that's another thing for people to think about. And it's easy for me to say because I've got a running buddy here, and this is my job.
[00:42:49] But if you find you pick up Middlemarch, which is a wonderful text with lots of allusions that you can also read as just a great book on its own, and then you're at the end, you're like, "What did I get out of that?" I think that's a very valid and difficult question to answer, Anne. Like, what do you do with all of that experience at that moment?
ANNE: What did I get out of that? Okay, I like that.
REBECCA: I love this notion of reading in community. One of my, I think, perpetual hot takes is that book clubs are overrated because you're trying to solve for the happiness and, like, taste of so many people. Like, 8 to 10 people is too many people to try to like ring everybody's bells and have a deep conversation about something. When we get a question from listeners about, like, "How can I do this better?" I'm always like, "You need one book buddy." My reading life, and I think Jeff's reading life are meaningfully different because we get to talk to each other.
[00:43:40] There's something really valuable about one or maybe two, maybe you have a really small book club with a couple people who are like-minded but different enough from you that their thinking will open things up for you and will challenge you, that we come to conversations. I walk away with new thoughts about a book because Jeff is a different human than I am and brings a different perspective and might have a different take or help me open up my understanding of something. I'm going to appreciate different things than he's going to appreciate.
But you can even read in community with yourself, that I think the step zero is reading with a pen in your hand if you're reading in paper, or getting familiar with the highlighting features if you're reading digitally, that notice to be more present to your reading experience rather than just letting the words wash over you, noticing when something strikes you.
JEFF: You're right. That is step zero, Rebecca. Absolutely.
[00:44:32] REBECCA: Right? Noticing when something feels important. Mark it down. One of the enduring and repeated surprises of our show is that we do a little segment on each episode about notable quotes, and we will come with the same quotes without having talked about them.
REBECCA: Out of a 400-page book, we'll have 10 of the same ones.
REBECCA: We're like, "Oh, that is a thing. That's something here, that the writer... Like, they landed on something important. They hit some emotional bell in a particular way that resonates." When we host read-alongs with our community, it happens as well, where people are like, "Oh yeah, I underlined that, too." But give yourself a chance to notice and then to go back and either talk to someone about what you noticed that struck you deeply or that seemed important, or write something about it.
And this doesn't have to be public. The internet makes you feel like everything has to be some kind of public side hustle. But you don't have to post a public review on Goodreads. You don't have to launch a Substack. We have a good friend, Greg, who's had a reading journal for 25 years. It could be as simple as that. Open a Google Doc and write two paragraphs about the book you just read and what seemed important about it. What were the themes? What is the author trying to say? What moved you? What will you remember about it?
[00:45:44] That in itself... you're communing with your current self, and then you're giving your future self something to come back to, can be, I think, a really expansive and formative part of becoming not more well-read, but more d... about reading more well. Reading well more. I don't know.
JEFF: Reading better, Rebecca. I believe in you.
REBECCA: Reading better.
JEFF: There you go.
REBECCA: I was trying to stick to the formulation of well-read and reading well.
JEFF: I was enjoying you drowning in Anne's River.
REBECCA: Thanks for letting me flail a little bit there.
ANNE: On that note, thinking of all the imposter syndrome I've heard and literary insecurity, noticing what jumps out at you when you're reading is so important. Also, a word of advice, if I may, readers. Don't be precious about-
REBECCA: Don't be precious.
ANNE: ...thinking like, "What will somebody think if they read my highlight? Later will somebody who reads this paperback I've highlighted with my pen in after me go, 'What kind of reader highlighted that sentence?'" Like, don't... Notice what you notice, and give yourself the freedom to record that so that you can actually remember what it is that you noticed. And if anybody needs to hear this, I notice, or I... Well, I do notice, and also highlight the most basic, boring things in my texts, because I want to remember something like, "Oh, this character was 15 in 1967." The smart readers are not highlighting that. "Smart readers," hear my air quotes.
REBECCA: They might be.
[00:47:03] ANNE: But I am, because I might need to know that later for my work or my review or my thoughts. But if you have no idea what it is about a particular turn of phrase that jumps out at you, but it does, like, mark that down. That's how you learn about the author, you learn about the text, you learn about the reader.
REBECCA: And eventually you learn something about yourself when you have a collection of quotes or moments or ideas from books you've read over time. You will start to see themes. It's like, "Oh, I'm a person who's interested in this question. I care about books that do this thing." And that lets you go into conversations with other readers or conversations with a great bookseller or a librarian where you can be like, "Who's exploring this?" A lot of recommendations are just based on the voice is similar or the tone of the book is similar, or they have similar tropes. But I think you really unlock a new kind of reading and like a daisy chain you're making for yourself when you can start to ask those questions of "I really like a book." Like, what we talk a lot about, like fathers and sons, man. I love a book about an old man waiting to die and reflecting on his life. Who's doing that? You know, who's asking these big questions? You can get different and I think more interesting recommendations that way.
[00:48:13] ANNE: And you know, something I've learned from my years on What Should I Read Next? is that talking through your reading life with a friend can be really helpful. Because you may not realize that you keep coming back to the same themes, or that you keep visiting certain topics over and over again. Like, it might take your version of book buddy Jeff or Rebecca saying to you, like, "Hey, what is it with all these books about old men waiting to die? Do you realize you keep doing that?" Oftentimes the answer is, "No, I had no idea. I kept on coming back to, I don't know, tortured female protagonists making choices on bridges in their mid-30s." I need somebody else to point that out to me.
REBECCA: There is something, I think, kind of vulnerable, to use an overused word, about sharing your reading life and your perspectives on books with someone else. One of the things that comes back to you is you get perceived. Like, we see each other in an interesting way, and probably a different way than anybody else in our lives sees us because of the specific conversations we're having and the way that we're having them about books. That's a gift. It's very cool to get to have a book buddy and reflect on your own stuff, but to have somebody who can reflect back to you. Like, "Man, you sure don't like these complicated mothers and daughters, do you?"
[00:49:25] ANNE: But that's worth noticing.
REBECCA: Yeah.
ANNE: I believe that's worth noticing. Okay, Rebecca, you referenced point zero on the road, Zero to Well-read.
REBECCA: Oh, no.
ANNE: Would you all acquaint us with some other stops along the way? Questions to ask ourselves, steps to take.
JEFF: Well, Rebecca, so step zero is notice stuff, right? Do something where you're slowing down. And I was going to build on that, so I'm glad you followed up this way, is step zero is noticing. And so maybe along with that, try to slough off caring about how many books you read this year or how fast you're reading. Because this is a slower kind of reading.
If you're the kind of person who keeps a journal or a Goodreads or whatever, and you've got some identity wrapped up in "I'm the kind of reader who reads X number of books a year," and you want to read well or read better, you may find those things to be in tension with each other. Because reading with a pen in hand is different than reading on your Kindle and just flying through it. Again, it's not worse, but it's a different kind of reading experience.
[00:50:33] I think the thing on top of that is going back to what Anne said about not worrying about what people think of your highlights. Do people hear how weird it is to think about people thinking about people reading your highlights? Like, I hear you say that, and I'm totally with you, but when you think about it, what kind of narcissism is that, that you think someone's going to pick up your book, read it all the way through, and notice your highlighting, and care enough to say something to you about it and feel some kind of way about it?
But that extends to all kinds of things like, are you worried about performative reading, or are you worried about what people are going to s... This is a long way of saying you're doing this for you. If there is no trophy you're going to get when you are, quote-unquote, "well-read" that you can put on your mantle, right? That's not happening, people. This is all for you.
So any part of this experience that you feel sort of the tap on your shoulder of other people saying you should do it differently or why aren't you doing X, you gotta let that go, man. That's not going to help you. This is for you. And all the stuff that's good about it is not going to show up on your Goodreads or on your clothes or your, you know, Phi Beta Kappa pin. You're not going to get any of that stuff. It's all internal.
[00:51:46] I think that's another thing just to be real about. It's all internal. And maybe your reading buddy will see you. Okay, so that's one other person. But you have to have some self... If you want to do this in a way that I think is actually sustaining and actually nourishing, you might be the only one that knows.
REBECCA: I think letting go of external measurements of it or no longer investing in sort of external perceptions of your reading. But to be, I guess, practical in recommendation. Step one is noticing, step zero is noticing, then step one is doing something with what you notice. Talk about it, write about it, make a record of it in some way.
And then after that, be sort of in conversation with those things over time so that the books you read aren't just a series of one-off experiences, but you are actively then working to connect the threads. One thing I deeply believe is that we could have picked a whole different 50 books for the first year of the show, and we would have found a bunch of the same themes. We would have found ways that they talk to each other. We would have had just as alive and enriching conversations about them.
[00:52:54] You will tap into the big ideas, the big questions that art asks, the big things that people are worried about in their lives now and that they've been worried about for as long as we've had art with any substantial reading experience. So also commit to the list you're committing to or commit to the way that you're reading and practice that acceptance that there are still just going to be a million books that you'll never get to.
If you're going to enjoy the ones in front of you, you can't be constantly nagged by the hundreds that you'll never get to. We're both going to die with thousands of books unread that would've been great, but you won't know. It's like you're going to be dead, you won't know. Try to enjoy the ones that you've got right now, I think, is really critical. But I think do let it be reading's internal. Let it be an internal thing. If the social aspects of it, if the posting and the Goodreads and the counting and all of that are constraining you more than they are expanding you, I would say, really try to let go of that.
[00:53:54] I just got asked if I would ever be willing to post my whole annual reading list at the end of the year, and I was like, "Absolutely not." I talk about a lot of the things I read on the podcast, but there are things I read just to see what's up with them. There are things that I finish even though they're bad, because I wanted to see if they would go through. There's a bender that I go on with a series when I'm on vacation. We have all sorts of stuff going on, but it doesn't all need to be for public consumption. And letting reading be transformative for you in the ways that you want to be transformed, I think, is the most important guidepost.
ANNE: I mean, there's so much we can learn and ways we can benefit by bringing that to other readers, and also, we want it to be essentially yours.
[00:54:45] Jeff and Rebecca, last question. For those who are still squeamish, scared, overwhelmed, what's a word of advice you would give? I'll go first. And that is I'd want you to know that reading is something you learn by doing. So you are not going to figure out exactly what to do and then step into the books. You're going to step into the books and then figure out what to do. So pick your next book, or the one you're in the middle of right now, and keep going, maybe with an added awareness of what it is you're doing based on what we talked about today.
JEFF: You stole mine, Anne. Maybe to build on it a little bit is that it is-
ANNE: I'm sure you have more to say.
JEFF: It is okay and normal if you're in the middle of something and you don't get what's going on.
REBECCA: Ooh. You stole mine.
[00:55:32] JEFF: Okay. Well, then I'll give you 90 seconds while I expound on that a little bit. That is completely normal. We talked about it when we did Hamlet and when we did Much Ado About Nothing. Shakespeare is tough, it's different, and the language is beyond, past, wherever, it's away from us, wherever that is. And part of the experience of it is the difficulty and the strangeness. But that's a feature, not a bug most of the time because then you have to engage. This is not easy. It is intellectual and emotional work to understand, to try to get into your bones what's going on with some of these texts.
And you may not ever understand it, and they're not all going to go great for you. It's not always going to go great. I have a household of long-distance runners, and each run is painful because it's just a little harder than the last run, but they're running longer and faster each time, and that's part of the process. It's not as grueling as running a 5K, but there is an element, as you say, as each book goes into it, but that feeling of tension or pain or discomfort is growth. That's a feature, not a bug.
[00:56:35] And then within that, one of the reasons they're hard to understand, one of the reasons you may not get it, they may be discomforting, is by and large the books that survive time, even a decade, they're weird, man. These are weird books. They're doing something different. They've broken the mold in some way. And we find the ones we come back to still have something to say, and they resist your easy categorization of what you think you may know about Shakespeare or you may know about what... Hemingway, I guess, is a great one, where people have a conception of what a Hemingway book is, but then you actually go read Old Man and the Sea, and it's like, yes and, it's that and it's something else.
So I think you may be surprised to find that it is discomforting, but also this is a litany of strangeness going back to Homer essentially, and before. And that strangeness is their sort of a sequential contribution to the human project of figuring out what the hell it means to be human. And that's what's cool to me about it because these are all weirdos. So be weird. Be a weird reader, because they're a weird book.
[00:57:39] REBECCA: I was going to take the "they're all weirdos" point. But I think trust yourself. You're a reader, and you have some of these skills already fundamentally. And trusting yourself as a reader in today's technological era means when you hit something in the book that you don't understand, because you will. Like, there will be weird moments, there will be things you don't understand, or maybe there are unfamiliar words. Mark it, but keep moving. Don't interrupt your reading experience to Google something immediately.
Try to trust yourself that you can put together from context what that word means, or that you will figure out what this strange scene is ultimately about. If you pick up Beloved, there's some stuff in there that's really weird, and you aren't going to know what's going on. And that's the point in some works of fiction. You are supposed to be unsettled. So if you put the book down and you go to Google at the first sign of, "Oh my God, maybe I don't get it," you will interrupt your reading experience, you'll interrupt your flow, and you reinforce the idea that you need to Google stuff in order to understand it.
[00:58:45] But the reading muscle is built just like Jeff's long-distance running muscles by just practicing it. And like, you will be able to do it. Also, you're not going to die if you don't pick up every one of Steinbeck's weird vocabulary terms. You will still walk away from East of Eden having gotten the point, and it will be there for you later. So like, I'm kind of always advising readers, circle the word you don't understand, and if when you're flipping back through the book you still need to Google it to make sense of that passage, then go Google it. But if you can, for the most part, read like you don't know the internet exists and you don't know your phone is in the next room, please don't read with your phone right next to you, then you can start to... Like, give yourself opportunities to figure it out, and that will reinforce the idea that, oh, I can do this. And every one of those is another rep of that muscle getting stronger. And then over time you trust yourself more, and that's really gratifying.
[00:59:39] ANNE: I also want to repeat something I say several times a month on What Should I Read Next?, which is, in the reading life, probably everywhere, it is never just you. It's not like everybody understands the story but you, everybody appreciates the story but you, everybody loves the story but you, everybody reads the story faster than you are. There is no such thing. So I hope that helps you keep going.
REBECCA: Yes, keep going.
ANNE: Jeff and Rebecca, parting words?
JEFF: Boy, that's tough. If you're listening to Anne's show, like, I think probably a lot of this you maybe get in ways that we don't understand, but also do understand at the same time. I think each individual reader is going to have to answer the question themself, like what's their own baggage around the idea of being well-read. If you can let it go, great. That's for you. But if it's something that you actually think about, like you want something different out of your reading life than you're getting now, you gotta do something different, and it probably needs a structure of some kind to get going a little bit.
[01:00:39] So like anything interesting, challenging, and worthwhile doing, it's not just hard, but it's the difficulty isn't the difficulty, it's the repeating the difficulty over time that's hard. And that's going to be something they have to decide for themselves, rather like, "Oh, I'm never going to get to this or this book." It's like, well, you're not going to unless you try to get to it. And do you really want to get to it, or are you, you know, come to some kind of honesty with yourself about what you want out of your reading? And know that whatever that is is fine. And you can always start again later. Doesn't have to be today. Can start any time.
REBECCA: I think that you're allowed to care about this. You're allowed to care about being well-read. You're also allowed not to. But like you're allowed to care about it, and caring about it doesn't make you snobby. It also doesn't make you better than other kinds of readers.
JEFF: You can be snobby, though.
REBECCA: You can.
JEFF: But don't. Don't do that either. Don't do that.
[01:01:27] REBECCA: It's not inherently snobby. It's not inherently anything. Like, you can care about this even if it's less popular on the internet to care about this than to be interested in, I don't know, whatever TikTok is into. And those forms of reading have their own va... they add their own value to the literary landscape as well. But if you're listening to this and thinking, "I do want to get something more out of my reading life," it's okay. And it also doesn't mean that your past reading life has been a failure. But we like... we're constantly wanting to expand and to grow in new ways, and there's no better way to do that than books, and to do it through books with people who are also interested in having those kinds of conversations.
ANNE: Whatever it is, it's never just you.
REBECCA: It's never just you. Love that.
ANNE: Jeff and Rebecca, this has been a pleasure. Thanks so much for joining me today.
REBECCA: Thanks so much, Anne.
JEFF: Anne, wonderful. Thank you so much.
[01:02:17] ANNE: Hey readers. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Rebecca and Jeff. We'll have the links to their podcast, Zero to Well-Read, as well as the full list of titles we talked about today at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com.
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Thanks to the people who make this show happen. What Should I Read Next? is created each week by executive producer Will Bogel, Media production specialist Holly Wielkoszewski, social media manager and editor Leigh Kramer, community coordinator Brigid Misselhorn, community manager Shannan Malone, and our whole team at What Should I Read Next? and Modern Mrs. Darcy HQ. Plus the audio whizzes at Studio D Podcast Production.
Readers, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And as Rainer Maria Rilke said, "Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading." Happy reading, everyone.
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Books mentioned in this episode:
• 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer
• Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
❤ The Fraud by Zadie Smith
❤ Matrix by Lauren Groff
❤ The Road by Cormac McCarthy
❤ The Orchard by Adele Crockett Robertson
❤ Solito by Javier Zamora
❤ Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck
• The Shining by Stephen King
• Fifty Shades of Grey by E L James
• Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
❤: Guest favorite book
▵: A book they didn’t love
Also mentioned:
• From Zero to Well-Read in 100 Books
• Check back for the link once Anne’s conversation on Zero to Well-Read releases!
• Please support our sponsors.
One comment
When fandoms collide! I’ve been listening to Book Riot for years and have been loving Jeff and Rebecca’s new venture with Zero to Well Read. So delighted to see they are guests on your podcast. Will very much looking forward to listening to this one!