Show Notes
In this latest podcast, Shannen and Gareth discuss why you should join a book club. This episode is filled with many wonderful gems, including discussions on what a good book club is, a tier system for ranking books that change us, Oprah Winfrey's book club, and excerpts from members from the Vicious Circle, I mean, The Algonquin Table. Enjoy!
Shownotes
J.R.R. Tolkien
The man, the myth, the legend, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) is best known for his high fantasy works
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings. Termed the “father” of modern fantasy literature, Tolkien wrote stories of Middle-earth to read to his children at night, yet he completed much more in his life. Additionally, Tolkien was a philologist, a poet, and an academic, a professor of English Literature at many Universities, including the University of Oxford, until his retirement in 1959. He was a member of the
Inklings, an informal literary discussion group, which included his close friend C.S. Lewis. In 1972 he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. After his passing, his son published his father’s extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, gifting us the
Silmarillion amongst other works, including works on the invented languages for Middle-earth!
Ursula Le Guin
What could be termed a prolific writer, the late Ursula Le Guin (1929-2018) had a literary career spanning nearly sixty years, producing over a hundred short stories and more than twenty novels, as well as poetry and other works. Her works include speculative fiction, science fiction works set in her
Hainish Universe, and the beloved
Earthsea fantasy series. The
Earthsea series saw her win both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, making her the first woman to do so. But she didn’t stop there; in her lifetime, she received numerous accolades, including eight Hugos, six Nebulas, and twenty-two Locus Awards, and in 2003, Ursula became the second woman honoured as a Grand Master of The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. But wait, there’s more: in 2000, the U.S. Library of Congress named her a Living Legend! There is so much to be impressed by with Ursula, and others agree; she has influenced many other authors, including Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Neil Gaiman and Iain Banks.
Stanislaw Lem
Polish writer, Stanislaw Herman Lem (1921-2006), wrote predominately science fiction, but also essays on various subjects, including philosophy, futurology and literary criticism. Lem’s books have been translated into more than 50 languages, selling over 45 million copies, and his science fiction stories are deemed satirical and humorous (though that may have been lost in translation…). His most renowned novel is the 1961
Solaris, with most of his works exploring philosophical themes through speculation on technology, intelligence, human limitations and humanity’s place in the universe. An interesting fact, the Polish Parliament declared 2021 the year of Stanislaw Lem.
Ian Fleming
British writer Ian Lancaster Fleming (1908-1964) is famous for his spy novels featuring the roguish Mr James Bond. A writer at heart, Fleming moved through several jobs which didn’t stick before he started writing. Much of his inspiration came from his work for Britain’s Naval Intelligence Division during World War Two, where Fleming was involved in planning Operation Goldeneye, and in the planning and oversight of two intelligence units, 30 Assault Unit and T-Force. Fleming was a heavy smoker and drinker for most of his life and died in 1964 at the age of 56 of heart disease. Fleming's creation has appeared in film twenty-seven times and has been portrayed by seven actors.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Numerous literary critics rate him as one of the greatest novelists in all of world literature; the late Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and journalist. Given the troubled political and social atmosphere of Russia in the 19th century, his works engage with the human condition under such conditions, and explores themes of religion and philosophy. Dostoevsky also dealt with censorship and book bans in his time; he was arrested in 1849 for discussing banned books critical of the Tsar, and sentenced to death. However, his sentence was commuted; he then spent four years in a Siberian prison camp. From rags to riches, Dostoevsky developed a gambling problem in his later life, at times needing to beg for money, but he eventually became one of the most highly regarded Russian writers.
Michael Sala
Michael Sala was born in the Netherlands in 1975 to a Greek father and a Dutch mother, and first came to Australia in the 1980s. He lives in Newcastle. His critically acclaimed debut,
The Last Thread, won the 2013 NSW Premier’s Award for New Writing and was the regional winner (Pacific) of the 2013 Commonwealth Book Prize.
The Restorer is Michael Sala’s latest novel.
The Tiger Book Club
The Tiger Book Club is the brainchild of one of my best friends, Luke. Not someone who does things by half measures, he took the plunge, created a book club, and created bookmarks for every member. On the back of the bookmark reads:
“This bookmark is intended to be used solely as a placeholder for any pause, discontinuation, hesitation or adjournment of reading of any book, opus, publication or manual. The “Tiger Book Club” hereby removes themselves of accountability from any grievance, wrongdoing, crime, or immorality incurred from the stipulated misuse of this article. I am not a lawyer, and nor are you, unless you are, in which case, you would know more than this bookmark regarding the legal ramifications of untoward actions, for example, flinging it like a playing card like Gambit. Keep out of reach of children, unless they are reading and are in need of a placeholder as they wish to stop for the time being. Please don’t use this bookmark wrongly. I’m begging you now. I can't go back to prison. You’re grown. You can do what you want. There’s no way I can stop you from doing that. I’m just a placeholder. But I will be one in your mind. A tab sticking out of your life’s transcript, your conscience, reminding you of the warranted guilt felt for your misconduct. Try as you might, I will always occupy a part of your brain. Maybe it’s a part you want to forget, but you won't. Not even on your deathbed, when Death comes and relieves you of your burden, and every thought you thought you had evaporates in a cloud of realization that it was all a ruse to keep you conformed to societal norms. Tricks played by your own brain that you had while locked in a room that is your mind. You’ll still remember, like that old lady in the Titanic movie, only there’s no dropping the blue necklace thing into the water for you. Fran Drescher was a 10.”
My Bookmark, thanks Luke!
“Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe, there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better? Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, and realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through The Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place."
Goodreads
Other books by Matthew Haig include:
Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend. Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled existence. Except, sometimes, everything...
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is the 2017 debut novel by Gail Honeyman, and the winner of the 2017 Costa Debut Novel Award.
The late Kōbō Abe (安部 公房), (1924-1993), was a Japanese writer, playwright, photographer, and inventor. He was the son of a doctor and studied medicine at Tokyo University; however, he never practised, instead giving it up to join a literary group that aimed to apply surrealist techniques to Marxist ideology. Abe has often been compared to Franz Kafka and Alberto Moravia for his surreal, often nightmarish explorations of individuals in contemporary society and his modernist sensibilities. Though he did much work as an avant-garde novelist and playwright, it was not until the publication of
The Woman in the Dunes in 1962 that he won widespread international acclaim. In the 1960s, he collaborated with Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara in the film adaptations of
The Pitfall, Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another and
The Ruined Map. In 1973, he founded an acting studio in Tokyo, where he trained performers and directed plays. He was elected as a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977. Over a seven-year period in the 1960s, Kōbō Abe wrote the screenplays for
four films directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara, three of which were based on Abe’s own novels. Other works by Kōbō Abe:
Christopher Lee
Sir Christopher Lee (1922-2015) was an English actor and singer, and a huge fan of Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings. In an incredibly long career, he played Saruman in both the
Lord of the Rings film trilogy and the
Hobbit film trilogy. He played many other villains, playing Count Dracula, Francisco Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun, and Count Dooku in the Star Wars films. Lee was knighted for services to drama and charity in 2009, received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2011, and received the BFI Fellowship in 2013. He credited three films for making his name as an actor,
A Tale of Two Cities (1958), in which he played the villainous marquis, and two horror films,
The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), and
Dracula (1958).
1st Tier Books
The Socrates School and Socratic Circles
Great philosophers such as Socrates, Aristophanes, Xenophon, and Plato congregated at The Socrates School in approximately 400 BC. […] To hold a Socratic circle, a group must choose and analyze a thought-provoking text through inquiry, thoughtful response, and communal spirit.
Junto Club
This book club was founded by Benjamin Franklin and his literature-loving friends in 1727. The Philadelphia-based club was comprised of tradesmen and artisans discussing morals, politics, and natural philosophy. The Junto Club convened on Friday evenings for nearly 40 years. The club served the community by acting as a platform for various public projects. Some of Franklin’s weekly meetings resulted in plans for the first lending library, the University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Hospital, and others. Besides the planning of public projects, Franklin structured his meetings with a list of 24 questions. In 1743, a new branch of the Junto Club was created. It was called the American Philosophical Society and still exists to this day.
Book of the Month Club
The Book of the Month Club was a mail-order business, founded by Harry Sherman in 1926. […] By 1927, Book of the Month Club had over 60,000 subscribers, and a new class of readers was created. Though it received some backlash from critics, the Club soon became a household name. Readers found titles like
Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms,
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, J
ohn Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and
Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird on their doorsteps. Today, Book of the Month Club boasts more than one million subscribers, and Harry Sherman is considered “the father of the mail-order business.”
The Bloomsbury Group included Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, economist John Maynard Keynes, critic Clive Bell, and painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.
Stratford-on-Odeon included Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein.
The Inklings included J. R. R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, Roger Lancelyn Green, and Adam Fox.
On November 6, 1839, American journalist, editor, critic, and translator Margaret Fuller held the first of her Conversations, considered the First Book Club in the U.S., a series of discussions [...] intended to compensate for the lack of women's education with discussions and debates focused on subjects including the fine arts, history, mythology, literature, and nature. By serving as the "nucleus of conversation", Fuller intended to answer the "great questions" facing women and encourage women "to question, to define, to state and examine their opinions". She asked her participants, "What were we born to do? How shall we do it? Which so few ever propose to themselves 'till their best years are gone by". These gatherings have been called the first woman's book club in the U.S.
The late Margaret Fulton was a Scottish-born Australian food and cooking writer, journalist, author and commentator. Fulton's early recipes encouraged Australians to alter their traditional staple of "meat and three vegetables" and to be creative with food. She encouraged international cuisine from places such as Spain, Italy, India and China.
Oprah Winfrey
Needing no introduction really, Oprah is an American talk show host, television producer, actress, author and philanthropist. The Oprah Winfrey Show ran in the US national syndication for 25 years, from 1986 to 2011. I could go on, but for now,
Oprah Winfrey’s launched her book club in 1996, which was a turning point in the history of book clubs — a moment that author Toni Morrison called a “reading revolution.” In the first three years, each book Oprah chose averaged sales of 1.4 million copies. Those who dismissed it as “schmaltzy, one-dimensional” missed its serious core: books ranged from
Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to
William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, to
Maya Angelou’s The Heart of a Woman. In a way that is surprisingly reminiscent of those early women dissidents starting reading circles, Winfrey spoke about literature in civic terms. “Getting my library card was like citizenship; it was like American citizenship,” she told Life Magazine in 1997.
A brief mention of
Barak Obama’s reading list, which can be viewed
here.
The Algonquin Round Table was a group of New York City writers, critics, actors, and wits. Gathering initially as part of a practical joke, members of "The Vicious Circle", as they dubbed themselves, met for lunch each day at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until roughly 1929. At these luncheons, they engaged in wisecracks, wordplay, and witticisms that, through the newspaper columns of Round Table members, were disseminated across the country. The group played many games, most notably a game called the "I can give you a sentence" game, which spawned Dorothy Parker's memorable sentence using the word horticulture:
"You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think."
Charter Members included: Alexander Woollcott (critic and journalist), Robert E. Sherwood (author and playwright), Robert Benchley (humorist and actor), and Dorothy Parker (critic, poet, short-story writer, and screenwriter). Other Members included: Tallulah Bankhead (actress), Noël Coward (playwright), Edna Ferber (author and playwright), and Harpo Marx (comedian and film star).
Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker (1893 –1967) was an American poet, writer, critic, and satirist based in New York; she was best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles. From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary works published in magazines, such as
The New Yorker, and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker travelled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed when her involvement in left-wing politics resulted in her being placed on the Hollywood blacklist. Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker."
Resumé
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
Robert Benchley
Robert Charles Benchley (September 15, 1889 – November 21, 1945) was an American humorist best known for his work as a newspaper columnist and film actor. From his beginnings at The Harvard Lampoon, while attending Harvard University, through his many years writing essays and articles for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and his acclaimed short films, Benchley's style of humour brought him respect and success during his life, from his peers at the Algonquin Round Table in New York City to contemporaries in the burgeoning film industry.
In order to laugh at something, it is necessary (1) to know what you are laughing at, (2) to know why you are laughing, (3) to ask some people why they think you are laughing, (4) to jot down a few notes, (5) to laugh. Even then, the thing may not be cleared up for days.
All laughter is merely a compensatory reflex to take the place of sneezing. What we really want to do is sneeze, but as that is not always possible, we laugh instead. [...] Analyze any funny story or comic situation at which we “laugh” and it will be seen that this theory is correct. Incidentally, by the time you have the “humor” analyzed, it will be found that the necessity for laughing has been relieved. ()
Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command.
Goodreads
Gareth and I chose this book for our horror genre selection for our Book Club segment, yet others, as well as the author, define the book as a love story (let us know your verdict over at
pleasureofthetext.com). I am beyond excited to read this treasure, and if you would like to join us, you are in luck!
House of Leaves has typically been a difficult book to get hold of, but this book has recently been reprinted, and there are more copies available to avid readers in most bookstores now.
Other Works By Mark Z. Danielewski: