Being a Great Books reader is always pathetic

On failure, digital detox, and whether Tolstoy is in trouble (he's not) plus PODCAST RECOMMENDATIONS!!!!!

Hello friends, I've succeeded in not looking at my phone so much. I uninstalled email / social apps from my phone (which is a tiny, ridiculous Android phone),¹ and I've been relatively successful at keeping away: I check Twitter / Instagram / Substack / Goodreads / and my email a few times a day from my computer only. It's successful enough, as a system, that people have had genuine trouble reaching me and a few times someone has asked me (in person) "Did you get that email I sent?" and I could say without lying that I hadn't checked my email in the past day.

I think that I am supposed to say I've noticed some sea change in my productivity or peace of mind, but I can't say that's happened. I'm still about halfway through Wings of the Dove, and today is the first day I’ve cracked the book in the past week. I haven't started or finished any other books. I haven't spent that much more time outdoors or taking care of errands. I've mostly been spending the excess time in the company of my own thoughts, which hasn't always been very pleasant—turns out that all our pleasant distractions actually do distract us from our troubles! Enjoyable things are enjoyable, who knew?

My debut novel-for-adults, The Default World, came out two weeks ago. I had events in SF and NYC and the events had decent turn-out (thirty-ish people), but it's hard to work for six years on a book and release it into the world and be like...my book is just another book. Nobody was waiting for it. Nobody cares about it. Reviewers aren't reviewing it.² Critics aren't excited for it. Readers pick it up, read the first few pages and put it down. It's not special at all to anyone besides me. It's not going to break out, and, barring some extraordinary good fortune, will not be on end of year tallies or awards lists.

Three times in the past six months people have asked "What do you think success would look like for this book?" and I've always had the same answer "It would look like being a NYT notable book and being on the National Book Awards longlist." Three times I've gotten back dead silence. But what am I supposed to say? That so long as one person reads my book and enjoys it, I'm happy? Am I supposed to set my sights so low that any result whatsoever would constitute success? I think the problem is that even a relatively small amount of success (you prob can't name the winner of last year's NBA, much less any book on the long list) is so much larger than a book from my small-press non-profit publisher can reasonably expect.³

So in my phoneless interludes I’ve just been ruminating about all the agents who said the book didn't compel them and all the editors who said it wasn't a good fit. About the friend who read it when I was thirty-five and said "Well maybe you won’t have success until your forties, like Susan Sontag" (saying she didn't think this would be the book that did it for me). I think of them hearing my book finally came out and thinking "Well, good for her!" And I feel sick, thinking about how deep down they'll all think they were right and that my book just about found its level. And none of them will ever re-evaluate their opinion like Gide had to reevaluate his opinion of Proust (who he’d initially dismissed as a man of fashion merely amusing himself with literature) because no voice that they respect will ever speak up on my book's behalf. I think of all the years when I was the only person insisting that I was a serious writer—I think of the agent who I used to tell "I want to write books that could be on the National Book Awards shortlist" and how he would say "Well do it then, send me something" even after we’d just spent an hour discussing The Default World. I think of all the years when I alone insisted that I still had something to say—I think of how I never had the luxury of self-doubt—the luxury of imposter syndrome—the luxury to sit back and let my teachers and peers tell me "Oh no the world needs your voice." I think about the events that still happen, where the aspiring queer writers gush to me about other writers ("Oh she has talent, she is really exciting, I’m really looking forward to seeing her") or look past me, seeing if there's something more important to talk to. So I think about the absence of recognition, the absence of excitement, that surrounds my book, and I think "Maybe they're right. Maybe the quality is just not there. Maybe my book is just another book."

You know, I've been doing this for twenty years, and I've seen a lot of people quit writing. A lot of people. Out of my cohort of YA writers (people who sold books in 2014/2015) probably eighty to ninety percent aren't writing anymore. And it happens because each time you fail, you need to break in anew. You can't write the same thing over and over and keep selling books. Each time you've failed, you need to recalibrate and offer a different value proposition to the publisher so they will condescend to publish you again.

So when my friends and family say "Maybe the next book will hit," they don't get that there won't be a next book unless I'm willing to put in the imaginative labor of doing something next time that is substantially different from what I've done this time. I can't just write another domestic realist fiction about contemporary American characters. It needs a different value proposition of some kind. If you're a successful writer, then you can move from Custom of the Country to Age of Innocence to House of Mirth. You can develop your themes, style, and content at your own pace. But if you're not successful, the development gets interrupted. If you're not successful then you've got to be like Walter Tevis or George R. R. Martin—writers who came back with different work in a substantially different genre / style. Or you just don't get published again. And that's the kind of labor that most writers aren't willing or capable of doing. Most writers can't even make the shifts that I made in the course of my YA career—much less the shift I made from YA to adult, from commercial to literary.

But the thought of still having to hustle well into my third decade of doing this—that's just kind of sickening. And I've realized, I'm not special. I'm no different from all my friends who've quit writing. They all hit the point where they just didn't have the interest in or ability to adapt themselves to the realities of what they'd need to write in order to continue to be working writers. And I'm not sure I have that interest or ability either. I mean...I actually do have another book under contract. I have my Great Books book from Princeton Press. It's substantially complete: I had coffee in New York with my editor, and he's pretty pleased with it. But I've been procrastinating on finishing just because I know it's a whole ‘nother go-around. That I might very well be sitting here this time next year being like "Well the timing wasn't right for this kind of book." And the truth is, I'm not that sure about the Great Books book deserves serious attention. It's like my Substack: it's neither a passionate defense of the Great Books nor a serious critique of them. It bats away criticisms of the GB project but when it tries to propound points of its own, the book lacks conviction. In reality, unless you already yearn to know what Plato really said, you aren't going to be drawn to the Great Books project. But if you already have that yearning, then you don't really need to read a defense of the GBs, what you need is to go out and pick up a copy of the Crito and start reading. In my opinion, most literate people have that desire--they want to know what's in these books. How can anyone not want to read Anna Karenina? That original yearning, which is often weak and obscure, is quite frequently confused with a social yearning (the desire to be the kind of person who's read Anna Karenina). And I don't think the social yearning is invalid either! When society pushes people to do things that are good, then that's a good thing! We should be a society where having read Anna Karenina is a mark of distinction, and it's a testament to the health of bourgeois society that there is such a strong cachet to being cultured. It's actually kind of sick and disgusting when literary people—whose entire value is built upon a reverence for culture—start to deny or twist or turn upon peoples' natural reverence for what is old and distinguished. But here's the thing—you also can't construct that reverence. People revere the Great Books (even if they haven't read them) because they see that expert opinion for the Great Books is natural and unforced. We aren't required to say we love Tolstoy. If anyone could seriously claim that Tolstoy is flawed and poorly-written, they could certainly publish an essay on the topic and the essay would be read. There is simply no need to insist to the world that Tolstoy is excellent. He is. You can open the book and see that for yourself! And if you can't see it, then after ten or twenty years of reading, you'll come back to him and change your mind.

Given this, to write a book or a blog about the Great Books is simply palaver. It's enjoyable, but I'm not sure it's particularly important. I don’t really think that Tolstoy is under threat. I am firmly convinced that there is some twenty-two year old right now copying "Anna Karenina" into an excel spreadsheet of "Lifetime Reading". She's probably reading this very blog as we speak! But to tell people to read Tolstoy isn't the kind of thing upon which you can base a literary reputation! It's simply the sort of thing you're obligated to do if you've read and enjoyed him yourself—same as you're obligated to give blurbs or to read earnest young peoples' MFA writing samples. It's not the work of a writer, it's the work that accompanies being a writer. I'm sure there's something great that remains to be said about Tolstoy, but I don't know that my book actually says it! And, what's worse, I think in the process of taking seriously the critiques of the Great Books I've actually written a book that's more circumspect than I think it truly should be. Like, I don’t think we need to debate whether or not Tolstoy is a writer a Christian Nationalist could enjoy. Yes, it's very easy to read Anna Karenina as a critique of licentiousness, because that is quite literally what the book is! It's not at all misreading to say that Anna Karenina supports the idea that unhappy people should not divorce. But that’s exactly why you should read the book! Because there is a solid argument to be made that unhappy people ought to stay married, simply because marriage is a social pact that is deeper and truer than transitory happiness. Surely there no harm (in fact, there is benefit!) in encountering this idea! But I think that even by acknowledging that the mores of the Great Books are not modern mores, I have somehow undercut them. And the truth is that my mores aren't modern mores either. I have plenty of Christian Nationalism in me. I simply believe that our Christian Nation is the secular one in which we actually live. Our unhappy marriage is the cosmopolitan twenty-first United States, with its unequal Senate and stupid Electoral College, and this is the marriage we ought to choose not to dissolve. Similarly, I see how the Great Books could, for many people, be an unhappy marriage, and my book counsels them not to dissolve it. But this underrates the fact that for me the Great Books have been a very happy marriage indeed, and that for me, the compact has worked exactly as it was supposed to. I was given a reverence for a sacred thing, and when I was finally inducted into the mysteries themselves, I did indeed see and speak to God, exactly as I was supposed to. There were pitfalls along the way. I thought for many years I was just faking it (or, rather, I worried that I was just faking it). But ultimately it was quite salutary to realize that there was actually no incentive to fake a love for the Great Books (and in fact the financial incentives really went the other way), so any fakery, if it had ever existed, must've long since fallen away.

Anyhow, the problem is that it's still a lot of work to read Wings of the Dove. It's rewarding and enjoyable work. But it's work, and I procrastinate on that work, just like anyone else. And it would certainly be a worthwhile occupation to explain how and why that work is so worth doing, and how-and-why it makes sense to sacrifice your evenings and weekends to the task of understanding Henry James's looping, labyrinthine, exhausted mind, with all its glancing sensations and half-deciphered shadows (the man literally has a novella called "A Figure In The Carpet" about a man who spends his life trying to figure out the hidden, indecipherable meaning of a novel). It would certainly be worthwhile to explain how and why reading James is a worthwhile activity, but this is something I've never quite seemed to do. It's an activity that certainly makes you better, more sensitive, more acute, and more moral, but I'm not sure it does those things in proportion to the amount of time it involves—surely any thoughtful and self-directed activity towards a concrete goal would accomplish these aims to some degree. So it's very difficult to speak about the aim that is accomplished solely by reading Henry James. The aim of...what? Understanding beauty, I suppose. And yet if you abstract morality and truth and goodness from beauty, then what's left hardly seems worth the time. I think the truth is that beauty without goodness would simply be...music. And it's much easier and simpler to listen to music than it is to read Henry James. You read Henry James precisely because it's in narrative art that beauty, goodness, and truth are combined. And that's about as close as it's possible to come to describing a raison for the Great Books, and it's only taken you twenty minutes to read this blog post and you haven't needed to pay $20 for it, which is why I'm not that excited about revising my Great Books book (even though I probably will).

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Podcast Recommendations

Thus endeth the main part of the newsletter. Now that my newsletter only posts once a week I thought that I'd do it up really serious, with, like, sections and sub-headings and pull quotes and recurring features, etc. I definitely have a vision of creating a harmless GB-inflected cottage industry. Which kind of soap would someone who reads Socrates use? Which kind of bullet journals would Herodotus have used? You know, just create some very safe soyboy lifestyle brand focused on a kind of dreamy union with the ancients. Does this seem doable to you? You could all be my brand ambassadors and push it as a kind of joke, but in the end, is it really a joke? Maybe it starts out as a joke but becomes real, and everyone who's on the inside becomes best friends and gets book deals, while I of course make a million bucks selling out to Conde Nast. And yes, it has nothing to do with sitting down and reading books, but we have a good time, don't we! We enjoy ourselves! We don't hurt anyone!

Anyway, I'm doing it. That's the pitch. That's the game. That's the deck. That's the slingshot. That's the pivot, as people said in my youth. To that end we now have...PODCAST RECOMMENDATIONS:

This section is a response to the question: “If you haven't been spending time reading or browsing the internet or even eating, then what HAVE you been doing, Naomi?”

And the answer is I've been listening to podcasts.

I got really into history podcasts about four or five years ago, and I think that I'm actually a history podcast person now. Like, this is a major part of my identity at this point. I only like one form of history podcast, which is when a white guy in his mid-twenties finishes listening to History of Rome, thinks "I could do that" and picks a spot on the map and then ten years later the guy has turned describing that spot on the map into his full-time job. So far I am up to date (i.e. have listened to all the extant episodes of) History of Rome, History of England, Age of Napoleon, History of China, Revolutions, History of the Crusades, History of Byzantium, Scandinavian History, History of the Germans, and History of Africa. I am making my way through: History of Egypt, Ancient World, French History, and History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, the Islamic History podcast, oh and the Persian History podcast. Half the shit I say on Substack just shit I learned on a history podcast, and I'd say that the audience overlap between the GBs and the Ancient History world has to be near-total at this point.⁴ I’ve gotten into a few podcasts that aren’t ‘History of [Modern Nation-State, But The Podcast Is About That Historical People From Which The Nation State Derives Its Name]’, but without the narrative to keep me going, I tend to stall out at some point. Same thing with podcasts that are divided into discrete seasons that are about discontinuous but thematically-related periods—I tend to drop off between seasons.⁵

My absolute favorite history podcast is Robin Pierson's History of Byzantium. This guy's got his whole thing figured out. He’s been running 11 years, and we’re almost to the end (Constantinople has just fallen to the Crusaders during the Fourth Crusade). He's got a beautiful voice, and his approach to the material is perfect. He's not all-in on narrative history: it's not all kings and emperors and generals. There is a lot of material, intellectual, and political history there. But he doesn't stint on the narrative too. Because, like, nobody wants to listen to an entire Byzantine History podcast and end up not even being able to keep their crusades straight.

But my second-favorite podcast and biggest recommendation is the History of Africa podcast. Except shoot now I feel bad burying the recommendation so far down the list. Because with History of Africa I almost have, like, some kind of parasocial relationship. I'm a huge Patreon subscriber (I think probably their biggest by far—my name is first in all the congratulation lists), and I just so deeply admire what this guy, who I think just has a day job as security guard at a museum or something, is doing. His audience is pretty small, maybe a few thousand people? And I'm pretty sure he's a white guy, although he's really cagey on this. But his podcast is so well-researched and so in-depth. This is like unbelievably good history podcasting here. He's not only giving you History of Byzantium level storytelling / analysis, but he's doing it on places that you might not've even heard of, like Ethiopia's Aksum civilization (a contemporary of Rome that lasted well into the 12th century) or the Malagasy Merino Empire. It's truly, truly, astonishing—he has to hunt down seriously obscure books just to get started. Some of these places barely have a wikipedia entry, and he’s producing entire podcast seasons on them! The quality level is a little shaky in the first season (on Old Kingdom Egypt), but starting with the second (on the Aksumite Kingdom) it goes way up, and by the end of the Ashanti Empire (Season Three) it's one of the best podcasts on the internet. Like if you can put something out there as good as what this guy does, that's really something to be proud of. And I don't even know his fucking name? I give him $200 a month—I don't know his name. Go sign up, give him $200 a month. He's easily worth it. Like, the amount of work he puts into each episode dwarfs what I put into Woman of Letters.

I mean, here's the deal. I'm a novelist: Woman of Letters is obviously not the main gig. I put most of my effort into my books and writing this blog takes maybe three or four hours a week, compared to the thirty or forty hours a week that these history podcasters put in. But I've never figured out how to work hard. Editors demand that you pretend everything you write is highly-finished, highly-polished, very thoughtful, and I'm just not that way. My Princeton Press book was written in three months! It's basically a very long substack post! And my editor wants to print up thousands of copies and send it out into the world! Where's the dividing line? When is something good enough? When is it worth your time? When is it self-indulgent rambling and when is it literature?

Hard to say!⁶ But if a guy is telling you about how the Ashanti Empire finally collapsed because the Dutch and the British cut a deal where they swapped forts, so the Ashanti no longer had an independent source of trade partners from which to get ammunition? And he’s doing it over a well-produced audio feed so you can learn something during your commute? Well that is a level of usefulness and entertainment that Woman of Letters can't even aspire to!

Maybe that's the problem! Maybe when you open WoL you should know you're gonna learn about something. I should be saying, “this is the last word on Henry James.” BAM. Now you don't need to read Henry James anymore! That would be really worthwhile. A podcast where I just explain the Great Books to people so they don't have to read them? But the problem is you can explain history—but you can't explain the Great Books. Except, I think, what you CAN DO is atomize and particularize the GB identity.

You know what's great about being a GB reader? Nobody checks your receipts! You think people are going to check what you have and haven’t read, but they don't. During my first few years of writing about the GBs I was always worried somebody would be like, oh you're a fraud, you haven't read Aristotle. Oh, you're a fraud, you haven't read Descartes. Never happens. Where have the snobs gone? There is no barrier to being a GB person. My real-life friend D___, a blog reader, has been reading things little by little, always self-deprecatingly announcing it to me as "I am a person now who has read Anna Karenina", and I realized at some point....he is a Great Books reader too!!!!⁷ It happened! Now I look at his reading list and it's always crazy shit I've barely heard of! He made our book club read The Golden Ass! He's so fucking erudite! And I saw it happen! It just happens! That's what we're packaging here at WoL—the permission to think of yourself, privately, diffidently, as an educated person. The sneaking suspicion that, although you haven't read everything, there are lots of "real intellectuals" (i.e. people with book deals and PhDs) who not only haven’t read books, but don't even feel bad about it! So why should you feel bad, when even your superiors don't feel bad? It's fine to worship a God that our superiors don't worship, but we shouldn't fear a God they don't fear.

Maybe down here beneath the real literary world we can make a newer, friendlier, and more genuine literary world! And ours will still have fakes and posers, but it will be different in some way. It really will be! Because we will understand you’re never actually “done with the reading”. It’s always ongoing.

But here’s the question: how much time do you spend really reading the books and how much do you spend reading about them? How much time do you spend reading Wings of the Dove compared to the amount you spend listening to history podcasts (in the last week the ratio is at least 1 to 15)? How much real knowledge is there at the bottom to feed this ecosystem? And when does the pool of real erudition become so shallow that the ecosystem becomes a stunted imitation of learning? Which is to say that if the monolingual U-Chicago Professor (and Great Books Founder) Mortimer Adler is a cut-rate polymath, a cheap facsimile of an Aristotle, and I, the novelist Naomi Kanakia, with my mere MFA, am a facsimile of Mortimer Adler, and my readers are facsimiles of me, then at what level does it become pathetic? At what level is the actual amount of achievement so little as to not be worth bothering? Or, on the other hand, does there occur a kind of renewal? Am I offering up something that Mortimer Adler couldn't? It's hard to say, because in comparison to him and Hutchins (who were all figures of derision in their day, because of their democratic ethos), I feel rather faded.

I think the answer is that being a Great Books reader is always pathetic. It's never respectable. It always feels like you're trying too hard. That's why there's no checking of receipts. Because to come along and say "Oh, but you haven't even read Nietzsche" would be to reveal yourself as equally pathetic.

Anyway, I feel a genuine affection for all of my readers (including those who haven't purchased or read my novel—it's totally fine if you haven't!). Thank you for giving me your attention. You weren't required to. Three of you even came to my NYC launch! Thank you

Salieri Redemption

and Quiara and a guy named Adam!

Maybe I'll continue the slow, subtle, self-aware process of turning myself into a lifestyle brand and maybe I won't. Who the fuck knows. But this post marks my official pivot away from novel self-promo and towards non-fiction book self-promo.

(P.S. You should still buy my novel tho)

1. Personally, I don’t bother with dumb phones or light phones. The problem with anything less than a full-featured smart phone is that there’s always some finicky app you need to install to get into your gym or get on a flight or get a cup of coffee or something. Trying to live without all the apps is just more trouble than it’s worth.

2. Yikes of course this post was written and set to publish and I saw John Pistelli’s generous review of the book on his substack!:

This becomes the thematic question of the novel: is the “found family” casually celebrated in progressive and queer spaces really an adequate replacement for the thick and unchosen obligations of actual family and community?

3. The winner was Justin Torres's book BLACKOUTS, by the way, which you almost certainly have not read (and neither have I)!

4. In this list, I believe only the History of the Crusades (white woman) and Islamic History podcast (Black guy) aren’t by white guys. The Islamic History podcast is interesting because it’s by someone whose intent is to educate true believers. There’s a subgenre of history podcast out there that’s by ethnic nationalists—you know, the Armenian guy who really does want to tell the world about how Armenia is/was the greatest nation on earth. I tend to avoid these, but the Islamic History podcast is just genuinely high-quality, truthful storytelling. It’s from an Islamic perspective (no questioning the historicity of Muhammad here!) and he goes out of his way to say he prefers to rely on Islamic sources rather than the work of non-Islamic historians, but still—it’s a good podcast!

5. The non-geographic podcast I’ve followed most closely is The Industrial Revolutions, which is also extremely well-researched and under-supported. Definitely worth subscribing to that one too!

6. I guess my theory is that the eight or nine thousand hours I’ve spent reading difficult books somehow goes into the background labor for each episode.

7. D___ is also the one person who made the leap from on-line fan to real-life friend by the way! He was a big fan of my last blog and of my sci-fi short stories, and now we are REAL friends. So it can happen, you guys—just shoot me an email. I also did have one guy make the leap but then he turned out to be a creep, whoops. If you’re worrying that’s you—it’s not.