47: How to Read a Book

Hi, and welcome to the Classical Stuff You Should Know. My name is AJ Hanenburg, and I am here with two fellows. One is named Graham. Hey.

And one is named Thomas. That's me. And we are all three educators at a small private school in Austin, Texas, named Veritas Academy. And we all like books and letters and history and art and each other and rain and… It's raining tonight.

Yeah, it's still raining. Man, Texas needs it. I mean, yeah, happy birthday, Texas. Happy birthday.

I actually went to celebrate the 4th this weekend at a lake house, and it rained for a good chunk of it. So as a Canadian, I may have asked this a year ago on the podcast, but as a Canadian, how do you greet people on the 4th of July? Happy Independence Day? Happy 4th.

But Happy 4th sounds so awkward to say. Happy 4th of July. Happy 4th. I just never thought about it.

I think usually the standard Texas greeting is, whew, y'all. And there's missiles in the air. Yeah, that's right. It explains that.

And you take your Spurs together and ride off on it. Horse. Thank you. The thing that comes to my mind is the… What was that show?

It had the funny clips, America's Funny Home Videos. I can only think, America, America, this is you. That comes to my head when it's around the 4th. Yep.

So that's also an acceptable greeting. How's your celebration of Independence Day? Canadian Independence Day is on July 1st. That's Canada Day.

That's where we celebrate our dependence on the British throne and on our vast natural resources that we exploit for our nation's profit. No, Canada Day is on July 1st, and I'm not quite sure what we celebrate. We celebrate Canada, right? But it's not like we had… It's Canada Day.

Charter… I don't know. You could just, like, stand out in a field and be like, I'm doing it. Celebrate in Canada. And the traditional greeting is, one person yells out, how's she going?

And the person replies, she's going great. Good. That's like a rip-roaring Canada Day. No one celebrates Canada Day in Texas.

Nope. Yeah, so I do, but Amanda wore red and white. I know she was really nice for her. Yeah, I wonder why.

There's no, like, Canadian bars. There is one. There's one Canadian bar. It's in, like, Round Rock.

It's way far north. Oh. Yeah, but they watch hockey. I've not been.

I've not been. I feel like Canada Day would be the perfect day to open up a Canadian bar. That's true. I should have done that.

I got a whole year. I feel like the Irish have lots of options. No, man. Irish holidays.

They sure do. Like, they really got a lot of bars. Yeah, and you can even, like, you know, find a restaurant that, like, Mongolia. You can go to a Mongolian restaurant and be like, celebrate Mongolia.

Canada. Well, we don't really have our own, like, distinctive cuisine. Poutine. But that's it.

That's all you need. And, like, not everybody likes sweet cheese curds on french fries. But you could really, like, you could make a theme of it. Like, you could sell maple syrup and… Oh, you are preaching to the choir, my friend.

I feel like Canada could do a better job at marketing itself internationally. That's true. We need to start the food truck. What would you call it?

Grade A food. Grade A. Grade A. Oh.

I mean, it would work. How's she going, eh? It's perfect. All right.

You want to dive in? Yeah, let's do this. Cool. So today we're gonna be talking about a book called How to Read a Book.

It's by Mortimer Adler, and Graham terrified me before this episode started by asking, Hey, haven't we done that episode before? Which we have not, to the best of my knowledge. We have talked about Mortimer Adler many times. He's an important dude for bringing back the focus on classics.

He's the guy who, working for Encyclopedia Britannica, curated the great books of the Western world, which is something you can still buy. He also, I think it's a nonprofit, but there's a group that put together a thing called The Great Conversations. He was also a part of that. Then also, he wrote this book, and then something I read kind of recently and was interested by, he had this whole line of books, one of which is the Paideia Proposal, but he had this proposal for what modern education should look like.

He focused that on Paideia, which is a Greek word we've referenced a few times, but kind of the growing up of a child into, like, a fully developed adult. Did he teach somewhere? What was his, like, day job? He worked at, he went to Columbia.

I wanna say he worked there for a while. That might have been when he was doing his research, but he worked for Encyclopedia Britannica. That's where he came up with or put together the great books. I feel like when you say that's what you work for, you can push your glasses up a little on your nose.

Like, yes, I work for Encyclopedia Britannica. Maybe not so much anymore, because, yeah, I probably shouldn't, you know, buy that stock. Yeah, I don't think it's doing well. Yeah, but at the same time, like, do we have a good replacement?

Because if I said I worked for Wikipedia, what's the automatic assumption? Like, I'm not reliable? That's true. Or I'm the chips.

Well, maybe the automatic assumption is, like, you run Linux. You're a big computer nerd. So, which is probably not far off if you work for Wikipedia. Sorry for all of our Wikipedia listeners out there.

So, this book, charmingly titled How to Read a Book. I hope all of you are laughing at the idea of there being a book by this title. I was hoping that one of the two of you would make some joke about the way to read a book is to open it and to read the words. Oh, this is a serious podcast, Thomas.

I'm used to the lack of banter and severity with which we approach our topics. Solemnity, please. It's like how to build furniture, but before you can figure that out, you have to build the chair that's written on. I'm sorry.

That was the best I could come up with right both on metaphor, and it's not great. I love it. Like a chair with a book written on the bottom. That's what I was trying to do.

It just seems like you have to accomplish the thing before you can accomplish the thing. Or like a book on reading books. And that's 100% what it sounds like approaching it. But there are lots of ideas contained in this book, the most important of which is the four levels of reading, which is what we'll be going through today.

But so the four levels of reading are first introduced in the second chapter. The first chapter, just kind of off the bat, is really open with, first off, this is a funny name for a book. Second off, the stuff that he talks about in this book, not everyone is going to do it for every book they read. We have many different reasons for approaching books.

So in the loosest definition of a book, we could include the instruction manual for your DVD player. You know, there are written words on a page. What we are talking about today has nothing to do with that. You have a very clear intention with approaching that instruction manual.

Please do not. The DVD player. I don't know. The first thing we read.

I'm sorry. What's your HD DVD player? Thomas, do you currently own a DVD player? Is there one in your house?

We read a slash DVD player, but yeah, it's impressive. You don't have one? I do not. You don't own one?

I think my computer has some disk drives, but I think those are going into the dinosaur too. They're not going to stick around. That's a bummer. No, again, we have a Blu-ray slash DVD player.

Don't buy that stock. Well, I have a DVD player right here on the side of my laptop. You didn't even know? I guess you… I had it.

How often do I use it? All the time to watch all the DVDs. For a long time, this movie Hoot was stuck in my DVD player on my school computer. And so every once in a while when I was giving a presentation, load up, Hoot would just boot up and you'd have this menu screen with an owl.

Is that really? Is it? I don't know what Hoot is. It's about owls.

Good. I've been recently on a kick of going through the American Film Institute Top 100 Best Movies of All Time, 2007 list, in case you're curious. And that's required DVD player because they're old. Anyway.

So that's one extreme of the example is instructions. But another example is sometimes we read for entertainment, and that's fine. If your goal is entertainment, please don't go through the difficult process that Adler's going to lay out in here. It's okay to read a book and just enjoy it.

Adler would encourage you to not only read books for entertainment, but… And I would probably encourage people not to just read books for enrichment, too. I mean, you should read fun books just when you're chilling. Just don't, like... I don't know, it's human to enjoy stuff.

It's hard to be, like, all Aristotle all the time. Oh, man. The brain needs a rest. Oh, man it's the block of text with no divisions, there's no chapters, there's no verses, all those things are added later.

So to be able to split it up, you have to know the text first. So that's why I would call it analytical. I'll go into the inspection in a second, but anyway, elementary level is the first level, it is the shallowest level of reading, but it's necessary. All of these build on each other, you cannot do one without the other, is the argument of Adler.

You might argue you can do inspectional, but you don't have to do inspectional, but it certainly helps. So what you're accomplishing with elementary reading is literally recognizing individual words on a page. It is the literal ability to read through a book. I think at the shallow level, picking up on basic things such as plot, if it's a work of fiction, but a work of the sciences, it is understanding what is being tested, it's understanding conclusions, it's just being able to follow it, follow the text itself.

I call that plot. So when you all read books, is this something that's important? Well, of course, you know what happens. And this is like the basic things that get quizzed on in an English class.

I was thinking that, like I think this is the stuff that SparkNotes would have. I think this is the stuff that is easy to quiz over because it's literally just what happened in what you read. Weirdly enough, when you skip this, there are problems. This gets into the symbolism stuff we were talking about.

Exactly, like even with poetry. Before students actually understand what every line means, they'll say, this is about war. And I'm like, not at all, actually. There's nothing about war in here.

They're like, it says bombs. That's about it. Let's start over. And so we have to read through.

But when you don't actually know what happened or you don't keep track of who's who and what they did and where, you can make some really big mistakes about later symbolism and motif. But also like where the word missile is used in anything, like before what we call missiles were invented, like, you know, they mean arrows. And so in that same way, what they mean like things that the church wrote. That's my favorite one.

Papal missiles. I have students that are so confused every time we talk about papal missiles. Like the Pope's just like lobbing bombs. I like that.

And the diet of worms. That's gross. Yeah. It's like where they find all the worms.

That's my question. Why do they eat them? Why do they get enough for everybody? Adler says here that people do breeze over this.

And so if something is particularly complex, you'll miss the elementary level and you're not even really reading the book at that point. You are turning pages. He also says if something is in a foreign language that you're not comfortable with, that would also mean you have not achieved the elementary level if you don't know what the words are saying. So it's just the bare bones.

Like, can you read the book? And this is work that needs to be done on something like Shakespeare or Dante or Milton. You know, whereas maybe sitting down and reading some, you know, poppy pulp fiction book of the day is going to be easy and requires very little of the reader. Yes.

This first step. It doesn't mean elementary. It doesn't mean like facile. It doesn't mean simple.

It means, you know, in a way, it's the most foundational. Yeah. All other all other meaning from a book will come from the elementary level. It's like the way the reading scripture that you need to start with the literal.

What is this verse saying? And same with the book. That's where AJ's point of you get weird interpretations when it's not based on what a book or a poem or whatever is actually saying. So the second level is the one that is rarer.

It's called inspectional reading. So I will read the overview of it and then I'll go into some of the rules of what it is. So when reading at this level, the student is allowed a set time to complete an assigned amount of reading. You might be allowed 15 minutes to read this book, for instance, or even a book twice as long.

Still, another name for this level might be skimming or pre-reading. Have you ever skimmed or pre-read a book before diving into the book? Interesting. Not before diving.

I usually do it after. I read the book and then I need to get the lay of the land. Like if you're thinking of it like, I don't know, boating around a lake, right? You can jump in the boat, you boat around, and then if you are going to jump straight to super analytical, you'd stop in a cove and then start looking at the brush and the wildlife.

But if you don't really have a good picture of the whole lake, then you're kind of in trouble. So I boat around for a while and then I look at a map of the lake and then I would dive to the port stuff. Yeah, I may do that with like a history book. So if I'm going to read a book on the Civil War, I may sort of flip through and see what the chapters are called and sort of see how they sequence the events or how they focus on.

But if it's a novel, I'm not, I don't really, I don't really jump ahead because I don't want to like hit spoilers or anything. Yep. And I think that's a good point again that most reading for entertainment will just stay at the elementary level. You start at the beginning and read to the end and that's kind of the end of it.

Yeah, there are there are only certain books that will require or benefit from inspectional reading. That's probably a good sign that they would benefit from analytical and then syntopical reading. So he has a list of things that he recommends for this systematic or preview reading. So I'll just go through these.

Some of these are things that you already do, you just don't think of them in this formal way that Adler's writing them down. First one, look at the title page and if the book has one at its preface and then read them quickly. So he has this example about Graham, I think you said you want to do this book, Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall. I do, all six volumes.

You monster. So a thing, so the title of the book, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, would you want to guess what is not included in that book that relates to the Roman Empire? Probably the beginning of it. So it's not at the beginning, it's not at the rise.

If you were to guess, I don't know this, I haven't read it, do you think it's a happy book or a sad book? Depends how you feel about Rome, I guess. Sure, but I guess the Romans who were going through it. Oh, that would be a sad book, right.

It's probably, if it's Decline and Fall, it's probably about things getting worse and worse and worse over six volumes, culminating with, I mean, whatever the opposite of culminating is, with their destruction. So probably a bummer. The glorious rise of the Middle Ages. There it is, sorry, that's what I was about to say.

But this is interesting. So he doesn't call it the glorious rise of the Middle Ages. Yes. And that tells you something of how he feels about this.

Well, I think if he called it that, you'd have to focus on primarily the Middle Ages and not Rome. Yeah. So, the way I start with a book is, what is its title, and kind of what does that tell you about the book? AJ, I'm thinking of your comments that Shakespeare's play is titled Julius Caesar, but Caesar does not really play a large role as a character.

That has to be something that's interesting. I guess maybe because he's so important to the plot. And it might have been, honestly, sometimes I think these things have to do with selling it. Right, if I'm a playwright putting up Brutus, it might not draw the largest crowd, but Julius Caesar probably will.

Yeah, I think that makes sense. His second level is to study the table of contents. And I know this is something I skip by all the time. So, what are the table of contents?

Tell me about how the book will be structured, what's in that book, what sections are most likely the most important, what is in this book, essentially. Looking at Shakespeare, you'd see table of contents with either five acts. The five acts then tell you how the play is going to be structured, how the story is going to be structured, what you're looking for in each of those acts. You want to meet your characters in the first act.

You want to find your inciting incident in the second act. You want to figure out what the climax is in the third and then conclusion in the fifth. So, in the same way with history, Graham was just talking about. So, the third… He says that's the one that's most often skipped.

He said this whole thing is skipped. I say that I skip that. And what's the importance does that give to you? It helps focus your study.

Yeah. So, it helps for the subsequent with the analytical reading that will come up next. Yeah, because even in the, think about the books that you all teach, there are, I assume, particular passages that you are drawn back to over and over again, or particular ideas you're drawn back to over and over again. Sure.

Oh, yeah. So, that means that there are some things you're not focusing on. And that is, maybe it's, you know, you haven't seen the grandeur of what's in these missing sections, in these lost sections, in these other sections. Or it's, these parts aren't as important.

They aren't What is the level of the way that it does? You have to understand, so you have to ask those questions as you're reading through, and then come to a concise summary of what is the author arguing in this piece, or yeah, I think that's probably the best way to put it. What is the author, I mean, basically, why did they write the book? What are they trying to get across in this book in their own terms?

And you do all that work before you then come to a conclusion of I agree or I disagree with that book. Does that sound like either how you all approach books or how your students approach books? I think that's, yeah, that's how we would approach the book in class. If we didn't do any, especially that last step, I would feel like we would just, it's just exposure.

I've just been like, all right, look, congratulations, you know a little bit about the story of Paradise Lost and the structure of it. Let's go on to Frankenstein, right? And there would be, there's no understanding. There's no, there's no analysis of the book.

So yes, for sure. That's definitely what we do in class. But I know, I often have the reaction of wanting to agree or disagree with the book, like as I'm reading through it. I was gonna say that often agreement and disagreement and judgment comes far prior to full understanding of the book.

And my students get a little bit of the Iliad and they decide that they love it or hate it before they've even hit the end. Yeah. And, or understood. Yeah.

And understood what Homer is trying to do with the Iliad. Yeah. I guess now that I think about it, I really don't pay much attention to whether or not the kids like it. That's probably the way to be, right?

Like, I don't care because, I mean, or I just have the fundamental belief that they will. Eventually. Just to nuance it, because what you're saying is these are good books and they are enjoyable and you want the kids to experience that. And so if their initial reaction is, I don't like this book, that doesn't mean a whole lot.

In the same way that when I approach a big, a thick book and I don't like it at first, it doesn't mean anything. It probably means I'm lazy. First time I had scotch, I didn't like it. Now I do.

Although there is, especially in the earliest stages, so one of the key parts of my class, especially because it's ninth grade and we're just diving into old books, is hopefully cultivating a fondness for these. Because it's entirely possible that they hate the Iliad and then that sets them on a tone and they hate the Odyssey and then they hate every other book we've read. And they like a book that is easy and we do a bad job of showing them why it's worth liking books that are hard. And you set that tone early and it's probably not going to go away because they'll just say, I hate big books and they'll believe that without ever giving them a fair shake.

I cannot lie. Oh my word. And that's kind of something that Adler gets at here that when we read books that are worth going through all four levels, we are, we're, we're probably challenged by the book. Like the book is probably above our current level.

If it were just cotton candy, then we would just do an elementary reading and we'd just get through it and that'd be the end of it. But Yeah, there are books that you grasp entirely on the first pass. Yeah, but we don't benefit from those. We don't improve our ability of reading by only going to books that we already can read easily.

But Thomas, we are modern people with no time. We need to get them right the first time. I want you to give me, write me a summary of this book so I can understand it without even having to read it. This is, I don't want to name it, but there's this website that does, um, like five minute, like you can read a summary of five that takes five minutes to get through and that's supposed to take the place of an entire book.

And most of them are practical books where in fact, I think a five minute reading is superior to going through the book itself. But sometimes they'll put on there like classics and it's like, Oh yeah, the plot of Romeo. I don't know if this is on there, but the plot of Romeo and Juliet in five minutes. That doesn't do anything for me.

Like, I don't know. War and Peace. Yeah, exactly. Like there's something to the experience of reading through a book like that that changes people that you want.

Yeah. A good book should have a reason for existing, right? If, if it's pointlessly big, that's a bad book. Exactly right.

I think that's a great point. Yeah, the book should be no longer than it needs to be. That's what he talks about with inspectional reading, that it should be no quicker than it needs to be and analytical should be no longer than it needs to be. Some books will tap out sooner than other books.

I think that's fine. Yeah, it's still worth the time. Do you stop books? Do you abandon books?

Yeah, so this is not a good rule. And it's a great rule on books. The rule on best route is entirely arbitrary, but I read a book until page 70 and that's when I make a decision. So I will, if I start a book, I will commit to the first 70 and that's when I make my decision.

But if I read to 71, I'm finishing that book. Interesting. That is arbitrary. It's entirely arbitrary.

I don't know where it came from, but what about you, Hanborough? Do you abandon books and just say like, I'm not gonna finish this book? Occasionally I have. Yeah, I'd say, I mean, more often than not, it's not necessarily that I've abandoned the book, but there are other books that seem more pertinent at the moment.

So I just move on to something a little bit. It's not like I make a concerted, like this book is trash and I will no longer read it. There are occasions like that. And there's one specific type of book that happens a lot in the professional realm.

And it's the kind of book that can be a pamphlet, but what they do is they say, here is my principle. Here is five examples of that principle. Here's me breaking that principle into bullet points, even though the bullet points are incredibly obvious, and here are discussion questions at the end of the chapter. And I see this all the time in business books, in how to teach books.

If you can say it in a pamphlet and there's no real information that's missing, say it in a pamphlet. Please. I don't want to read all that extra stuff. And there have been occasions where I'm reading like a long sci-fi book and it's just, it's just too long.

Like the prose is too long. But yeah, so I don't appreciate when there are like stories and books in the practical books, like you're talking about. Like I feel like they waste time and I just want, like, give me the one rule. But Sarah feels very differently.

Sarah likes it when there's like an actual connection to humans who do these things. Like Seven Habits of Highly Effective People could literally just be seven sentences and probably would be equally as practical, but I don't know. You miss something for all the stories, right AJ? No, but not if they're poorly told.

A lot of those are, I find that a lot of those stories are poorly wrought. The one in Seven Habits, if I'm not mistaken, is he's giving, he's giving, he sits his son down, who's having trouble at school, and he gives him these seven habits and then his son goes off and gets an A and gets on the football team and like gets a girlfriend. And it's like, like, let's wait. I gotta read this book.

It's just like, okay, of course. That's what's gonna happen to everyone who reads this book. It's like, it's things really funny. I think like, it's even worse when they make up the characters and it's not an honest story that happened to people.

I read one recently about business communication and it was like, consider Cassandra. She was scared to give a presentation. I was like, no, she wasn't. There's no Cassandra.

This is not a real event that has ever happened in real life and I don't need you to call me this way. I'm just worried that means that the person writing the book hasn't done it in the real world, that they had to make up examples for it. Like you should know someone who went through this. Is there a punishment for writing bad books?

Like ultimately? Maybe. Well, this is harsh, but you have to hang out with the people you produce. Oh, there you go.

That would actually be the punishment. If everybody in your business world has read your book on how to communicate business wise and it's just this really shallow. You got to sit through eternal PowerPoint presentations of them giving their five minute summaries of your book. Or people emulating your writing and then you have to read that.

Oh man. All right. So I'm convinced, probably unfairly, but I'm convinced that the best business writer is a guy named Peter Drucker. And the best business book ever written is The Effective Executive.

And I want to say it's 100 pages and it's kind of all you ever need to read. Like if you're into that genre. And like, that's all you need. And there have been countless books that have been written that are based on it or steal from it.

But they, you know, make it 200 pages and have as much information. Anyway, he was writing, I get the dates wrong, but I think he was writing in the 50s. 1966 is when this one was Because we hold these books up and say, these are great books. And a piece of that must be, there's some truth in it.

There's something in it that is right. But we don't necessarily affirm everything that's in the book. I just want to throw that out there. I don't know if that complicates the reading of, or even maybe you focus on your students.

Like, is it hard for a high schooler to read through and be like, this book says one thing, this book says another thing. But my teachers make me read both. But I think it's like having, using the Julius Caesar example is a great example. You read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, where it's a great gray area.

And maybe it was probably a good thing that we got, you know, that we got this tyrant. And then you read Dante and Dante is like, what they did was absolutely wrong. You should never kill your lead. It was betrayal of the highest order.

And to have these two points of view artfully rendered and brought forth and put in front of the students in the same year is, I think, a really important discussion. And then they, for them to really sort of go back and forth between like, is this a good thing or is this a bad thing? Yeah, I think that's, I think that's a good, definitely important. We do a little bit in 10th grade because we read Paradise Lost and afterwards we read Frankenstein.

Frankenstein does a lot of hearkening back to Paradise Lost because the monster says, well, I'm even worse off than Adam and Eve. And he learns English from reading Paradise Lost, which is- And Plutarch's Lives, I believe. And Plutarch's Lives. And so the students, you know, get the taste of doing that fourth kind of reading because they are now being able to compare these two things and one's fresh in their mind because they've just done it.

And yeah, so it's making, they become English scholars as opposed to just read the book and get my grade. But I think there's also an autoquatio thing to be brought into it. There are questions that maybe certain grades aren't ready for. And I don't want to say ninth graders.

I feel like, you know, they're already getting pretty hard enough on them. So I read Great Expectations as a senior and I hated that book. And I mean, you all hate it now too. But like this book, and then was forced, no, I read it again as a part of the book club that Veritas has for parents.

And I loved the book. And the book hadn't changed, but what I was going through had changed. And I related with Pip much differently than I had as a senior. So, I mean, yeah, just because someone's 18 doesn't mean that they are ready to engage with all the ideas.

They're probably ideas that I, as a 29-year-old, am not ready to engage with. But I think even more so than just being ready for the book, being ready for two separate perspectives on a very formative thing. Right. There are certain things, questions that you just shouldn't ask a five-year-old.

He is not ready to grapple with questions of ethics, probably. At the very base level, he needs to know don't eat on the carpet. Tell him what to do. And that will come later.

But giving him, like, this dog stole from another dog. The other dog turned out to be an evil dog. Who was right? Come up with the answer.

Like, you don't want to do that to a four-year-old kid. And I think the same sort of thing bears out as you move into higher education. You just have to give them appropriate questions. Which is hilarious because sometimes you see those news articles where it's like, we ask kids what they thought about this high-level policy proposal in government.

And they said X, which happened to be the one that I want. It's like, that's not credit. It doesn't matter. It doesn't help you.

That's like the worst kind of ad populum argument. It's where, like, everyone agrees with me. Toddlers love it. By the way, they're all children.

Like, that's the wrong group to, like, have at your backside, you know, at the back. But I think it's something that's complicated in reading books that, yeah, you might have, like, in reading through something, you might be subject to an idea you disagree with. And that might, in fact, be wrong that the book is championing as right. But that's a piece.

People through history have not always agreed with how we feel in 2018. So it's probably an important thing to do, to understand. We don't all agree on how we feel in 21. I feel everything.

Anyway, when we talk about how, like, Romans felt this way or, like, Roman society was like this. That's how people are going to talk about us one day. About our podcast? Our cultural defining podcast.

But this is why we read. Once you graduate and you realize what your college education was worth, you have no more voice at that college. And you are paying it off anyway. Like you said, you pay for it.

You're gone and you have nothing more to say. It's like going into McDonald's. They hand you a bag of food that you paid for yesterday. And then by the time you get sick, you paid for it days ago.

And now you're out of town. Like, you have nothing more to say to that McDonald's. That's a pretty dark view of college education, I think. Well, I'm talking specifically about these courses, right?

Oh, when you realize they're a waste of time. Well, when you read the title, geez. College is soon. If I'm a college kid, what am I going to choose?

That's why I'm worried about allocating the money because you give it to the Harry Potter teachers. Right. Exactly. And so that's my point is that the way college is set up, it's not people like you.

You don't pay for it. Yes, this has been worthy. And I will, like, allot my money according to what has served me well. So then maybe how do we discern what should be studied syntopically?

And how do, as teachers, do we just, like, be standard bearers? We just try to keep the standard high of what is talked about syntopically. I mean, I get called snobby already, so. There's nothing wrong with that.

I believe snobbery is the price of taste. It is. Yes. Snobbery is the burden of everyone with taste.

Are you saying you're in a discussion with students and you're talking about... Not necessarily. I'm just thinking, like, culturally... Yeah, that's exactly a perfect example.

We're talking about, we're studying Beowulf. We're like, oh, this just sounds like Skyrim. Let's talk about Skyrim and how Beowulf is like Skyrim. And Skyrim does not deserve to be talked about syntopically.

You're probably right. But, like, I'm almost thinking that the comparisons will stop very soon. Because they're run out of plot concerns. There are plot elements that you can point to.

Not even plot, but, like, stylistic elements, I guess. Like how I try to talk about how Arrested Development is really Brothers Karamazov. There it is. Yeah.

Maybe. So should you shoot down someone for bringing in a book other than the classics? I'd say no. Especially with students who are being introduced to the great conversation.

You don't want to shut that off. Like, if they're excited to share something and it's about Buffy, like, rock and roll. But, you know, someone's 35 and, like, that's how they're talking about books. You probably would look at them kind of funny.

So I think the way to think about it is the books that are worthy of deep study will keep on delivering. Like, if I am really in-depth studying, like, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, at a certain point, it's going to ring hollow. And I'll need to move on to something else. Unless it is, in fact...

Unless it can, in fact, deliver. And then as far as what books should we bring into a discussion about a given topic. So say we are talking syntopically about the Inferno. I think that once you are leaving the book that is considered great, its tendrils will, ideally, reach everything.

So bringing in Buffy to a discussion about the Inferno that is being discussed syntopically does not necessarily mean I'm spending X amount of hours with Buffy. It just means that maybe it has a little something to contribute to a greater conversation. And so I think that great study will happen with works that are worthy of that great study. And then once you sort of...

Like, their tendrils will reach everything. So bringing Skyrim into a discussion about Beowulf is fine. I can say, yes, it's influenced the way that video games are made. It's influenced storytelling.

They still bring dragons up because dragons still are cool. And so it has something to do with it. But I don't think studying Skyrim is going to deliver for you. And a lot of the side quests are all the same.

You know what I mean? So a video game being brought up once, Skyrim is a video game. So bring up the video game a couple times in class to make the comparison is fine. But you shouldn't do an entire class on Skyrim and Beowulf.

That kind of... Yeah, yeah. Maybe there's something between, but... I just think the love of learning is so important that you want to foster that.

Even if, like, in a conversation with you all, I wouldn't make... It's the only thing you can compare Beowulf to is a video game. And I guess like different things will get you in the door. Like what got me into reading books, like I read really bad Star Wars novels, like the X-Wing series, which got me reading and I enjoyed it.

And then I was like, I think I like workbooks. And I read Red Badge of Courage and I kind of liked that one. And then sort of that was the book that kind of got me into older books and classical. So I guess it's like, but I'm never going to go back and reread bad X-Wing books.

Anyway, it's just, I guess maybe we shouldn't completely disparage the gates or whatever got you inside. But once you're inside, there are greater feasts to be had. Okay, that's it. So this has been The Classical Stuff You Should Know.

You can tweet at us at CLSSCALstuff at Twitter dot Twit. The ad comes before. The handle is at Classical Stuff at Twitter.com slash. I think if you added more ads, it would still work.

So you can tweet at us. You can check out our website at classicalstuff.net. You can email us at classicalstuff at veritasacademy.net. We appreciate hearing from you.

We like hearing your perspective, even if it's just some thoughts you had. And if we got some stuff wrong, you can correct us. Remember, as generalists, we're not necessarily experts on everything that we bring up. That's part of the price of trying to be a generalist, right?

It adds a value to everything you study, but it means that you're not necessarily an expert in everything you study. And if you've emailed us and haven't heard anything back, just hang tight. Emails are we try to get back to everybody and I... And it's weird because we all free check the emails, so no one's really sure who's responsible for the reply.

So emails are coming. Don't worry. We appreciate all your feedback. And thanks for listening.

If you want to hear certain episodes, let us know. The ideas are always good. I'm trying to branch out into art. So look forward to, you know, a podcast on Michelangelo coming soon.

And we'll, you know, keep on keeping on.