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A Book Club Reader Discusses Her Experience with Shakespeare's Histories, Tolkien & Blood Meridian (Patreon)

Published:
2022-05-14 17:28:03
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Today we're having a chat with a book club member and behind-the-scenes assistant about her recent reading experiences.

We're talking about:

  • Shakespeare's Histories (Falstaff & the Henriad) 
  • theories about Judge Holden in Blood Meridian
  • Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings
  • Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
  • the character of Cleopatra 
  • the effect of deep-reading

Timestamps:

  • 0:00 Shakespeare’s history plays
  • 2:00 Falstaff vs Prince Hal in Henry IV
  • 7:10 Antony and Cleopatra
  • 10:00 Cleopatra vs Juliet
  • 11:00 does Cleopatra love Mark Antony?
  • 12:00 Cleopatra vs Hamlet
  • 13:20 Richard II and Henry VI
  • 15:00 Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
  • 16:00 the character of Judge Holden
  • 19:00 Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
  • 21:30 Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
  • 22:30 the effect of reading the classics
  • 25:30 connecting with the first reader
  • 27:00 Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables
  • 27:30 Cervantes’ Don Quixote

Mentioned in the show:

  • The Hollow Crown - This series is truly tremendous. If you're interested in breaking into Shakespeare's Histories, start with Richard II, then enjoy Henry IV parts one and two, and Henry V in season one.

Let us know - have you had any experience with Shakespeare's Histories? 

Happy reading, everybody!

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Comments

Ellen M

Great chat Ben and Ashley! What resonated with me was the experience of going back to the fiction one would normally read after following our syllabus. It’s like exposing oneself to wonderful food or wine, once you’ve tasted a higher quality it’s quite difficult to go back. I’d much rather go slow and steady, and don’t miss my days of bingeing everything on a best seller list. It reminds me of an experience I had years ago. I picked up a book by Virginia Woolf, I don’t recall which, and did not like it at all. I stopped reading a chapter or two in - something I never would have done prior to this. I remember the powerful feeling I had at the realization that I’d finally become confident enough as a reader to put a classic down. It was ok for me to think ‘legend or not, this work by Ms Woolf is not for me’. I now trust my instincts but more importantly I know that sometimes it’s just not the right book for me at the right time. I wish I could remember what that book was !

hardcoreliterature
>>84004918

Thank you, Ellen! That's the perfect analogy. I'll always remember my first time eating high quality sushi in Japan. People find it funny when I say this, but it was honestly one of a handful of peak experiences. I've since not been able to enjoy the sushi available in the UK - apart from one authentic Japanese-run restaurant around the corner from my old place in London. As for books, I return to the bestsellers but they almost always serve only to remind me of what I'm missing with the "good stuff". As for the Virginia Woolf book, I wonder if it was 'The Waves'...?

Anonymous

Hi Ben. Have you ever compared the last paragraphs of Middlemarch and Anna Karenina?George Eliot's magnificent eulogy to the quietly heroic Dorothea.  "But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."   The Last Paragraph of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina "I’ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I’ll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I’ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray—but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!" Levin and Dorothea. What an exciting discovery. Now I'm writing down the specific ways they acted and thought.