Being a serious reader brings many joys, but also nagging anxieties: Should I be reading a different book? Should I read more classic lit instead of contemporary fiction? Is it problem that I read multiple books at once? Do I abandon books too frequently? Are my online activities ruining my attention span and making me jealous of others and their prodigious reading habits?...Music: “Sunday Smooth" by Scott Buckley, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License - www.scottbuckley.com.au.

Author Greg Gerke is our guest and we discuss his book of literary and film essays "See What I See," We talk William Gaddis, Bergman's film Fanny and Alexander, the role of emotion in reading and loving literature and the time Greg flew to the Midwest to interview his literary hero William Gass...Music: “Sunday Smooth" by Scott Buckley, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License - www.scottbuckley.com.au.

It has been a science fiction phenomenon. President Obama loved it, it's a perennial Powell's Books best-seller. We debate its merits and drill down on "hard" vs. "soft" science fiction. We talk about the Thucydides Trap, who fears aliens, the history of science fiction in the west and Roman's karma with Philip K. Dick. Music: “Sunday Smooth" by Scott Buckley, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License - www.scottbuckley.com.au.

We do it all the time as readers, but it's a great mystery: why and how do we get emotionally involved in fictional characters? It's a massive question and we bring in Spinoza, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Harold Bloom, Walter Isaacson, Brad Pitt and Quentin Tarantino to help answer the question. There is no one answer, of course, but we have fun chasing down the various leads...Music: “Sunday Smooth" by Scott Buckley, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License - www.scottbuckley.com.au.

What happens when you swallow the American myth whole and try to be famous, virile and successful? Well, you might just write a sad, hilarious and enlightening fictional memoir filled with mental hospitals and boozy taverns. A Fan's Notes is a cult classic for those who eschew cult classics. The prose is electric. The characters unforgettable. It's fun and loathing between two covers. We take it on.

Music: “Sunday Smooth" by Scott Buckley, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License - www.scottbuckley.com.au.

We examine this underappreciated 20th Century classic. A cautionary tale of what happens when you stop being a tourist and truly become a traveler. Our conversation also stumbles upon Leonard Bernstein, Camus, Edward Said, A Farewell to Arms and Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess....Music: “October" from the album Chapter Four / Fall, by Kai Engel, used under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

Let's go deep with fully-drawn tricksters, agitators, dreamers and faux intellectuals--it's Dostoevsky's Demons and we're talking God, Mother Russia, Shakespeare and why Demons gets under your skin. Join us for an extended conversation on the Russian master who previewed much of the psychology inquiry and political tumult of the 20th Century. Music credit: Passage of Time (Duet) by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/52856 Ft: Doxent Zsigmond

We finally take on the South African master Coetzee. He's a bit intimidating to many, but we dive in, and look at his novel about a fictional Russian writer named Fyodor Dostoevsky. Heston Hoffman joins us, and we discuss Joseph Frank, the political atmosphere of 19th century Russia and whether Coetzee is an Afrikaner, African or Australian writer...This podcast features excerpts from the song Terminal 7, by Thomasz Stanko. Obtained from the Internet Archive. Available under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

We chat with special guest Josh Calvo, a writer and translator of Arabic and Hebrew literature. We talk about Israeli writer S. Yizhar's untranslated masterpiece "Days of Ziklag," the work of Kurdish-Syrian writer Salim Barakat and why so little of Arabic literature is translated into English, and why the works that are translated, are often read solely in the light of politics. We also chat about being multilingual and the challenges of learning languages throughout one's life.

The Beats writers were a force in American culture for decades. But are they still relevant today? Are they great writers or just curious cultural figures? Does anyone under 40 still care about them? We talk Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, along with other figures like Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth and few words on Celine, Herbert Hunke and Neil Cassidy.