The One You Feed - Will Schwalbe: On the Love of Reading Books

Episode Date: February 14, 2018

Please Support The Show with a DonationWill Schwalbe is an author, entrepreneur, and journalist. He is also perhaps the most delightful, interesting and thoughtful person you've come across in a while. His love of books is infectious and as you know, Eric is a bibliophile himself so when the two talk about books and reading as they do in this episode, the result is one blissful experience. Do you love reading? Did you used to love reading but it's moved out of the spotlight of your life? Have you wanted to cultivate a love of reading? Are you looking for some really wonderful books to read? Are you alive and breathing? If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then this interview is for you.He is the author of  Thoughts on Reading, Reflecting and Embracing Life, The End of Your Life Book Club and SEND: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better Omax3 Ultrapure go to www.tryomax.com/wolf and try a box for freeIn This Interview, Will Schwalbe and I Discuss...The Wolf ParableHis book, Books for Living, Some Thoughts on Reading, Reflecting and Embracing LifeThe importance of readingThat reading isn't binaryThat every time we read, we become better at readingHow reading can promote empathyHow we connect through booksThe practice of "visiting your books"How he chooses which book to read nextThe way books can be a bio of your lifeThe primary emotion he has at the beginning of reading a bookLive to work vs work to liveThe freedom to quitThe freedom of mediocrityGood being the enemy of greatYou write the books you needThat our devices allow us to rob ourselves of silenceHow reading is an artThe "can't you tell I'm reading" faceHis favorite books that he's read recently that were written recentlyWill Schwalbe LinksHomepageTwitterFacebook Please Support The Show with a Donation See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm a very clumsy person, and I always read the book I knock over. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor,

what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The really no really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Will Schwabe, an author, entrepreneur, and journalist based in New York City. Will is the author of three books and was the former editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books. In 2008, he founded the recipe site Cookster, which was acquired by

Macmillan Publishing in 2014, where he serves as executive vice president. His latest work, Books for Living, consists of essays about 26 different books that affected the author's life. Among the books described by Schwalbe include Homer's The Odyssey, Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, E.B. White's Stuart Little, and Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train. Carl Jung once said, you are what you do, not what you say you'll do. Sometimes at the end of a day or a week, Carl Jung once said, person you want to be. So I'll pose the question to you for reflection. What actions have you taken to support the things you value in this world? If you value this show, if it has helped you to feel better on a dark day, to be a better parent or spouse or a better friend, then please donate at

oneyoufeed.net support. There you'll see many levels at which you can become a patron of the show. At $10 a month, we'll offer you additional exclusive content from our guests, as well as one mini episode per month. And plus, there is no quicker way to feeling better than doing something good. And folks, we really need your financial support. That page, again, is oneufeed.net support. Thank you. And here's the interview with Will Schwalbe. Hi, Will. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Eric. Thank you for having me on the show. Your latest book is called Books for Living, Some Thoughts on Reading, Reflecting, and Embracing Life. And as I am a passionate reader, the minute I saw the book title, I was like, all right,

this should be a great conversation. And the book is wonderful, and we will get into it in a lot more detail here in just a second. But let's start like we usually do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness, bravery, love. The other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. The grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up and asks his grandfather, he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that

parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, Eric, I loved hearing that parable, and it wasn't a parable that I had heard before I encountered your podcast. But it spoke to me on a very deep level, because my book is really a book about reading, and about the importance of reading and stopping in our busy lives, stopping with all the texting and emailing and aggravating ourselves and just taking time to read thoughtfully and purposefully. And to me, every time I read, I'm feeding the good wolf. And so, reading, I think, is just one of the most powerful, simple ways that we can feed the good wolf, that we can feed the part of ourselves which is about kindness and sensitivity and about listening. When we run around in this agitated state of greed and distraction, when we're on Twitter, when we watch endless amounts of CNN, then we're feeding the bad wolf.

I will second that 100%. I have the same issue. So let's talk about reading for a minute. You've got a couple great lines in the book that I'll read because I really like them. I think they just speak to reading in general. You say, I'm not the same reader when I finish a book as I was when I started. Brains are tangles of pathways, and reading creates new ones. Every book changes your life. So I like to ask, how is this book changing mine? I'm so glad that quote spoke to you. One of the things that I wanted to correct is the idea that reading is binary. So usually you say to someone,

can you read? And they say, of course I can read. Or, no, I can't read. It's something I'd like to learn if you encounter, say, an adult who hasn't received the benefit of an education that taught her or him how to read. But actually, reading isn't binary. Every time we read, we become better at reading. And every book teaches us to be a better reader. Every page, we're just not the same person. We're a better reader at the end of that page. And we're a better reader of that book, a better reader. Every page, we're just not the same person. We're a better reader at the end of that page. And we're a better reader of that book, a better reader of that author, and just a better reader in general. And there's obviously the great classical Greek saying that you can never step in the same river twice. You're not the same person, and the river isn't the same.

And that's true of reading. And that's one of the things that makes it such an extraordinary way to spend our time. It is one of my absolute favorite ways to spend time. You also say, reading is one of the few things you do alone that can make you feel less alone. It's a solitary activity that connects you to others. Yes. And there's a quote that I love that really speaks to that. It's something I quote in Books for Living, and it's James Baldwin. And James Baldwin said in an interview, you think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, and then you read. And what he was talking about is this idea that joining the human conversation, you do that through reading. And you find out that all these things you're feeling and all these

emotions and beliefs, other people have had those too or had versions of them. And it connects you to people not just around the country, around the world, that connects you to people from hundreds or even thousands of years ago. And that's why I say, when you read, even though it's solitary, it makes you less alone, not more alone. Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like I've seen studies to this effect, but it feels like emotional intelligence to me is one of the big gifts that I've gotten from reading fiction. I just being able to be inside lots of different people's heads, I think, just naturally for me suddenly allowed me to see the world in a lot of different ways and and help me to connect better to different people and to maybe understand

people who are at least on the surface different than me. And I love that Baldwin quote, because he kind of goes on to say that, and I got it from you, that not only does the reading, you know, connect us to others, and he says, you know, then it was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive or who had ever been alive. And I love that because not only is he feeling less alone, he's able to use books and reading to transform the very difficult activities that we all have in life or challenges that we have. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's such a remarkable quote. I come back to that again and again. And I'm also so glad you mentioned the E word, empathy. I really believe that empathy is a muscle

and it atrophies if you don't exercise it, and books are how I exercise my empathy muscle. You also mentioned early in the book, and it just caught my attention because I just finished this book, which is the book called A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth, is it Ozeki? Ozeki, yes. Yes. It's an incredible book, that book. And I mentioned it in a context of connecting with a friend of mine who started as a pen pal, 95 years old, a woman, a great music editor for film who lives in Los Angeles. Her name's Elsa Blankfeld. And we talk all the time about books. And this is a novel about a young girl who's thinking of ending her life and her 104, 105-year-old Buddhist nun

aunt, who is the most extraordinary character. And I love, I shared the book with Elsa, my 95-year-old friend, and she called me and she said that she'd fallen in love with the character of the aunt. And she said, now I know who I want to be when I grow up. Yeah, it is a great book. I mean, I'm so interested in Buddhist ideas that it was a natural thing to me. But it was just so well written and such a good novel. I mean, it wasn't just like, oh, it's got some Buddhist ideas in it. It was just a very beautiful, well-written novel. I mean, it wasn't just like, oh, it's got some Buddhist ideas in it. It was just a very beautiful, well-written novel. It always amazes me. I think she's a Zen priest. It always amazes me when people can be that good at multiple different things. I'm like, wow.

Oh, it's incredible, isn't it? Yeah, and you've got Silicon Valley, and you've got contemporary Tokyo, and you've got hostess bars, and she writes from the point of view of this 16-year-old girl, and you're totally there with her, and you've got a kamikaze pilot. It is, it's a masterwork. Yep. It really is. Let's talk about that for a second. Cause you mentioned, you know, you've got this pen pal and you guys talk about books. The book you wrote before this one, I think was called the end of your life book club, which talks about how you and your mother, you know, shared a series of books that you were reading, you know, as she was dealing with cancer. You talk about other stories

in the book where there's a grandmother who says, you know, when she talks to her grandson on the phone, how is everything? It's fine. It's fine. And then one day she asked him what he's reading, and she starts reading the books he is, and now they have lots of conversations. So talk to me about this idea of books being a way for us to connect to the people around us. Well, books are so democratic and egalitarian. There's a book that I wrote about in the End of Your Life Book Club, which is called The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett. And it's a book about the Queen of England discovering books. And it has a marvelous passage in it, which I'll paraphrase badly. But what the Queen of England realizes in this

fantasy novella, it's not really about the Queen, or it's about the Queen, but it's not a true story. But what she realizes is that all readers are equal. That when she's reading, she's not the Queen of England reading a book, she's just another reader. And that grandmother that I talked about, she was able to connect with her grandson just by saying, what are you reading? Because he was reading The Hunger Games. And when they started talking about The Hunger Games, she was no longer a kind of grandmother pestering her grandchild with boring questions he didn't want to answer. They were just two readers who just couldn't wait to find out what happened next.

And reading levels the playing field. When we talk to someone about a book that we both love, we're both literally on the same page. Yeah, it is a great way. I always feel like I love that idea. And yet I always feel like very difficult for me to remember or to articulate like what it was I loved about a book or I don just terrible. I just forget so much of what happens. And it used to trouble me, and I'm finally at the age, you know, I'm like, well, that's just the way my brain works. I don't think I'm going to change that. But, yeah. I love to, well, I do this thing, and Winston Churchill had a great phrase.

He called it visiting your books. So I'll go to a book I've read, I'll pull it off the shelf, and I'll just flip open to a page and read a page and then put it back. And books become kind of like magic eight balls. It's totally weird, but it's always the paragraph that I need to hear at just the moment I need to hear it. That's a great one, because I look at these books all the time, and my main thought is, well, I'd like to read that again, but I love that because one of the things that we talk about on this show, and I coach people on all the time, is like, just instead of trying to do the huge thing, just take like a really small step. And that's like the book version of it. I don't have to wait until I can reread the whole book. I can bring it down and read one page. I love it. Yeah, just a page. And I think especially if you ask your bookshelf a question and just let your hand settle on a book, you can see if the book and the page will answer the question you have. And as I said, it's uncanny how it does. I also have to share with you, Eric, one of my great techniques for finding which book to read next. And that's, I'm a very clumsy person, and I always read the book I knock

over. That's a good way to do it if you've got them stacked precariously. Yeah, we have them. I can never remember if it's stalagmites or stalactites, but whatever comes up from the floor is what we have all over our apartment. And I'm constantly looking over huge stacks of books, and the first one I stumble over is the book I read next. Well, you are in the professional publishing industry in addition to being an author, right? Yes, I am. I edit books and have been in publishing for a couple decades. You must have books coming out your ears then.

I do. I love it. Yeah. Well, one of the things I, you know, is a constant source of fun for me in this, doing this show is that people are just sending me books. And even when it's not really a book that I want, or that I care about, it's still I love books so much, the very fact that they're just showing up, it just, you know, still tickles me. Now, my problem is starting to become one of storage, where I'm like, I don't,

where do I put all these things? I live in a pretty small apartment. So it's just fun that they just keep coming. I was going to say, the storage problem is one I face. And in Books for Living, I tell the story of a professor who was a great friend of mine who had a vast library. And in the last decade of his life, he decided to give all of his books away except for 100 books. And if he wanted to keep a book, he had to give one of the 100 books away. And what happened was that when he died, he left 100 books that almost perfectly described his life. And it was such a marvelous gift to the rest of us. Of course,

we miss him dreadfully. He was one of the most extraordinary people I'll ever meet. But to look at the books on martinis and the books on Tangier and the books on the Foreign Legion, and this was his autobiography in 100 books. And someday I'm going to do that. I'm not ready for it yet, but someday. Yeah, I love that idea. I went through a thing a few years ago where, I guess more than a few, where I was like, all right, this book stuff needs to come to an end. And I'm going to become a library guy. Like I've always loved the library, but I was like,

no more buying books. I'm just going to get them from the library. Then I'm going to take them back to the library because a, I'm, you know, every time I move, I've got like 40 boxes to bring with me. And I only display a portion of them because I don't have the space and it's a, you know, it costs a small fortune, but then of course that lasts for a little bit and then I'm like but I want to have that book and so you know but I have gotten better at at least saying I'm only going to have books by and large now again a lot of them keep showing up but the ones that I'm going to have and keep I've tried to get better at like the ones that really matter to me you know that that those are the ones that are around yeah I love the idea of keeping at like the ones that really matter to me, you know, that, that those are the ones that are around.

Yeah. I love the idea of keeping on hand the books that really matter, but I also have to be surrounded by books that I haven't read. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app,

on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I love this line you say, my primary emotion at the start of any book is hope. Hope that it will teach me something. And I love that line. And I think that that describes better than anything I've done before the way I feel in a library. I love being in a library, but I don't know that I could have ever said what the emotion was. But I think that's what it is. Yeah, it's hope. And it's also curiosity. And so we started when we were talking by talking about the idea that reading feeds the good wolf. But I was thinking more about the parable. And I was also starting to think that curiosity is a good wolf and prejudice is a bad wolf. So when I choose choose books because I'm curious about them, because it's something I don't know, an experience I haven't had,

someone from a different place or different culture, then I'm feeding the good, curious wolf. But when I go to the library, the bookstore, my bookshelf, and choose a book that just confirms some prejudice I already hold, or some deeply felt belief and just makes it more ingrained, I think then in those cases, maybe I'm feeding the bad wolf, even though I'm reading. Yeah, I agree. I think it is hope and curiosity at the library, and sort of a sense of unlimited potential. Like, who knows what's going to happen? Like, who knows what's going to happen? Yes, who knows?

I love that there's millions of books out there for us, but the hope also is that this next book you read is going to teach you something so powerful that it'll rock your world. That this will be the book that changes your life, not in a subtle way, but in a kind of earth-shattering way. Right, right. So let's talk about some specific books. We've talked about reading in general. Let's talk first about a book that you referenced throughout the book that you wrote by a gentleman by the name of, is it Li Yutang? Lin Yutang. Lin Yutang. Talk to me about that book. So this was one of those books that I was curious about. I, as a kid, having seen the movie Cabaret, became obsessed with Christopher Isherwood, who wrote the Berlin stories on which Cabaret is based, started reading all the Isherwood I could, started reading as much about the 1930s as I could. And I kept coming across this name, Lin Yu-Tang, and the title of a book, which was The Importance of Living. And The Importance of Living was a monster bestseller

in 1938. The entire world was reading The Importance of Living. I was like Tuesdays with Maury on steroids. At this point, though, by a couple of decades ago, it had been completely forgotten. So when I was in publishing, I stumbled across this book and actually arranged for it to come back into print and reached out to Lin Yu Tang's Surviving Two Daughters. There's 500 dense pages. It's charming. It's discursive. But it's really about what Lin calls the noble art of leaving things undone. And it's about the Chinese philosophy of life. And he was trying to explain to everybody across the world this idea. And he phrased it so wonderfully. He said, if you've spent a perfectly useless afternoon doing absolutely nothing, then you've mastered the art of living. And I just fell in love with this book. And I think it's a book for our times. It's a book about relaxing, about looking at nature, about lying in bed, about reading poetry, spending time with friends.

But, Eric, there's one more thing that I think just is so amazing about this book is when you start reading it, you think, oh, this is charming and delightful about napping and reading. But then as you get further into the book, you remember this thing was written in 1937, published in 38. And Lin-Yu Tang starts to mention Stalin and Hitler. And he starts to talk in this book about the culture of greed and power. And what he's really doing in this is positing humanism, conversation, as everything that's good, and really the bulwark that we have against the kind of tyranny that he saw rising across Asia and Europe, and that of course culminated in the great genocides and slaughters of our time. Yeah, you reference it throughout. It sounds like a fascinating book, and I love that. You know, you say it or he says it, but naps and reading are two of life's greatest pleasures.

Yes, they're life's greatest pleasures, or two of them, but they're also really a form of resistance that in a world mad with greed and ambition and power, to reaffirm what it means to be human, just simply to breathe, to be alive, to stroll in nature, to talk to our friends. This is an act of resistance. Yeah, he talks about three American vices. I love that. So, the three American vices, as I recall them, are punctuality, efficiency. I'm trying to remember what they are.

Do you recall? They've gone out of my mind. What is punctuality for sure? I'm pretty sure I have it. And you know what? I didn't. I just, I took the quote, three American vices out, but I don't know that I have the-

Oh, that's so funny. I can't, I can't, I'm having a middle-aged moment. Here they are. Actually, here they are. So efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. There we go. And he said in his book, and I quote it in mine, that all of Americans' unhappiness can be traced to those three things. Yeah, it's very interesting, because I am sort of, by nature, a doer. You know, I've got a lot of like go and do things, but I've realized over the last couple years that I need to learn to spend a

good, idle, and beautiful afternoon more often. Yes. And the question really to ask ourselves after reading Lin Yu-Tang is, do we live to work or do we work to live? And of course, he would have us work to live. How do you, from your perspective, how does working to live tie with doing things that are deeply important to you? Like writing a book is working in a sense, but it's also, you know, a deep passion. So how do you reconcile that sort of idea of, you know, work and relaxation and is writing a book to you not work because it's something you love? Or what's your thinking on that? Well, my thinking on that is that we all have to work to different extents depending on where we live and what our rent is and what our family obligations

are. And it would be silly to pretend that most people have the option of not working. I really think of it more as a mindset. And for example, if you work 23 hours a day, on that one precious hour you have off, are you checking your email or are you reading a book or talking with a friend or staring out the window? Really, what you do when you're not at work determines a large part of it. And I do believe there's some work that is such a joy that it doesn't seem like work. But I'm actually more of the belief that most of us know the difference between working and living. And no matter how much we love our work, it's probably still work. I had a friend, a great friend who I wrote about in this book,

a friend who was killed in an accident. And whenever he heard anyone complained about their job, he used to say the same thing to them. He'd say, if it was so much darn fun, they wouldn't have to pay you. Yep. But you don't have to write books, obviously. That is something that you're doing in addition to your career, right? So you're taking on that additional work. Yes, and I do love that. And for me, it's mostly not work, although there are certainly days when I feel like a school child in detention and all my friends are running out seeing movies and outdoor and I'm chained to my computer. But yes, I do. I feel I enjoy it and I feel compelled to do it. So the books happily for me are usually not work. They're something that bring me great joy. Yeah, I find that paradox there you're talking about of, I sort of frame it up for myself in terms of, you know, what do I want to do versus what do I feel like doing? So something like writing the book or for me doing this show

is something I want to do. So it's a voluntary thing that I choose to do that I love to do. There are moments that I certainly don't feel like it though. And so for me, that I choose to do that I love to do. There are moments that I certainly don't feel like it, though. And so for me, that helps me to sort of get back to like, okay, I do want to, and I am choosing to do this, even if I don't feel like it in that moment. Because otherwise, it really, it sucks to turn something you love into a chore. Yeah, I also wrote a chapter about, for me, a story that's a real touchstone, and that's Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener. And Bartleby the Scrivener is a wonderful story, obviously author of Moby Dick, about a clerk who just quits. He just decides one day he'd prefer not to do this or that, and he just stops doing anything.

And it's an iconic American short story. But one of the things I wanted to celebrate in Books for Living is quitters. I think we give quitters a bad name. And I think part of the joy that I get in writing a book is actually knowing I can stop at any time. That since I've given myself permission to quit, it never becomes too onerous because I never really have to do it. It's always something I want to do. Um, and that's, that's a big difference. My day job. Um, yes, I could quit it, but I don't know who would pay the rent. I think that idea is so important in general, even with things like day jobs, because the minute I start feeling like I have to do something, I start to feel trapped. And even recognizing want to, but that idea of knowing that I could

really helps take a burden off my shoulders when I start to get into that I have to, I have to, I have to thing. Yeah, and I think as a culture, we really set a dangerous precedent for ourselves when we denigrate quitters and when we make people feel badly because they try something and they stop it. Because I really think freedom to quit is really freedom to explore. If you start a book and you don't much care for it, stop reading it. But don't not start it because you won't quit it. Or if you want to throw pots and you've never thrown a pot before, try it. If you don't like it, quit. The ability to quit really allows ourselves, I think, to be fully human in a way that adherence to seeing everything through to the bitter end just doesn't. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you

and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really.

No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another line that I had pulled out, you say, When we denigrate mediocrity, we discourage ourselves and others from trying new things. It would be great to be a great painter, but it's also great just to paint or sing or throw pots or knit scarves or play chess. And I love that idea of just being able to do something because I like doing it regardless of where it leads.

to do something because I like doing it regardless of where it leads. And I think that goes a little bit back to the Lin Yutang, some of the ideas of that not everything has to go somewhere or have a purpose beyond I enjoy doing it. Exactly. And one of the, I think, other big causes for unhappiness in my life and in my friends' lives and in the lives of people around me is this idea that everything has to be great. And I write in the book about, I'll be sitting around with a friend having a nice piece of pizza, a cold beer in Greenwich Village where I live, and I'll be enjoying the pizza and enjoying the beer. And my friend will say something like oh well this pizza is good but you know the very best pizza is that and then he'll name some place you know across town or naples i don't know wherever um but the idea is why can't i just enjoy my pizza and and i think that's a bit of a metaphor

for life in general is if we're always in search of mind-blowingly great things, we really rob ourselves of the ability to enjoy the good things that we have in our lives. Yeah, it's that idea of the paradox of choice they talk about. And there's like two types of people. I think it's – I may get this right. Maximizers and satisficers, right? Maximizers are that sort of like everything always has to be the best. Like I'm going to spend eight hours on Yelp picking out the very best dinner restaurant satisficers are more able to just sort of go, you know what, this is good enough. Here we go. And,

and then, and they're just in and they're happy with it the way they are. And, and, uh, I have to watch my tendency to be a maximizer. The story I tell often is about music. Like I'm a guitar player and used to write songs. And for a long time, I sort of thought, well, maybe that's what I would do. And then it became clear that that was not going to happen. You know, that just wasn't in the cards. And it took me a while to be able to pick up the guitar and just play it just for fun, just because I like the way that chord sounds, or I like the way it feels, without always being like, I would start to hear a little part and I'd be like, oh, I need to write a song out of this, or I need to, and it just took, it just kind of

ruined it for me for a while until I was really able to do what you said. Like, I'm just a mediocre guitar player. But you know what? I like doing it. And so I'm going to do it just for that reason. That's so great. I love the story. I love the idea of that.

And I also believe, too, when you say mediocre guitar player, it's really just a frame of reference. of reference. I like to talk about, for example, the most mediocre baseball player on, say, the New York Yankees is one of the best baseball players in the country. In the world, yeah. In the world. It just depends on your frame of reference. Right. So, to see yourself as proudly mediocre is really just to admit that whatever it is you're doing, there's probably someone who does it better than you, and to take that whatever it is you're doing, there's probably someone who does it better than you, and to take satisfaction in the way you do it and to admire the way they

do it. And I catch myself with this all the time. There's a wonderful phrase a publishing friend told me. He said, you write the books you need. And one of the reasons I wrote Books for Living is it was the book I needed, because I catch myself doing this all the time. I was in Beaufort, South Carolina. I was having something that was the most delicious boil thing with sausage and shrimp and potatoes in a little restaurant I'd stumbled across, and I was enjoying it so much. And then all of a sudden, I thought to myself, oh, I have my iPhone here. I'll Google what's the best version of this in Beaufort. And I was just about to do that. I thought, why are you doing that? You're just trying to make yourself unhappy with what you're loving. And who cares what the best is? This is

really good. Right. And that is where you actually happen to be, not at the other place. Yes, I'm there. I'm not at the other place. I'm leaving in a couple of hours. I'm never going to make it back. Yeah. You know, not for years. So why do we do that to ourselves? Why do we insist on making ourselves so unhappy? And actually, I think these little electronic devices we carry everywhere aid in our making ourselves unhappy. And a chapter that I really had fun writing was a chapter about George Orwell's 1984. And what I had to say about that was, Orwell imagined a world where there were telescreens watching everything we did, everything we said, everything we ate. But he never could have imagined that we would carry the telescreens in our own pockets and spy on ourselves.

Yep. Yet the other thing that you mentioned about our devices is how they allow us to rob ourselves of silence. And I think that is really, that is a big one, I think, that is underappreciated. Boy, it is true. Just as sort of backstory to our talking right now, you sent out some wonderful instructions about how to maximize the experience. And you said you make sure that the phones are turned off and that ringers and buzzers

and notifications. And it took me about 15 minutes of running around the apartment before I'd actually turned off every buzzer, tone, ring. And it made me so happy once I'd done it. And I thought, you know, thanks, Eric. I'm not going to turn them back on. Why do I have all these buzzers and beeps and notifications anyways? I'll look at the thing when I look at the thing. I have become a big fan of the do not disturb feature on my phone, such to the point that I forget to turn it off and then I miss like eight calls. But I just love the idea. Like I'm like, I don't want to, I don't want to deal with it, whatever it is. I'm just going to flip this switch and, and I'm not going to, to be bothered except for like, if somebody calls me three times in a row. So like if my son is in North Carolina at college is in trouble, I'll get the call. But otherwise, you know what, I you know, I don't,

I just don't need to do it. It also saves me when I do that. It saves me the guilt of seeing somebody call knowing I don't want to talk and screening it and then feeling like I'm screening that person's call. This is just sort of a across the board, like everybody, you know, give me some, give me some space, give me some space. And when I read, I do go into a zone. That's when I have my reading for me as a form of meditation. Because I know that my heart rate settles my blood pressure. I just relax because I don't have any responsibility when I'm reading other than simply to absorb the words on the page. The writer and the book don't care what I think of them. I can comment, but not in any way that they can hear me. And so, it's just a kind of time of

bliss. One of the other books I had great fun writing about is Zen and the Art of Archery. And that book sort of got me thinking that reading is an art. And it comes back to that quote that you mentioned before. But when I read, I feel like I'm practicing this art. And anytime there's a bell or a ringer or a buzzer, I resent it bitterly. What I hadn't thought to do until you sent out those wonderful instructions is simply turn all that stuff off. You've got somewhere in the book where you describe the, you give somebody the can't you tell I'm reading face. And that just made me laugh. Because when I get deep, deep into a book, it's like, I don't want to be unpleasant,

if you interrupt me, but boy, I'm just so deep in that it's very difficult for me to change gears at that point. And so I was like, I think I've given plenty of people that look before. Oh, yeah, I really have that look down, bent down cold. I think that was in a chapter I was writing about an extraordinary novel by Hanya Yanagihara called A Little Life. And I actually was so obsessed with that book. I was near the end and I wasn't finished and I called in sick to work. Yeah, I've been there. I have done that sort of thing before. So we're going to wrap up here in just a moment. But you say at one point, if you could have only 10 books, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison would be one of them, which made me very happy because I've not read that book. So it sounds like I have a treat ahead of me. But I wanted to ask you, as for more recently, what's the best novel you've read? Or maybe not even best, but what's a couple favorite novels you've read recently that were also written recently?

So one of them, a book I read recently that was written recently, is a historical novel called Pachinko. And it's by Min Jin Lee. And this book was a finalist for the national book award and it is a story about a korean family in japan over the course of several generations and it is one of those novels that absolutely sweeps you up in it i guarantee if you start this book you will give people anyone who this book, you will give people, anyone who dares disturb you, you will give them that, can't you see I'm reading glower. So, that's a book that I loved recently. I also really fell in love with a book called The News of the World by Paulette Giles. And in this book, it's about someone traveling the West who reads the news

to communities where they have no newspaper. He's absorbed the newspapers and he brings them around and he reads them. And he's given custody of a little girl who has to reunite with her family. And it's an absolutely marvelous book. But I'm constantly finding things. I read a lot of young adult books. I read The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, which is a young adult book that has a kind of extraordinary story about a young African American woman and a friend of hers who's killed by the police and everything that follows that and her awakening and her attempts to awaken others. And that's an incredible book. But I'm constantly devouring things.

Here Comes the Sun is another book, Nicole Dennis-Benn. And this is a book that's set in contemporary Jamaica. And it's a marvelous novel. And the prose is just electric. Yeah, I love the end of the year because all the end of the year book lists come out and I have just a field day reading them all. And then I go to the library and I walk out, you know, embarrassed because I've got 65 books with me. And of course, I only read like one or two of them before the time is up. But it's just I just love that time of year. And so I think I actually have Pachinko sitting in the other room that I, that I got from the library. Um, and so that's another

encouragement to pick it up. And I will put links in the show notes to the books you've mentioned, A, as a service to our readers and B, as a service to myself. Listeners, if you decide you want to buy them, just click that link. Cause then we will, you know, it'll be the ongoing support of the show plea that I have, but I'll definitely put them there mainly so people can find them. Will, thank you so much for taking the time. I've got a whole lot more notes. We will have an after conversation posted. So, so listeners, if you are interested in that, you can become a supporter of the show and get this conversation with Will and lots and lots of other ones, because we're going to go on and talk about at least The Little Prince, if nothing else. Great. Thank you so much, Eric. I really,

I really appreciate it. I've loved talking with you today. Yeah, it's been a real pleasure. Okay, take care. Thanks. Bye. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

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