Tell Me What You're Reading
Tell Me What You're Reading
Podcast Description
Our Podcast is intended to stimulate a dialogue about the issues and ideas we find in books, and also what we learn about ourselves and the world around us as a result of diving into literature . . . of all kinds.
“Books are a sort of cultural DNA, the code for who, as a society, we are, and what we know. All the wonders and failures, all the champions and villains, all the legends and ideas and revelations of a culture last forever in its books.” The Library Book, by Susan Orlean
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The show centers on themes of literary analysis, personal growth through reading, and cultural insights, with specific episodes exploring topics such as the elements of bestseller literature exemplified in Hit Lit and the in-depth analysis of classic works like Ulysses.
Our Podcast is intended to stimulate a dialogue about the issues and ideas we find in books, and also what we learn about ourselves and the world around us as a result of diving into literature . . . of all kinds.
“Books are a sort of cultural DNA, the code for who, as a society, we are, and what we know. All the wonders and failures, all the champions and villains, all the legends and ideas and revelations of a culture last forever in its books.” The Library Book, by Susan Orlean
Susan Brown is a professional editor, writing coach, and book doctor. She’s had forty years of teaching college creative writing and book editing, and has guided dozens of books into print as an editor, and as a writing coach.
My friend Jeff Moran in Woodstock had previously mentioned Susan to me, and so I was intrigued when I heard that Susan was going to run a five week online writing workshop called “The Secrets of the Great Writers”.
Jeff had told me that Susan was a James Joyce scholar. That was a little bit intimidating, but also immediately credentializing. I’ve appreciated a number of books on writing, by Stephen King, George Saunders, Anne Lamotte, Mary Karr and others, and thought it might also be instructive, and interesting, to be part of a writing workshop, so I signed up for Susan’s class.
I learned a lot in the workshop, we had a terrific group of very talented fiction and memoir writers in the class, and it was a lot of fun.
One of the dozens of sources Susan identified for us during the workshop was a book called Hit Lit – Cracking the Code of the 20th Century’s Biggest Bestsellers, by James Hall. In his book, Hall identifies the features common to the biggest bestsellers of all time.
Susan and I discussed her Secrets of the Great Writers Workshop. Susan actually conducted an abbreviated Workshop on the Air. We discussed Hall’s Hit Lit and we discussed Ulysses.
We discussed storytelling. I loved this discussion.
The books examined in Hit-Lit, many of which are referred to in our discussion.
- Gone with the Wind*
- Peyton Place
- To Kill a Mockingbird*
- Valley of the Dolls
- The Godfather*
- The Exorcist
- Jaws
- The Dead Zone
- The Hunt for Red October*
- The Firm*
- The Bridges of Madison County; and
- The Da Vinci Code*
- *I’ve read these.
Some of the other books referred to by Susan:
Moby Dick
The Scarlet Letter
The Lighthouse
Sound and the Fury
The Lincoln Lawyer
Black Cherry Blues
Gone Baby Gone
Pride and Prejudice
Let the Great World Spin
Madame Bovary
The Glass Castle
Angela’s Ashes
Wild
Catcher in the Rye
Lolita
Ulysses
I encouraged Susan to run a class guiding us through Ulysses!
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