A podcast about the literary canon that actually deepens your knowledge (sort of)

While most of life’s pleasures can be shared, reading is lonely. It’s more than possible for six friends to enjoy an exquisite meal, a bottle of wine and then settle down for a four- or five-hour orgy. Food, drink, sex: these things are better shared. But if, as dawn approached, someone cracked open Chaucer’s ‘Parliament of Fowls’ and intimated that it was time to really get down to brass tacks, it could only spoil the mood.

Reading is lonely because so much of the reading that matters is hard. The books that change the world and shake the culture are rarely pure pleasure. The heaven sections of Paradise Lost. The war bits of War and Peace. The history bits embedded within the war bits of War and Peace. These are not pleasurable to read but we read them anyway, partly because they help us understand the intellectual scope of the author’s vision, and partly because we are inured to the truth that life is suffering.