The Great Books Of The Western World
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First chapter of CRIME AND PUNISHMENT down.
Ah, more readable than I expected.
Raskolnikov feels like a very contemporary character, in many ways...
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I'm more than halfway at this point. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT remains very contemporary and "cat and mouse" in its feel. Compelling characters. This is perhaps one of the strongest novels I've read in this entire series.
I must say that although the lyrical writing of MOBY DICK appealed at the time, it compares very unfavourably with CRIME AND PUNISHMENT in the cold light of day. This is tight, fine writing in comparison with MOBY DICK now feeling a little contrived and overly styled.
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On the final stretch with CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. It's sizeable, that explains the progress. I am enjoying it, can't say that it feels like it is dragging in comparison with some of the other stuff I've read.
I feel a tremendous sense of lightness now, I easily have another 6 months reading left but the end really is in sight. Some of the texts that I'm going into from here on in are very slim. Off the top of my head we'll have Twain, Lenin, Freud, Sartre etc.
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Finished CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. It stood my expectations on their head, this was incredibly contemporary and readable. Maybe not all Russian literature is like this (I thought it would be depressing and inaccessible), but I'd certainly consider reading more from him.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT has a curiously uplifting ending. I knew that the protagonist is redeemed, but I didn't think that it would occur through embracing suffering and then the realisation of love. I suppose, what else does it ever occur by, though!!
Now I'm reading Mark Twain's THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER, which is different but... Interestingly I couldn't help but notice the thread of poverty that runs through both books.
When Tom meets a boy new to town, it's his fine clothes that irritate him and are the most remarkable thing about him. He was wearing shoes, "on a Friday", no less!
First hand experience of what we would undoubtedly consider poverty and suffering was a feature of the lives of practically every author I have read in this thread. Even the Emperor Marcus Aurelius would have been considered to be no more than middling well off by contemporary standards, in respect of some of the things he would have had to put up with (in terms of the childhood mortality of his offspring, perhaps).
I have to believe that this experience informed at least some of the greatness of the works they produced.
As I was driving into work today I got to thinking, in contrast, of our contemporary literary superstars, people like Sally Rooney. I don't think Sally Rooney is a bad author, but I have known many like her, who lived comfortable middle or upper middle class lives and seem to have decided as far as as their university days that they were going to be writers. It's interesting to me that Rooney is one of the more self aware authors out there, she has written / meditated on the fact that there's a lot of bullshit in her industry, she talks about dinner parties full of authors, millionaires and publishing moguls and how there's a dissonance between that and her personal / political outlooks on life.
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Some quick reading this past few days.
Mark Twain's TOM SAWYER. Enjoyable, and for some reason "Injun Joe" and his dramatic escape from the courthouse remains etched into my memories. Could such a villain be in a contemporary children's book, described as a 'half breed'? Probably not.
Also Nietzsche's BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, which contains some very compelling passages and is maybe worth reading for the influence that it had on later thinkers, but to be honest I've always found Nietzsche a bit rambling and hard to follow. And this is before he went mad.
It contains the immortal warning that if you fight monsters you risk becoming one, and that if you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you.
What Nietzsche says in BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL is that a morality of altruism or sympathy for ones' fellow man is an abnegation of the true potential of man for greatness. He talks about Christianity and democracy as an evolution of "slave morality". What Nietzsche envisages is that nothing less than acting for personal interest and the accrual of power is man's highest calling and noble path. Although - as I said - I don't really follow everything he says, I believe his intention is that the higher man will behave well towards his inferiors after he has obtained his seat of power, but not before. He talks about things like nobility being not just behaving munificently to inferiors, but being willing to exercise the prerogatives of rank.
I do actually agree with some of his comments that there is a degeneracy or inherent weakness in a society which begins to 'take the side' of persons trying to destroy it. Nietzsche has in mind criminals, and he has scathing things to say about 'learned men' who take the side of criminals (Take your pick, contemporarily, that's the entirely field of criminology), but it could be just as true today of those who excuse the actions of repressive regimes abroad but complain about our own liberal democracies. Nietzche argues that the root of this desire to excuse the actions of criminals and malcontents is that if they can be understood to not be responsible for their actions then the people making the argument are as equally absolved of personal responsibility or failings on their part. He believes their motivation is, ultimately, a latent desire on their own part to avoid any personal responsibility.
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Freud's INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS now.
Straight away, we're hit with the argument that Freud makes ... All dreams are wish fulfilment, even the painful nightmares. How can this be?
He may be wrong about a lot of things, but hard to underestimate his importance nonetheless. It's been 20+ years since I read his INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOANALYSIS, but he remains readable.
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INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS is interesting but it does feel a little like Freud did not really tap the dream state and its meaning any more effectively than some of the ancient Greek dream seers that he references in his literature review.
Some of what he says we probably all can experience, maybe that's why the book is considered so ingenious. So we have a wish fulfilment of not going to work, and sleeping in... We dream have risen, showered and are getting ready in order that we can lie more time in bed - I think many of us will have had this dream. Then, of course, there is the dream of drinking cool water when we are dehydrated in our sleep, and so on.
Not sure this is as interesting as his INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOANALYSIS which was my other potential option to read here, and I passed over that as I read it as an undergrad.
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Rushed my way to an early finish of INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS.
I started to find Freud's prose very grating towards the end. He writes clearly, but there's something really pedantic about him as well, unsurprising considering all the time he spent around neurotics.
Essentially, his findings remain that dreams are wish fulfilment and any element that is contrary to that probably arises from tension between the unconscious and precociousness and our tendency to censor the unacceptable from ourselves.
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Next up is a slim 80 page book written by the American educationalist and philosopher John Dewey.
Dewey was involved in debating traditional versus progressive forms of education in schools.
Only at the foreword stage so far, but there is timeless advice there.
He says that of course it is appropriate that we try to find new ways to educate, but he notes that new approaches will inherently be more difficult to implement at the start, and many attempts lead to backsliding and nostalgia for more heavily-trodden systems of the past.
He notes that the fundamental tension is between those who believe education is about releasing something internal to the individual, a potential, and those who believe it is predominantly an external shaping and tempering force that is brought to bear.
Finally, perhaps most cogent for these days, he warns that people who attempt to change education based on their perception of a lack or problem based on any 'ism (I guess we might think of racism, sexism, communism, capitalism, ableism, whatever it is) might have good intentions but they must not forget that the question is finally about the quality of education not the merits of the 'ism in question. He talks about the potential for an educational programme to be 'captured' by an 'ism at the expense of overall educational value.
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Dewey describes the traditional model of education:-
That there is an accumulated wisdom of the past, in books and customs/standards/practices, which the young learner must master. The teacher's role is to skilfully bring the learner into connection with this body of knowledge and to facilitate learning it.
I thought there was something almost spiritual about this idea of the teacher as connecting the learner with a higher body of knowledge.
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Still working on Dewey but I've jumped ahead in my reading order and I've started THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO as well. This is 'out of sequence' but there's an audiobook related reason, basically, I want something that I can listen to in the car for the next while and of what I have left, this is the one that has the "best" audiobook format.
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Almost finished with Dewey on EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE.
It's probably a testament to him that I'm not completely clear where he comes down on progressive education versus traditional education, he critiques both very effectively.
I like that he says that child-centred education, with no structure or guidance, on the pretext that it is about personal freedom is a silly idea. He notes that if you swap a traditional teacher, who tells the child what to do, with a vaccum i.e no teacer, and the child decides themselves, they are really no freer, because they have the illusion of choice but actually have such low quality experiences and ability to control their fate that it means they are actually in less control of their outcomes, not greater.
On the other hand he does a good job of warning against the risks of children turned off by authoritarian traditional models of education, and the unnaturalness of the silence and stillness usually required according to a very traditional model. He notes that the teacher in that system is the "keeper of order" whereas in a progressive situation in theory the greater involvment and buy-in of the children can mean that there is a shared understanding of the need for 'rules' to the game / the system.
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The GULAG ARCHIPELAGO is fantastic too, I have to say.
The only bum note so far is a really odd bit where the author appears to be a bit outraged that a number of frontline officers were arrested and brought to prison for attempting to rape a woman who was the concubine of a senior counterintelligence officer. He notes that it was practically a war distinction to be allowed to rape and then shoot a German woman, but that Polish or Russian women were to be merely chased around the garden for sport, and let off with a slap of the bum. Talk about perspectives changing!
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Finished Sartre's EXISTENTIALISM AND HUMANISM.
A strange experience to read a book I read in the late 1990s and enjoyed, and think it was **** this time around... It's almost nothing like I remember. I recall Sartre being one of the few post-1920s philosophers that I could easily understand, and perhaps that was why I liked it.
Reading it now, it's classic after-dinner French intellectual navel-gazing masquerading as profundity, I should have read Kierkegaard instead maybe.
The idea that man creates his own values, and Sartre's insistence that this is a logical conclusion of considering that there is no God, appealed to me as an undergraduate.
Not a set of ideas that is actually very useful outside of a dinner party or an undergraduate philosophy society. Even in terms of the 'robustness' of the philosophy in the real world, it melts away because actually - in practical as well as theoretical terms - most of us are sure, if we are sure of nothing else, that there is indeed such a thing as absolute right or wrong. And the people who claim they're not are either are usually only affecting to believe it, or if they do (and act upon it), have genuine neurological or psychological issues.
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The real final lap now... Still listening to the GULAG, which is excellent.
Reading wise I have a short text from Stalin ... A short novel from Kafka ... And an Ernest Hemmingway novel.
And then done.
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Struggling with Kafka a bit. I just don't get that he is this modernist genius. Perhaps if I read him in the original language, but this comes across as neurotic but otherwise surprisingly banal. I still maintain that reading it back to back with GULAG has undermined THE TRIAL for me significantly. It's hard to get any sense of disorientation or weirdness considering this is a case where the truth is far worse than Kafka's imaginings.
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Blasted my way through the rest of THE TRIAL. Overall I think it remains a hot mess, compared to some of the rest of what I've read, but the final scene is disturbing, I'll give him that.
And so, with two days to go until the birth of 2022, I find myself on the final two books of my project - Still listening to GULAG, which is simply remarkable and should be required reading / listening for contemporary people, and I've also cracked open Hemmingway's FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS.
When these are done, that's it, I'm done with this. I'll post a summary and maybe review and do a shortlist of my ten 'must reads'.
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Enjoying FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS. It's quite readable, and actually marries reasonably well with GULAG as a read.
In the book the protagonist is on the Republican side and his commander is 'General Golz', a Soviet general who is present in Spain to organise the Republic's military operations. Golz talks about having 'chosen' his nom de guerre before his arrival and wishes he picked a different one.
On the other side of the conflict I guess the fascists receive their assistance from the Nazis.
Although in Ireland we very lionise foreign fighters who took the anti-fascist side in Spain, and I wouldn't necessarily cast aspersions on the intentions of Americans and Europeans who fought, after reading GULAG it's hard not to look at the Soviet assistance and recognise that ultimately if they had their way they would have imposed as repressive a regime as the Nazis / Franco would have. If Spain was a closer satellite of Russia I don't think it's unreasonable to say actually they would have created a more repressive regime, which is what happened elsewhere.
After reading GULAG it's pretty clear that the Soviet Union was just as bad as the Nazis, which is not something I thought I would ever write confidently, considering the Nazi genocide of jews, roma, homosexuals and political prisoners. I know it was a repressive, authoritarian regime, but we're used to putting the Nazis on a pedestal of evil and considering them uniquely reprehensible. But reading about the presence of concentration camps in Soviet Russia from before 1918, and the utter depravity and evil of the regime's system of internal repression and mass murder, you would have to say that the Soviets were as bad as the Nazis in absolute terms, and in terms of the number of people exterminated they surpassed the Nazis, and there's something galling about the fact that regime members succeeded, in the follow decades, in largely shutting down much acknowledgement of exactly how horrendous their acts were. I guess in the West there remains a committed core of people with a reluctance, that is ideologically based, to fully recognising that the Soviet project's survival and economic model was based on forced penal labour.
I also find it interesting that there is a clear thread of thought in relation to the value of forced labour for prisoners. Stalin inherited it from Lenin, and maybe he had it from Marx (Who never swung a pick axe in his life). In GULAG they discuss how the idea very much took hold that to incarcerate a prisoner and let him read and think was of far less moral and practical value than making him work for 12-14 hours a day. Stalin had the 'genius' idea that he would transition the Soviet Union to post-capitalism not by eliminating systems of control like the prison system, but by actively strengthening them. As is noted in GULAG, it's a funny idea, isn't it... You strengthen massively the thing you are claiming will wither away and die if you can just make it strong and effective enough.
In FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, the old man, Anselmo, hates fascists and he talks about wishing not to kill them, but just to put them to work, and to have them understand what it is to work hard as he has. It's a bit chilling after you've read GULAG...
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I'm on the final countdown to finishing this process now.
I'm halfway through FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS and it is 'fine' but I won't be rushing off to read more Hemmingway afterwards. I find it really irritating the way he represents his dialog which is in Spanish. It's hard to explain, but he writes it in English in a very stylised way, which I guess is representative of the literal way the sentence would translate, but either way it just comes across as overly ornate and there's a lot of repetition of slang phrases.
GULAG is close to done and I have to say, one of the most remarkable documents I've read as part of this process and when all is said and done it's probably the one I would recommend the most to any contemporary people interested in politics, society and especially the 20th century. You can read Marx and Lenin's key documents, as I did, or go further back and start with Thomas More's UTOPIA, but honestly GULAG is the brutal reality that those who want to say anything positive about Communism or the October Revolution must contend with.
I'm at a remarkable stage in the book where the prisoners in the political camps have successfully revolted at Kengir, seizing and making autonomous a political camp for 40 days. I won't go into detail, but considering the inhuman conditions of starvation and torture they were in, it is both remarkable that they were able to successfully revolt and also remarkable that it took as long as it did. There are a variety of factors in play but the one thing which strikes me is that the conditions of the camp made it "every man for himself" for decades. It was only in the 50s that a combination of small factors led a number of prisoners to effectively reconcile themselves to death and begin taking the steps necessary to organise resistance to camp authorities. Once they gained a foothold, it was the undermining of the "every man for himself" conditions and the actions of the prisoners collectively that then allowed successful revolts. The takeaway? I guess no matter what conditions you are in, remember it's only in solidarity with those around you that you have a chance of improving your situation.
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Completed GULAG. When I do my review I've no doubt I'll put this near the top of my recommendation of "must reads".
Technically that means my last "official" read from my list is FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS. I'm more than halfway through that now and expect to be done by the end of the weekend, if not before, it's moving along fairly rapidly.
I started Victor Frankl's MANS' SEARCH FOR MEANING, which is a classic recommendation and often tops peoples' lists of their most profound reads ever. It's very hard not to compare this to GULAG and find it slightly wanting. It's a special book, it's a good book, but GULAG was exceptional for me. Solzhenitsyn spent years and years reviewing and crafting it into his life's work / magnum opus, he says at the conclusion that he only stopped working on it because he had to move on with his life. Aside from the detail and quality of GULAG as a historical document, there's also a kind of irreverent humour and free-flowing prose style that makes it very readable and ejoyable, I think a lot of people will be expecting a "misery" read, and it's actually not like that. Shocking, yes, but always enjoyable and engaging. Solzhenitsyn is optimistic and never self-pitying. You do suspect at times all the GULAG's occupants were permanently driven slightly out of kilter emotionally and psychologically, but Solzhenitsyn would probably have agreed with that enthusiastically and with a grin on his face. In contrast, Frankl wrote his book in a relatively short space of time (9 days), it's not really fair to expect it to have the same depth as GULAG, in terms of being a memoir / historical account. I feel like Frankl tossed this off in a creative fit and feels very urgent. However, Frankl's tone is drier, more careful and less humorous. He's also an optimist, I think, but to be honest of the two I would put GULAG well above so far. Isn't it typical though, of what seems to have happened - the erasure of the experiences of Soviet concentration camp victims from public memory (Largely, anyway)? Frankl says at one point that "World War 2 gave us the concentration camp". Poor Solzhenitsyn notes that the British invented them during the Boer war, and there were concentration camps in Russia pre 1918. But it's the Nazi camps that people remember.
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I began this thread on my adherence to Mortimer J Adler's reading list on the 21/02/2018, and I completed this project last Sunday, on 09/01/2022, finishing FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS.
I thought I would feel some sense of anti climax, but not so much. I enjoyed Hemmingway and I'm glad I finished on a relative 'high note'.
There's a definite sense of relief to have finished, not because the reading material itself felt like a chore, but just because now I feel like I can truly enjoy reading whatever I want, in an unstructured way, for a while. I never came to resent the reading list, but of course there's a natural feeling of freedom that follows concluding it.
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At the moment I'm one third into STATION 11 by Emily St John Mandel. A troupe of musicians and actors travel post-apocalypse Toronto. I can't fault it, a really good addition to the genre which is a little bit literary but still has page-turning qualities. The only thing I notice is that after COVID we can all see the flaw in a plot which involves a killer flu that is both highly lethal, fast incubating and high transmissible... It simply wouldn't spread the way COVID would, it would kill too many hosts too quickly. But, anyway, it's good nonetheless.
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I debated closing this thread and starting a new log, but for the moment I'm inclined to just keep rolling even though strictly speaking after post #232 I am outside the scope of what would be considered a 'Great books' reading list in the sense of being focused on the Western canon in an organised manner, and as associated with C20 educationalists.
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Finished MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING.
Somewhat ephemeral in the takeaways but I will try to summarise by saying Frankl suggests that the 'meaning of life' is individual and fluid, that it is specific and subjective for each person. No single sweeping statement can address the meaning of life because in varying circumstances there will be a different appropriate course to be taken. He suggests that sometimes it will be action-based, but perhaps the takeaway from his time in the camps is that he believes the trickier element is that sometimes inaction is required, and we struggle more with this. He talks about the recognition that suffering will sometimes be unavoidable and our 'opportunity' is to bear the suffering mindfully and in the best manner we can. In some ways it strikes me that this is a case of a psychoanalytic conclusion being reached which is very similar to religious notions that life is suffering, we must bear the will of God etc.
There are some interesting details. He warns against, for example, indulging optimism in circumstances of suffering. I tend to agree that in the long run one of the greatest causes of human unhappiness is not just the suffering we go through but the disappointment and compounding of the suffering by our wasting time failing or delaying a full recognition of the suffering before us.
Still reading STATION ELEVEN but I believe I will return to Tolkien now. Last year I listened to a very good production of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING and as I have a long drive ahead of me this evening it seems an ideal time to listen to THE TWO TOWERS.
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Had to do a substantial amount of driving since yesterday, and have been listening to both THE TWO TOWERS and Jordan Peterson's BEYOND ORDER (12 MORE RULES FOR LIFE).
First, THE TWO TOWERS. I'm several chapters in. It always is the book in the trilogy that reminds me that Tolkien never wrote THE LORD OF THE RINGS as a trilogy, strictly speaking, I think it was simply a publishing issue. At any rate, THE TWO TOWERS begins in a slightly jarring way, taking up immediately the cliffhanger end of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING.
However, I'm well back into it now and this time around I'm enjoying things that, as a teenager or a college student reading it, I don't think I dwelled on. I like the interplay of politics between the orcs who have captured the hobbits. This obviously made it into the movie adaptations, and in the books it's a well-drawn scene. Tolkien sketches quite effectively the differences between Sauruman's new breed of orc and the more conventional goblins of Moria and Mordor, even down to the differences in voice, physical phenotype and behaviours.
Also enjoying the Ents quite a bit, I don't think I realised how funny these scenes involving them are, when I was younger. And wow, Robert Jordan really drew on the Ents extensively for his Ogiers, didnt he? Right down to the Ogier concern with hasty actions and their pitfalls.
As for BEYOND ORDER:-
I'll hold my hands up and say at the outset I was an early fan of Peterson, having listened to the first podcasts he did that played a large part in catapulting him to fame. I remain convinced that those were great podcasts, that he had relevant things to say there and in his biblical YouTube series, and for what it's worth I also think he was right about the warnings he made about the dangers of attempts to police speech in Canada (On that particular issue I think recent years have shown that to at least some degree he was the canary in the coalmine when he warned that controls around speech would have real outcomes for people who dissented, in their professional and public lives, if not in criminal prosecutions).
At a certain point though I felt he began to recycle talking points, and I regret that he became vastly, vastly over-exposed. He did a lot of interviews, and too often, and ended up, at times, no longer on top of his brief. I've seen ones from just before he wrote BEYOND ORDER, in particular, where he looked out of his depth, a bit intellectually shallow, and clearly inappropriately emotional on occasion as well (This bit makes a lot more sense now).
It was frustrating, because I believed - still believe... - that he was a really positive figure in most ways, and offered a compelling amalgamation of clinical psychology, current affairs analysis and a smattering of esoteric bits from other disciplines. He's quirky, flawed but yeah I do think he's insightful and there's a reason why he had the surge of popularity that he did ... It's wasn't just a fluke, nothing that big is.
I also still reject the idea that he is the malign figure that is, by now, a default position for much of the left or centre when it comes to him. He remains one of the most misrepresented people I can think of.
Before I downloaded BEYOND ORDER I actually hesitated because several of the reviews I read were negative, even from outlets that would be broadly pro Peterson! It seemed to me though that all the reviews, whether they were for or against, were all more talking about him than talking about BEYOND ORDER.
I'm several chapters in and all I can say is that if this is the type of work he does in the grip of a benzo addiction then ... I guess the addiction wasn't all bad, because this is the best thing he's done in years. Better than the first book, easily.
One way I can immediately tell that very few of his reviewers actually read this book in any depth is that they completely miss that this is a kind of unusual book for Peterson. The titles of the 'rules' remain eye-catching and bombastic, but so far this isn't even the "obvious self evident self help" stuff that is occasionally it is claimed to be. He's talking about clinical cases from his practice, and the strong theme so far is that a person must engage in several meaningful ways with the community around them in order to remain well-adjusted and happy. He talks about cultivating creative outlets. Talks about making peace with being in a low-status job and waiting for opportunities to progress. To be honest, it's actually all pretty wholesome stuff.
Revisiting one of the review I read, there is a mention that it felt to the reviewer that Peterson was "addressing a Dungeons & Dragons convention". I just can't understand how that was the takeaway, but I guess the point was not to present an insight into an actual reading of the book, but to let the reader of the interview know that the reviewer is 'on the right side' of the debate on Peterson, and to feed them the kind of lazy tropes about his readership they expect.
(Never played D&D in my life, btw, although I wouldn't have minded the opportunity back in the day!)
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One thing I really like about STATION ELEVEN is that we are spared the misery-porn and extreme violence of some post-apocalyptic novels and shows (I'm looking at you, THE WALKING DEAD, and even THE ROAD). I don't care if the descent into savagery is reasonably likely. I don't necessarily need to see it in detail in my entertainment-art.
In STATION ELEVEN, at year 20, the optimism is found in the view of a protagonist that Alexandra, 'the youngest fifteen year old she has ever seen', might reasonably live her whole life without having to kill anyone.
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Finished STATION ELEVEN. I would really recommend this as an excellent literary science fiction novel.
It has a genuine page-turning quality about it, and something I liked about it is that the author didn't descend into the misery-porn that the post-apocalypse novel can sometimes become.
There is a phrase - "cosy catastrophe" - which was used to describe the end of the world novels of John Wyndham. Despite elements of terror, generally Wyndham avoided on-page violence and there were a lot of warm cottages and cups of tea drank, no matter what else was going on outside. There are elements of this in STATION ELEVEN. We're spared the worst.
Going to take a trip back to the 1990s now and re-read THE MAGIC OF RECLUCE, a fantasy novel about a young man exiled from his quasi-utopian island home, and sent into exile to a dangerous mainland continent.
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Still working away on BEYOND ORDER.
I feel Peterson is strongest when he's drawing on his clinical experience, or doing a psychological analysis of matters. In the book - and indeed his current Joe Rogan interview, which I'm also listening to - it's interesting to me that he really emphasises the explanatory power of the psychological concept of repression, which obviously I'm familiar with from reading Freud. He discusses the risks associated with repressing or making taboo forms of behaviour and seeing them rebound (potentially violently). Better to integrate those experiences, even the ones that are non-conforming or anti-social.
There's a really funny exchange with Rogan where Peterson notes that often it seems to be the ostensible "male feminists" who turn out to be treating their girlfriends or employees like **** (Joss Whedon springs to mind, but I think we almost all know these types). Rogan says "It's so surprising!" and Peterson, deadpan, says "No, it's not, it's exactly what you'd expect". Partly because - repression.
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Wow, the Jordan Peterson podcast with Joe Rogan got too weird towards the end, even for me. His wife and daughter only eat Lamb? Weird.
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Halfway through THE MAGIC OF RECLUCE.
When I read this as a younger man it felt like it went on forever, a real doorstopper. But it's not really, it's practically a weekend holiday read (Not quite, but I'll be done within the week, I expect).
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Now on SS-GB by Len Deighton.
Very readable, excellent atmosphere.
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