Shiloh Brooks, CEO of the George W. Bush Presidential Center and host of Old School, argues men should read more books—like Lincoln’s Shakespeare or Churchill’s classics—to deepen emotional and intellectual engagement beyond short-form media. He credits immersive fiction (e.g., Anna Karenina, The Great Gatsby) with fostering empathy, even for characters like Mr. Darcy or Nietzsche’s critiques of Western civilization, while modern education’s reliance on excerpts stifles critical reflection. Brooks advises beginners to seek serendipity in physical bookstores or libraries, starting with enduring works that challenge perspectives and reveal humanity’s complexity. [Automatically generated summary]
And yet I found myself living the life of Elizabeth Bennett, and I felt like I was a girl.
I felt like I was a woman falling in love.
I know this sounds weird, with Mr. Darcy.
In other words, I got a perspective on the world that I myself would not have been able to provide.
And therefore, I began to feel feelings.
Hi, everyone.
This is Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Shiloh Brooks, who's got a great new podcast at the Free Press about great books.
And it's called Old School.
It's about great books.
And I have to say, last week, I just finished rereading Anna Karenina, which I consider possibly one of the three greatest books ever.
It may be the greatest book ever.
It's an amazing, amazing novel.
And it's so, it's been years since I read it.
And it was so changed my perceptions and lifted me up that I was almost sorry that nobody reads books anymore.
So I wanted to bring Shiloh on and talk about that and all of the things that we do get from these great books because it's a lot.
He is president and CEO of the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
He's professor of practice in the Department of Political Science at SMU.
And as I say, he's got a podcast called Old School at Free Press about great books and how reading them can make stronger, better men.
Shiloh, it's nice to meet you.
Thank you for coming on.
Thank you.
It's good to meet you too.
So this is a subject obviously very dear to my heart.
I mean, when I started out, I've been a novelist all my life.
And when I started out, the novelists were like rock stars.
They had one name.
You know, it was Hemingway.
It was Faulkner.
You know, they didn't have to actually, didn't have to tell you who they were.
We just knew.
And everybody wanted to replace them and be the next one.
And while I was working, basically, novelists fell off the shelf, you know, as cultural figures.
And then books sort of, I think, in recent years have fallen off the shelf.
So let's begin with this.
How did books become a part of your life?
Yeah, I mean, you're right about books.
And there's all kinds of statistics that show that Americans read less and less every year.
You know, books became a part of my life in a couple of ways.
One is that I had a pretty rough upbringing, but I had a stepfather at one point who he was a blue-collar guy, hard-working guy, Vietnam veteran, didn't have a college education, but he'd come home after work and after we were out in the backyard throwing the football and whatnot, he'd always come in and I'd see him sitting down with a book.
And I think just him modeling that behavior for me, seeing a man, a grown man, a manly man, you know, a guy who drove a forklift every day, could throw the football like a rocket, but also could sit down with a novel and talk to me about it.
So that, you know, certainly changed my perspective of the kind of activity reading is.
And the second thing that was formative for me with books is that I went to this great books college called St. John's College that's got campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
And you read the great books in chronological order, beginning with Homer and the ancient Greeks all the way up through modern times in every discipline, music, mathematics, philosophy, literature, science.
And so you really, you know, the culture of the book and what books have meant and the way they've shaped human thought was kind of imparted to me at St. John's.
And those books changed my life.
And so that's, you know, that's why I do what I do today.
Yeah, it's an amazing thing.
I mean, I was a lousy, lousy student.
I educated myself after I left school by reading all the books.
But I remember the moment walking on campus when I suddenly thought, oh, I get it.
First came the Greeks and then came the Romans and then came, and that there was this chain of culture that had passed ideas on to one another.
And it's just, you know, it kind of opened up your eyes.
You're the president and CEO of the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
W. was a big reader.
People made fun of him for being a dope.
But I have two fan letters from him.
He read everything.
You know, he's a big reader.
In his memoir, Decision Points, he talks about the fact that he read 14 biographies of Lincoln while in office.
You know, in addition, when he left office, he had a reading contest with one of his aides.
I don't remember the exact score, but it was something like in his first year out of office, he read, you know, 98 books and the aide read, you know, 110 or something like that.
And even today, he's a real serious book reader.
And I admire that.
And, you know, I teach courses on statesmanship and leadership.
And, you know, I point this out to the students that people like Lincoln, you know, Lincoln read Shakespeare, Lincoln read Euclid, Lincoln read the Bible.
Churchill was a, you know, a pretty well-read person, talks at least with some accuracy and passion about Aristotle, such that, you know, this seems to me to be part of the formative life of a statesman and of a leader is a kind of deep, robust reflection on, you know, thoughts that are communicated through books.
The Power of Long Books00:10:49
You know, what is it do you think?
You know, I like the movies.
I like TV.
I mean, I like all these forms of entertainment and culture.
But there is something, you know, about a book that is just unique.
Is there any way to put that into words?
It's hard.
I mean, you know, one of the things that I think that people don't fully understand about books in an age of short form media is that a book is a companion in a very unique way.
It lives with you.
You mentioned Anna Krinina at the top of the show.
Anna Krinina is a very long book.
That's a book that you would take with you over weeks.
It might take some people months to read.
That book lives with you in parallel with your own life.
It's a book that you might read every day for a period of months or even years in some cases.
And so I think what a book provides you with is this companionship, this relationship, the intimacy.
I mean, I know you're a writer of novels, of course, the intimacy with which you get to know the characters, the sense in which you're going to spend a considerable amount of time with them, such that you come to love them, you come to hate them.
In a certain way, you sometimes become them.
You metabolize them into your heart and your soul.
Even film, which I love, the art form of film, but even film, you're going to spend about two hours with those characters.
So it's not the same kind of companion for life.
It doesn't accompany you.
It's not in bed with you in the same way on the train with you in the same way as a book is.
So just, I mean, as an object, a book is extraordinary.
And the way in which you can locate yourself in a book by way of its page numbers, I encourage my students always to read physical copies, largely because what a book encourages is comparison, that you can hold your page on page 100 and go forward to page 145 and go back and forth and compare those two passages.
The physical object of the book opens up ways of thinking, ways of comparing that a digital book or a film or a video simply can't match.
So, you know, books as objects and both for their physical properties and their content are extraordinary.
Yeah, you know, when people have asked me in interviews what I want out of writing, I always say I want somebody to reach out for my book at 3 o'clock in the morning and feel that he's not alone.
You know, I mean, I think that that's just an amazing thing that books can do.
And you're absolutely right.
Reading Anna Krinina, those people are now as real to me as people I've met.
And I think they'll just be with me forever.
I mean, that's, or as long as I'm here, which will be considerably shorter.
So leaving the Bible out of it, you're stranded on a desert island.
What are the three books you want with you?
Oh, my gosh.
Well, I mean, in a way, this goes back to your previous question.
I would want a book that I could establish a relationship with.
I think it's important for people to see that books are objects to have a relationship with over the course of a life.
They're things that you could come back to.
And the desert island question really brings that out because if you're on a desert island, the presumption would be that you would reread the book over and over again.
And not all books give themselves over to rich rereading.
I mean, I can envision not to take anything away from romance, but I suspect I don't want to read the latest romance novel 50 times.
But if I could read a book like Plato's Republic, I suspect that that book could sustain me.
You know, I think of a book like that.
There's a book by an ancient writer named Xenophon called The Education of Cyrus, the Syropaideea.
Xenophon was a student of Socrates, the only student who wrote anything that we know of other than Plato.
I can come back to Xenophon's writings just perpetually.
I teach them every year.
I think another author who I've grappled with in my own intellectual life is Nietzsche.
Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil is a book that's critical of everything I thought was true growing up, whether it's Western civilization, Christianity, democracy.
I love confronting thoughts like that.
And I always learn something from testing my convictions against an author of that substance.
So I would say, you know, just as I would take Xenophon or Plato, I might take Nietzsche.
And then for me personally, and this one's probably a peculiar choice given that I've, you know, discussed these enduring, enduring works of Western civilization.
But I'm a lover of American literature.
And, you know, I think an author like F. Scott Fitzgerald to me, when I read a book like The Great Gatsby, the poetry of the writing, it takes my breath away.
It makes my stomach hurt sometimes.
And I wish I could compose a sentence like that with that rhythm and with that syrup and with that sweetness.
And so I think just as a person who revels in the written word, a book like that to accompany the deeper ones would be great.
Yeah, no, it's a great book.
And you can read it again and again.
It's true.
Although it's a little short for a desert island, dependent on being on the desert island.
So how do you work your podcast, Old School, which is at the Free Press?
How do you get into this subject there?
Are you just talking about books or you're doing more than that?
Yeah, we're doing more than that.
So, you know, one of the things that's unique about books I find when I talk to people about them, and I've been talking to people about them my whole life because I'm sort of known as a book guy and everybody knows I read, is that I would engage in these conversations with people and they would ask me my favorite book.
And I would say, I can tell you my favorite book.
But what's a more interesting question is, what's the book that changed your life?
Now, it might not be your favorite, but it might be a book that you stumbled upon when you were going through a hard time.
Maybe you were going through a divorce or you lost your job or you lacked purpose or you, you know, something was happening.
You were young and you were, it's a book that you read.
It may not be your favorite book, but it's a book that when you read it, something changed for you.
It provided a medicine for some ailment from which you suffered.
It provided inspiration for something that you wanted to accomplish.
That's the premise of old school is to bring on, in my case, men, because men don't read as much as women.
If you look at statistics on reading groups across America, the overwhelming majority of participants in reading groups are women.
This is true of anyone who's taught literature in college.
You walk into a Victorian literature class, the enrollment is typically, not in every case, but typically overwhelmingly female.
You walk into engineering classes.
Usually there's a lot of males in there.
And so the sexes kind of sort themselves.
And I just thought, you know, one of the, you see men hurting a lot today.
I mean, there's a lot of, you know, talk about this online and in various news sources, that men are graduating from college at lower rates, that they're being radicalized on the internet, that they're living in their parents' basements, that unemployment among young men in particular is high.
When I would go to my classes, I couldn't help but notice that I was teaching books of substance, literary books, and there were young men everywhere.
And I thought, either I have a voice that they're not hearing somewhere else or something's going on here.
And so when I started to think about all of those things, the way young men seem to respond to my classes, the way young men are in a bit of a crisis, the way books can serve as guides for life, I've conceived of old school.
And so we invite a man on to talk about a book, to tell us about it.
First of all, just what is the book?
But second, and more importantly, in some respects, how did this book change your life?
Where were you when you read it?
And what did you do after you read it?
And did you read it again 10 years later?
And how did it strike you then?
That's sort of the premise of old school.
You know, that's really great.
The thing about men that's really interesting is they don't read as much.
And when they read, they almost always read nonfiction.
And I, you know, I have a conservative bent.
And when I bring out a novel, I want to go on and talk about it.
And I can't tell you the number of times I've gone on an interview.
And the first question I've gotten, especially from male interviewers, is, why should I read this?
It's not true.
Which is always a wonderful thing to hear when you're trying to sell books.
I got into, I opened my mouth as a conservative for my sins.
I mean, a stupid thing to do career-wise, but I did it because I felt that the culture had become poisonous, it had become toxic, and that conservatives, people who loved freedom, never mind whether they were right or left, just people who loved the idea that human individuals could be free, weren't paying attention to the fact that every movie was about not doing that.
It was about not being free and doing the things that make you unfree.
And I found this stumbling block with people, I'll describe them as conservatives.
Let's just say they were, you know, what we would think of in America as people who believed in the Constitution and things like that, think of them as right-wing.
One thing I found is that they wanted books, especially modern books, to reflect their values specifically.
And you mentioned before that you love reading Nietzsche.
And I've loved reading Nietzsche and I don't agree with my, well, it's not true.
I think he's obviously a great thinker, but he's, I don't think he's, I'm not living the Nietzschean life, let's put it that way.
But I love that, you know, because it makes your mind react.
You know, it makes you say, like, gee, I love Anna Karenina, but she's doing something that seems to me to be wrong.
You know, how do I reconcile those things?
Do you find this in your classes that people do not want to be challenged, that they don't want their minds to be broadened that way?
I find young people, I mean, shockingly enough, given some of the things you read about them on the internet, but I do find that a lot of times in my classes, young people are game.
In other words, they're, you know, they have some calcified views, but there's a kind of nervousness about whether those views are true.
And when those views are challenged, they often don't hold up to scrutiny.
And frankly, I think it's exciting when a professor presents a book to a student who has calcified views and presents that book as a forbidden book precisely because it will challenge you.
And it might be subversive.
I mean, you know, the way this is how one might introduce Nietzsche to begin to learn from him.
So I find, you know, I often tell my students, you know, we talk a lot about the liberal arts and what does that mean.
And I think a lot of people have this idyllic view that it means taking courses on pottery and reading poetry or something like that at Middlebury.
That's not what liberal education means.
Liberal education means, as you put it a moment ago, freedom, the freedom of the mind in particular.
The freedom of the mind from the convictions which it labors under, which might be false.
And it doesn't know that they're false until it encounters arguments and alternatives to those convictions and puts the convictions that you currently hold into conversation with those alternative arguments, the way I said I did with Nietzsche.
And it's only then that you come to test those convictions and you can liberate yourself from mere conviction and ascend to truth because you can say, well, the convictions have been tested by their greatest critic and I've been able or I've not been able to refute him.
Why Fiction Liberates Thought00:13:56
And either you've refuted him and your convictions hold water or you haven't and you better change your mind or else you're just a dogmatist.
That's what liberal education can do.
That's the way it can free the mind.
So to answer your question, I absolutely have that experience myself in my own life.
And if I'm a teacher worth anything, I recreate the experience that I had in my students every single day to liberate and free their mind.
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Yeah, and you know, you emphasize for obvious reasons that books can take your ideas apart, but just the idea that you have to defend your book against a brilliant mind.
You have to defend your ideas against a brilliant mind is incredibly, you know, solidifying.
It can make you understand why you think the things you think, not just because they were taught to you.
I think that that's an amazing thing.
And it seems to me it's not happening in universities across the country where people are being inculcated with ideas that the professor likes and they're not even allowed to think of what Shakespeare might have been thinking when he sat down to write.
They have to hear it in terms of some feminist theory or black race theory or whatever, you know.
So another thing that I have run into repeatedly is with Christians that they feel that it is sinful for them to be in the presence of some ideas, of certain ideas, of certain things that attack their faith.
I had the experience when I was going through my conversion experience, which went on for decades, of reading during a period of atheism, of reading the Marquis de Sade, looking for atheist theories that made sense.
And he was the only atheist theorist who actually made sense to me, where his ideas held together.
And I thought, oh, well, this is hell.
This is the worst thing ever.
You know, this is not what I want.
And that really helped me toward Christianity.
But of course, it was reading this horrible, ugly pornographic philosophy, though it was brilliant philosophy, that actually turned my ship around in the right direction.
And I find that Christians frequently are fragile in this regard.
Is that something that you have encountered?
Or is that something that do the people who come to you, they want to change their mind?
I guess is what I'm trying to get at.
Yeah, I think, you know, I find that oftentimes my most pious students, whether they're Christian, Jew, Muslim, are my best students.
And maybe it's just because they're young people, but the reason they're good is this, that if you come into a classroom, I think Alan Bloom observed a similar phenomenon in Closing of the American Mind.
If you come into a classroom and you're a relativist, you have no sense for You have no principles on the basis of which to test these authors.
Whereas if you come in a Christian or you come in a Jew or a Muslim, you have a kind of ordered, principled, religious view of the world and the way that it works, which when you encounter Plato can cause you to begin to think very interesting thoughts on the basis of this bedrock that you carry with you in your heart.
And so I certainly sympathize with the experience, the disorienting experience that you describe.
I can certainly understand the believer who doesn't want to be in the presence of books that challenge faith.
On the other hand, and this is not true of all faith traditions, but I think faith requires some testing to see how solid it really is and to see whether it meets the challenge that it purports to meet.
So when I get students in my class who are Catholic or Protestant or Christian or Muslim or Jewish, they're often, they write very good papers.
They come to me with very good questions because they're genuinely troubled.
The tension sits on their souls in a real meaningful way that I think is kind of opens up the possibility of, as I said earlier, true liberal education.
You know, one thing I've noticed, obviously, well, let me go step back.
What is it do you think that is causing people to stop reading?
Is it just the amount of screen time they have or is it something else?
I think there are a lot of causes.
As a good social scientist, I want to say there's multiple variables for any phenomenon and we should analyze them all.
But I think one of the big ones you've touched on is reading is a habit and it requires habituation to long-form engagement.
The attention span has to be trained.
And I think that there are incentives by way of what I'll call psychoaddictive technology that create habits of mind that are not in keeping with the kind of attention span, let's say, required to really sit with something for a while.
There's a certain kind of curiosity that's required that I don't know that people necessarily have anymore, and I'm not sure why.
That wouldn't have anything to do with the technology.
It might have something to do with technology.
I'm not sure.
I think the education system does this.
I confess to you, I was at Princeton University teaching for a long time.
The best students, I love those students, and I love the university.
But I had several students, and I would teach courses that had 250 people in them, come up to me afterward and say, thank you, first of all, for this course.
I've never in my whole education, either at Princeton or in my high school, had the opportunity to read a book in full over the course of a period of time.
And I'm thinking, well, what are you doing in high school that you're not reading?
Y'all didn't read, I don't know, some Steinbeck novel or Gatsby or Hemingway or something.
Like you never, and these are the best kids in the world.
They got a perfect score on their SAT.
And so I think there's a lot that's going on with technology, a lot that's going on in schools.
You know, there are excerpts that people read now rather than the full text and all this kind of thing going on that really have harmed the training of the habits of mind needed to engage with a piece of great literature.
There seems to be a kind of surrender too.
I mean, I talk to teachers now who teach graphic novels, comic books.
And you know, listen, I discovered books by reading classics, illustrated, comic books.
And I know I'm not alone in that.
You know, those are the old, before your time, those were those comic books that told you classic stories.
The Count of Monte Cristo would be a comic book.
And I think these are better stories than the ones I'm getting in the Superman comic.
And that kind of led me to reading.
But I find this, I meet English majors in college who've never read a Shakespeare play, never experienced a Shakespeare play.
There seems to be a kind of surrender.
And I wonder, I mean, it seems to me a podcast like old school, like your podcast, is important because it's rebuilding from the ground up.
I mean, you're sort of explaining to people something that even the teachers seem to have forgotten that there's something special in this.
I've noticed from talking to young people that a certain depth of thought has vanished.
And that the minute someone starts, not the minute someone starts talking, but within minutes of someone talking to me, I can tell whether they read books or not.
Now, in nonfiction, what is that?
What is that thing that you get from actually reading a nonfiction book that you don't get from reading articles online?
Well, I think it's that you get, you know, sustained, reasoned reflection on a topic which merits a complex treatment.
So, you know, you can read an article online.
You know, sometimes I'll ask people, tell me your favorite book, and they'll tell me their favorite book.
And then I'll say, tell me your favorite op-ed.
And they're like, I don't have a favorite op-ed.
Who has a favorite op-ed?
I don't even, well, tell me, you know, if you read a book last week, what is it?
And they can tell me.
And then I say, tell me one op-ed you read last week.
And they have no conscious memory of it.
What I mean is that the articles are in a way, you know, on the internet.
I don't mean academic articles or some long-form, beautiful essay, but there's a kind of fleetingness to it.
What a long nonfiction book provides is it provides you a chance to immerse yourself in a world.
I take, for example, one of my favorite nonfiction genres, biography.
I would tell my students, look, you're boring.
And that's not your fault, but you're boring.
You're 18 to 21.
And you're 18.
Of course you're boring.
You haven't done anything.
What you need to do is immerse yourself in nonfiction.
Let's go and read the memoirs of a person like Frederick Douglass or of a person like Winston Churchill.
Live their life with them over time.
Become them.
Metabolize the complexity of all that they are over 500 pages into your soul and live the life of a Lincoln or a Churchill.
And lo and behold, at the end, you will become more interesting.
And there will be parts of that book that inscribe themselves on your soul that you'll begin to quote to people.
And that when you get in a heart, when you're a leader or you're going through something in your family, you will remember that passage and you say, you know, it's like that time when Churchill, it's like when Lincoln was going through, because this thing will have made an imprint on your heart because, as I said earlier, it was a companion for you for a month or two when you were 20 years old because you had a course on it and you wrote a paper on it.
And so I think that that's what nonfiction, long-form investigation does for a person.
It immerses you in complexity.
It inscribes on the heart and the soul these events or these people in a way that something short form simply can't.
And that will shape you and that will make you better in a person of substance.
So that's nonfiction.
Now, as I was saying, when I go on to try to sell fiction, I frequently get this question, especially from men.
I get it from men all the time.
Why should I read this?
It isn't true.
What's the answer to that?
First, I might play with them and say, it's not clear to me that you know what's true, that what you think is true is true.
And so I'm not so sure that you are the arbiter of what's true and false.
So it may be that the books that you read that you think are true are also false.
And they're also novels for all I know.
There's plenty of books out there of that kind.
So I might say that.
But what I would say more seriously is what fiction can provide, especially for a young person, is it gives you an occasion to feel feelings that you have no cause or right to feel.
So when I was young, I hadn't experienced much in love.
Who has?
You're 16 years old.
But when I read a book by Fitzgerald called This Side of Paradise and saw its chief character, Amory Blaine, falling in love, I began to see and feel what it meant to fall in love.
Or when I read Jane Austen, I am not a woman.
I mean, I'm not a woman, you can see.
And yet I found myself living the life of Elizabeth Bennett.
And I felt like I was a girl.
I felt like I was a woman falling in love.
I know this sounds weird with Mr. Darcy.
In other words, I got a perspective on the world that I myself would not have been able to provide.
And therefore, I began to feel feelings that either I hadn't felt before and was capable of feeling or that I would have never felt like what it feels like for a young woman to fall in love with a strapping gentleman.
What I mean here, or feelings of war, you know, when you read a book like War and Peace or Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and the atheism of Ivan Karamasov and just what that, I hadn't felt any of that.
And so a novel provides you with a kind of emotional education by giving you an emotional cosmos in which to play.
And that's what's so beautiful.
I read a lot of Cormac McCarthy and the severity of his novels, the barrenness of the novels, the evil.
Some of the evil characters are so awful.
I just couldn't have come up with anything like that myself.
And yet I'm trying to see from their point of view how the world is.
That's what fiction permits is a kind of emotional freedom of spirit and education that is practically limitless and that makes you a fuller human being, more capable of experiencing all that the human situation is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, I know it does sound strange when you're talking about the perspectives of women, but I feel like there's really, you know, you can meet a lot of women without ever understanding them at all, but you do get something out of reading Austin that you just don't get from actual life, which is bizarre, but there it is.
All right.
Explore a Physical Bookstore00:02:51
So someone comes to you and they're 25 and they've never read a book and they think, gee, I'm missing something.
How do I begin to read?
Are there tricks that I need to know before I take this on?
I would tell them, well, you know, you know, related to your previous question, prepare yourself to become someone you're not.
That's what your goal should be, is to get out of your own head, your own boring, narrow, single life.
Reading will allow you to live another life in a very educational way.
And so what should you do?
How should you begin?
Well, I often tell people, look, first of all, you got to go to a bookstore, a real bookstore.
What you shouldn't do is get online on Amazon.
I love Amazon.
It's great and everything.
But what you shouldn't do is ask for a title recommendation from somebody, get on and type it in and order it.
That deprives you of the extraordinary experience of serendipity, that you might walk into a bookstore and there might be 10 books on the shelf and you think you're heading for the one your friend recommended, but there's five more that you find on the way.
And it's one of those five that really changed your life.
So I would say go to a physical bookstore and just look around.
What interests you?
Don't have any intention in mind.
Just check it out.
Go to a library.
This is part of the beauty of a library.
You'd call up on the computer, you're looking for a specific book, and on your way to find it, and you're scanning the shelves and you can't find the number.
But then there's 10 books that you see on the way to finding the one that you can hardly wait to read that you didn't know existed.
Have that experience.
And I would say if you don't know what you're interested in, what section to look in, I always tell people there's a beginning solution to that is that there's this section of a lot of bookstores called classics.
And you'll find all kinds of stuff in the classics.
But the one feature that they have, if it's a good classic section, is that they've endured over time and they've probably endured for some reason.
And so, the likelihood that you're going to go wrong by picking up a classic, you don't have to stay in the classics.
It might be that you're really looking for spirituality or you're really looking for psychology.
I don't know.
But if you just pick up a classic as your first book and you fall in love with something enduring, that's going to lead to sustained literary nutrition and the habits of reading for the rest of your life.
So, that's my advice: browse widely.
And if you don't know where else to start, go and pick up a classic and nourish yourself on it and think about why it's endured for 100 or 2,000 years.
Excellent advice.
Shiloh Brooks, his podcast is old school.
It's over at the Free Press.
Really nice talking to you.
It's nice to talk to somebody who's actually read a book.
It's got a rare experience, but it's lovely to meet you.
I appreciate your coming on.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you for having me.
I always feel strange talking about books like they're objects, you know, instead of like this actual pool of being that you dive into.
But I have to say, Shiloh Brooks did it very well.
He held up his end of the conversation very well.
And we will continue to hold up our end of the conversation on Friday with the Andrew Clavin Show.