Some stories cannot be rushed.

Perhaps you’ve done this before—you pick up a collection of short stories, intending to read only a few, and start with the one with the most distinctive title. Then, to decide whether you really want to read that particular story, you might skim through the first few pages to see if it grips you, and if it does, you read.

Alternatively, you may try to get a vague sense of an author without slogging through their collected works. After carefully reading a story or two as an introduction, you might choose to skim a few more pieces to parse out their structure. It’s bad practice, generally, but this method often succeeds in giving you a sense of what the stories look like, even if you’ll close the book ignorant as to how they actually feel.

If you read three Raymond Carver stories and scan your eyes over three more, you’ll get the sense that you’ve come across three great works of fiction and three entirely pointless ones. There’s no ‘point’ to any of these stories—at least, none that you can point to or wrap neatly in a bow and say “This is why this was written.” Something usually happens, whether it’s an unfinished affair or a conversation in bed, but there’s often no clean place that the story ‘begins’ and it ‘ends.’

Carver’s stories are snippets; their impact is subtle. As a reader, you aren’t conscious of the character development as it is happening on the page—it is only after a story is finished that you realize the characters have been fully formed in your head, their depth way outperforming the story’s word count.

The characters are grey, with unresolved pasts and secret urges. People lie, and cheat, and reminisce about exes they still kind of love. They partake in vices that neither aid nor destroy them. These stories offer no kind edges, no absolute truth wrapped neatly in a bow.

Maybe this unsettles you. Maybe you can handle depravity if it is punished, can appreciate a messy relationship if its imperfections are called out against some palatable ideal. Perhaps this is same ambiguity which troubles you in your own life, as you ponder past mistakes, punish situations for not being perfect.

It’s realism done beautifully. Yes, the stories appear ‘realistic’ on the surface, with working-class characters in everyday scenarios, but what makes them masterful is far subtler. Carver’s fiction is a perfect mirror of life—conflicts that don’t resolve, depravity that goes unpunished, good characters who suffer without reward.

Yet (and this is vital), in acknowledging imperfection, Carver does not slide into cynicism. Love is real—it is just messy. Happiness is achievable—it is just temporary. Life is meaningful, even when it is ugly.

As always, thank you for reading.

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Or don’t. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I don’t know how to feel about this book.

I liked it. In fact, during some parts I really liked it. It’s clever—sometimes too clever for its own good. It evokes some strong, compelling imagery. Kuang even achieved the near-impossible challenge of creating a fresh and interesting conception of Hell, despite the journey-to-the-underworld trope having been done to death (pun intended). Her Underworld is nearly entirely devoid of body horror and eternal fire, but is instead a mirror of the real world—an empty version, with all the pleasure and, rightly, all of the life sucked out of it.

Katabasis was thought-provoking. It was also, at times, disappointing. And, since it’s a little intimidating to try to capture this all at once, I figure the best way to unpack my thoughts on this book are to journey through them one by one, from the surface-level to the downright ugly, mirroring Alice Law’s journey through the vast Underworld.

Pride

If this book were a newly-deceased soul awaiting its own eternal punishment, this is where it would land. We’re getting my complaints about the book out of the way early—this book is pretentious.

Yes, this book was a 500-page reminder of how I am not as well-educated or as well-read as I’d like to be, ripe with name-dropping and references that I sometimes, sort of got. The only saving grace is that the book knows it’s pretentious, and sometimes leans into it. This doesn’t absolve it completely, but it helps.

The whole thing reads as an in-joke for an ivy-league club that I will never be invited to join. And that’s fine. Kuang owns it.

Desire

In fact, one of the things that I liked most about this book is that, while every character is flawed (unsurprising, given that they’re all in Hell), they’re flawed in the same way as you, me, and basically everyone.

Kuang’s depiction of Desire was a perfect representation of the various addictions that keep humans in their own perpetual Hells-on-Earth. Characters are trapped in endless cycles of painful pleasure-seeking. They’re not evil, but pathetic. It’s really spot-on, and it gives the reader the impression that everyone they know will end up in Hell eventually.

It provoked a lot of thought. Don’t a lot of religions have this conception of an afterlife, in which everyone winds up in the same place, a Hell of sorts, cleansing themselves from whichever impurities befell them in their mortal life? It makes a lot of sense, actually. Instead of classifying people as either ‘saved’ or ‘damned,’ this conception assumes that we’re all messed up, somehow—the only difference is which version of Hell we wind up in.

Greed

Although none of Hell was necessarily punitive, and no one in Hell was necessarily evil, the ‘lesser’ spheres of pride and desire were distinguished from the remaining ones, where a person’s sins actually harm others and not just themselves.

Still, sin in this book wasn’t depicted as a horrible affliction that we must cleanse ourselves from, and Hell wasn’t really depicted as punitive.

Instead, Hell is created personally, due to one’s shortcomings of understanding. Their hang-ups, their inability to let go. As soon as they accept reality, they pass on. It’s much more of a personal journey than a punishment, and it’s fitting that, even though it’s entirely in everyone’s power to escape Hell, most characters choose not to (perhaps because of the sins that they still hold onto).

Wrath

Now, the rest of these greater sins are going to start to blend together, and this kind of parallels the reading experience of Katabasis. Kuang did a great job exploring the ‘surface’ of Hell, with pride and gluttony and distrust. But I don’t think she really knew what to do with these darkest sides of humanity, so they were just kind of glazed over.

Violence

Towards the middle of the book, it seemed like the entire ‘fantasy novel’ aspect of this book was kind of glazed over, too. Don’t get me wrong. There was action, and violence, and worldbuilding, and a plot with a logical arc that reached a satisfying conclusion.

However, despite the stakes being high on paper (pun intended), I didn’t really feel the emotional energy. Instead of the drama intensifying as the book went on, it just kind of fell flat. Just when I was getting into the tension of Hell, Kuang hit the reader with a series of flashbacks about sexual abuse and chronic disease. Just when I was getting into the Peter-Alice chemistry, Peter died and wouldn’t come back until the ass-end of the book!

Cruelty

Fine, maybe I’m being a bit mean. It was a good book. I wouldn’t call it a great book, but it was a good book. Maybe even a very good book.

Tyranny

In fact, I actually managed to finish 500 pages in a week, almost like it took some tyrannical hold on my—

These headings are starting to feel a bit contrived now, huh?

Sorry.

The Eighth Court

Alright, no more nonsense. Let’s talk about the ‘meat’ of this book.

The Citadel reflected on the cyclical nature of reality, the futility of existence, how we’re all just creating towards eventual destruction and waiting for the end while never really wanting it to come. The book really communicated the idea of how no one really wants to die, whether or not they actually enjoy living.

The book also got pretty existential. What’s the point of ambition? Does anything matter at all? What’s the point of living, of learning, if you’re not going to enjoy any of it?

However, the interesting thing about all of this is that the whole thing read less like a gripping story than like a dissertation on what feeling is supposed to, well, feel like. I thought a lot while reading this book. I thought a lot about feeling while reading this book. But the book didn’t really inspire much genuine emotion.

I’m not knocking Kuang here. She’s smart and she knows it, and this was one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read in a while. However, it seems like the author still feels a bit detached from her words (a detachment that is, in fact, explored in the book). She’s young. I’d be curious to see how her work evolves, and I’ll probably read more of her books in the future.

In all, I enjoyed it.

Thanks for reading. Post your own thoughts on this book in the comments, along with recommendations for future TMBC picks.

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Last weekend, something happened to me that made me feel really cool.

Not that cool, really, but cool in a nerdy sort of way—like I finally fit in with the geeks, so to speak—and let’s be honest, this is the best it was ever going to get.

John and I went to a library—a very nice one, which we’d never been to before but which we can utilize thanks to our swanky new Westchester library cards.

Brand new and shiny and in the 14-days-only new releases section was R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis.

This thing has been displayed front and center in just about every bookstore. It just looks cool (geek-cool, of course). R.F. Kuang’s name is always part of the “respected modern fantasy authors” conversation. Plus John recently read The Aeneid, and I wanted to take my own journey into the Underworld.

So I decided to read it. Ready for the kicker?

When I went to check out the book, the librarian said “nice.”

Wow. I earned a ‘nice’ from a book selection—a new release, no less. I finally made it, didn’t I? I picked a book that someone actually wanted to read.

Naturally, I was overjoyed. I had finally become the perfect level of pretentious—still respectable (I read smart books with clever titles and references to ancient thinkers and elite universities), but not boring.

Seriously. I’ve read about 50 pages already, and this story is fun. It’s funny, the action starts early, there’s a rivalry dynamic which better turn into a love story. But it’s also really smart and really interesting. It’s the kind of book that I wish I could write—the kind of book that makes me want to write.

John’s most recent classics aside, I know that TMBC has a reputation for choosing stinkers (I have a half-read David Foster Wallace book lined up for next time that’s probably going to continue this tradition). This time, though, it seems like Kuang is finally going to help us break the boring streak.

Anyway. As I was reading the beginning, a thought struck me which is so unoriginal (ironically, I think I’ve written about this same topic several times by now) that it perfectly illustrates my point.

How come writers are always telling and retelling the same stories?
(Disclaimer: This is not a knock on Katabasis or R.F. Kuang. All writers do this.)

This book perfectly illustrates two distinct sorts of imitation, one of which is trendy and one of which is timeless.

Imitation type #1: Literary Trends

‘Dark academia’ is a huge genre right now, and for good reason. It’s fun, exciting, and, most importantly, familiar. Most people have been to school, most people have read about school.

‘Romantasy is also pretty massive right now, also for good reason. It’s fun. People love, well, love, and they love escapism, and romantasy gives you both.

Would this book have earned the ‘nice’ in the library (I’m still riding that high) that it earned if it wasn’t straddling some of the most marketable subgenres of fiction right now? I don’t know. But I also don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. Literary trends are ever-changing and ever-present. All books are products of their time, whether they try to be or not. So lean in.

Imitation type #2: Literary Tropes

What’s interesting about Katabasis is that, in addition to being a great example of the 2025 fiction market, it’s also a nod to a literary tradition that spans thousands of years.

Kuang embraces this—in fact, in the book she references just about every book that’s referenced a trip to Hell before her. The book is a nod to Dante and Virgil and everyone else (who I can’t think of right now).

You don’t have to think too hard to figure out why these types of stories still resonate with us, even after thousands of years. We’re all curious about what’s going to happen after we die, and we all love a good thrill.

Most of all, we all love a good Hero’s Journey.

That’s right. Even though subgenres change all the time, story structure itself is as close to timeless as it gets. A seemingly-unsolvable problem, and a hero, and a predictable-yet-suspenseful quest that ultimately always leads to fulfillment. This combination always works.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this. I’m just pointing out the obvious about how stories work at this point. But I think it’s cool how this book straddles the line between modern and timeless.

Alright, that’s it. I’m done pretending to know stuff about a book that I haven’t actually read (even though that’s exactly the kind of thing that this Substack is built on).

I’m aiming to finish the book by next Tuesday. Read it with me—I think it’s actually gonna be entertaining this time.

See you then.

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We waged war in Ithaca.

We sailed alongside Odysseus on his voyage home.

And now we’ve… finally finished the Aeneid!

That’s right. The Summer of Classics has come to an end. It was a long journey that saw me going in completely blind, and after many troubles (though not as many as Odysseus faced) I can finally say that I have read the big three epic poems. Let me pat myself on the back for a moment. Okay, there. Let’s continue.

I really didn’t know what to expect when I began this reading challenge. Would I like these epics? Would they even be remotely entertaining? Would I actually get anything out of reading them? Would I actually finish them? These questions whirred inside my head before starting each book. And thankfully I found the answers. As it turns out, I did, in fact, finish reading them. I did like them, I did find them entertaining, and I did get something out of them, but we’ll get to that part later. For now, let’s focus on Father Aeneas and his merry band of Trojan expats.

First let me start by saying that I once again read the Stanely Lombardo translation. I really enjoyed reading all of them through his translations. His decision to separate the similes from the rest of the text were an excellent way to help you envision the theatrics in the works. My comments on Aeneas and Virgil’s poem are not going to be lengthy.

The Aeneid proved to be my least favorite of the three epics. It makes sense why. Although the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey is up for debate (depending on who you ask), one thing most can agree on is their development through oral tradition. We can thank Millman Pary for helping us get to that understanding. For anyone who hasn’t heard of oral tradition, or what it means in terms of the two Homeric epics, it means the works were spoken long before they were ever actually written down and officially put under Homer’s name.

You see, oral tradition is pretty fascinating. The idea that poets were able to memorize hundreds of “pages” of verse to recant their tales to eager listeners seems almost impossible, yet these poets still exist today. For example, the Epic of Manas is a 553,500 line epic poem of the Kyrgyz people from central Asia. That epic is still told orally by Kyrgyz “manaschi” who tells the entire story through rhythmic chants. To understand how mind blowing that feat is, the Iliad is only a paltry 15,693 lines in comparison to the Epic of Manas.

Here’s a short video on the Kyrgyz poem.

Parry’s oral-formulaic theory suggests that the poets used memorized formulae (an often-used phrase/expression) to tell most of the stories. This explains why one of my chief complaints at the beginning of the Iliad was the overuse of the same words to describe certain characters (e.g. godlike Odysseus). But now I get it. This helped them keep the beat—to tell the stories on the fly with little preparation once it was memorized. It’s why you may have read a line talking about rosy-fingered dawn seemingly countless times.

Here’s the GOAT classics translator Stanely Lombardo reading his translation of the Iliad. Grab your popcorn, folks. This one’s a doozy.

The thing about these orally told tales is this: even if their stories remained the same over the hundreds of years of them being spoken, each poet could add their own flair to make it better and even more epic each time it passed through the next set of speakers, until the tale was finally written down in its complete and best possible form.

With that we come to Virgil’s Aeneid. Although the poem mirrored the use of dactylic hexameter from the Iliad and Odyssey, the Aeneid was developed on the page and by one guy. Virgil was the only poet who had a hand in the story. That doesn’t mean it’s any less great; I think Virgil did a fantastic job matching the voice of the other two. BUT it still shouldn’t be compared to them. Even though that’s exactly what I’m doing.

I’m not saying oral storytelling vs written storytelling is better or worse. That’s a different argument altogether. I’m just giving some background. I’m also not saying I didn’t like the Aeneid—I did. All three had some weak points and all three had some great ones. I honestly think the greatest writing out of any of the three was found in the Aeneid. Here’s a powerful excerpt when Anchises, Aeneas’s father, is talking to Aeneas in the underworld.

“Each of us must suffer his own demanding ghost.
Then we are sent to Elysium’s broad expanse,
A few of us even hold these fields of joy
Till the long days, a circle of time seen through,
Cleanse our hard, inveterate stains and leave us clear
Ethereal sense, the eternal breath of fire purged and pure.
But all the rest, once they have turned the wheel of time
For a thousand years: God calls them forth to the Lethe,
Great armies of souls, their memories blank so that
They may revisit the overarching world once more
And begin to long to return to bodies yet again.”
(The Aeneid, Book Six, Line 859)

The Aeneid’s sixth book was the standout book found in any of the three epics and was no doubt an inspiration for Dante Alighieri’s Inferno in The Divine Comedy. Dante was such a fan of Virgil he cast him as his own guide through Hell and Purgatory in Inferno and Paradiso. It just so happens that we picked up a copy of each of the three parts of the divine comedy while we were in Italy. Perhaps next Summer of Classics, we may make another trip to the underworld…

Speaking of Italy, let’s get back to it. So, the real reason I believe Virgil’s work doesn’t pack the same punch as the other two is this: Augustus. Everyone’s favorite Roman emperor outside of Marcus Aurelius commissioned Virgil to write the epic! Augustus wanted the poem to promote his version of Roman values and used it as a propaganda piece. Aeneas, the heroic founder of Italy, was a symbolic predecessor to Augustus himself. Augustus was the founder of the Roman Empire and its first emperor. So, having the mythical hero of Aeneas written in his honor was a great way to get the masses behind him.

When Virgil was on his deathbed, he requested the manuscript be burned. I’m pretty sure that’s because it wasn’t completed yet. Which I’m sure is why it ended with Father Aeneas bloodthirstily slaughtering pseudo-Hector in cold blood and cutting. As it turned out, I don’t think Aeneas was that heroic. He was kind of a dick, which is kind of in line with the heroes of the other two epics. Aeneas was also extremely hypocritical. Nothing like fleeing your city getting sacked and burned to the ground, only to finally find a new land and take it from its inhabitants. Maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe Virgil was asking you to read between the lines on what was supposed to be an Augustus fluff piece. Who knows. I’m just a guy writing a half-assed book club post.

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What a finish. The suitors were vanquished, Penelope and Odysseus were reconnected, and all the Ithacans forgave good ol’ Odysseus and co. for slaughtering all of their most eligible bachelors. The Odyssey turned out to be one of the most fun books I’ve ever read. Who would’ve thought that a three-thousand-year-old story that has stood the test of time would actually be good? The story was inspiring. It was hopeful. It was everything a good story should be.

Somehow, even with the boring Telemachus-led beginning (which I’ve found to be referred to as the Telemachy) and the last twelve books mostly revolving around suitors all up in Odysseus’s wife’s bidness, it still managed to be just as adventurous as the hype around it would lead you to believe. I’m sure that me being in Sicily during the entirety of my reading helped. Sitting on the island the Greeks called Thrinacria knowing many of the tale’s locations were on and around Sicily was really a great experience. I often found myself floating off the rocky shores and out to sea as if I were in a dream, wondering what the beautiful island looked like through Odysseus’s eyes.

Most scholars agree that the following scenes were all in Sicily: the Cyclops, the island of Aeolus, the island of the sun, and between Scylla and Charybdis. Here’s what I can tell you. Polyphemus, the cyclops, lived near Mount Etna; the island of Aeolus where Odysseus was given the bag of winds was likely Lipari in the Aeolian islands of Sicily’s coast; the land of the Laestrygonians (the man-eating giants) was southeast Sicily; the island of the sun, Thrinacia, where Odysseus’s men slaughtered Helios’ cattle was likely Sicily; and between Scylla and Charybdis is the Strait of Messina which separates Sicily from Calabria. Scylla and Charybdis were mythical versions of real-life maritime hazards ancient sailors faced crossing through the strait, which was known for shipwrecks due to the fierce currents and unpredictable weather. Scylla, the six-headed monster, was thought to be a rock shoal on the Calabrian side of the strait and Charybdis was a whirlpool on the Sicily side.

In addition to all those places, arguments can be made that the Sirens were also in the Strait of Messina and that the island of Ogygia was the island of Ortigia in Syracuse. Sorry if I’m going off on a completely irrelevant tangent, but musing about where fictional locations could possibly be just gets me off, especially when they revolve around my ancestral homeland. However, no theory excites me more than Samuel Butler’s. To start, he believed that Homer’s Ithaca was in Trapani, which is the province my grandparents are from. The English poet wrote an entire book about his theory, which in short, is that he believed the author(ess) of the Odyssey was a single Sicilian woman. Since I’m a sucker for skeptical and controversial theories, I obviously need to boldly side with Butler here—fuck Occam’s razor (sorry, but I still can’t forgive its appearance in The Name of the Rose).

Honestly, if you think about Odysseus’s home and Ithaca as being on the modern island of Favignana, off the coast of Trapani, it doesn’t seem too far a stretch. In the Odyssey’s last few books, the references to Sicily stopped being hidden behind other names. They started calling Sicily, well, Sicily. There was a Sicilian woman working on the island, and someone even mentioned sending someone back to Sicily. It seems kind of odd for the switch. But think about it, if you live on a little island off the coast of a much bigger land, wouldn’t you refer to sending a pain in the ass to said bigger land? Honestly my only argument to that is this is: Go to Naples!, or “Va fa Napoli!” as my Sicilian grandfather would say when someone annoyed him. Naples was the big city across the sea from Palermo where he grew up, so he could have been following a three-thousand-year-old Sicilian tradition by using that phrase.

Butler suggests that the real author of the Odyssey inserted herself as the character of Nausicaa, daughter of the Phaeacian king. Robert Graves, known for I, Claudius, wrote a novel called Homer’s Daughter which expands on Butler’s Sicilian authoress theory, telling the story of the life of the woman who wrote it.

Well, that’s all I got. I’m totally team Trapani-Ithaca. I hope I have sold you on it, because that’s all I got regarding an argument for it. Actually, I might have one more argument to really sell you on it. Christopher Nolan filmed the Odyssey movie on Favignana. He must know something!

Anyway. During our travels we found a great bookstore in Trapani called Libreria del Corso. We ended up walking out of that store with a free backpack which the owner gave us to thank Melissa and I for buying so many books… One of those books talks about Butler’s theory and adds a modern Sicilian argument to Ithaca being Trapani. I’d love to read it; I just need to get better at reading Italian. Hell, at the very least, this whole deep dive into somewhat obscure ancient mythical literature location theories makes me think the MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation I’m going for isn’t going to be a total waste.

See you for the Aeneid!

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We’re at the midway point of Homer’s Odyssey. So far, I find myself completely captivated by the story. However, I can’t express my love for Odysseus’s tale without saying how hard the story was to get into at first. Especially since I wasn’t sure what to expect before I started it. To paint you a better picture of what I mean, I’ll start from the beginning, my beginning.

The Odyssey has always seemed to just appear ever since I picked up writing. Bits and pieces of the story seem to pop up where I least expect it. It all began with Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. In that book, Pressfield uses Homer’s tale and the character of Odysseus as an allegory for the artist’s journey. He explains that Odysseus’s ten year journey home to Ithaca is just like our own journey in art. If we ever want to see it through to the end, we need to continue fighting through failure after failure. In the end, you never truly fail until you stop trying. It’s a lesson that our parents have always told us, but it usually hits harder when a stranger spins the words, especially when the allegory has been specifically structured to punch you where it hurts.

Opening Odyssey for the first time was a kind of spiritual experience. I felt like I was one with an artist. Like my soul was intertwining with the many spoken word poets of antiquity, translators who put the ancient Greek into English, the hopeful Pressfield the first time he heard the invocation of the muse, and our hero Odysseus, whose journey would appear alongside mine for the rest of my life. On top of all that, to put it plainly, I was expecting some badass action and adventure. Saying all that, I couldn’t have been more surprised to find that the first book centered around Telemachus, Odysseus’s son at home in Ithaca. More surprises came when I read through the first four books and was bored to tears reading about Telemachus and his mother’s many suitors.1

As boring as it is, the opening is necessary. We learn things that I’m sure will come in handy later. Plus, we find out one of the main “heroes” of Iliad, Agamemnon, was killed by his cheating wife’s lover as soon as he made it back from Troy. As much as I didn’t like him in The Iliad, I gotta feel bad for him there.

Side note: When Melissa and I went to the Neapolis Archaeological Park in Syracuse, Sicily this week, we entered the Ear of Dionysus. It’s a man-made cave constructed in the Greek era of the island. Tucked inside the cave was a massive sculpture of Agamemnon’s mother-in-law’s head. Talk about a coincidence. Side note #2: I’m not trying to brag, but I impressed our tour guide with knowing the story of what happened between Agamemnon and his wife (she didn’t need to know that I read that part of the Odyssey a few days before the tour). Anyway, she described him as one of the heroes of the Trojan war. I expressed my view on the deceased king (that he sucked) and she was taken aback, firmly stating he was indeed a hero. I gave up arguing. Like I mentioned in the wrap-up of The Iliad, times have certainly changed. Back then, heroes were judged based on the amount of heads they chopped off, unlike now where they’re judged over how many heads they saved from said chopping.

It’s really fitting that I read Odyssey while Melissa and I spend the month in Sicily. Odysseus’s journey around the Mediterranean found him in Sicily more than once, including when he fought the cyclops Polyphemus. I read the chapter of their showdown on the beach in Taormina. When we made it back up to the town, I found a car painted with pictures of the entire cyclops scene! Talk about a coincidence. To keep it up, we ended up going to a restaurant on the main drag called Il Ciclope. I couldn’t believe how much pride the Sicilians on this side of the island have in their Greek roots. Here’s some pictures of the car and the restaurant:

Well that’s all I’ve got. I decided to end at book 12 for two reasons. 1) because it was the midpoint of the book, and 2) it appears Odysseus was done telling his story to the Phaeacians. Somehow, the story really was as epic as it’s been hyped up to be. Who would have thought that a story that has stood the test of time for thousands of years would still hold up…

I’m happy I decided to read the Stanley Lombardo translation again. As the story moves on, so shall we. Melissa and I are heading to Trapani in western Sicily. We may be getting closer to Odysseus’s home just as he is in the story. Samuel Butler, an English novelist and translator of prose versions of Iliad and Odyssey, believed Trapani and the Egadi Islands off the city’s coast were the inspiration for Ithaca and its surrounding areas. I buy the theory. Why else would Christopher Nolan be filming the Odyssey movie on Favignana, the largest island in the Egadi archipelago? I trust Nolan to have stayed true to the source material (after the Dark Knight series I don’t think he can do any wrong). Anyway. For now, my only hope, besides Odysseus and myself finding a safe passage home, is that the second half of the book keeps up the pace of books 5-12.

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We’ve made it to the end. The first installment of the Summer of Classics was an exciting one. I’m pleased to say that I enjoyed Iliad. Getting wrapped up in translations and ancient texts and the myths within the myths has always fascinated me, and this lived up to the hype. Outside of books 3 and 23, which contained a mind-numbing amount of character introductions and a questionable number of pages dedicated to funeral games, I was sucked into the world built by the poem. Maybe Homer (or, the Homers) were paid by the word. Hey, you never know.

The Iliad is the story of two heroes. Hector and Achilles were the driving forces of the story, with the former being my favorite character and a much more sympathetic one than Achilles whose name has stood the test of time far more than Hector’s has. While I read I found it hard to understand why the godlike Achilles was the focal point of the book. He acted like a brat for three quarters of the story and then went on a murder spree the likes of which most of us will never see in order to avenge the death of his best friend and murder the guy I’m sure most of us were rooting for.

After the candle I lit in memoriam for the fallen Trojan horse breaker burned out, I got to thinking. From the beginning of the ten-year war, Hector fought to protect his family and his city. Achilles fought for his own personal glory. While this may seem unheroic to us now, in his day and age it was what set great warriors apart. Achilles’ strength, bravery, and skill were what made him a hero.

As the ending of the book drew nearer, I waited to see the Trojan Horse in action, I was dying to see the epic description of Achilles finally getting it in his heel, and I was preparing to witness the utter devastation the Greeks left the city of Troy in.

I was shocked when none of that happened. Achilles made it to the end alive and well (minus one Patroculus), there was no hollow horse, and there were enough Trojans left to give Hector a proper funeral. What happened? Shockingly, to me at least, in the ten years of the Trojan War, the story contained in the Iliad only took place over the course of a few weeks. We don’t see the beginning, nor do we see the ending. All that bloodshed over a girl, with no closure. I had to Google what happened next, some of that information may shock you.

So, Achilles ended up getting killed by an arrow to the heel. Somehow, that arrow was shot by Paris. After all the buildup, Achilles gets killed by one of the least deserving characters in the book. The Greeks won the war, Priam was killed by Achilles’ son, and Hector’s baby was chucked off the wall. Those Greeks were ruthless! Perhaps the most shocking of all my findings was this: Telamonian Ajax (Ajax the Great) killed himself.

Huh? Yep. And boy does it get weirder. After the death of Achilles, Ajax and Odysseus tried to claim his god-given armor. Ajax, being the second greatest warrior in the Achaean army, believed he deserved it. However, Odysseus, being the sweet talker that he was (how else did he talk himself into not one, but two starring roles in Homeric productions1), managed to say just the right things to get the armor. This decision made Ajax thirsty for revenge. He decided to murder those who went against him, namely Odysseus, Agamemnon, and Menelaus. But before he could, Athena clouded his mind. He ended up killing a flock of sheep thinking they were the ol’ gang. When Ajax realized what he’d done, he became so embarrassed that he chose suicide rather than public shame. Ajax the Great, a major character who had more screen time in Iliad than Achilles, killed himself by impaling himself with the mighty sword Hector gifted him. I mean WTF! Sophocles’ earliest surviving tragedy Ajax tells this tale.

Iliad is a complex story that paints a picture of the Trojan War through the eyes of both the Greeks and the Trojans. By reading it, we get to see how truly ugly war is. The descriptions of the light leaving a dying soldier’s eyes as he is engulfed in the blackness of oblivion is powerful stuff, especially after reading that he has a wife and kid at home. It’s even sadder when you realize that what the two sides were fighting for was not even close to the worth of all the lives lost. Sadly, humans still haven’t gotten that part figured out.

At least we know one thing for sure—we can all agree that Agamemnon sucks.

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Stay tuned for the next Thinking Man Book Club pick: Homer’s The Odyssey.

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This will be a short update, just to check in. I’ve read through 16 books of Iliad. The books, which break the epic poem in 24 parts, were originally organized by the letters of the Greek alphabet. It’s debated whether the epic was separated into these 24 sections by the original composer(s), if they were done long after they had been written (in order to make it easier for scribes to work with), or if it was done for early performances. I’m no Homeric scholar, so don’t take my word for any of this.

Iliad was likely written by many poets through the oral tradition of storytelling before it was ever officially written down. Because of this, it’s hard to pinpoint what was part of the original work and what may have been changed over time. There is, however, one book of Iliad that seems to have a general consensus that it was written much later than the rest of the epic.

I’m talking about Book 10. That’s the part where Odysseus and Diomedes embark on a mission to spy on the Trojans in the dead of night. Upon first reading, I noticed a serious tone shift there. Modern scholars make the argument that the language, structure, and theme of Book 10 indicate that it was added much later than the original. The idea of this book not being an initial part of the poem is nothing new; even scholars in antiquity argued that it couldn’t have been part of the original. Did anyone else notice a difference?

Anyway. I’m thoroughly enjoying Iliad and have found myself fully immersed in the story. We end Book 16 with Patroclus’s ferocity on the battlefield. I still can’t believe we’re 2/3’s of the way through this book and Achilles hasn’t done anything. Odds are, that’s about to change. See you in July when we finish this thing!

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It took a while, but I can officially say that I’m enjoying The Iliad. Or should I say Iliad? You see, Iliad literally means The Poem of Ilion, which means the The is already there. So, if you call it The Iliad, you’re actually calling it the The The Poem of Ilion. Confusing, right? That’s only the beginning. You may be wondering who Ilion is. Isn’t the Iliad about the Trojan War? Why, yes, it is. Turns out Ilion is where the Trojans live. Oh yeah, and it’s also known as Troy. Wait. Ilion is Troy and Troy is Ilion? Why do we call it Troy and not Ilion today? Maybe Homer’s Triliad just isn’t as good a title for the epic poem than Homer’s Iliad.

Anyway. The story opens with the rage (or wrath or anger, depending on which translation you picked) of Achilles, the godlike Greek whose name has lived on in the canon of epic heroes alongside Batman, George Washington, James Bond, Han Solo, and Odysseus (who’s also in [the] Iliad). Achilles’s rage/wrath/anger begins when Agamemnon, ruler of men/warlord/general (again, depending which translation you picked), King of the Mycenae and commander of the Achaean (Greek) army, orders Achilles to give up his trophy girl Briseis, after Agamemnon was forced to give up his own trophy girl, Chryseis (daughter of Chryses, a priest who prays to Apollo to afflict a plague on the Achaean army). By being forced to give up his trophy (slave), Achilles was gravely insulted (raged up). He left the army and got his goddess mom to ask Zeus to help the Trojans (who he had been fighting against for NINE YEARS) beat Agamemnon and all of his friends. Zeus obliges and the Trojans, led by the superstar warrior (who doesn’t steal his best soldier’s girl) Hector, gain the upper hand. Yet they call him godlike Achilles? Are you kidding me? This guy sucks! After not being in much of the story after the beginning, Achilles returns in Book 9 to basically remind everyone that he really does kind of suck. Listen. Agamemnon is definitely the worst character in the book so far, but Achilles’s ability to hold a grunge is just as bad. He’s so desperate to spite Agamemnon that he’s willing to let his comrades die at the hands of the gods and the Trojans. That’s messed up.

Reading the Stanley Lombardo translation, I took his advice and began reading it like a performance rather than a straight up book. Doing that made the lines flow much easier. It’s amazing how different the book can be presented based on whose translation you decide to read. The hardest part of the reading has been Homer’s (or the many poets Homer was) need to mention everyone’s dad’s names when mentioning them. Agamenon is the son of Atreus, and gods forbid Homer would let you forget that. One of the main reasons I ended up choosing Lombardo’s translation over Peter Green’s is due to the fact that Green opening the book by only mentioning the Agamemnon as Atreus’s son and not by his own name. For the record, Atreus has two sons. I mean, come on. Even when guys are being slaughtered on the battlefield, the poet manages to remind you of every last ounce of someone’s lineage just seconds before they get an arrow through the throat.

The story takes us near the end of the Trojan War. A war started when son of Priam, Paris of Ilion (Troy), took Son of Atreus, Agamemnon’s brother (Menelaus, son of Atreus)’s wife Helen, proclaimed hottest woman on the planet. They’ve been fighting nine years for her, so I’m assuming she must have been pretty special. During this time, the gods are basically just having fun watching the slaughter and intervening when they want to help give their team the upper hand. They stare down from Olympus and allow Achaeans and Trojans to be killed by the trough, flying into the battlefield sometimes to save an important character, but doing nothing when a background solider gets blown to smithereens. Meanwhile, while all this happens, Peleus’s son, the swift footed and godlike Achilles, sits in his tent with rage.

Below are the opening pages to all the translations I was able to get an eye on this past week. Let me know which one you think reads best. See you next week!

In memory of Peter Green, Robert Fagles, Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fitzgerald, any other Iliad translators we’ve lost, and the many great poets who became known to history as Homer.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to share your own list—I could always use a few more book recommendations.

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There are books that we may never read. With a finite amount of time left in this life, there is absolutely no way we’ll be able to read everything we’ll ever want to read. I’ve seen 28 years go by in an instant, all while my reading list has grown to staggeringly unrealistic heights. Last year I released a list of 105 books I want to read before I die. Since then, I ended up reading twenty-one books. Only three of those books (A Scanner Darkly, Timeline, and For Whom the Bell Tolls) were on that list.

Many books will forever be left on to-be-read. Usually, those books are the epics, the ones that no one actually believes they’ll get to. I’m talking about books like The Bible and The Hermetica. As much as I’d love to read them, I just really can’t imagine ever getting around to it. For a long time, the epic poems of Homer fell into that category.

Iliad and Odyssey. Maybe you read them in high school. Maybe you read them in college. Maybe you read them in Ancient Greek. Maybe you post comments on reddit explaining why your translator is better than everybody else’s. I’ve never read those epic poems, but I have always wanted to. I remember being a teenager and imagining how much of a slog to get through they must be. By the time I was in my early twenties and had grown an appreciation for the finer things, I realized I’d eventually need to get to them. So, I bought a few copies, worrying more about which translation to read rather than actually getting around to read them. After getting my hands on them, they sat for a long time.

My grandfather died last week. For whatever reason, his death inspired me to finally pick up Iliad as translated by Stanley Lombardo. Maybe I wanted to prove to his spirit looking down at me that his grandson was as smart as he hopefully believed I was. Maybe his passing reminded me how short life truly is. It reminded me to stop putting things off, because one day there won’t be a tomorrow. Whatever the case may be, it gave me the idea to bring back the book club.

Summer of 2025 will be Thinking Man’s Summer of Classics. The book club will be reading Homer’s Iliad in June, Homer’s Odyssey in July, and Virgil’s Aeneid in August. I’ll be reading Stanley Lombardo’s translations of Iliad and Odyssey, and Shadi Bartsch’s translation of Aeneid. If you have recommendations on translations, feel free to share. If you’ve already read them, I’d love to hear your thoughts along the way. If you’ve always wanted to read them but can’t get through the work, you can live vicariously through me on my quest to finally put a check mark next to these titles.

Next week we’ll check in with the first 7 “books” of Iliad. If we keep it to 1 book/day we should have no problem finishing the whole book within the month.

This is my chance, our chance, to be held accountable. To finally say we’ve read these epic works of Greek and Roman literature. It truly will be a summer to remember.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to share your own list—I could always use a few more book recommendations.

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Melissa’s Comments:

This book is really starting to get good. This week, we read the third part of the book, “Black Rock,” and we have a feeling that things are only going to get more intense from here.

The graduate students who we’ve been following throughout the book have now been disassembled on a quantum level and transported into the past—or, rather, another universe that is almost identical to this one.

By all intents and purposes, this means that their bodies, which exist in their universe, have ceased to exist. The people that have taken over in their place are near-perfect clones of the people they once were. Are these new clones the same people? Or are the original graduate students gone, disintegrated into nothingness?

The first conclusion John and I came to was that they were dead. How could they not be? Their original body was destroyed. But then we thought about it some more. Their consciousness didn’t skip a beat. It merely traveled from the first body to the second.

John was reminded of the ‘teletransportation paradox’ (which I promptly Googled because I had never heard of it before). Here’s its Wikipedia page, which, incidentally, has a link to Timeline in its “See Also” section.

The teletransportation paradox is a thought experiment (accredited to the philosopher David Parfit, although other people have posed similar questions) that goes something like this:

Imagine a machine that allows you to ‘teleport’ by putting you to sleep, breaking you apart into atoms, and then making a copy of you, which another machine recreates somewhere else. The copy that comes out of the machine looks just like you, with your same memories and same brain, but the actual cells and atoms that make you up are different. Is the copy actually ‘you,’ or have you actually been killed and replaced with an exact replica?

You might say that as long as the person has the same memories—the same ‘consciousness’—then they are the same person.

The thought experiment goes further, though. Imagine that the machine does not have to kill you—it simply makes a replica of you in the new place, with the same memories and the same ‘consciousness’ at the time of replication. You and the new replica of you diverge and go your separate paths creating new experiences, but at the time of replication, you were exactly the same. Are these people both ‘you’?

Well, now that there’s two people, the answer becomes more complicated. It’s hard to stomach the idea that the new clone is just as much ‘you’ as your real self. But then doesn’t this mean that the replica isn’t actually you in the case where your original self was disintegrated?

What if the original disintegration happens, but infinite copies can still be generated? Are these copies all you?

Suddenly, this concept has become incredibly complex. Why?

Could it be because ‘personal identity’ itself is an illusion. It’s a longshot, but it’s not too radical of a claim. The Wikipedia page for the teletransportation paradox also linked to the concept of “Anattā”: a Buddhist term for the non-existence of the self.

If everything is all connected, and our consciousness is, in fact, merely a case of ‘the universe experiencing itself,’ playing at being human and immersing itself completely in one blip of the wide expanse of experiences that it has to offer, than when we get into minutiae like this, the question of where one ‘self’ ends and another begins is arbitrary.

I touched on this concept when the Thinking Man Book Club tackled Watchmen. Give it a read if you’re interested.

My conclusion at this point in Timeline is that no, the scientists aren’t dead (although their physical bodies are). As far as the cloning stuff goes, I don’t really know what to make of that (any of your thoughts would be greatly appreciated).

That being said, my head is spinning, so I’ll let John take the reigns for this one.

John’s Comments:

Hello. My name is John. Perhaps you’ve seen some of my writing on Substack before. Regardless, let’s dive right in.

Alright, let’s get to it. As Melissa said earlier, this portion of the book reminded me of the teletransportation paradox. After the conclusion of John Gibson and David Stern’s conversation just as the graduate students made the jump, Stern forced Gibson to admit that the versions of Kate, Chris, and Marek they had just seen were completely destroyed. I was devastated, jumping off the couch and running up to Melissa screaming “Oh the humanity!” or something like it.

Our conversation went something like this:

“So they died!” I screamed.

“Huh?” Melissa responded.

“The characters died. Look at what Gibson said here,” I said, shoving the book into her hands.

“Hm, I guess you’re right,” Melissa said. “Well, actually. That may not be the case.”

I scoffed and began explaining the teletransportation paradox to her. I had been familiar with the concept since high school. Any time the idea had been brought to my attention I usually felt unease thinking about the heaps of dead bodies of the same clone, all who had just a few hours of life before being eviscerated into oblivion. Ugh. It’s a concept that John Dies at the End explores at a much smaller, but still just as mind-fucking level.

“So, they died,” I said triumphantly, while still mourning the loss of our dearly departed fictional friends.

“Not exactly,” Melissa said. As she is smarter than me, she tends to show me the things I’m missing. In this case, it was the idea of their consciousness. If the world is black and white, and people are born and then they die and that’s all there is to it, then yes, the characters died. BUT, if there is more to life than this meatsack I occupy and use to type these awful posts, then why wouldn’t my soul/consciousness just teleport into the newly formed version of my body that materialized at Point B?

“Holy shit,” I screamed. “You’re right. I’ve had this wrong the whole time.”

Sure, some people will say that I’m an idiot for thinking that’s a possibility. Let’s go through WHY I might be an idiot (according to this theory alone mind you).

#1 - Souls don’t exist and once you die that’s it. OK BOOMER.

#2 - IF souls existed and the multiverse is real, then there’s trillions of souls of everyone on this planet. Including hundreds or thousands of John souls flying all around multiverse heaven.

Now wait, we’re getting crazy, so let’s get crazier. Have you heard of NPC’s? The acronym stands for non-playable character. Have you ever gotten a speeding ticket while going the speed limit and no matter how much you begged and pleaded with the state trooper he still gave you a ticket? Not that I would know, but imagine that. When that douchebag gets into his car and drives off the highway and blasts home without a second thought, you may turn to your significant other named Melissa in the passenger seat and say, “That guy was a fucking robot.”

It’s another theory. Some people are there, some people aren’t. Maybe some of the characters in our world are empty vessels, with their soul occupying a different version of them in a different universe. Maybe if the vessel the soul is in dies, it would transport itself and its consciousness into the next closest version of itself in another universe, promptly not skipping a beat. It could be why the Mandela Effect is a thing.

Come on, I’m not saying it’s true. I’m not exactly saying it isn’t true, either. What I can say is that I’ve been in a few situations where looking back I feel like I could have died, maybe I even have a slight memory of something close like the rush of oxygen out of my lungs, the slight pulse of death before my soul woke up in the body I’m occupying now, and all the hint I have that that happened is the cornucopia on the Fruit of the Loom logo is missing.

Alright alright, I’ll stop. All I’m saying is that this book is pretty sweet. I’m glad we picked it and I look forward to you telling me that I’m nuts.

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John’s Comments:

Well this is a nice change. Not much has happened yet, but Timeline has been a ton of fun to read so far. 125-ish pages of setup and I’m hooked. This is a welcome departure from any of our other recent picks (I’m looking at you Name of the Rose). The characters are fun, and the typical guy-girl flirting and dialogue has been done in a tasteful way—no corn here. This is a book written by a seasoned pro.

As a history nerd, I’ve loved immersing myself among the graduate students at the medieval site in Dordogne. The feelings it invokes have been similar to any other Crichton books I had read when I was younger. I find myself wanting to go (back) to college so I can start doing my own medieval research.

There hasn’t been much action, but the prose has kept me engaged. I’m wondering if any of our new friends will die on the road to saving the professor. My favorite character so far has been Chris.

The decision to make Marek take the reigns is the only questionable point of the novel so far. The character had a bad introduction and I find him unlikable, so I haven’t loved the story taking on his point of view since the second half of this week’s reading.

In all, it’s a fun book. Do I expect to be blown away by the end and contemplating my own existence? No. But not every book needs to be like that (something I think I’m finally understanding). I look forward for what’s to come. I’m going to let Melissa get into the Quantum Theory stuff; she’s the brains behind the operation, after all. With that, I will see you next week. Happy reading!

Melissa’s Comments:

As always, I’ll start with the disclaimer that I’m not an expert. I am not a historian, and I am definitely not a physicist. Since we’re examining a work of fiction here, a second disclaimer might be warranted: everything that’s talked about here may not be true. The whole point of this is to hear your thoughts. If you’d like to chime in separating the fact from the fiction, feel free.

That being said, one of the things I really enjoyed about this book was Crichton’s ability to teach his reader about the subjects he’s writing about. For example, he included a very brief history of the Middle Ages that I really enjoyed.

I’ll summarize it even more briefly here: first, the Romans controlled Europe, then the Romans lost some of their power and tribes like the Goths and the Huns and the Vikings took over and everything was chaotic and kind of sucked for a while, and then feudalism happened and things took shape again and became the foundations for our modern world.

It was cool. It was an extremely simplified version of events that wouldn’t satisfy a historian, but for the average reader who left the American education system without even this basic understanding of history (I’m including myself in this population), I think it was a decent lesson. I also liked how Crichton took this opportunity to wax philosophical about the importance of history and how the public doesn’t seem to care about it at all.

A fun fact about me is that I love used books with writing in them. One of my prized possessions is a copy of Plato’s Republic that was marked up by a professor who was teaching a course on the book.

My copy of Timeline (the used mass-market paperback which John ordered online and then traded in for a shiny new copy) is virtually spotless. The only bit of writing I’ve encountered in the book was on one dog-eared page (the horror!), where the previous owner of the book highlighted these paragraphs:

Yet the truth was that the modern world was invented in the Middle Ages. Everything from the legal system, to nation-states, to reliance on technology, to the concept of romantic love had first been established in medieval times. These stockbrokers owed the very notion of a market economy to the Middle Ages. And if they didn’t know that, then they didn’t know the basic facts of who they were. Why they did what they did. Where they had come from.

Professor Johnston often said that if you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree.

Cool, right?

Now for the quantum physics.

First of all, I think the time travel mechanics of this book are pretty cool. The idea that the professor went “back in time” by going to a near-identical alternate reality is an interesting thing to think about. I’m assuming that, in order to find him, the students are going to go to the same timeline that he’s in.

I’m curious to see how Crichton wraps it all up. Are they going to all come back to the current timeline, or are they going to travel to a new one which also takes place in the ‘present’ day?

This week’s reading ended with a pretty detailed quantum physics lesson in which Crichton details the theory of multiverses and uses the double-slit experiment as evidence of multiple universes.

For the purposes of this book, we’re accepting it as absolute fact that there are an infinite number of universes, an infinite number of posisbilities, that all exist simultaneously. This is something that some scientists believe, but not all.

Crichton’s scienfic ‘proof’ of this comes from the double-slit experiment. Do a quick google search or read my article for a run-down of what the experiment is; I don’t feel like explaining it here. All caught up? Good.

When beams of light are shot through the double-slit and onto a back wall, the photons of light interfere with one another and form an ‘interference pattern’ on the back wall. Simple. This illustrates the wave-like properties of light.

It gets weirder, though. When individual photons are shot through the double-slit, one by one, they still form the interference pattern, even though there aren’t any other photons to interfere with. What’s causing them to behave this way?

Well, according to the scientists of Timeline, the reason is that the photons are interfering with photons from other universes—proof of the multiverse theory. I doubt this is actually true (any scientists reading this please weigh in), but it’s still a cool basis for a science fiction novel.

And imagine it were true? The question it poses are endless.

First of all, this would mean that other universes actually interact with this universe. Can we move from one to the other? Are we hopping around from universe to universe with each choice that we make, like characters in a choose-your-own adventure video game? Which timeline is the ‘real’ timeline?

It seems like the book is really picking up now, and for the first time since the Thinking Man Book Club started, I can genuinely say that I’m excited to keep reading. See you guys next week.

Thanks for reading and for following along. If you enjoy these posts and would like to support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. You can also buy us a coffee. John’s new degree in medieval archaeology is going to be expensive.

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John’s Comments:

Was The Man in the High Castle my favorite PKD book? No. Was it a good book? Yes. The story was interesting, not particularly engaging, but it did give you a pretty decent amount of stuff to think about. The world building in it was well done. I don’t particularly know if antique dealing was the best path forward in an idea this great, but Dick consulted the I Ching to help create the story—so if this is what the Oracle gave him, who am I to judge? Plus, it won the Hugo Award (the only of Dick’s career) so who cares what I think about the antiques business?

No one. Exactly.

Moving on. The “mind fuck” that was the ending. It couldn’t have been a PKD book without some element of porking one’s mind. This was no different. Tagomi’s walk through San Francisco at the end of the novel was my favorite part. He saw our world, and then was sent back to his own. Which one is real? It seemed like Juliana figured that ours is the real one and all the characters in the book were living in an alternate dimension that wasn’t real. Maybe. That was my takeaway at least.

Did you enjoy the “man” in the “high castle”? I was pretty disappointed with a character so hyped throughout the whole book to be a rather uninteresting part of it. The whole book was just confusing. What was the purpose? Maybe I missed something. It did introduce us to the I Ching, so I’m thankful to have read it. But that’s all I got. It wasn’t a thriller or a read that kept you onto the edge of your seat. It really just made me go “hm” a few times. But I guess that’s better than most other books.

Did the Thinking Man book club pick a winner this time? Meh. I hope Timeline can do what I hoped this book would do, but I’m not so sure about that either. See you next time! Mmmmkay?!

Melissa’s Comments:

Well, John pretty much said it all. If you’re thinking of reading this and you’re a big PKD fan, give it a shot. If this will be your first book of his, you might want to pick up a copy of Ubik instead.

That being said, I’m glad I read it. While the book wasn’t exciting, it was certainly thought-provoking, and like John, I found the I Ching to be the most interesting thing about it.

In fact, I was so enamored by the I Ching that the remainder of my discussion is going to focus on Carl Jung’s foreword to it, written in 1967, five years after the publication of The Man in the High Castle.

I know, I know. I’m supposed to be talking about The Man in the High Castle. But this is not coming from nowhere. There are some parallels.

For one, PKD used the I Ching to write The Man in the High Castle (and Hawthorne Abendsen used the I Ching to write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy). Carl Jung actually consulted the I Ching in writing his foreword to the I Ching .

If you’re interested in what the I Ching said about itself, read Carl Jung’s foreword. The gist was this: “I contain spiritual nourishment.” If you’re interested, I’m sure you can find a PDF somewhere.

The I Ching is supposed to be a book of divination, and this actually turned out to be pretty legit. John and I consulted it a few times, and were shocked by the targeted results we received.

I know, I know. It’s up for interpretation and you can find an answer to your question in any result you receive and blah blah blah. I think this thing is cool, and so did Carl Jung. Here’s his explanation for how it ‘works’:

“The ancient Chinese mind contemplates the cosmos in a way comparable to that of the modern physicist, who cannot deny that his model of the world is a decidedly psychophysical structure. The microphysical event includes the observer just as much as the reality underlying the I Ching comprises subjective, i.e., psychic conditions in the totality of the momentary situation. Just as causality describes the sequence of events, so synchronicity to the Chinese mind deals with the coincidence of events. The causal point of view tells us a dramatic story about how D came into existence: it took its origin from C, which existed before D, and C in its turn had a father, B, etc. The synchronistic view on the other hand tries to produce an equally meaningful picture of coincidence. How does it happen that A′, B′, C′, D′, etc., appear all in the same moment and in the same place? It happens in the first place because the physical events A′ and B′ are of the same quality as the psychic events C′ and D′, and further because all are the exponents of one and the same momentary situation. The situation is assumed to represent a legible or understandable picture.”

Confused? I don’t blame you. I’ll try to summarize his whole ‘theory’ here:

The ancient Chinese viewed reality differently than we do. We look at things in terms of cause and effect, while they viewed everything that happened as the outcome of chance. In our causal view of the world, flipping coins or playing around with yarrow stalks or whatever has absolutely nothing to do with the thoughts going on in your head as you’re doing so, but according to the ancient Chinese, they’re all linked by virtue of simply occurring at the same moment (I think, anyway—might’ve butchered that part a little). Therefore, the results are meaningful because the laws of chance or synchronicity or whatever which govern the world also govern the coin flips or yarrow stalk-pulls or however else you figure out which passage in this book to read.

Here’s what got me the most, though: Jung mentions that this has something to do with the way modern physicists view reality?

I don’t know. I might revisit this later when/if I learn some more physics, but I figured I’d throw this out there in case any of you know the answer.

I also feel like it kind of relates to the timeline stuff that PKD was getting at in The Man in the High Castle (differences in the outcome of chance, perhaps?), but I don’t really have a definitive answer to that, either.

Anyway, sorry if this take on this book was a little underwhelming. John and I went on vacation and we’re still getting accustomed to our return to real life.

Check back next week for an introduction to our next TMBC pick: Michael Crichton’s Timeline.

I’m still waiting for a Thinking Man Book Club pick that I won’t be able to put down. Here’s hoping this is the one.

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Melissa’s Comments:

Getting into this one was tough. I find PKD’s books difficult to begin reading—they start off very dense, with a strange new world to figure out and a bunch of characters to keep track of. It usually takes a few chapters of hard work before they start getting fun. I was just about ready to chalk this one up as another failed Thinking Man Book Club attempt until somewhere around the fifty-page mark, when I started really enjoying it.

This book is a slow burn. There’s some minor antiques-counterfeiting drama and the intrigue of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. However, the main thing that kept me reading (besides the looming book club deadline) was the world. There’s a lot of food for thought here.

There is, of course, the absurd and terrifying prospect of a Nazi-run United States. Racial tensions are high (obviously), and the tolerance and freedom that characterizes the US is completely gone. There are some stranger details, too. The Mediterranean Sea has been drained and turned into farmland. If I’m not mistaken, I think I read that Nazi scientists were doing experiments on people in Africa (this one hits a little too close to home).

It actually got me thinking about George Orwell. I can’t remember the exact quote (and I’m tired so I won’t be looking it up), but in one of his essays (I think it was “The Lion and the Unicorn”), Orwell criticized people in England during WWII who believed that “things could be no worse off under Hitler,” and thus accepted the possibility of fascist rule. It’s an important reminder. Don’t take your liberties for granted; things could always be worse.

The book was full of questions with no definitive answers. I’m going to throw a couple quotes at you. Think about them. See what you think.

“Afraid I do not care for modern art,” Mr. Baynes said. “I like the old prewar cubists and abstractionists. I like a picture to mean something, not merely to represent the ideal.” He turned away.
"But that’s the task of art,” Lotze said. “To advance the spirituality of man, over the sensual. Your abstract art represented a period of spiritual decadence, of spiritual chaos, due to the disintegration of society, the old plutocracy… Those times are over; art has to go on—it can’t stay still.”

“We are absurd,” Mr. Tagomi said, “because we live by a five-thousand-year-old book. We set it questions as if it were alive. It is alive. As is the Christian Bible; many books are actually alive. Not in metaphoric fashion. Spirit animates it. Do you see?”

We didn’t get the chance to look at the I Ching this week. However, I wonder why Dick chose it to be featured so heavily in The Man in the High Castle. Is he speaking to the breakdown of Christianity (and its replacement with Eastern spirituality)? Does he believe in the power of the I Ching? Furthermore, is the power in the book itself, or in the simple power of making a decision and sticking to it?

Let us know what you think. I’m looking forward to finishing this book (and I don’t think it should take long, now that the initial ‘slog’ is over). Stay tuned and follow along; we should be wrapping this one up next week!

John’s Comments:

So far, I’m liking the book—a far cry from anything said on the last two book club picks. I will be the first to admit that it is not the most engaging things Philip K. Dick ever did. It’s not Eye in the Sky-level tough to get through (that’s a PKD book I had to put down before finishing), but it’s no Ubik or Flow My Tears. The book is definitely interesting. The world-building our Dick has done has been one to behold.

I enjoyed the breaking of the fourth wall during the dinner party scene at the Kasouras. Alright, it may not exactly be breaking the fourth wall, but I was amused to see the Kasouras explaining The Grasshopper Lies Heavy to Childan. It seemed like Dick knew that The Man in the High Castle would be considered sci-fi just because he was known as a sci-fi writer. It’s something that this book, Valis, and even Ubik fall prey to. “Oh no,” Betty disagreed. “No science in it. Nor set in future. Science fiction deals with future, in particular future where science has advanced over now. Book fits neither premise.” Well, fifty years later I plucked this book off the sci-fi shelf at Barnes and Noble. Sorry, Phil.

The highlights of this book have all been situations in which Dick was not afraid to make things uncomfortable: Childan’s thoughts while at dinner with the Kasouras, the conversation between Juliana and Joe while they talked about Joe’s war experience and the mysterious book. I wasn’t envisioning this thing going the antiques biz route, but Dick’s books usually go against the grain. I’m looking forward to getting to the ending. I have no idea where this will go, but I feel like we’ll end up at the High Castle in one way or another.

Thanks so much for following along with us. We’re planning on getting to the end by next Thursday.

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John’s Comments:

Much has been said regarding The Man in the High Castle here on Thinking Man. My post about its genius author, Philip K Dick, sparked fantastic comments from the community. The post discussed the author, his exegesis, Valis, synchronicity, God, and life after death. This led to further “Dick”-inspired discussion in the ensuing “Community Comments” post Melissa made. Go check those comment sections out if you want a brain blast of Dick-spired information:

Since was the first one to mention The Man in the High Castle, I’ll leave his awesome comments here:

The Man in the High Castle was inspired by Bring the Jubilee (1953) by Ward Moore, which is an alternative history novel where the Confederates won the Civil War. It sounds like a pretty interesting novel—and exactly what The Man in the High Castle is to WWII. That’s right. If you somehow didn’t know, this book is also an alternative history work where the Axis Powers won WWII. If you’ve seen the show or read this already, please no spoilers. We usually pick pretty bad books for the Thinking Man Book Club and are hoping this breaks that streak.

Anyway. There’s a famous Dick speech called ““If You Find this World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others,” given at a sci-fi convention in France in 1977. I’ll link to it below; it’s a fascinating listen. During the speech he mentions God, the multiverse, and living in a simulation. ( can give you some expert information on that last bit.)

He talks about this alternate reality in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Says (amazing book btw) and tells the audience it’s a real place, an alternate world from our own. He continues, “In novel after novel, story after story, over a 25-year period, I wrote repeatedly about a particular other landscape, a dreadful one. In March 1974, I understood why . . . I had good reason to. My novels and stories were, without my realizing it consciously, autobiographical.”

Is The Man in the High Castle from another alternate reality he saw? Maybe. Either way, it’s not the one that we’re in (thankfully), but I’m excited to read about it. I’ve heard that this isn’t Dick’s best work (no surprise for us to pick this then), but it may be his most famous. I’m excited to get started and read along with you guys. Here’s the link to that speech, and see you next week for our discussion of the first eight chapters!

Melissa’s Comments:

I have to admit, I cheated a little bit. I read the first two chapters of the book before writing this. Surprise surprise, it’s not my favorite PKD book, but I like it, and it’s a hell of a lot better than our other TMBC picks so far, so I won’t look a gift horse(lover fat)1 in the mouth.

It’s a good book. It has an interesting world. Great concept. There’s lots of food for thought here.

Don’t worry, it’s still too early for spoilers, but I do want to offer some context about a book that seems like it will be referenced fairly often in The Man in the High Castle.

The book is the I Ching. The I Ching sounded kind of familiar to me because of a very brief Taoism ‘phase’ I went through a couple years ago. However, I didn’t really know anything about it until today. I consulted everyone’s favorite teacher (Google), and here’s what I learned:

The I Ching is an ancient Chinese text. It was written around 1000 BC. Confucius allegedly worked on an early version of it. In other words, it’s old as hell, and it’s also really cool.

Turns out, it’s a divination text (sorry if this was obvious to any of you—I had no clue). You don’t just read this book straight through. You ask the I Ching for advice, then either flip coins or do something with long, thin sticks (yarrow stalks, to be exact) in order to fill out a “hexagram”—a combination of six lines that corresponds to one teaching from the book. The one that shows up is supposed to be the advice you need to solve the problem you asked about.

Since I described this poorly, here’s an article that explained it for me.

Apparently a lot of people love this thing. Carl Jung consulted the I Ching often (he even penned an introduction to one edition). It seems interesting, and John and I want to start playing around with it.

We’ll report our findings next week. Follow along, and check back next Thursday for our report on chapters 1-8.

I think this might actually be a good one (and it’s not 500 pages long, at any rate, so if you don’t like it, you can power through instead of abandoning it like a lot of us did for The Name of the Rose).

I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts, and happy reading!

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Melissa’s Comments:

I’m going to keep this one short and sweet, because The War of Art speaks for itself.

If you’re a writer, a painter, a musician, you should read this book. If you’ve ever aspired to make a change in your life or pursue something outside your comfort zone, you should read this book. Everyone should read this book.

The War of Art is an antidote to laziness. It teaches you to stop talking about what you want to do and actually do it. It is an antidote to ‘resistance’: the metaphysical foe facing all of us which keeps us from doing the things that we were put in this world to do.

Even if you’re not stuck—even if you’re at the top of your game and living life exactly how you want to—there’s still value in this book for you. The War of Art paints a clear, concise picture of the spiritual process of creation. It’s a guide to life. An instruction manual for how to view the world.

I’m not going to summarize Steven Pressfield’s ideas here. The book is short; you can read it yourself. I’ll just leave you with a final thought. Thinking Man would not exist without this book. I would be a different person without this book.

It will do the same for you.

John’s Comments:

I jumped the gun a little on this one. I wrote an article about Steven Pressfield on Sunday, which you can read here:

There’s not much I can say about this book that I haven’t said already. It changed my life. It changes my life every time I read it. It’s the best book ever (outside of Gates of Fire).

If you want to get better, physically and spirituality—if you want a kick in the ass, a reason for being, a push in the right direction—read it. Like right now. And yes the audiobook is just as good as reading the physical book. It’s narrated by the savior himself and has sweet sound effects. Ok I’m done. Read it. Bye.

What books have changed your life?

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John’s Comments:

I’m sorry to say, but we’ve failed you for the second book club pick in a row. The Name of the Rose is finished, but we lost Melissa, lost a few of you, and I finished with a longing for more. I had a brutal time reading this book. I understand now that that’s because our push to complete this in a timely fashion to keep our book club alive resulted in me excruciatingly flipping through page after history-dumping page to get to the end, rather than taking my time and truly appreciating the effort Eco took in crafting such a book.

Is it the best thing I ever read? No. Would it have been my all-time favorite book had I took the time to soak it all in? Definitely not. Would I have left with a feeling of admiration and having learned something new had I taken the time to do so? Definitely.

I can’t tell you if I would have liked Umberto Eco as a person. Some chapters went by with him slapping you in the face with his medieval history prowess, and it seemed his goal was to shit on religion and God—which is taking it a bit far in my opinion. However, I can’t say that his book sucked just because I couldn’t get it. That isn’t fair at all. This thing should have been read slowly, over the course of six months, instead of cramming the whole book in a month to get to the end.

At first I was mocking the mystery, having correctly guessed the culprit in the first 1/5 of the book, and was patting myself on the back when Jorge was finally revealed as the evil behind the events of the novel. Then I finished the book and realized that I totally missed the point. The mystery was part of it, sure. But for me to criticize the book as being a shitty mystery when in fact it was a piece of historical fiction that used a mystery to carry itself to the end shows I’m not as smart as I had initially credited myself to be. When I got to the end I immediately wanted to pick up another Eco book and take it all in as best I could, to see how different my reaction and enjoyment would be without having time constraints associated with it.

So what was the point of the book? My best guess is summed up in the final exchange between William and Adso, as they leave the abby and eventually part ways:

“You have no reason to reproach yourself: you did your best.” (Adso said.)

“A human best, which is very little. It’s hard to accept the idea that there cannot be an order in the universe because it would offend the free will of God and His omnipotence. So the freedom of God is our condemnation, or at least the condemnation of our pride.” (William said.)

I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: “But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primigenial chaos? Isn’t affirming God’s absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?”

William looked at me without betraying any feeling in his features, and he said, “How could a learned man go on communicating his learning if he answered yes to your question?” I did not understand the meaning of his words. “Do you mean,” I asked, “that there would be no possible and communicable learning any more if the very criterion of truth were lacking, or do you mean you could no longer communicate what you know because others would not allow you to?”

To me, this is the conclusion of all of William’s debates scattered throughout the book. He was allowed to study by going into the Franciscan order. Through his learning he deduced that God did not exist. Had he then started teaching that, he would have promptly been executed for his heresy. Instead, he continued the quest for his own truth through his order, and tried to help others get to that same understanding, like Adso did at this point.

I think it’s a very black and white way to look at our reality. To me learning and atheism do not need to be tied together, but some people, like Eco, would tie the two as inseparable outcomes.

So what was The Name of the Rose? A murder mystery, or Eco trying to show us the contradictions of the church and the wasted knowledge that was kept hidden by Jorge and monks like him? Even with them hiding everything in the library, the unread pages of those books didn’t conceal a hidden truth which would turn people from God. Truth will always prevail, there isn’t a book that would change that. And like all of the books lost in the burning of the library at the end of the novel, new ideas and discoveries will always be made and people holding others back from learning will learn that they had only wasted their own lives to gatekeeping the truth.

Thanks for following along throughout this whole journey. This was a rough one. While trying to get through this, I started to read Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield, and it’s been absolutely incredible to start. If there’s one thing this book club pick should come out with is for you to read that book instead. Speaking of Steven Pressfield…

Our next book club pick is a suggestion to all of you to read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. It’s a short book that has changed both Melissa’s and my own life many times since discovering it. We truly believe that anyone could read it and have a similar impact on their creative or spiritual journey. Whether you’re a creative or not, the book will undoubtebly have a positive impact on you. The goal is for everyone to read it by June 6th, which will resume our standard Thursday book club updates. The plan is to discuss the book on June 6th, get everyone’s reactions, and then move forward with the next fiction book, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, on June 13th. This was decided after the discussion left on my Philip K. Dick post last week (your voices are heard!). Thanks again and see you in The Deep End!

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John’s Comments:

Poor Adso. Just as he finally gets his D wet, the grossest monk in the abbey becomes Mr. Steal-Your-Girl. On top of that, she’s deemed a witch by the new biggest baddest inquisitor on the market, Bernard Gui.

That’s right. This chapter flipped the script. Gone were the mentioning of Berengar and Adelmo getting hot and heavy (save for one line at the end of day). Adso lost in purity and mated lwith a poor girl from the village who he had walked in on in the kitchen after a night’s romp in the library. As happy as I was for Adso to have finally become a man, the whole situation didn’t make much sense. The girl was about to get slap happy with the cellarer in exchange for a beautiful cow heart to scarf down later, but when Adso walks in on them in the dark of the kitchen the guy scrams and Adso and the girl are so overcome with lust for each other that they pork right then and there. He must have done quite the job since she didn’t even have sense enough to pick up that cow heart before it was time to go back down to the village.

After that we learn Adso is a huge simp. We then meet the band of inquisitors/the Pope’s henchmen who arrive to the abbey. More extremely tedious inquisition history lessons take place, William and Adso uncover the secret of how the library’s labyrinth is categorized, and we get nowhere closer to finding out who the murderer is than when the chapter started. And no one died! Well, maybe by the start of the next day Adso’s girl will already have been burned at the stake…

In the last post I mentioned that Jorge and Benno were my two picks for who could potentially be the murderer. I give you another candidate: Alinardo. He’s the monk that’s been explaining how all three deaths so far have been done in a fashion to appear like the seven signs of the Apocalypse from the book of Revelation. He’s been right so far, and also been appearing to be downright crazy. Could he be a dark horse candidate hiding in plain sight? Maybe. Am I ready to switch my guess to him? Not exactly, but it does seem likely that the guy could know something is up—unless that means he’ll be the next person to go.

We’re nearing the end. I haven’t had much fun with this lately. We should be done in the next two weeks. Who do you think did it?

Melissa’s Comments:

Alright, well John basically said it all with this one. I gotta admit, he held up his end of the bargain way better than I have this week. I only read about half of Fourth Day so far (I’ll try to catch up, I promise), and even if I had finished it, I probably wouldn’t have had much to say. My eyes are glazing over. My brain is turned to mush. I absolutely loathe this book.

He was also ready to post this thing (on time) yesterday—I was the one who delayed the posting of it. I deluded myself into thinking I was going to read fifty pages today and write something profound. I was wrong.

I’m truly sorry. We picked two stinkers in a row. If possible, this one’s more painful than Dune, because I feel like I need to really pay attention to it.

Anyway, thanks for reading. See you next week, where we’ll be discussing Week 5 (assuming I don’t gouge my eyes out along the way).

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John’s Comments:

What can I say. This part was extremely tough for me to get through. The discussions Adso had with William and Ubertino (which really just seem like excuses for Eco to show off his history chops) took every ounce of muscle my eyes have to keep from dozing off. The plot is fun, the murder mystery is intriguing, but the history dumps really pull you out of the story. I can see why Eco said that he didn’t think it was his best work. He shows great prowess for storytelling here, but loses the reader in these long slogs.

As for the murder mystery, I think Benno is next to go. I’m surprised Berengar didn’t make it past this part, but it seems like everyone involved in the evening surrounding Adelmo’s death is getting picked off. Him and Jorge are the last to go and as of now I’m picking Jorge as the murderer. If Jorge is next, I’ll say Benno is our man. Let’s see where the story takes us. I will say this, if the murderer is a yet-to-be introduced character I will feel mildly cheated. So what do you think. Have we met the culprit yet?

Here’s to Fourth Day being more palatable to all of us layreaders. See you next week!

Melissa’s Comments:

I keep flipping back and forth about how I feel about this book. I usually like it when I pick it up—the problem is that I never want to. The book is interesting, for sure. But it’s hard. Eco is definitely intelligent; unfortunately, he’s still casting doubt as to whether the same thing can be said about me.

Eco said that he tried to write this book like it was actually written in the 1300s, and that is very apparent here. A decent chunk of Third Day is written like a classic philosophical dialogue—one character poses an abstract, verbose argument, another character inquires further, the first character continues, his conversational partner either inquires or refutes the argument, and so on.

I actually really enjoyed it. John found these discussions to be a slog (and I did tend to ‘tune out’ the minutiae about which monastic orders believed what and why), but I enjoyed the large-scale questions that they posed. Plus, you can tune in and out of a conversation about abstract concepts—when dealing with an actual murder mystery, you have to know what’s going on.

There are some interesting topics that warrant a mention:

• The idea that ‘heretics’ are simply people who threaten the church’s power.

• The idea of the ‘simple’ (i.e. un-learned) being used as pawns in the games of the powerful, as exemplified in the conversation between Adso and Salvatore about how Jews were offered as a scapegoat to distract Christians from their true enemies.

  • Also note the irony that Salvatore was able to describe this while firmly believing that this hatred was morally just).

• The feud between science and theology. Consider this quote (spoken by William) about science: “To believe it I must assume that there are universal laws. Yet I cannot speak of them, because the very concept that universal laws and an established order exist would imply that God is their prisoner, whereas God is something absolutely free, so that if He wanted, with a single act of His will He could make the world different.”

• The gatekeeping of knowledge—what is in that library? Could this be alluding to the secret knowledge hoarded by the Vatican?

Umberto Eco obviously doesn’t like the Church very much. Perhaps this is for good reason; The Name of the Rose certainly doesn’t portray it in a good light (although, admittedly, this is only one side of the story).

Presumably, his characters are mouthpieces of how monks at that time would have thought. It is interesting when their unusual way of thinking makes itself apparent. Brother William, a self-proclaimed man of God, does not appear to be very pious; Adso considers sex to be the utmost crime; Salvatore preaches peace yet supports hatred and war if it is sanctioned by the Church. Plus there’s the whole William being an inquisitor thing (and isn’t murder in the name of God the greatest irony out there?).

Things got ‘spicy’ at the end of this part (a twist I was certainly not expecting), so we’ll see if the Fourth Day is a little easier to get through.

As always, if we got anything wrong, or if you have something you’d like to add, please comment.

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Melissa’s Comments:

This thing is starting to get really good.

I stopped painstakingly looking up every translation in the book (thanks ), which has made the whole thing a lot more enjoyable to read.

The murder mystery itself is pretty juicy, as is the history contained within it. Franciscans being hated because of their vow of poverty (yet kept around for political reasons); Benedictines corrupted by money and wealth and power into practicing the opposite of what they preach; the whole irony that the Church keeps this air of piety (which many people within it no doubt believe) while simultaneously supporting things like Inquisitions.

It’s unclear how much of this is actually historically accurate (it takes some digging to find out—highly-curated, sugar-coated Google search results aren’t much help), but the whole thing works as a pretty fine expose into the shady political dealings of the Catholic Church.

There are so many moral questions brought up in this book, such as the gatekeeping of knowledge (I’m struck by Aristotle’s claim that revealing too much esoteric knowledge too fast breaks some type of celestial seal).

There was more, of course. There’s a philosophical question on practically every page of this thing. If anything stood out to you, feel free to leave it in the comments.

I’m a little scared, though, because this book is seriously calling my reading comprehension skills into question. John keeps mentioning stuff that went completely over my head (which may be why he has a clearer picture of the actual murder mystery than I do—check it out in his comments).

I want to think that I’m a whole lot more intelligent than Umberto Eco is making me feel right now, but I’d like to say in my defense that I know absolutely nothing about this time period, and have the tendency to ‘miss the forest for the trees’ when it comes to things like this where I’m bombarded by things that I don’t fully understand.

Nevertheless, the book has certainly been a learning experience. It’s made me think. And I can’t wait to find out what’s hidden in this damned library.

John’s Comments:

After finishing Second Day, I’m all in. This book has completely hooked me. As we said, the first hundred-ish pages were not an easy read. But now that we’re through them and nearing the 200-page mark, Eco has put the pedal to the metal and let this murder mystery completely take hold. Since the death of poor Venantius, I’ve been trying to analyze the characters’ words and actions to see who might be the murderer—or who is next to be killed.

I can’t tell who did it so far. I’m leaning towards Jorge, since a supposedly blind monk being the murderer would be a good twist. Right now all signs point to Berengar having something to do with it (besides porking Adelmo into the grave) but I think it’s too obvious. After the way this part ended I’m sure that we’ll find him dead somewhere in the Third Day.

It’s still early. There’s five more days to read through, so I’m sure Eco will pull the rug our from under us and show us all roads he was pointing to was distracting us from an entirely different plot going on. There’s some weird shit going down with the library and I just don’t know what it is, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Abbot is a whole lot guiltier of something than we realize. Remember, William of Baskerville was sent to the abbey to inspect claims of heresy, so there’s definitely a lot to unwrap still.

For now, I’m going with Jorge as the murderin’ monk so far. Who are you pinning this on?

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