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You have to imagine this kind of imposing Tudor-style grand home on a cliff overlooking Gloucester Harbor, literally built by a diamond mining tycoon in the year 1900. Something like The Great Gatsby.

Something like The Great Gatsby, except it was a lot quieter and virtually empty and ended up feeling a little bit like an abandoned museum.

Until as a 16yearold on his way to audition for the Matt Dillon movie Tex, he read The Great Gatsby. By the time he arrived, he had decided that acting seemed a pretty silly ambition.

Staying overnight at The Thirteen in November 2019, a Macau-based business journalist wrote that it reminded him of the hotel in The Shining.

He just finished reading The Shining by Stephen King.

He had far right views. Papers where he quoted Mein Kampf.

they find stolen ammunition, a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf,

I'm Gilbert Cruz. This week on the Book Review Podcast, our monthly book club meets to talk about Ben Lerner's new novel, Transcription.

It's really brilliant.

I'm Gilbert Cruz. This week on the Book Review Podcast, our monthly book club meets to talk about Ben Lerner's new novel, Transcription. It's really brilliant. His 2014 book made the Times' best hundred books in the 21st century list, so whenever Ben Lerner puts out something new, it's an event, and it's something that needs to be discussed.

He wrote about those changes with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, first in The Atlantic and then in a book called The Coddling of the American Mind.

In his book Why We Sleep, the neuroscientist Matthew Walker halfjokes that dreams are a time when everyone on Earth becomes flagrantly psychotic, experiencing hallucinations, delusions, disorientation, emotional lability, and amnesia.

When Dan Brown wrote The Da Vinci Code he had all kinds of lawsuits he said.

Among the items prosecutors presented as evidence against Seraj ... including the widely known Anarchist cookbook, and books that Seraj had recommended to El Shafay, which were available at the bookstore.

I also like children books, Winnie the Pooh, Harry Potter, those books.

He's got a gigantic bookshelf in his living room, with the Bible, the Koran and a copy of the German constitution.

I talked to the author Ryan Holiday about why he nominated Cormac McCarthy's The Road as one of his top books of the 21st century.

Can I quote something else from the book? It's just right on what you're saying.

I love it. The Road captures both the beauty and the horror of being a parent. Do not get me started on that scene.

Her character reminds me of an embodiment of this book that came out in the 90s that was called The Rules. It was a huge bestseller. We all made fun of it. That book was sort of a dating guide for women that was instructing them to let men chase them, which in the 90s was a very retrograde concept. It seems to be, you know, coming back again.

like saying that Moby Dick is a book about whales, she said.

I mean, at first I think it was like an interactive, erotic novel. Like reading Bridgerton where you're in the book.

And all of a sudden we look on Facebook and we see this photograph of doctors in their blue scrubs and they're all holding up their hands with the threefingered salute from the Hunger Games. So this photograph of the doctors holding up their three fingers in the Hunger Games salute goes viral.

Because Genesis says that we're his supreme creation, but do you think it's possible that...

We had yet to reach, for instance, his encyclopedic lists of possible rhymes, all categorized by syllable count, running on for page after page like Homer's list of ships in The Iliad.

Throughout his work, which includes classic books like The Omnivore's Dilemma, about why we eat the way we do, and How to Change Your Mind, about the science and use of psychedelic drugs, Pollan has waded into questions about the inner workings of the mind.

Frankenstein as a piece of cultural mythology, I actually hadn't read the book.

I love the book. The book is brilliant, obviously. You know, it's one of like, what, five books published that were written by women in the 19th century?

I love the book. The book is brilliant, obviously. You know, it's one of like, what, five books published that were written by women in the 19th century? I know I'm exaggerating, but like, you know, not easy to do.

I know, I know. Paul Murray's The Bee Sting listeners if you haven't read it from a couple years ago. So good. It's fantastic.