Here’s some behind-the-scenes, insider baseball for those interested in Hardcore Literature.
We’re currently putting together multiple lecture series that will run concurrently.
The first lecture series is a deep reading book club focused on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina:
Anna Karenina Lecture Series Waiting List
We’ll run readings of several novels together.
From Anna Karenina, there are a number of potential pathways:
- Domestic, English = Jane Austen novels like Persuasion
- More Russians = Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment or more Tolstoy
- Thematic = Flaubert’s Madame Bovary
We’ll also be putting out guides to different poetic movements – the Romantics, the Victorians, the American Sublime, and learning to read poets like Emily Dickinson and Robert Browning.
Along the way, there will also be a smattering of short story appreciation classes – Chekhov, Turgenev, Maupassant, Borges, name your own.
And we’ll do a couple of long projects:
- The Proust Project – let’s read Proust over the long term together
- Shakespeare in Chronological Order – all the sonnets, all the plays.
I’ve been wondering about the best format for delivering these lectures.
The Shakespeare one, no doubt, and pop-up lecture series on Tolstoy and Proust will benefit from a multi-media treatment (you have to see some of the paintings Proust mentions).
The Anna Karenina lecture series will be video modules, but perhaps we’ll put out a whole host of audio series too?
Basically, Hardcore Literature is becoming a choose-your-own-adventure book reading club.
Hardcore Literature is at an invisible tipping point.
I get emails every day, and I’m so grateful to have an intelligent listenership.
The show currently has 17 ratings worldwide, some really lovely reviews, and has even hit the podcast charts in countries as diverse as Switzerland, Malaysia, Russia, Norway, which boggles my mind. Amazing stuff!
Incidentally, one of the best, easiest, and quickest ways to support the show is to leave a review. This has real tangible effects and makes the show more viable for me to continue with. You can leave a review here.
Listeners email me asking for more shows – I’ve lost count of the times I’ve be told to charge something for them – but a typical show will take at least 20 hours of time to prepare.
The most recent lecture on Shakespeare’s sonnets definitely took that amount of focused time (that’s not counting the hours spent researching over the years).
I have a full-time job that occupies my working week, and I spend a great deal of my weekend and after-hours time in academic consultations (which I love doing and find extremely fulfilling), so I’ve hit the limit of what I can do with these lectures and shows, and now need to start taking people on to help put them together.
When I started Hardcore Literature, not too long ago, I had severe doubts that it would be worth my time. I wasn’t sure there was an audience. All I knew was I loved reading and the style of reading, criticism, and analysis I naturally found myself drawn to wasn’t available anywhere (not even in the top universities, like Oxford).
So I was so surprised when people started loving the shows.
The shows draw a really nice mix of the best people:
- Self-educated readers who didn’t go to university. My kind of people. People who want to learn for the love and sheer joy of learning.
- Readers who studied a different subject and now want to learn about literature. I’ve had emails from students of Economics, Politics, Philosophy, Psychology, Biology, all the different sciences, Engineering, Maths, and more. This is so wonderful. I remember I enjoyed discussing Shakespeare with my friends studying Biochemistry at university rather than the English crew – they brought a nice perspective and their enthusiasm was amazing.
- Older, successful women and men who are bringing their life experience to bear on the books they read.
- Younger readers who have high aspirations, great amounts of empathy, think with nuance, and are going places. When people scorn the younger generations, they surely cannot be talking about anyone who listens to my show – they’re all mature before their time.
Let’s talk goals for the show and the lectures.
I want you in on the picture because if you’re reading this we’re doing this together:
- Ramp up the amount of shows and get a good amount of lectures up. There will always been a ton of free entry-points, standalone shows, and running pop-up lectures, but I’d like to get a back catalogue up for serious readers in search of difficult pleasures (Netflix for Nerds). Deep reading is a great hobby, like going to the gym, and so it would be great to get some structured lectures running with reading assignments and interactive discussions.
- Get more reviews for Hardcore Literature. If I can hit the big 100, I’ll be over the moon. This helps with traction, the algorithms, and getting more listeners. I’m already working on some sponsorships, but more reviews helps that along quicker. Simply put, that means more free shows. So please do leave a review because you’ll get more content.
- Get some great guests on the show. If you’re a writer, academic, speaker, have your own show, or simply have an interesting career (many of the listeners who email me have really impressive careers), and would like to talk books and promote your own stuff, please get in touch. I’ll reach out to people I think will be interesting too, but I warmly welcome people approaching me.
Also, if you’ve recommended a book for a show, please rest assured that I have all the recommendations filed away and we will be getting around to them. And please do keep the recommendations coming – there have been some fabulous ones.