John and Rosianna discuss The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. This episode was originally released to subscribers in May 2019.
Magical realism, multi-generational family dynamics, the relationship between the personal and the political—The House of the Spirits has got it all, and John Green and Rosianna Halse Rojas discuss these themes and more in this episode of the Life’s Library’s podcast.
This episode was originally released to subscribers in May 2019. The Life’s Library Discord and subscriptions are now closed after a wonderful three years of reading together. Check out past books at www.lifeslibrarybookclub.com, Twitter, and Instagram.
Life’s Library logo by Bethany Mannion.
John Green: Hello, and welcome to the Life's Library podcast. I'm joined by Rosianna Halse Rojas, and we're reading, this time, her choice: The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. So, Rosianna, before we start talking about the book, I just have to tell you one quick thing.
Rosianna Halse Rojas: Yeah?
John: One of my favorite movies—on one of Sarah and I's first dates, she was like, I really want you to see my favorite movie. It's called Kicking and Screaming. Now there's a movie called Kicking and Screaming that stars Will Ferrell as a soccer coach for seven-year-olds. This is not that movie. This is a different movie called Kicking and Screaming about people who have just graduated from college. And are being dragged into adulthood, kicking and screaming.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And it's Noah Baumbach's—I think it's his first movie. It's very good. And it's very Sarah. And about midway through the movie, these two characters have a two-person book club. And one of the people in the two person book club very clearly has not read the book.
Rosianna: I feel like I can see why the story is going.
John: Which you can get away with in a thousand-person book club, but you really can't get away with it in a two-person book club. So I just feel like I need to acknowledge at the outset that I would argue because we're recording this pod a little early. I have not finished House of the Spirits. I have read 250 pages of it. I loved it. I think it's really good. I'm enjoying it. It's my favorite of your picks so far, but I haven't finished it. So I don't feel like I'm able to talk about spoilers because I don't know that many of them.
Rosianna: You don't even know half the spoilers. I think that's totally fine. It's a long book. Listen, when it arrived, the copy that we sent out through Life's Library arrived, I was surprised at how thick it was. And then I looked at the copy that I have at home and realized that the font is all squashed together. It's typeset terribly.
John: Oh. Yeah.
Rosianna: And it's like—the one copy that I have at home, it's like a 250-page, like terribly formatted, extremely cheap book. So this one's much nicer.
John: I bought a copy of Things Falls Apart in Sierra Leone that was like thirty pages long. Yeah. So much of it is in the typeset—how much white space do you have. But I'll just tell you what I'm enjoying about the book. And I've read some of the response to the book so far on the shelves and I disagree with some people. I agree with some people. I'll just tell you what I like about the book. I don't usually like multi-generational family sagas. It's just not my—it's not my bag, but I love the texture of it. I love the richness of the world. I just can't get enough of the richness of the symbolism and how it's both the personal and the political. It's both what happens inside of a human heart and how that shapes physical geography, how that shapes political geography. I just think the way that—so far, at least—the way the novel explores the relationship between people and their place is just phenomenal.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I mean, no wonder that it's one of the, you know, often cited as one of the greatest books of the twentieth century, because it's just, god.
Rosianna: I so love the way it so easily interweaves the family's history and the country's history—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —and the idea of who gets to tell it and who has power. And also that sense of even the people who do have power sort of betray themselves in some way. And even when you're hearing from Esteban, his kind of perspective as he challenges his granddaughter's telling of the story, it's it still feels like he's betraying himself as actually, or maybe he wasn't that simply perfect person that he thought he was. It's this constant challenging.
John: Yeah. And everybody in the story who has power feels like they don't—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —you know? They all feel like they're working inside of a system that's bigger than them and that they don't really control and they want to control it more. And even something like your daughter dying from poison that's intended for you is a reminder of the ways that we do and don't have power.
Rosianna: Yeah, and even though all of these characters have—or several of the characters at least have the ability to have these premonitions and see the future, it doesn't actually give them a lot of control over it. I don't know, it's such an interesting balance, as you say, between that sense of place and what's going on inside and also how out of control everyone is, and yet how everyone's still—how those choices are still part of what makes us us and what makes a country a country and what makes us society a society.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Like it just—it's so masterful. I'm so envious every time I read this book, but also so delighted.
John: Yeah. It's definitely a story for me where almost every page, I think like, oh god, I wish I could do that. There are writers' writers, you know who—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —when you read them, you're just like, oh boy, I'll never do that.
Rosianna:
Yeah, and just even keeping—I knew that this has been a problem for some people—just keeping all the characters in your head, in the sense of where they are at this particular time. And what physical place looks like at this particular time, like the description of the house on the corner, growing all of its different rooms and its different spaces and just kind of keeping track of where everything is. I don't know, I needed a lot of post-it notes, I think.
John: Yeah. I mean, I think that is one of the big challenges for me so far—
Rosianna: Mhm.
John: —is, because we've got a lot of characters. I write always on an extremely like small canvas to mix metaphors. Like I only write about a few people. I never have a big cast of characters. I never have. I usually don't even have big time spans. And the reason for that is that I find it pretty confusing. Like I get easily overwhelmed as a reader and I have to like go back and be like, wait, who, who is this? And I have to say that is especially true—and I think this is something to be conscious of—that it's a bias. It's especially true of names that are not familiar to me.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Or names that are not easy to me. Names that don't—I've been thinking about this reading House of the Spirits, because I think when I read, if a name isn't familiar to me, I often use the first two letters or three letters of their name as a shortcut when I'm reading and that can get confusing if there's more than one character whose name starts with the same letter.
Rosianna: And indeed if they're related or in some way related.
John: Right, yeah, exactly. And more confusing if they're, you know, nephew and uncle. Rosianna: Yeah. Yeah, and I think it really plays into that confusion as well. It really—it wants you to be confused by it. It wants you to have that feeling of repetition, but there was also—so we've got this new shelf in the Discord if you haven't been there lately that has the discussion in Spanish, as well, for Spanish speakers or people who are learning Spanish who want to discuss House of the Spirits in the language that was originally written in. And it's really interesting because there's been a lot of discussion there of people saying, well, actually I didn't find the first chapter as hard as people on the other shelves seem to because it feels very familiar. It feels how stories are told, especially in Latin America—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —and in these families where nuclear family doesn't mean four people. Nuclear family means like 20 people or 25 people, a hundred people.
John: Right.
Rosianna: And it really rang true for me. Because I was thinking of all of these family pictures we have at home. And there's one that I think has about, probably like 150 people in it. And every time I kind of look at it or pass it, my mom's always like, oh, that wasn't even an eighth of who was in our family at that time. And she gets very defensive that she doesn't have this huge picture of all of the hundreds of people who are in our family.
John: Yeah, don't you have like over a hundred cousins?
Rosianna: Yeah. Well, so I'm the 100th great-granddaughter of my great-grandmother. Yeah.
John: Wow. Wow.
Rosianna: Yeah. So it's a big family. It's a big family. There's a lot of—a lot of people in my mom's generation, especially who are like one of thirteen, one of fifteen.
John: Mhm. Mhm.
Rosianna: Yeah, so it's big families.
John: Yeah, I think that's true. I think that there's a little bit of a cultural barrier and I think that when that happens, we have to give ourselves over to it as readers. We have to let it be the world. And that's one of the things I like about the magic—the way magical realism is used here is that you just have to let it be the world.
Rosianna: Yeah. Except that she has green hair or has this—it looks like a mermaid.
John: Yeah, or yeah, or she becomes more and more mermaid-like over time. But that, like, you just have to—I understand why some people find that just like, I don't understand, what's going on here, this is super weird, I don't get it. And some people, I think, feel a little bit left out in that conversation, somehow. They feel like there's something that they don't get. I do think that there are like metaphorical and symbolic reasons why Latin American writers have used magical realism? I also think that you can be what J. D. Salinger famously called the reader who reads and runs, just giving yourself over to the story and giving yourself over to the world and letting it be that way.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Letting that be the story.
Rosianna: Yeah. Kind of—I feel like with so much of reading when I don't feel like I get it or I can't get into it, I have to just let it dictate the rhythm of reading, which can be really hard, and I don't want to minimize that.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: It's frustrating when you're looking at a page and you feel like I don't get what's going on, or I don't understand why this is happening.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: But a lot of the time, I think I have to like make a choice to just be confused for a bit. And then more often than not, especially with the books that I end up really, really loving the form and the rhythm kind of reveals itself, or I—when I get to the end of it, I learn how to read it, but again I get—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —why that's tricky.
John: Yeah. But you don't start off being able to read everything.
Rosianna: Right.
John: Like nobody starts off able to read Shakespeare. You learn to read Shakespeare by reading Shakespeare. You learn to read poetry by reading poetry. And I think this is a novel that you learn to read by reading it.
Rosianna: Yeah. Yeah, I really liked that and I love magical realism overall. I was reading Gabriel García Márquez's Nobel speech earlier—because someone shared it on the Discord—in which he was talking about sort of the history of Latin America and why all of these things that you might consider magical or fantastical actually feel very necessary. I think that this was must've been in the eighties that he delivered this speech. But I think what he was saying is that because the normal was so in itself, like unable to be accessed, you can't—you couldn't get to the normal, there was no such thing as normal because everything was so chaotic politically.
John: Right.
Rosianna: And people were disappearing left, right, and center.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Yeah, I just thought it was really beautiful. I'll share it on the Discord if I haven't yet but yeah, put it in the staff picks.
John: Yeah, please do.
Rosianna: I also—there was just a little passage I really liked it. It's quite early on. It's on page 92, where it talks about Clara going into her teenage years. And it says, "Clara's childhood came to an end and she entered her youth within the walls of her house in a world of terrifying stories in calm silences. It was a world in which time was not marked by calendars or watches and objects had a life of their own. In which apparition sat at the table and conversed with human beings. The past and the future formed part of a single unit. And the reality of the present was a kaleidoscope of jumbled mirrors where everything and anything could happen. It is a delight for me to read her notebooks from these years, which describe a magic world that no longer exists. Clara lived in a universe of her own invention, protected from life's inclement weather, where the prosaic truth of material objects mingled with a tumultuous reality of dreams and the laws of physics and logic did not always apply." Which I feel like is such a beautiful summary of magical realism itself.
John: Yeah. Right. And also a pretty good summary of adult consciousness.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Because we are in conversation with apparitions and because objects do have—they are in chanted in deep and powerful ways. The other day, we got a question on Dear Hank and John from somebody who is like, there's this band-aid, that's stuck to the bottom of my trashcan, and it's been there since I was four. And I can't throw away this trashcan or this bandaid. And I—you know, my thought was like, of course you can't. Please hold on to the magical trashcan and the magical band-aid.
Rosianna: Yeah!
John: Like, that's the appropriate response to having a magical band-aid is to hold onto it because it can—those enchanted objects can take you to places that you otherwise can't get to, emotionally, and even in memory. The other thing that I really, really like is something you touched on earlier, which is the idea of being able to see the future and not being able to do anything about it. The idea of being able to glimpse the likely future and not being able to stop it. It reminded me of We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled in the sense that so many people, you know, as war began to feel inevitable, it became inevitable. And everyone knew it was going to be horrible, but there didn't seem to be a way to stop that future from coming to pass.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And that's, I think, really deeply true in a lot of Latin American history, as well.
Rosianna: Yeah. And I don't know, that sense of also—that not being justification for the terrible things, but there is still a sense of inevitability to it, at least at certain times and the way certain things were set up and yeah.
John: Right, it's not in any way a justification. It's just like, how do you stop what starts to feel inevitable?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I remember that happening with the war in Iraq, in the U.S. and like 2002, 2003. I remember thinking, like, oh, this is—they're lining this up to make it feel like it has to happen.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And then it's just going to feel like it has to happen and then it's going to happen. And feeling totally powerless in the face of it, you know, in the same way of being able to see a future that you can't not bring to pass.
Rosianna: Yeah, that's so true. I remember, like, just kind of understanding all these little pieces that were being put in play and yeah. Yeah. That's such a fascinating comparison. Because I, I remember that very, very clearly.
John: I'm a little worried that it's happening again in the U.S., but let's hope not.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Can I tell you my Gabriel García Márquez story?
Rosianna: Oh, please do.
John: So I was at the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes once and Gabriel García Márquez won an L.A. Times Book Prize. And by that time he was old, very old, and sickly and was unable to attend. But his son, who I think is a Hollywood screenwriter, director, person did attend. And he got up there to accept the award. And he said, I asked my dad what I should say if he won. And he said, how long do you have to speak? And I told him, between one and two minutes and then Gabriel García Márquez paused on the phone. And after a minute said, an eternity.
Rosianna: Wait, that's where that's from?
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I say that all the time. All the time, people will be like, it's only ten minutes and I'll be, oh, an eternity. It's from that. Yeah.
Rosianna: I did not realize that had an origin story. I love that.
John: Oh, it has an origin—of course, yeah, no, that's too good of a line for me to have thought of myself.
Rosianna: I don't know, man, I credited you with it.
John: I know. It's from a Nobel Prize laureate.
Rosianna: Cool, isn't it? Oh my god, that's great. I love that.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Oh yeah. I mean, there are so many of writers in that genre who are just masters of it. I mean, I know he's an obvious one. In all of this work, but one of my favorites, which I wrote about, I think in the introductory letter also is Como agua para chocolate by Laura Esquivel, which is Like Water for Chocolate.
John: Yeah, what a great book. Yeah.
Rosianna: Which I just love! But I have learned since then that a lot of kids in the U.S. study it in high school. And I think they have that reaction that a lot of kids do to the books that they study in high school, that they just hate it for that reason.
John: Yeah. Yeah.
Rosianna: It makes you so sad because it's one of my absolute all-time favorite books.
John: I read it in 11th grade and I liked it. Which is unusual because most of the books I read in 11th grade I hated, including many very good books, like The Great Gatsby. Which—I still have the paper I wrote about The Great Gatsby and it is humiliating. It is the most embarrassing piece of writing that's ever been produced by a human being.
Rosianna: Were you just taking it down?
John: Oh, god, I crushed it. You know, I just—because 17-year-old me knew something that the world didn't know.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like 17-year-old me had seen that the emperor had no clothes and was going to share this news. And then the world was going to stop reading this book all at once.
Rosianna: It may get an A.
John: Oh, yo, definitely it was going to get an A.
Rosianna: Oh, I still remember sitting down for my interview at Oxford and saying, you know what? I think we're done with World War poetry. I don't think we need that anymore. Oh, god, I think about that all the time.
John: Oh, I'm so glad you didn't get into Oxford because if you had, we would never have probably worked together. So it was a blessing to me that the first thing you said when you sat down was, I don't think we need war poetry anymore. And, scene. God.
Rosianna: I cringe.
John: What I loved about Like Water for Chocolate—was similar to this story, though, which is that at first I found it very disorienting and very confusing, but by giving myself over to the story and to the language and to the weirdness of it, eventually I was immersed in this sensorial wonder that I'd never experienced before. Like the level of—in that book, especially—the level that you feel the experiences of the characters, the levels that you can smell the smells—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —is incredible.
Rosianna: Yeah. Yeah, I always think about that when I'm chopping onions and I can't stop weeping.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: I just always think of that book.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: I mean—and that's something, also, that I think House of the Spirits does so beautifully. Like in a time where women's voices and poor people's voices, that kind of silenced again and again. They still have this expression and this agency that comes through in really sensorial ways, whether that's through—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —the colors and their relationship with colors and spirits and moving objects and interacting with giant dogs. I don't know, even just this, this sense of things moving broadly outside, I don't know, outside of them. There's kind of like an almost, I don't want to use the word aura, but there is an aura to it. There is a sense of that expression coming in different ways and the agency coming through in ways. It's really gratifying, even though, so often in the book, so many terrible things are happening to them.
John: Yeah, but I do think that there's a lot of metaphorical resonance to the idea that these people who have traditionally been shut out of power and shut out of the conversation are able to, for instance, make things move without touching them.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: That even though they aren't allowed direct access to touch and change things, they still find ways to change things. I found that one of the many ways—at least so far. Again, haven't finished it—that the book for me gets at the complicated-ness of agency—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —and how people find ways to assert their humanity and their importance within their families and within their communities, even when power structures try to deny that humanity or to silence those voices.
Rosianna: Yeah, absolutely. And that there are all these strange avenues for them as well. Like I think it's Rosa who does all the embroidery on the tablecloth.
John: Right.
Rosianna: So she creates these fantastical creatures and their mother, also, is kind of outspoken from the start. But still, you know, knows that she'll never have freedom until she doesn't have to wear a corset, which I loved.
John: Right.
Rosianna: I love—I mean, I love the humor, I love the satire, I love the way comments are just thrown in like Uncle Marcos in the barrel organ. Thinks the right way to his cousin's heart is the barrel organ. It's just things like that. It's just—it's such fun writing as well as being very serious.
John: Yeah, yeah, there's almost like a noir clippiness to some of the dialogue and things that happen as well. They're almost like set pieces, kind of.
Rosianna: Totally.
John: And then they have these like really nice payoffs. Like, I don't know, like this is a strange comparison, but like a Marx Brothers film or, well—what I love in noir mystery novels is when this complicated set up happens and then there's this payoff with a single line of dialogue. And that happens a few times in House of the Spirits.
Rosianna:I love the idea of like a noir House of the Spirits, and I now really want to see that made.
John: Oh man, that'd be a great movie. It'd be a bold adaptational choice.
Rosianna: So it sounds great. They are making a new adaptation of it. So there was this terrible 1991 film version of it, which cast all white actors because of course.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And then there's a Hulu adaptation that I think is coming that I believe is all going to be in Spanish, which would be really cool. But I don't know how far along that is. So I've proposed a third adaptation.
John: Is Hulu in Latin America? Aren't they only America-only?
Rosianna: Well, I think that that's maybe why they're launching.
John: Mm.
Rosianna: I don't know. I think it was. But that maybe it was another series. I didn't think it was Netflix.
John: There's a lot of them, Rosianna.
Rosianna: There are a lot of them.
John: There's Freeform, there's Seeso—
Rosianna: There's Disney—
John: —there's Curiosity Stream—
Rosianna: —whatever.
John: Disney Plus.
Rosianna: Quibi. Yeah.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Good old YouTube. That's what I like.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: It's a bubble.
Rosianna: Oh, man. I also really, um—I guess there's like, there's so many different languages that play in the book, but I really enjoyed the deep intertextuality of Catholicism because that's a language that I forget how fluent I am in. Sort of like, the saints of roses, of miracles and mythology and just all the different people you pray to when you've lost something and—
John: Oh, all the patron saints, yeah. Oh
Rosianna: Yeah, just things like that. They're like little things that snuck in that just really rang home. But I forgot that I knew about, which was quite fun.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Because you love saints, don't you?
John: Oh, I love saints. I didn't grow up Catholic, but my dad grew up Catholic and I inherited the love for saints. Like my dad completely abandoned Catholicism, except for being able to tell me all of these saints stories that I—oh, I love a saint—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —and I love a patron saint. I love being able to pray to Padre Pio for one thing and Saint Apollonia for a toothache. I love it. I think it's the most—I think of the things that Protestantism has done away with, that was the biggest mistake.
Rosianna: Well, it's just so much fun. Like I just—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —like praying to San Antonio that your uncle would return. It's just that—
John: Right, totally. Well, and there's this—yeah, there's the weirdness of like, people are like, oh, but it's heretical or it's pagan. And I'm like, exactly.
Rosianna: Yeah. It's great.
John: That's why it works so good.
Rosianna: Yeah, and there's every few years or so, or probably even more regular than that, there's always like a new article about, you know, the new saint that should be created for new thing. New patron saint of something, I don't know.
John: Right.
Rosianna: I think we need more patron saints. There are those contemporary patron saint candles. I think I had one that was like Frida Kahlo—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —that you can buy. They're quite cool.
John: Yeah. I think that part of what's happened with secular saints though, is that people are forgotten what saints are supposed to be. And this is one of my pet issues because I think we need saints. And I think if we don't live in a religious world, we still make saints because that's just—we've been making them for a long time and I think we just make them. But then we're like, oh, but this saint wasn't perfect. Like Einstein wasn't perfect. He cheated on his wife and married his cousin, which is true. And the thing about a saint is not that they were perfect. It's that they did something that was important or beautiful or heroic and we can look to that part of them as a model.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like no saint is perfect. The idea isn't that they're God, the idea is that they're human, but in one respect or in several respects, they did something extraordinary. They made some extraordinary commitment. We're getting a little bit off topic, but this is one of my pet issues. I've always talking about it to Hank, where I'm like, we need to be able to love Einstein. We need to be able to love Martin Luther king. We need to be able to love, you know, Harriet Tubman, even though they weren't perfect. And the response to loving those people and looking toward them as saints should never be like, oh, but they weren't perfect because of course they weren't perfect! They were human beings stuck inside of this deeply flawed vessel and experiencing all the regular weaknesses of persons. That's the reason that they're saints! Sorry. Okay, I'll stop.
Rosianna: But I feel like that is actually kind of on topic because—on two different levels to me, because for one, I feel like the spirits that are around all of these characters, especially Clara and Alba to a later extent, are their ancestors in a lot of ways.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: They're the people who came before, they're the stories of generations before that they both keep alive and are kept alive by, and there is a willingness to take on that mythology and welcome their roles in being around the characters and the information that they have that help with events, but also just their physical presence, in a way.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And I think that is a kind of like, almost micro sainthood, but without maybe the association of this pure benevolent act that yeah, that means to be raised up in kind of a global way. It's this kind of more local sainthood. And then the other thing I think why it's relevant is that you have, in this book, characters that I know a lot of people would consider very unlikable and not easily liked. And for me that's such a good unpacking, I guess, of what it is we look for when we go to books. I don't go to books for the characters I necessarily like, and it definitely helps when those characters I dislike have a counterpart who I do like, and I'm compelled to read more about. But there's something to reading about people who aren't easy to like, and people who aren't easy to see from the perspective of, because there's an opening that happens there. Yeah, I don't know. I'm just—there have been several books lately.
John: Yeah, but I also think the opening that that can happen when you read about characters who aren't likable is an opening toward understanding that you are not purely likable.
Rosianna: Yes. That's so true.
John: That most of us seek power sometimes in ways that are destructive to our family. That most of us, you know, have weaknesses. And I feel like true stories almost always contain unlikeable characters or facets of characters that are unlikable because yeah, that's the truth. And I do bristle very much when people—like people often said that—I mean, I'm not trying to compare my work to Isabel Allende, to be clear—but people often said that about Paper Towns. They would be like, Margaret, wasn't very likable. And I'd be like, yeah! That's not—I don't accept that as a criticism. I acknowledge that people, you know, people are difficult, they make difficult choices. Like, yeah, I guess.
Rosianna: But that's so true. I mean, what you say about it—coming with the understanding that you yourself are unlikable is like, that's so, so true. And I think that it's also something that we know, but we are sort of afraid of.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And like, you know, we all, I'm sure, have things about ourselves that we find more unlikeable than other people would even. But it's, yeah, it is almost like a reluctance to look inward that stops us from looking at characters from different perspectives so we might—it's quite easy to dismiss someone as unlikeable. I think it's quite a dismissive thing to do like that. I don't have anything in common with them. I don't have anything that I want to look at—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —from their perspective.
John: Right. If you only identify with really likable characters, then you aren't probably looking hard enough at yourself, you know. At least I feel like I'm not.
Rosianna: I don't know. I'm perfect.
John: Our next book, I think, features entirely likable characters. Like two extremely likable heroes, but I've been proven wrong before. The people that I like in books are not always the people that other people like in books. And it is well and truly funny and fun, which hopefully will be a nice departure from the places that we've been to. Although I felt—I find this book very funny.
Rosianna: Yeah, I find it very funny, too. I mean, there's obviously terrible, terrible things that happen within it, but—
John: Yeah, it's all—yeah, I don't want to minimize how also awful it is.
Rosianna: But no, I find it hilarious.
John: Yeah
Rosianna: I like—there's points in it that I'm just laughing and laughing. I think it's exactly my sense of humor, as well.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Very—it's very sarcastic—
John: It is, yeah.
Rosianna: —but also kind of wry.
John: Right.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Yeah, it is very much your sense of humor.
Rosianna: I like that stuff. But I'm excited about the next book. I haven't read it as per our tradition of picking books the other hasn't read.
John: Well, it's not as long as this, but if you come to the podcast having read only 250 pages of it, I will not be disappointed.
Rosianna: Okay.
John: I'm looking forward to finishing this, and then we're going to do a Q&A, right—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —where we're going to talk with with everybody. And I'm also going to do a livestream later this month to give you all an update on the work that you're supporting through Life's Library with Partners in Health Sierra Leone. And give you an update on where we are in terms of officially launching the big, big project and maybe walk you through what we're thinking. So look for that and look for the Q&A.
Rosianna: And I want to say thank you to everyone who's filled out the little survey we did about kind of things you'd like to see next year. And also just sharing some thoughts and feedback. It's been really, really helpful to read these answers as they're coming in, and we're still looking at those. So if you haven't filled it out then—I think it's in your email. It should be in your email, so check it out.
John: Yup. Thanks very much for being part of Life's Library and we'll see you next time.
Rosianna: See you next time
John: Or you'll hear us next time.
Rosianna: We'll be watching.