John and Rosianna discuss Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne. This episode was originally released to subscribers in May 2020.
John Green and Rosianna Halse Rojas selected Journey to the Center of the Earth as a bonus public domain pick for Life’s Library during the first months of the pandemic. In this episode, they discuss the novel and the 1959 movie, contemplating topics of translation, abridgement, Romantic awe, and the story’s surprising relevance to modern times.
This episode was originally released to subscribers in May 2020. 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. Just because we're all stuck at home doesn't mean we can't have a Life's Library podcast, even if we couldn't get you a book this round because of—he gestures broadly.
Rosianna Halse Rojas: This is actually I realize the first one we've done in the—gesturing broadly period—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —because the last podcast was Hank and Martha Wells.
John: Right, and the podcast before that we were still in relatively normal times, at least in the U.S. and the U.K. So here we are.
Rosianna: It's strange, I think, of—yeah, six-week cycles. Well, they encompass a lot.
John: Yeah. Some six weeks are longer than other six weeks.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And this has maybe been the longest six-week period of my life. Certainly the most historically significant six-week period I've ever lived through until the one that's coming up.
Rosianna: I do think that any day in March was the longest six-week period I've lived in my life.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: March took forever.
John: Yeah, whereas May is going quite quickly for me. We're recording this in the middle of May and—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —it's moving along for me. One of the highlights of my month so far was watching the Journey to the Center of the Earth movie from the 1950s with the Life's Library Discord channel.
Rosianna: That was so much fun.
John: It was so great. And you can go to the Life's Library Discord channel—I know it's a little overwhelming at first, but it gets better—at Life's Library—just like everything—at lifeslibrarybookclub.com. And we all watched Journey to the Center of the Earth together and it just felt like as close as I've come in this period to being in a theater with other people.
Rosianna: Yeah, it was really, really good fun. And I'd—as I'd said in my letter for this book—grown up with watching that film over and over again whenever it was on TV. It's the 1959 one and I love it so much, but it's always one that I'm a little trepidatious about sharing with people in case they don't like it.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Because it won't affect how I feel about it, but I'm—you know, you want people to like something that you really like. So it was good fun.
John: It is a surprisingly good film for 1959. It's very weird. And I guess part of what really struck me about it, and I might talk more about the film than the book because I have not read most of the book yet, but part of what struck me about the movie was—I guess the tone of, you know, the mixing of what I think of as genres, but were probably less firmly established then.
Rosianna: Mm.
John: And the somewhat playful tone, even alongside real action, which has become like a big movie thing, from Indiana Jones to, you know, National Treasure. And I really—I really enjoyed and was impressed by how difficult it is to pull off that tone. Now, that's a very different tone from the book, which, you know, is somewhat more serious, I would say.
Rosianna: Yeah. I mean, I think it's important to say from the beginning, obviously, that this is a translation.
John: Right.
Rosianna: You and I have probably read different versions of this translation, as well, which is kind of part of why I wanted to pick it as our public domain for this interim period because everyone always brings their own interpretations to a book, and then translation changes it a lot further. And with books in the 1800s, you could literally just, you know, change characters entirely. Like there's a translation that's quite famous for having changed names and huge plot points because the translator decided that they were improving it.
John: Mm.
Rosianna: And in some ways, you know, there are parts of the process of Journey to the Center of the Earth's history and story, whether that's through translation or through film or—you know, I think it was a play, as well, at one point? There are things about it that are examples of how we all read books differently, but also of how broadly and how widely stories can spread and in different forms and that they're never the same story for each person. But this kind of pushes it to an absolute degree with the various translations, and its—that was part of also what I enjoyed about having a book that's in the public domain, because you can look through so many different examples—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —of how the story is told and, and each one is kind of different. And for a book club—like the premise of a book club is you read the same book and can—I don't know, I suppose the question there is like, are we reading the same book here and are we ever reading the same book?
John: Yeah, I think—
Rosianna: Not to get too existential.
John: No, but I think that's really true. Are we ever reading the same book? And if we aren't—which we aren't, let's face it—then is any purportedly objective or purportedly authoritative critical response to that book truly authoritative?
Rosianna: Right.
John: Or is the text so dependent upon the context in which it is read and the person who is reading it that we should question that sense of authority. Like if somebody says that, I don't know, like harlequin romances suck, which people say all the time, shouldn't we question that sense of authority? Doesn't it depend on who's reading them when and the context that each person is bringing to it?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: This is, I think, an under-appreciated thing about criticism or whether we should like what we like on the internet today. Like there's so much of finding what is problematic about whatever it is that you like. And I do think that it's important to like things with qualms.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like the 1959 Journey to the Center of the Earth movie is a great example of that. Like you can love that movie and also understand that it has some cringe parts and—
Rosianna: Yeah, absolutely.
John: They don't negate each other.
Rosianna: Yeah. This is something that I actually—so I recently got a Letterboxd account, which is like the—where you can log the films you've seen and this has become a big hobby during my—lockdown period has been just logging every single film I remember ever seeing and giving it a rating and a little review. But what I really like about it is that they have a five-star rating scale, and then they also have the option to click a little heart to show that you liked it.
John: Mm.
Rosianna: So there are films that like, I've rated like three-and-a-half stars, but I still click. I like it.
John: Right. And I just really like that little detail about it because that's—you know, there are so many things that I'm like, yeah, I don't think that this is the same as a film that I absolutely adore. But then also there are probably films that I've rated five stars and books that I've rated five stars that other people would be like, what? Why are you giving it that? And I guess that's—you know, well, that's The Anthropocene Reviewed for you, really.
John: Yeah. I mean, it's such a ludicrous concept that anything can live on a five-star scale and have it be a meaningful discourse, right? Like the obvious reason the five-star scale emerged in the time that it did is because computers needed to sort information. It was not because of humans.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And I think—there are examples of movies to me that are, like, one-star movies that I like, and there are also examples of five-star movies that I really don't like, you know? I mean, I—like, that I wouldn't click hard on. Where I'm like, oh, you know, I could appreciate that and I understand that it's important and very influential and it doesn't make a big impact on me. But to go back to the book for a second, and away from The Anthropocene Reviewed, available wherever you get your podcasts, when I first read this book, I was a kid. I was probably twelve.
Rosianna: Mm.
John: And I only realized in reading this new translation that I'm reading—that the book that I read as a child was like 80% abridged and also like radically plot-simplified.
Rosianna: Oh, wow.
John: So it wasn't just a translation, it was really a deep reworking. So much so that I don't really rec—the book that I read as a kid and the book that I'm reading now are as different from each other as the 1959 movie that takes place in Scotland with an American playing a Scottish guy who doesn't have a Scottish accent.
Rosianna: Well, that was your real highlight of the thing. Mine was Gertrude.
John: Gertrude the Duck is an amazing, amazing—
Rosianna: Oh.
John: —character in that film.
Rosianna: The—Gertrude still makes me laugh so hard, and I know all of the jokes. I know the entire film off by heart. I could perform the film for you.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And it—yeah, it still makes me laugh. It's like when I, yeah, watch Indiana Jones. Like it just—Sanne will walk, my flatmate will walk in and just be like, you just love slapstick and I'm like, I just do.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: It's just great.
John: Sarah's the same way. Sarah loves like a pratfall in a movie.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: She just laughs uproariously.
Rosianna: This absolutely gets me. But yeah, it is—I mean, it's interesting, also, all those—yeah, many of the books that I read as a child were also abridged, especially of the ones that, you know, are considered quote unquote classics. There's a feeling of wanting to introduce those stories to young people, but maybe not wanting to give them the original text of it. And that's just so interesting because for many of us, those will be the versions that we think of when we think of those stories.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: I remember working in a children's bookshop when there was a huge shelf of I think must have been about like 200 young, us born classics versions of—yeah, of classics. And I was always amazed by—just, the huge range of stories that they'd abridged. Like there was an abridged version of Don Quixote that was, just I think about like twenty pages long.
John: Wow.
Rosianna: And that's quite a feat.
John: Right. But I mean, the thing that I didn't understand as a kid that I understand now is that this is all a function of copyright law.
Rosianna: Mm.
John: The reason that you can abridge Journey to the Center of the Earth and you can't abridge, say, Twilight, is that Stephanie Meyer would have to give permission for a twenty-page abridgement of Twilight, whereas the work in the public domain—anybody can do anything to it. Like we could print a Life's Library version of Journey to the Center of the Earth tomorrow and we don't have to pay royalties to anyone.
Rosianna: Well, that's an idea.
John: Yeah. Well, it's funny you should say that.
Rosianna: I guess not right now.
John: It's funny you should say that's an idea because that's an idea that my brother has already had and has pitched me several times. That Nerdfighteria should print really wonderful books from the public domain or books that have been out of print for a long time that deserve to have readerships, which is—
Rosianna: But he hasn't done it within an abridged version, has he? That's sort of—that's what I'm bringing to the table.
John: Right. That's the key—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —is like a twelve-page abridged version of Pride and Prejudice or whatever.
Rosianna: Yeah. Or like The Mill on the Floss in five pages.
John: Yeah. Yeah, it's not—
Rosianna: Which I've never read, but always meant to.
John: It's good. I read it in college. It's been a long time since I read it. I read it in a nineteenth-Century British Women in Literature course.
Rosianna: That's so funny because in university I did American literature over and over and over again, so.
John: I mostly did British literature—
Rosianna: Perfect.
John: —mostly nineteenth-century women in British literature.
Rosianna: I was very into American literature since 2001.
John: Mm.
Rosianna: That was my big field, but also there was literature of the American Renaissance. John: So like Philip Roth, Tony Morrison.
Rosianna: Yeah. We did a lot of—we did some Jonathan Safran Foer as well, and—
John: Oh, okay. Yeah.
Rosianna: —and what else? It was just like a huge—oh, Don DeLillo.
John: Oh, yeah.
Rosianna: Oh, Don DeLillo. It was great.
John: Did he die?
Rosianna: I loved that class. I'm not sure.
John: I hope not.
Rosianna: The amazing thing about that film is that as you were discovering on the Discord as we were watching it, is that almost everyone's alive.
John: He's alive. Yeah. So almost everybody from the Journey of the Center of the Earth film, which was made in 1959, is still here with us, including Pat Boone.
Rosianna: I love it. Pat Boone and Arlene Dahl, who's like 94.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And I think Diane Baker is the name of the actress who plays Jenny?
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Like could have a whole reunion.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: I wonder if Gertrude's still around.
John: I think Gertrude is probably not still here. But you never know. There is a very tan—there's not a lot of biographical information about Gertrude available on the internet, but there is a very tantalizing bit of trivia from Gertrude's IMDB page, that after a filming Journey to the Center of the Earth, Gertrude retired to a farm outside of Venice, Italy.
Rosianna: That sounds like something you'd tell a child.
John: It does. I actually—I believe that my first dog retired to a farm outside of Venice, Italy.
Rosianna: Oh, that's so nice. I wonder if they're friends. What if they know each other? Oh, man. It's making me think of The Americans, which is what I've mostly been doing with my time during this lockdown. I'm not gonna spoil anything, but I just watched an episode where there's a part in a grocery store. And someone walks past someone else without realizing or knowing anything about who that person is, and I audibly gasped.
John: Yeah, that's one of the things the Americans is really good at. And to take it back to Jules Verne for a second—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: It's a little bit of what Jules Verne is good at, though, is like—so one of the things I can't know because I don't read in French, despite having gone through four years of high school French—I still only know one sentence, which is je ne sais pas—
Rosianna: Oh, it's the most important one.
John: It is, especially in French class. It's very useful.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: It's really the only one you need. But I—
Rosianna: Je ne peux pas parle le français.
John: That's good, too. That's a very compelling—I don't speak French, like that's so good that people would think that you're lying.
Rosianna: I know.
John: You got to bring a real American accent to it, like je ne parle pas le français. But one of the things I can't know is whether the prose is—I don't—I never know how to talk about this without sounding like I'm being like cruel or judgmental—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —to a certain kind of book. But what is getting me in this book is the story.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: It's the moments of like a world opening up in my imagination. It almost reminds me of—you know everybody has dreams, or at least I have dreams where I'll be in my regular house, but I'll discover that there's a new room.
Rosianna: Ooh.
John: And you know, like I'll—like a key will appear in my hand and I'll know where the door is and I'll go to the door and I'll turn the key and there will be a new, unexpected, unexplored room in this home that I've lived in for fifteen years. And there's just this—
Rosianna: What? I want that dream.
John: Oh, it's great.
Rosianna: That sounds so fun.
John: I really recommend. It's a—I think it's a pretty common dream, or maybe I'm—maybe it's not, but like that's how reading Jules Verne makes me feel.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like it makes me feel like there's an unexplored room in my mind that this story has the key to, and now here I am, you know, deep underground and there's an ocean. And what I love about that is not—it is the choice of language in the sense that it takes a certain set of words to make me imagine that. But I don't take particular delight in the words themselves or in the voice of the story.
Rosianna: Mhm.
John: It's what the story does for me. Does that make sense?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I never know how to talk about this without sounding like I—like pretentious or whatever.
Rosianna: No, no, no.
John: But I love that feeling and—so I don't know how different it would be reading it in French, but that's how it feels to me.
Rosianna: Yeah, because I think for me, there's not really—there's humor in the narrative.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: There's not loads of voice. It's not like a voice-led book.
John: Right. Right.
Rosianna: It's what's happening that's really exciting to me. And kind of page to page, it's like, oh my god, they're literally walking underground. Like that's—and they—
John: Yes.
Rosianna: —and they've created this—he's created this world where you have an ocean, a subterranean sea, underground. Like I said to you on the film chat, that's the thing that always really stuck with me as a kid, is just that moment where they're standing and there's kind of cavernous ocean. And in the book, that ocean journey takes a lot longer than the five minutes they're in it.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: In the film—in the book, it goes on for pages and pages and pages and it's just this sense of what is in these deepest, darkest waters and going further and further into the unknown. I think that's really appealing to me, too, of that excitement of an explorer or of a scientist being excited by what's unknown rather than—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —completely overwhelmed by it, because I am someone who I think has historically been quite overwhelmed by what's unknown. But if I think of it in terms of curiosity and being able to see something new and—or see something that many people have seen before, but I haven't. Like that's where it gets exciting to me, and I think that—yeah, I think this book does a great job of really taking you down all of these different paths and saying, you know, and there's the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. There's the mushroom forest, there's the sea, there's the iridescent walls and so on.
John: Yeah, and—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —for a book that is a hundred and however many years old, like no book that old reads contemporary.
Rosianna: Mm.
John: Like Dickens doesn't read contemporary, Mark Twain doesn't read contemporary, but it has a very contemporary pace.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like it is kind of paced like a contemporary thriller or something, where there's a—like The Da Vinci Code is not a perfect comp, but I haven't read that many thrillers, so.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: But like—
Rosianna: The Firm? I liked The Firm.
John: The Firm. Yeah, where like—there's kind of two forms of that magic, right? Like something interesting has to happen on every page or two.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: As opposed to a book like Catcher in the Rye, where something interesting happens on page 11 and then again on page 196.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Something interesting has to happen every page or two. And then the something interestings all have to build to a much larger something interesting.
Rosianna: Yes.
John: That is so hard. I mean, I've tried to do that—
Rosianna: Yes.
John: —many times in my writing life, and it's really, really difficult to do. And in the end, maybe it's difficult for me to do in part because that's just not—it's not really how my brain works, but because it's not how my brain works, because I don't see it coming, I'm always like, ooh! Ooh!
Rosianna: Well, for me it's also this sense of the author having knowledge of the entire journey.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: But revealing it little bit by little bit—
John: Mm.
Rosianna: —and illuminating it. That's always what's amazed me about mystery writers, too. And yeah, thrillers and spy stories and adventure stories like this one. Like how do you know how much to reveal at any given time?
John: Right.
Rosianna: And do you go in knowing all of it? Do you discover it? I mean, I know it's different for each writer, but do you go in—I don't know, it's just kind of fascinating to me. There was also an article someone shared on the Discord that I really liked about adapting Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. It's written by Brian Taves, so I'll be sure to share it on the staff picks if it's not there already. But in the article, the writer mentions that this is the one of Verne's most famous stories that hasn't happened because it can't—because we can't, as far as we know, walk to the center of the earth. This is the one out of, you know, all of them that hasn't happened. You can go around the world in eighty days. You can go to the moon—
John: Go 20,000 leagues—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —under the sea. Yeah. But you cannot—
Rosianna: Yeah. Submarines exist, but you can't walk to the center of the earth.
John: Right. And in fact, like you can't even—we can't go there. It's a place—it's still a place that we've never directly observed. When I was—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —watching the movie, I kept thinking about Edmund Halley, the guy for whom Halley's Comet is named.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I've been reading a lot about Edmond Halley's life, and Edmond Halley was very interested in magnetism and why, you know, magnetic north pole was different from North Pole and all these questions that helped him eventually to establish how—like longitude lines that were tremendously influential in navigation and part of the reason why England ended up being the ascendent force in European seafaring life in the 17th and 18th centuries. But anyway.
Rosianna: The sweet, sweet GMT.
John: That's right! It's part of the reason that I live in negative five GMT, which is Greenwich Mean Time for those of you who don't know your time-related acronyms. Nothing wrong with that. Anyway, Edmond Halley was right about so much, that even stuff that he was just theorizing about eventually proved correct.
Rosianna: Wow.
John: But one of the things that he was wrong about is that he believed that there was a second Earth inside of Earth and that there—that Earth likely had seas on it and that that Earth might even have people on it.
Rosianna: Wow.
John: And that it had its own tides and it was its own world and it looked up at its sky and it saw our ground.
Rosianna: Oh my goodness. That's such an exciting idea.
John: It's such a beautiful—
Rosianna: And also horrifying.
John: Yeah. But it—from Halley's perspective, it would explain so much about the weirdness of magnetism on Earth.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like he recognized that there was something in the middle—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —that was really dense and so it made sense to him that it would be like a second Earth.
Rosianna: What I'm picturing is like when you cut open a bell pepper—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —and there's another little pepper inside.
John: Yes. Yes.
Rosianna: It's like that.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Love that.
John: And he probably had examples of that, like, you know, maybe a bell pepper in his life.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: If bell peppers were in Europe in the seventeenth century, which I don't know for sure.
Rosianna: I don't know.
John: It's outside my skill set.
Rosianna: But then it is really interesting and it's also—because it is also really good insight into the different ways people were thinking about Earth and exploration in general.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And then within the story, because they're descending through the earth, there's that sense of going from just walking through the past—this kind of museum of the past and noticing—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —the layers of rock and kind of all of these different parts that make up the earth's crust. And then going back to these prehistoric creatures, these kind of monstrous creatures, and potentially like prehistoric man as well.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And it's just such an interesting sort of passage of time as well as a physical passage.
John: Yeah, because going into the earth is a way of going back in time, right? Like—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And it is a way of understanding what the world looked like before. Like you're—it's clear that Verne understood this, that like you're—as you dig into the ground, you're digging into the past.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I was just outside with Alice and we were digging for worms and she was like, "What happens to the leaves every year?"
Rosianna: Oh, wow.
John: And I was like, "I think they become dirt. I'm not sure, but like, they probably become dirt over time." And then she was like, "So like, is it just gonna keep getting higher?" And I was like, "I don't know. Probably. Maybe?"
Rosianna: That's a good question.
John: But then—I mean, yeah, like I just think we are going into the past when we go into the center of the earth, whether we're doing that to find oil that's made from compressed dinosaur trees, or we're, you know, doing it to find last year's leaves.
Rosianna: I'm listening to David Attenborough's Life on Earth, which is on the BBC—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —Sounds app at the moment, so you can listen to it for free. And it's—yeah, it's so interesting because it—I mean, it tells a story that I've heard and seen and read about before, of the beginning of life on Earth until now and Eons is another great example of the story of life that's come before. But hearing him—yeah, hearing him talk about it always fills me with such wonder and the fact that we can know a lot of these things and also that there are so many things that we don't know.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: I think always just makes—gives me that feeling of—yeah. Of awe. Like Romantic awe. Capital R Romantic awe. And also the other thing that I read about the Journey to the Center of the Earth that—and then I read other people mentioning it on the Discord as well. The fact that they start by going into an extinct volcano and come out through an active volcano—
John: Mm.
Rosianna: —I thought was very interesting. Just as a visual of it. Almost they're like ejected into the real—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —present day.
John: Yeah. But also you're traveling from death to life. You're traveling—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —kind of like through the past into this new, active, alive world.
Rosianna: Yeah, it's kind of—yeah, it's like a—you know, it's a birth.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: As sort of violent as birth is. As I read this, I felt more and more like it was the right pick for me at least, because the chapters were really short.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And my attention span right now is not very good. I'm finding it quite hard to read and I'm mostly picking to listen to things or to watch things. And also that sense of the characters not knowing how the trip will end and there being some delight in that on the professor's side and sheer terror about that on Alec's side.
John: Right.
Rosianna: And there being real risk, you know, like running out of water or taking a wrong turn or just, you know, descending into the center of the earth in general as a concept.
John: Yeah, there are real stakes involved, which is helpful when you're struggling to read. Like it's really helpful to be—to care about people and be worried that they're going to die. Like that keeps you reading.
Rosianna: Yeah. That keeps you reading. And it also just—it gives me more of an understanding of the times when I feel more anxious right now, the times where I feel more stressed out right now, I'm like, oh, it's because I'm fully out of control and I don't know—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —what's gonna happen.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Like it's like someone's told me "walk to the center of the earth" and I'm like "well, I'm going. But like, what's our plan here? When is this trip going to end?"
John: "Are we sure this is the right way?"
Rosianna: "Did anyone bring water?"
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: "Did anyone bring toilet roll?" And that was funny, too, like the idea of them preparing and getting all the things that they need, and that's such a visual in the film, as well. Like prepping all the bits. And they—there's so much stuff from Carla's husband's—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —prep that they try and bring and it was like all of us, or at least, you know, everyone I know at the beginning of this was wasn't really sure what they were supposed to be buying, even if they—like, it was kind of that question of like, well, even if I were to stockpile, what should I be stockpiling?
John: Right.
Rosianna: Or like seeing video of people getting toilet paper, so I guess I'll grab a lot of that. Just the sense of like prepping for something that you don't yet understand, but having to somehow anticipate your needs for it. And then arriving in that situation and yes, you have some of the stuff that you need, but you don't have all of the stuff that you need because you had no knowledge of this—what the reality of it would be like until you were in
John: Right. You can never provision yourself properly.
Rosianna: No.
John: And in that sense it really—like we are living through this strange journey for which we are all ill-prepared and where there is real terror and danger and—you know, you can't really alleviate the fears by the way that I'm used to alleviating fears. By telling myself that it's probably going to be okay.
Rosianna: Mm.
John: And that is very disorienting. And I do feel poorly provisioned for it. Both literally—I didn't buy enough Diet Dr. Pepper and also, you know, in terms of who I am.
Rosianna: But that's been one of the pleasures of reading this book for me is—and why I do think it was a really good pick is because—I mean, a) we needed to do something while we waited for warehouses to get back—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —to open, which we're very grateful that they are, and we're excited to send you a real book. A physical book very soon. But b) we are going through a strange, heightened, scary time and this book does contain some guideposts, I think.
Rosianna: Yeah, and I mean as with any time we make this podcast, but I think now for me, especially, more than ever, I'm just so grateful that everyone listening to this is part of the community in some way. Whether that's, you know, reactively participating on the Discord or just listening to the podcast or you know, reading the book, whether it's the first page or the whole book. Just in any way, like it—I feel that moment when we were all watching the film the other night, I felt so connected to other people. And that's really amazing. Like that's an amazing thing that books can do, but also that you each can do by giving your time to this community. So thank you for that.
John: Yeah, thank you.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And thank you, Rosianna, for picking this book and leading the community and to all the folks at the Discord and everybody listening in their homes all around the world—thank you. And we look forward so much to continuing to be able to read with you.
Rosianna: Yeah. Speak to you soon, everyone.
John: Alright, bye.
Rosianna: Bye.