I’m a sucker for fairy tale retellings, from Cinderella to LGBTQ and gender-flipped iterations. What can I say? As far as I’m concerned, there are never enough. As long as there are writers and storytellers there will be creative new takes on the classic stories passed down through the generations. One of those stories that is told time and time again is the story of Little Red Riding Hood. A girl on her way to take some goodies to her sick grandmother is told not to stray from the path…but when she meets a wolf on the way, she doesn’t do as she was told. The wolf eats her grandmother and takes on her form to try to trick Red. But what if it didn’t have to go that way?

In these Little Red Riding Hood retellings we get to see how the story might’ve played out differently. In some the wolf takes the place of Little Red, in others she becomes the hunter instead of the hunted. Some are set in the 21st century while others sweep us away into a timeless fairy tale world. But in all cases these unique takes are ready to keep an age old story thriving even into modern day.

For those of us who love reading both fiction and nonfiction, there’s a certain category of book that combines these loves: nonfiction books about books. While I do sometimes read literary biographies, history, and criticism, there’s a particular category that rules them all. I love the books that dive into the fascinating stories behind literary phenomena. Because books, even singularly weird fiction that seems like it must have sprung from an author’s brain fully formed, don’t truly arrive out of nowhere. They reflect the times around them. Authors inevitably draw their ideas from somewhere. A book’s impact can expand beyond those who’ve read it or even people who’ve ever heard of it.

These are the stories I crave. Having more context for books I love, like my problematic fave Little House on the Prairie, enriches my understanding of the series as an adult without detracting from my childhood memories. Then there are books I find loathsome, like Go Ask Alice. Reading about what horrors that book contributed to, like the so-called War on Drugs, stokes my righteous flames of anger. It’s very exciting to share this niche collection of books with you. I know that if this category of books appeals to you, you’ll eagerly tear through this list. So let’s get meta with these books about books.

I’ve always liked stories that work out okay. Once, when I was 15 or so, I threw a book across the room because the main character stepped aside so her best friend could marry the man she loved, because her friend loved him, too. (That book was, it turned out, a Jane Austen fan fiction retelling, so the pairing was predetermined. But that’s beside the point.) I loved the main character of this book and was furious that she ended up unhappy. I have always grown overly attached to the heroines of books, and I thought for a long time that meant I liked them.

For my 18th birthday, a friend gave me a copy of Geek Love. I was captivated from the first page by the Binewski circus family and their experimental children, in love with this strange family and with Oly, the narrator. Geek Love is not a pleasant book; it’s ugly and mean, and my inclination to like all of the characters was not supported by how cruel they all were to one another. Arty started a cult. The conjoined twins…perhaps I won’t say what happens with them. Miranda is presented as a character we can like, but even she is not necessarily likable.

But I loved every single one of them, while actively disliking most of them. And that made me wonder: Do book characters need to be likable? Do main characters, in particular, need to be likable? For many people, the answer depends on who that character is. A reader can love Patrick Bateman, actual (fictional) serial killer, but hate Bella Swan, (fictional) teenage girl. Sure, that’s because of sexism, and I will neither argue that it’s anything else nor dismiss that as irrelevant. Of course it’s relevant, but what I’m wondering is if it matters that Bella Swan is widely hated — she’s also widely loved, or at least Twilight is. (So is American Psycho, probably.)

Geek Love introduced me to the idea that I don’t have to like someone (fictional) to love them, that a complex and terrible character can be better than a simple and good character (see above, re: Twilight). It also, in retrospect, taught me that I am a simple fool who will convince myself that I like someone because I like their story, or because I think I am supposed to like the main character simply by virtue of their being the main character.

My other favorite book, besides Geek Love, is We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Merricat is very likable…to me. She tells her own story, as Oly does in Geek Love, and that closeness to the character surely contributes to the feeling of intimacy, tricks the reader (me) into liking them. Both are unreliable narrators, withholding information that might make us dislike them until we are in too deep. (Again, whenever I talk about us, or about a generic reader, I really mean myself.)

Journey with Andy and Jules to the Lusail Stadium for Portugal’s second group stage game against Uruguay at the 2022 World Cup.

They discuss the strangeness of this tournament, the atmosphere in the country amongst the fans, and encounter an alarming number of grown men doing Cristiano Ronaldo’s trademark celebration! Plus, hidden hot dogs and Bud Zeroes all round…

Pete’s Film Club is back! Sign up for weekly episodes throughout the World Cup and much more here: patreon.com/footballramble.

Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!***

November 10 – December 22, 2022

October 29 – December 10, 2022

The novel Basti by Intizar Husain begins with children in the fictional village of Rupnagar— which means beautiful place in Urdu—shopping for staple foods like salt and brown sugar. Trees here breathe “through the centuries,” time “speaks” in the voices of birds, the world is new, and the sky is fresh. From a distance, elephants look like mountains moving. For the children, including the novel’s protagonist, Zakir, one source of information about the world is the town shopkeeper, Bhagat-ji, a Hindu; Zakir’s father, Abba Jan, a Muslim, is another.  Bhagat-ji tells them that elephants could once fly and are hatched from eggs. Abba Jan, who is referred to as Maulana, a respectful term for a man of religious learning, tells them the earth is shaped from the expanding ocean and the ocean’s water came from a single pearl. Together their voices weave a tapestry of life that will be torn asunder in 1947 by the partition of India.

“Partition set in motion a train of events unforeseen by every single person who had advocated and argued for the division,” writes the historian Yasmin Khan. The intention of local leadership and the British Raj was that the two new states of India and Pakistan would allow for Hindu and Muslim self-rule in Hindu- and Muslim-majority areas. But loosely organized violence against minority populations on both sides led to the mass migration of ten to twenty million people to the countries run by their co-religionists, with an estimated 500,000 to three million killed. These killings occurred with what Khan calls “indiscriminate callousness” that included widespread disfigurement, mutilation, and rape. Conflict between India and Pakistan is ongoing to this day. Most scholarship, Khan argues in her book The Great Partition, has largely viewed these events as historically and culturally isolated, but she makes a compelling argument for locating it within “wider world history.”

The main narrative in Basti, which I read in a translation from the Urdu by Frances W. Pritchett, starts two decades after Partition, with Zakir abruptly recalled to his childhood memories by “the sound of slogans being shouted from outside” in Lahore. Zakir is an adult; his family has left the paradise of Rupnagar for the promise of Pakistan. It’s the early seventies, a time of political turmoil between the western and eastern halves of the country that led to further sundering and to a war with India. (East Pakistan became Bangladesh during this period.) Zakir has become a professor, but the buildup of violence closes the university, casting him adrift into a world of memory, history, and myth. “The rain poured down all night inside him,” Husain writes. “The dense clouds of memory seemed to come from every direction.”

In September 1852, when he was twenty-three, Tolstoy published his first piece of writing, in a Saint Petersburg monthly. Although it garnered praise, he was upset that the magazine had changed the title to “The History of My Childhood.” “The alteration is especially disagreeable,” he complained to the editor, “because as I wrote to you, I meant ‘Childhood’ to form the first part of a novel.”

Like Tolstoy, Elif Batuman always intended to write fiction. One of the essays in her first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, a collection based on her experiences as a grad student in the Stanford comparative literature Ph.D. program, had originally been pitched to a magazine—and accepted, Batuman thought—as a short story. “I had changed things to protect people’s identities,” she told me earlier this year over Zoom, “but then had to unchange them so they could fact-check it; the alternative was not to be published.” The piece appeared in print as “The Murder of Leo Tolstoy: A Forensic Investigation.”

Batuman approaches much of her life and work as a reader on the lookout for clues. Her autobiographical debut novel, The Idiot, follows a young Turkish American woman named Selin through her freshman year at Harvard as she studies elementary Russian and linguistics, falls in love with an inscrutable math-major senior, and stress-tests the capacity of the former to explain the behavior of the latter. Selin compulsively overreads everything and everyone she encounters, as if gathering evidence for a case that may reveal itself only in hindsight. Batuman’s second novel, Either/Or, published this year, picks up where The Idiot left off, covering Selin’s second year at Harvard, and serves as a reckoning with all the previously gathered clues. As the title suggests, it aims to explode the supposed distinction between an ethical and an aesthetic conception of the good life. It’s a paradoxical and seriously funny contraption, a bildungsroman that relentlessly deconstructs its author, the social world around her, and the very concept and value of fiction itself.

Speaking with Batuman about Either/Or feels a bit like watching someone ride a motorbike along a tightrope. At one point during our conversation, she took out a pen and paper to trace her argument through Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and de Beauvoir. She expects from any book, her own included, nothing less than a real-time experiment in how we should think and live.