A Conversation with Chris Via - AD-FREE/ PATRON ONLY EARLY ACCESS
It was awesome speaking with Chris Via, the man behind the Youtube channel "Leaf by Leaf".
Please check out his channel, he has tons of literary knowledge, it's amazing.
There's a lot of great advice in here about reading large books or for long periods of time and even the right chair for the job.
It was a pleasure speaking with him and I'm looking forward to more collaborations.
Comments (10)
As a fan of both you and Chris, this was such a delight to watch. Thank you so much.
Great conversation, my friend
Synchronicity! Chris mentions Look Homeward, Angel. I read it the first time when I was about 15, and then more than a decade later, and thoroughly enjoyed it both times (the first time probably in part because of the "naughty" aspects that appealed to my 15-year-old self!). And then much later I read Of Time and the River (there are a couple pages in it about the experience of youth that are magnificent). For years I planned to read all of Wolfe's novels chronologically from the beginning (including the novels that later editors assembled from Wolfe's massive literary legacy of, I think, more than a million words). So a few weeks ago I started reading O Lost—the original version of Look Homeward, Angel before Maxwell Perkins and Wolfe cut some tens of thousands of words and reorganized it. O Lost has some magnificent passages, but I can well understand why Perkins insisted that it be chopped down. My verdict so far is that Wolfe suffered from advanced logorrhea! (How many breakfasts does one need to read about in detail? Does the reader really need a list of how much Julia paid for each of her dozens of pieces of real estate?) And yet there are again some passages that are so magnificent that the novel reads like a great epic. I'm not yet sure what my ultimate verdict will be.
That was a fascinating idea—that we change over time, and that that affects how we read a book and our response to it. I remember ages ago, when I was in my late teens, starting Mann's The Magic Mountain, and being bored out of my mind. I resolved that if the book didn't get any better by page 100, I would stop reading. It didn't, and I did! Ages later I took it up again—the same translation and even the same volume. And this time I was fascinated, and loved the novel, so much so, that I cried at the end—not because the ending was sad (it wasn't particularly), but because I would never again be an invitee to the characters' world. The book hadn't changed, but somehow I had.
If you're searching for something recent, check out 2008's Tinkers by Paul Harding. I don't think I've read anything published since then that has topped it yet.
Amazing discussion.
Amazing conversation guys!
These 2 guys are my go-to for book reviews on YouTube.
This is dangerous. These 2 guys have opened up a whole other world of amazing books to me. Sharpen the pencils. This is going to be great!
Better than Food meets Leaf by Leaf? Forget heading to bed early tonight, time to make a pot of tea and hear two of my favourite content creators hash it out.