Chris Womersley

such a large portion of life that it's much more easy to feel affected by it, I guess.

And the thing with Moby Dick is, I think, it's an incredibly wise kind of book.

Like, it has these sort of whole kind of segments about, you know, how to live as good a life as you possibly can.

It's mixed up with all this sort of wailing narrative.

And, of course, we all sort of know the outline of...

You know, a man joins a whaling boat run by a sort of a one-legged Ahab captain who's obsessed on finding the white whale, but seems to sort of encompass almost everything in life aside from that.

But the thing with Moby Dick is I think I like about it, and I think it's in common with a lot of really great books, is its ability to shift within registers.

You know, Dickens has it as well, that thing of moving from the comic to the melancholy to the serious to the dramatic with no seams.

in it, as it were, I guess.

Donna Tartt has it as well, I think.

I had a big crush on Donna Tartt as well.

Her second novel, Little Friend, which I think was always really underrated.

Yeah.

Best thing, I'm going to have to go back to Philip Roth again.

And I did, look, I overdid it on Philip Roth because I read about seven books in a row.

I just couldn't sort of stop.

And American Pastoral of his, I think, is easily just sort of one of the most incredible books I've ever read.

you know like all roth characters it's a sort of a jewish migrant who's who's become embedded into the wasp world um swede level and he's but his daughter grows up and um falls in with terrorists effectively um the weatherman in the early 70s and she blows up a post office and kills a guy

But I think, again, with Roth, as I was saying before, is his ability to move within registers.

And he's one of the few writers I've read who can take you on a sort of a byway of like 100 pages before coming back to the main plot and you don't get distracted by sheer energy of his voice and sheer... He's just so articulate.