July mailbag! (preview)

Once each month, we answer reader questions in a mailbag. It's a paid subscriber exclusive! Here's a little taste of this month's edition. To read the whole thing, you can upgrade your subscription using the button below:

spudsfan asks:

What book would you like to see an epic first-time reader reaction thread to? (Inspired by the Pride & Prejudice one that’s currently ongoing.)

Lily: Couple ideas here:

• Wuthering Heights. For all the cultural cachet it's enjoyed for the last, say, forty years, I get the sense that this is a book that's not actually been read very often. And that's a shame, because it is, not to put too fine a point on it, fucking insane. Heathcliff spends way more of it pointing a gun at random bystanders than you might think.
• The Idiot (the Elif Batuman novel). Much less high drama than Wuthering Heights, but much more potential for cringe comedy/the unbearable angst of watching someone you find modestly relatable (because, let's be real here, if you're the kind of person to read books like The Idiot you probably are a little bit like Selin, its protagonist) make strange and unfortunate decisions over and over.
• Infinite Jest. Suffice it to say, it earns its length! (If you want to see a reader reaction series of a sort to Infinite Jest, look no further than the Episodes Book Club, coming to your inbox starting next week!)

Emily: The thing that's so delightful about the Pride & Prejudice thread is that it's someone reading a book that is so thoroughly subsumed into our culture that they get the fun of checking out the place where a lot of the tropes started – and even if you haven't read the book in question, you can play along at home. Like you might not specifically remember how various plots resolve or anything, but you've probably seen an adaptation or reimagining somewhere along the line, so waiting for the reader to get to your favorite parts is kind of a spectator sport, like a higher-brow version of book readers waiting for Game of Thrones viewers to get to the good parts. (Sidebar, but: My favorite romcom novel of the past... however long... is Alexandria Bellefleur's Written in the Stars, a book I didn't realize was a Pride & Prejudice riff despite its leads being named Elle and Darcy. So. I may not be the target for any of this.)

Anyway, my suggestions are the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible. I thought maybe I was joking, but I do think there's value in the idea of either, though Shakespeare would necessarily require some heavier lifting for a literature newbie. Blogging the Bible was a semi-pastime in the 2000s, and I feel like skeeting the Bible could follow just as well. Granted, everybody knows what happens to Romeo, Juliet, and Jesus Christ, but what about all the other guys? Do you know them?

If we just want novels, I always love when people fight their way through Moby-Dick or War and Peace, but I do think there would be some real juice in somebody reading Frankenstein or Dracula for the first time in this form. They're shorter, so clawing through them in a few weeks is totally possible. Both have been live-posted before, but those are foundational texts for a reason, and watching someone discover just how foundational in real time would be a blast.

Tobias Carroll asks:

Any thoughts on the Phoebe Bridgers "no cellphones" tour?

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