Bare Marriage

Episode 289: Why Fiction Makes You a Better Person (Why We Don't Hate ALL Books!)

• Sheila Gregoire • Season 8 • Episode 289

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In this season finale of the Bare Marriage Podcast, Rebecca, Joanna, Connor, and Josiah discuss the powerful benefits of reading fiction for personal growth, empathy development, and critical thinking. They share their personal journeys back to reading after University & adult life interrupted their childhood love of books, explore scientific research on how fiction affects the brain, and provide practical advice for getting back into reading. The episode concludes with an inspiring poem about women's value and calling by Porsche Vu (The Poetic Activist).

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Sheila

Welcome to the Bare Marriage podcast. I'm Sheila Wray Gregoire from Baremarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence based biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage. And today is actually the last episode of season eight of the Bare Marriage Podcast. We're going to be taking July off. And so, Keith and I are on vacation.

We are camping. I'm filming this before we leave. We are in the middle of camping in our RV and just relaxing and having some much needed downtime. And so I'm actually gonna turn this podcast over to Rebecca and Joanna, who are going to do something kind of different. They're going to talk about something that we talk about, on an almost daily basis, but isn't necessarily part of the normal research that we do, but it's just our love of fiction. And how we think fiction can enhance your life, enhance your marriage, and make you see things in a different way. And so as we're heading into the summer, when hopefully people will have more time to read fiction, no matter what is going on in the world, as the world is increasingly chaotic, fiction can often help point us the way through.

So without further ado, here are Rebecca and Joanna. 


Rebecca

All right, I am excited about this one because this is the series area where it's near the end of what we do for the year, and so we just get to kind of do whatever we want and no one gets to complain. So if you're sitting there wanting to complain because we're not talking about sex today, don't. You don't get to. That's not what this part of the season of the podcast is about. This is about Rebecca getting to do whatever Rebecca wants and everyone puts up with it.


Connor

That sounds good to me.


Rebecca

Yeah, exactly. So we're talking about fiction today. So I have Joanna and Josiah Sawatsky on the podcast with me and Connor. So we've got this whole group of us who you normally don't get to hear from, and we are going to talk about books in a very different way than we normally talk about books. Isn't that right, Joanna?


Joanna

Indeed


Rebecca

For anyone who's not in the Patreon, Joanna is currently working on some papers that have to do with, as all of our papers do - Let's be real - That have to do with a lot of these teachings that we find in, nonfiction evangelical marriage books. And so we are constantly on the phone talking about books. And it is often, oh, my gosh, this is terrible.

So we're gonna have a little more fun today. 


Joanna

Yeah. Yep, yep. It's been so fun. And also, the four of us all read Brandon Sanderson's, latest book, that came out in December last year. Like at the same time. And it was so fun. We had like a group chat with who was at what page so that you knew what spoilers you could discuss. It's been very fun, 


Rebecca

But all four of us were mentioning that, you know, we were all avid readers in childhood and high school. And then like many people, you know, you start actual real adult life and you just stop reading. Maybe it's because you're in university and giant books are now causing you to have palpitations and sweats because of exam season.

But whatever it is, you just stop reading and then it's hard to get back into it. But over the last- Josiah is the first one who really got back into actually just tearing through books again. But like Joanna and Connor and I kind of all really got back into it pretty recently. Joanna has been reading nonfiction for forever, but over the last few years, each of us has managed to kind of actually get back to that love of reading that we had in childhood and adolescence. And so let's just talk about how that happened, I guess.


Connor

Yeah, I think, I think I can just about place it exactly. For me, it was about a year and a half ago because it was a couple of months before Christmas, I'd started getting back into reading a couple of smaller books, and I'd read the first few wheel of Time books over a few years before that. But then we read through our Christmas break, and I remember having my Goodreads account at the beginning of the new year and being like, okay, I want to set my goal for 30 books to read this year, and I ended up finishing over 40 books in that time frame. And it was just yeah, it was great. And I was reading that many books. I started getting into all kinds of stuff that I hadn't normally explored. I've always been a big fantasy guy, but I started getting really into sci fi as a genre which just wasn't me before, but I started to realize, oh, actually, sci fi isn't just fantasy, but without magic, and instead it's technology. It generally tends to delve more into a lot of really interesting and complex theoretical questions about... society and ethics and all these really interesting questions. It's often more of a hypothetical exercise rather than like, an escapism.


Rebecca

Yeah. There's rarely a sci fi world that is an escapist fantasy.


Connor

Yeah, it's normally, everything you know, but we've gone further and it's worse.


Josiah

Yeah. And for me, It has been a bit of a slow burn, like, I quit reading basically when I hit law school, I think because I was reading 500 pages a week for three years. And then I got back into reading very slowly. I guess it would've been... it took me being laid off, I think, at the beginning of Covid to kind of get back in.

I think, like Connor, I can pinpoint it pretty closely. And all of a sudden I had all kinds of free time on my hands, looking for a new job, obviously. But, sitting on the deck and trying to potty train the two year old in the summer and just sitting up there waiting for her to decide she wanted to try on the little plastic toilet. So, that was when I started getting back into reading. And, like, Connor, I mean, I've been always a both kind of fantasy, sci fi, guy that's been my niche, and I haven't... I don't branch out from that particularly far usually.


Connor

I think one thing that really one thing that really helped me, with reading as an adult, is certainly the fact that I did have some experience with reading as an adult. In my university days, I had like no money, and so there wasn't really anything to do for entertainment. And I'd moved across the country for university, so I didn't have a big social group yet, which meant that whenever I wasn't studying, I would just go to chapters and I would sit down and read for hours on end.


Rebecca

Oh, that is legit what we did for dates for a while. We would go to chapters and we would read the books and then put them back, which I know is... maybe some people will be mad at that, but it was like accepted. 


Connor

They had a reading table.


Rebecca

They did, like you were allowed to read. And then if you really liked the book, then when you had money buy... Yeah. What about you, Joanna? 


Joanna

Yeah. So, in I think it was 2020, I don't know, I feel like that's when it was or it was 2020 or 2021. I realized that I had a problem, and my problem was politics podcasts, and that I had to break up with them.

And simultaneously, Josiah's cousin was posting about the books that she was reading. And I was like, oh, I am listening to a lot of audio content. If I switched that to books, I would both feel better because I wasn't drinking out of the firehose of politics podcasts, and I would actually read some books. So that got me very much back into nonfiction reading.

And I was still reading, like comfort, classic books that I'm very familiar with that I have known forever. Those have always been really good. But I had an experience between the birth of my two kiddos, where I sat down to read one of L.M. Montgomery's and books as like one of the Anne of Green Gables books, but it wasn't the first one.

It's like mid series and Anne was just, frankly, in that book, not a relatable character. Like she always knew exactly what to do, and she always had exactly the right thing in the situation, which isn't how Anne is portrayed at the beginning. But the problem was, you were reading a later, a later Anne Buck. Yeah, and it wasn't... I didn't like it because it was unrealistic and it wasn't that I didn't like it. It was that it made me feel very judged because I was not perfect I guess. And then I was like, okay, girly, she is a figment. She is fiction. You do not get to feel bad about yourself because you're comparing yourself to a fictional character who's characterization has changed in a way that doesn't feel realistic across the series.

Like you're cool, please chill for the love. Chill. So I chill and I just didn't read fiction for a long time. And then in the last year, Rebecca said, okay, you have to read Mistborn. I read a book called The Mountain in the Sea as well, which is a sci fi book about sentient octopuses, which is fabulous and then Rebecca's like-


Connor

Oh, don't give me too many spoilers on that, because I do currently have that one sitting on the bedside table. About two chapters in.


Joanna

It's real good. That's all I'll say. It's really good. It made me feel so much better about AI. Weirdly not because it made me feel better, but because I felt like I understood what could happen. And yes, that is from a book about sentient octopuses. Octopi? I don't know.


Connor

Octopi. 


Joanna

Octopi. And then I read Mistborn and I went, oh, this is very fun. I really liked it. It felt like I had binged a really good movie. I had a fabulous time. I think I read all three books in a week, which was not responsible, but it was fun. They're long books. There they are long books. They're like 500 plus pages each. And I just went through them. And then I read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke.

And that was really when the floodgates opened. I went, oh, okay, fiction and I are now really buds. This is a very- like I really like Sanderson, but I wasn't like, oh, I'm going to read this forever. This is the best thing this ever happened. But it was the Mountain in the Sea and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell that was just like, yes, this is what fiction can do for me. I love this, this is so fun. 


Rebecca

My reentry into reading is a lot less wholesome, because I got back into reading because specifically, I hate-read a book. So I was told about... And I am so sorry, by the way, I am the kind of person who, if I hate about you love, that doesn't change how I feel about you, because I'm about to name which book I hate-read. And it's a very popular book. I read A Court of Thorns and Roses, because I had a friend who said, I don't get this book, but I don't typically read fantasy. And you love fantasy and specifically love, like, all that kind of Celtic fae stuff. And so I don't you read this and tell me if this is just me not getting the genre or if this actually is not very good. And again, all the power to you if you love these books, love you. You enjoy that bliss. I read these books and I could not stand it. I thought it was... the main character was whiny, the the conflict... There wasn't a real conflict. Everything was created to justify previous author actions. The plot holes were... Swiss cheese doesn't begin to describe it. I actually ended up playing a game while reading it because of how everything was just described as the most beautiful This or the most magical That, and there wasn't actual descriptions.

It was all just these superfluous hyperbolas that weren't attached to any concrete examples. I actually played a game with Connor where I said, I'm going to stop once this could NOT be Belleville, Ontario. Where we live, and it got me to 42% through the book before it actually could not be Belville, Ontario.


Connor

Because it's this fey, magical realm that's supposed to be like, so alien and weird, and the descriptions of the flora and the fauna are like-


Rebecca

Lilac bushes. Like our Tim Hortons has a lilac bush behind the dumpster in Bellville. We live in flower Paradise.


Connor

Oh, it's spring right now. I can look out my window and it matches the description that you're reading in the book.


Rebecca

Exactly. And I've read a lot of books in fae realms, and they are not all like that. And then I really just did not understand what this protagonist's problem was. I didn't feel like she was acting rationally and not saying you can't have unreliable narrators. I actually love the unreliable narrator, but this wasn't an unreliable narrator.

This was like, oh, this is not a well thought through character. So I really disliked the book. Again, all the power to you if you loved it. But what that did was it lit a fire in my belly and it's like, I can't have that be the last book that I've read. I have to do something better.

And so then I started getting into other books just to prove that there are better books out there than the one that I read and was very, very angry at. And, I think I read ACOTAR in August, September. And then I think by December I had read 50 more books or something like that.


Connor

That sounds about right.


Rebecca

And then the next year and, the next year, I think I read almost 50. We read like, like if you include the books that I read to the kids. So. Yeah. So that's my story. I got back into it out of spite and, a feeling of just wanting to prove something wrong, which is very on brand, I will say, but that is, that was my actual reintroduction. Was someone asking me to read it to know if they were feeling that they or just didn't like the genre or if it actually didn't have good writing. And I'm like, oh no, there's not good writing here. And you are allowed to like books that don't have great writing, but I, I can't, I can't, I couldn't get over it.

So that's all of our stories of how we got back into it. All of us definitely enjoy the fantasy realm. I think I much more out of all of us. I'm the one who's most likely to want to pick up a good modern fiction romance kind of thing. I think because I like a lot more of the emotional catharsis in books.

But also very much on the sci fi fantasy realm. That's probably 98% of what I read. That's the yeah, that's how all of us got back into it. And I think that for me, a big thing that I've noticed with all of us is that time of your life, especially in like the university years where you're having to read so much if you went to university or did something huge, like, yeah, law school with like 500 pages a week to get through, it's so easy to burn out on reading and then just not do it.

But we have really enjoyed going back into it because there are real benefits. And so we wanted to talk about some of those. And that means looking at research. So I found some studies - because we always have to find studies - on what reading fiction actually does for you. Because you know our audience, like the people who are listening, are people who typically have been raised in a lot of evangelical Christian worlds where what I've noticed is it's really common for people to read a ton of books a year, and all of them are nonfiction, right? Like you're reading a million devotionals and theological books on stuff and all this different stuff, and we're like.


Connor

You know, written self-help books and like, motivation books and how to hack your tidying schedule books and...


Rebecca

Yes, which are fantastic. We write nonfiction, not dogging nonfiction, but when it comes to actually, like, expanding how we understand the world and how we relate to each other, fiction has some serious benefits. So there's one study which was really cool, where they actually hooked people up to an fMRI while they were reading fiction to look at what their brains were doing.

And, they had them look at, two types of fiction: vivid versus abstract; and social versus non social passages. So analyzes demonstrated that participants who read fiction most often also showed the strongest social cognition performance, so their brains would have had stronger responses to an in like social cognition pathways when they were reading said passages. But pretty much what this study found, which is so interesting, is that it seems that as people are reading fiction, their brains are, in essence, going through the scenarios as if it were happening to them.

And it works out those social cognition muscles. So what they found is that people who read fiction have a stronger prefrontal cortex reaction to reading the social, cognitive, social cognition, abstract, excerpts, which shows that they have strengthened those pathways through their reading of fiction is what the, hypothesis is. So in essence, it's working out the social and critical thinking parts of your brain when you are reading fiction in a way that doesn't happen when you're reading nonfiction or just not reading at all.

And that is incredibly interesting because we talk a lot about how to increase empathy, how to change your mind, how to think critically about things, how to not get sucked into, frankly, these toxic kind of teachings and being able to have the ability to take different perspectives, to have better theory of mind, to engage in more critical reasoning. Those are all things that will help, that will help you not get duped. I'll be very honest.


Connor

And I also think this hypothesis is great news for introverts, because it means you can just have your alone quiet time reading books and you're not... You're not necessarily totally atrophying your social cognitive skills. You can still be working those out and engaging those all alone in your little reading nook.


Josiah

Yes. And we've been telling stories for as long as we've been human. Like sitting around the fire and stories are how we make sense of the world from when we didn't know how it made sense. That's what mythology is, is it's a telling of the universe to try and make the things that we don't understand or we didn't understand make sense.

And so it's it makes total sense to me that story would be beneficial to figuring out social connections and cues and developing that level of empathy.


Rebecca

Yeah. 100%. On that note, there's another study that that kind of ties into that that we found that compares the effects of fiction and nonfiction as well. And what it found was nonfiction is very great to read for its directness. And to, in essence, just give you information. Right. It's a great information medium, however, fiction was found to uniquely drive critical evaluations through the subtle and circuitous ways it presented ideas, the complication of veracity, as well as giving rich and deep understandings of the real world. So what this study found is that fiction reading experiences are connected with critical thinking in ways distinct to nonfiction, and as such, could be an avenue for promoting critical thinking across society through public library provision. Now, I know that, when we talk about the benefits of fiction, the thing that's tricky about it is that a lot of times you get the benefits because you're reading stuff from people you wouldn't normally listen to.

Right? Like I think about if you're saying, oh, boy, I read all sorts of fiction and it's all from my very specific small Christian bubble. You're going to have some benefits, it seems. But are we going to have all the benefits of taking different perspectives and engaging in critical thinking and looking at how things are more complicated than they seem to be on the surface?

So, like I'm just saying, I'm not sure I got those benefits from reading all of those Amish romance novels when I was 14. 


Joanna

I got sex from, from Lori Wick. So, you know, I don't know. To each their own, but genuinely, her books were doing an okay job. She was mostly good. She had a few things that weren't correct, but she did do a pretty good job, if you were an evangelical young lady, I will... I would like to speak up in defense of Auntie Lori. But that is absolutely right. Those books are just not going to give you the same benefits as reading from, a more just diverse group of authors with a variety of life experiences.


Connor

A variety of life experiences, and also a variety of writings styles that can challenge what you're reading. Like, some authors may, some authors may present varying degrees of like, unreliable narrator perspectives or, you know, some books will have mixed character perspectives where you're jumping around between a bunch of different things and looking at one event from a number of very different perspectives.

Some authors may write just from one person's perspective. Where you really get to dive deep into that one person's psychology. And you also have different kinds of prose structures, like some people are going to be a lot more poetic in their writing, and it's up to you to parse through some of the some of the subtle metaphor that may be layered in behind there, whereas others may be a lot more direct and utilitarian with their writing style.

And it's an exercise in how well can you how well can you take just this paragraph of description here and convert that into a mental image. And it's yeah, different writing styles, different authors, different stories are going to present a lot of different exercises for your brain to go through, while also giving a variety that can make it a lot more interesting and engaging to read a lot.


Josiah

And it's interesting how different media portrayals of the same story do things really differently. You mentioned seeing into a character's psyche and one of the series that immediately came to mind for me is The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.


Rebecca

Yes.


Josiah

Because the movies are great movies. They're fantastic, actually. I really enjoy them. They're good. They're good as adaptations of a book. But I remember distinctly watching the first movie when it came out and going, this is missing... Like Katniss, the main character in The Hunger Games lives inside her head and you get the running commentary of her thoughts throughout the book as she's trying to sort out what is going on, and you miss that in the movie.

It's still a great movie I really enjoy that movie, but the book is fantastic because you get to see the thought process and the angst and the it's really so it's interesting that different media portrayals of the same story can be so different in their effect.


Connor

Yeah, and I think that becomes even more pronounced with A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Which is one of the follow up books that Suzanne Collins wrote to The Hunger Games, because there you are taking the perspective of a bad guy. Like you're in Snow's head and it's like, I haven't seen the movie that they did, but reading through the book, I can see, like if I were to just look at his actions as they're described from an outside perspective, he can actually be a very sympathetic character and a lot of times and is often doing like the heroic thing.

But there's this constant running back track of what he's thinking in his head as he's doing this thing. And if you're paying attention to that, you're like, no, he is just rotten to the core. Like he's rotten deep down on a fundamental level. And maybe had things gone differently, he could have changed. But you can see his motivations and you can see what he's thinking as he's doing this thing, and he's thinking about how to use this person that he's helping out.

He's thinking about, like, how is this going to impact me? And it's just very interesting.


Rebecca

Yeah, that was a big complaint about the most recent movie. Exactly. Because it made Snow seem very, sympathetic and like, he could have been a good guy, but people just didn't understand, or something. And the book was not like that. And I think you're right, Josiah. Like getting the running monologue. I had the same feeling about The Hunger Games.

Same thing. Love those movie adaptations. I think they are objectively some of the better movie adaptations that I've ever seen of books. But it's just a different movie because it ends up being a little bit more focused on the games versus on the horror of the games, because you're not in their head.


Josiah

Yeah, I think that's entirely accurate.


Joanna

Yeah. And I think the other big thing with fiction is that it lets you work out stuff that could sound trite or just really big concepts in a way that makes it actually about people. So like we say all the time in our books and in podcasts, like everything you've ever needed to know, you learned in kindergarten, right?

Women are people too. Men are people too, right? These sorts of things. But it can be... It sounds awfully trite to just say it. It's hard to understand how does this actually relate to real life? And I realized this as I read Brandon Sanderson's Oath Bringer. He has... essentially everything is about what's the most important step that a man can take.

And I won't get into what the step is because that's a bigger spoiler. But it ends up being a message. And again, it is trite, like if you just say yes. Yeah. Embroider that on a pillow and stick it onto any woman's couch and it's like just yeah, it's a platitude. And yet the way that it's worked out in the story, you realize how profound and important these sorts of ideas actually are.

And it was really meaningful to me in a way. Like just reading the sentence on a pillow or painted on someone's wall... I don't know, wouldn't have really done anything for me. But in the book, it was very impactful because of the fact that you actually saw somebody living it out. And similarly, Rebecca and I have had many theological conversations through the years, and then I've gone, "crap, I thought I was being so original, and it's just from Narnia."

The extent to which Lewis was just like, I am done writing apologetics. I'm just going to write it in a kids story, and then they'll get it. Yes, exactly. All these grown ups are useless. Let's just tell it to kids. They understand.


Connor

Yeah. Another big thing that I've found in particular is, reading has also been a great way to work out or to gain experience with some big emotions, especially for me because I grew up with great parents. You know, I love my mom and my dad. They're fantastic. But there wasn't a lot of emotional discussion in our family, particularly when it comes to big emotions, like big negative emotions, like grief and anger and, and a lot of these things.

And so it never... Growing up and becoming an adult, I became a very non-confrontational person because it, it never really felt safe to go to places where, like, you can't really experience those big emotions in your life without something big and negative happening. Like, when do you get angry? When you've gotten in a big fight. When do you get really sad? When you've lost someone or something.

Like there's, there's a scary cost to these big emotions. But as I got older and older, I started to really like the emotional catharsis of approaching these emotions in a book. A book that can really make me feel something powerfully negative and give me an opportunity to experience those big and very human emotions in a very safe place where there's no real world risk or harm or loss has been a very big thing.

So I intentionally seek out, books and media that can really make me feel some of the extents, some of the extremes of the human experience that, frankly, my life just isn't set up to bring to me. I haven't really set my life up to expose me to a whole lot of anger, retribution, grief. I like my life stable and happy, but I get to experience these big emotions nevertheless, through these profound works of art that people are creating and sharing with the world.


Josiah

It's interesting you say that, Connor, because I think there is a school of thought in Christianity, and it actually goes back as far as I say to Augustine, who was really critical, of reading, of particularly secular literature, arguing there could be distraction from spiritual truth. And, I remember. I don't remember when I read I was young when I read this, I was a voracious reader and read just about anything I get my hands on as a kid, but it was in confessions.

And, I remember him saying, and I'm probably butchering the quote, but something to the effect of he feels how wretched he is when he feels the emotions that he feels when he's reading a book. Right? Because it's distracting him from, from God. But I think there is such importance and, and, and avenues to grow as a person by doing that. And yes, of course, anything can be done to excess. But ultimately the experience of the human condition and bettering ourselves and, and being able to start working things out that we don't like. You say that you don't necessarily have an opportunity to until the big scary thing happens. And reading is practice for that.

And seeing the emotions of the characters is practice for that. And it's I mean, it's... I'm reading a kid's fantasy series to my girls now. It's called The Wings of Fire. It's about dragons. But the characters go through these huge events to scary things, and my four year old loves it and hates it at the same time.

Like, she will be reading and then she'll run away and hide under a blanket because it's too much, and then she'll come back and she wants to know what happened and how did they work it out. And it's it. It's this, this intense emotion, especially for her, as she hears this story and is putting herself in these like, literally, it these character shoes and going, I can't, I can't, I can't handle this. It's too overwhelming. But then also realizing it comes out okay in the end. And the process by which that happens... she's loved that. And it's been so magical to see my kids engaging with these stories in a way that is formative and is, I think, helpful for them to look at the bigger things in the world.

And when they see big, scary things happening around them, they can go, okay, this is kind of like that. Or we can have conversations that I can then relate things that happen that they see around them to things that have happened in fiction. They okay. So it's a lens through which we can interpret the world, I think is another really important thing about fiction.


Rebecca

Something that I've noticed with our kid, too, with Alex. He's a voracious reader as well. He is five years old. He reads constantly. But he started reading Junie B Jones books, and I've been having lots of conversations with him because Junie B Jones is not a good kid. Junie B Jones calls people Meanie stupid head.


Connor

And one character she refers to as "the boy that I could probably beat up."


Rebecca

Like she's not a kind of protagonist that you want your child to emulate, right? And it's been very helpful for my little boy who needs some help understanding how to tell who you should emulate and who you shouldn't. Without immediately putting people in in the boxes of good kid and bad kid. Jones is not a bad kid.

She's just a kid who struggles to know what's appropriate. And, and it's been really helpful for that social skill development with Alex and being like, okay. Yeah. So that's what calling names is. And we're not doing that. So I think also, I remember growing up, a lot of people were very picky about what books their kids read because they were worried about bad influences.

But I know for myself personally, I read so many books where the protagonist was not a good person necessarily, and it helped so much. Because I think that we need to not be afraid of being exposed to stuff that's not like cookie cutter perfect all the time.


Connor

I think it also, again, going back to that idea of working out social cognitive muscles, I think also can really help with, especially when you're young, it can help you with this idea of developing empathy with someone who maybe you don't like or someone you know isn't a good person, or someone who you can see through their internal thoughts and their internal struggles, that they are a good person or they're trying to be a good person, but there are a lot of externalizing behaviors that make it difficult for them to be around other people and being able to develop empathy and understanding for the internal struggle that a character like that might be going through can be really helpful as a kid and as an adult realizing that, yeah, you know, I don't like this kid or I don't like this person, but there's a very real chance that there's stuff going on beneath the surface that actually makes them a lot more empathetic and relatable. And this is still a person with their own challenges and struggles who's worthy of dignity and respect.


Rebecca

Yeah. So as we're wrapping up, let's talk about how to get back into reading or how to gain those reading muscles if you've lost them.


Connor

And there's one thing I want to start off with that actually came to mind as I was listening to everyone else's stories, something that I think has probably been instrumental for most of us. (To Rebecca) Yours was anger. Yours was a different thing, or hate reading yours was a different thing. But for a lot of us, I think it comes down to giving yourself space or being at a time in your life when there is space to be bored.

Because I think it's really easy when you have some spare time to fill it up with social media scrolling or video games and, or anything like that. And I think for me, one of the big things was I reached a point where I was starting to get a bit more energy, and my kids were getting a bit older.

It wasn't so drained all the time. And I reached a point where, you know, I like to game in the evening, but sometimes I'm just not really in the mood and I would kind of make myself do it anyways. And I reached a point where I'm like, what if I just let myself be bored with playing a video game?

If it's not what I really want to be doing, what could I be doing instead? And then you read a book.


Rebecca

Yeah. Yep. And I think that we have so many distractions all around us that actively harm us. Like the studies on social media, guys are not very good.


Connor

They're bad. They're straight up bad.


Rebecca

The benefits from social media are the ones that actually connect you to communities. Just the doom scrolling, the for-you pages. That kind of stuff. It's not good for you. It's not good for us. And so learning how to put limits on ourselves and have boundaries for the sake of health, is good. But was it you, Joanna, who read like the dopamine nation book or whatever.

Like we do live in a society as much as that's horribly trite, we live in a society that, is just so flashy and it's taken the work out of fun because the fun happens to you, right? The dopamine hits happen to you. You don't have to go and do any work to seek it out. And that's not good for us to be living passively, in that way.

And so reading can be a great way for you to kind of like, work those muscles and understanding that it's probably going to feel hard, even if it's a book that you think is good, is a healthy thing, I think to expect. 


Joanna

And also you can dial up and down the difficulty. So, having read lots of books like Brandon Sanderson, he writes his books so that they are easy to read.

That is generally a goal that he has. I also read Ursula Le Guin for the first time last year, and went, oh, this is amazing. This is also harder to read. I have to yeah, yeah, people were smarter in the 60s because they didn't have YouTube shorts. Yeah.


Connor

Yeah.


Joanna

Right. And so just knowing like okay, I also I still I love narrative history. I think that narrative history, if you're going to read nonfiction, gives you a lot of the same benefits of fiction because you're getting into somebody who's had an understanding what happened. But I am also a giant nerd. And so I found this professor out of the University of Oklahoma who does histories of infectious diseases and how plagues have impacted the societies across the world.

There are amazing books. I could read them really easily at ten in the morning, but I sat down to try to read it after work and taking care of the kids, and I went. I just simply can't. I can't read this intense book right now, but I could listen to the audiobook and I would really like to read this book.

I really enjoy what I've read so far, but I'm not going to be able to get through it. If it's a print book. Well, then I got the audiobook right. Meet yourself where you are. So if you need to read an easier book, read an easier book. If you need to do an audiobook, awesome. People who tell you that audiobooks don't count as reading are wrong.

Just FYI. And so do what works for you, in your situation to find what you enjoy.


Josiah

And recognize that it will probably ebb and flow. For me, I got back into reading and I read, quite a bit during the early like the first half of 2020. And then life got crazy and I didn't read this much, and I got back into it last year at the beginning of last year, because Wind and Truth, Stormlight Archive, Brandon Sanderson's fifth book, was coming out, and November, and I wanted to do a read through of his entire Cosmere before that came out. And that was my goal for that for that year. And so I don't remember how many books that is. It's like 40 plus.


Rebecca

It's a lot.


Josiah

So but the that was my goal for that year and that was really kickstarted me. And now like, like Joanna says, there are books that I- Find stuff that you'd like to read. And if you're not enjoying a book, put it down and read something else. Unless you like hate-reading it. Like, you know, there's nothing wrong with that.


Josiah

But if you're not, if you're not finding enjoyment in the experience, find something that you do like, right. Don't feel bad because you don't like this book that your friend recommended or that everybody's talking about. Find your niche.


Joanna

Among the four of us, we have widely different taste. There are books that I love that Rebecca hates, books that Josiah loves the Connor hates, etc. Like there are many Venn diagrams here. 


Rebecca

I recommended Joanna, a book that when she read it, she put it down after three chapters. Like absolutely not. I had wax poetic about this author for like a year, and Joanna wanted that book three chapters. So again, I do want to emphasize, just because I know that the fandom is so zealous, if you love ACOTAR, I still love you. Okay? I just I just need to make this very clear, you know?


Connor

But like also with Joanna's point about meet yourself where you're at. That's why I always have, like 3 to 5. And I try not to go above five. I always have 3 to 5 books that I'm working on, and I'll have them in different mediums, and I'll typically have them as like very different kinds of books in terms of like difficulty to read.

So I can choose what to read based on where I'm at. Like, maybe I don't have time to sit down and get cozy with an actual book, but I've got 5 to 10 minutes, and so I've got my book on my phone that I can read through, or I'm driving somewhere or walking and I can listen to my audiobook, or I have a book that's a very straightforward, very efficient prose book, telling a an interesting and gripping but not particularly challenging story that I can read for when I just need a bit of a, when I just need a bit of like a power fantasy escape trip.

And then maybe I've got a more challenging book that really experiments with narrative conventions and can get fairly arcane in some of its language, or that will oscillate wildly between a descriptive prose and just a burst of poetry. And so having those different things that I'm working on at any given time means that I'm not limited to,

"I could kind of go for reading right now, but the book that I'm working on, I just don't have the energy for it." I give myself options.


Rebecca

My big thing that I've done this year is I got into horrible slump, and I decided to reread my favorite series from when I was 11. And don't knock kids books, guys like I think, wasn't it Louis who pretty much was like, who is like... I forget what it was.


Joanna

Yeah. So he said, you're going to get to be too old to read fairy books, and then you will get old enough to read them again. Yeah. And then you should read them. And it's like, yeah, it absolutely happened. 


Rebecca

As we were talking about doing this podcast, Joanna and I talked about reading Charlotte's Web to our kids and about how every- If you haven't read Charlotte's Web in a decade, you need to read Charlotte's Web again. It's so good. 


Joanna

I was just looking at my book list of like, why did I start reading again? And I lied earlier. It was partly those amazing fiction books that I read that I absolutely loved, but the other thing that I was doing at the same time is on my list of books I read with the kids that I finish them are Charlotte's Web, a ton of Narnia books.

We have been on a huge Beverly Cleary kick this year, and I don't know how I never read Ramona, but that has been amazing. Like, there's such good books and not just like, oh, they're good kids books, but no, no, they are great books. Like, you read it as a parent and you're like, oh, Mr. Quimby, and Mrs. Quimby.

Like I have had a hard couple of weeks and I was like, oh, you're going through what Mrs. Quimby went through in this book? 


Rebecca

Yes, exactly. Like this is a thing, I think that people, not kids books, but a lot of the classics for kids, like, a lot of these just they're not kids books. They're just good books that are accessible to children. Right? Like, you get to read those as a 35 year old and just enjoy it like.


Connor

Like Lord of the Rings


Rebecca

Haha Yeah. Okay.


Josiah

Yeah I can say if you want to, if you want to read the Gwyn, read Wizard of Earthsea.

Like Wind Gateway. It's it's. Yeah. And basically that's that's the pioneer of the Ya fantasy like that, that is kickstarted. That's what kickstarted everything. This whole Ya fantasy machine that we have now, it's a great book. So and it's an easy read


Connor

Looking forward to going back to reread.


Rebecca

And it's short too. Yeah.


Josiah

Yeah. It's not long. It's an easy read.


Rebecca

But we get a lot of questions about like how especially from parents who ask, how do I raise my boys in particular to not get sucked in to like, you know, this anti empathy male power kind of...


Josiah

Manosphere.


Rebecca

Thank you. Manosphere. How do I how do I help my boys stay kind and empathetic and open to, you know, other perspectives and I will say there are so many harrowing statistics about girls literacy rate versus boys literacy rate. So if you take one, there are two things I want you to take from this podcast. We're going to wrap it up in like two minutes.

But there's two things I want you to take away from this is that if you're not reading fiction, try to figure out how you can start to read fiction again, because evidence shows it's really good for you and it's really good for you in the ways that it allows you to work out big issues, engaging critical thought, gain empathy...

But also it's a it's a training ground for spotting narcissism, for seeing when people are being unreliable narrators, figuring out when you can trust people, when you can't. But also don't just think that reading is for girls because we have a real crisis of boys are not reading anymore. It is actually terrifying and shocking.

Don't let your boys especially grow up without reading books, because if you're worried about raising sons and we just get so many questions about how do I raise them to be empathetic? And they want a nonfiction book about being a man of God... that is not going to help


Josiah

Yeah, he doesn't want to read that.


Rebecca

Even if he does, that's actually a red flag that it's probably... that that we aren't engaging in a lot of these things like the, the studies that I have looked at are in essence like if you want to have someone be well-rounded and empathetic, get your kids reading the classics and don't have boys only read boy books, right?

Charlotte's web is a boy and a girl book. It's an everyone book. The Secret Garden is an everyone book. Little women is an everyone book. Like these books are everyone books and if you can, if you can just focus on having your children, especially your sons, just enjoy reading fiction and getting lost in these stories. You'll be in such a better position.


Josiah

I was going to say, a book that has a male power fantasy character that is so deeply in his own head about doing the right thing. And Connor knows them well. R. A. Salvatore's, Forgotten Realms about Drizzt Do'urden. Yeah. They're dark. They're twisty, but they're not. I don't know, like, I don't think they're terrifically inappropriate. They're appropriate for YA. I would say, I, I grew up, I grew up reading them and, he like, struggles deeply with what it is to do the right thing and to be a good person deeply struggles with that. And. That actually, I it was formative for me to read those. Yeah. Because you and he's just a cool character.


00;50;21;15 - 00;50;38;22

Speaker 4

Like, he's going around slicing up orcs and, you know, it's it was exploring dungeons and fighting dragons, like, it's cool, but yeah, it's, he really thinks really, really deeply. And he's. It can be campy for sure. But.


Connor

Like some sometimes some of the moralistic messages are a bit trite, but it's...


Josiah

Yeah, but again, there's, there's a reason that some of the things write these things are trite. And it's because they're true. Yeah, yeah. So I, I if you're looking for something I think that's for boys. I think that's a great place to start because this is a character who thinks deeply about what is right and what is wrong and how to find his place in a world that doesn't accept him. And comes to it comes to a good conclusion. And so, yeah.


Connor

Yeah, that's actually a really good point. But I think another thing is, you know, you might be concerned with like, okay, well, which what books should I let like, what kind of fiction books should I let my boys read? I wouldn't be too much focused on every single book that they're reading, and making sure that they're getting that empathetic, well-rounded, experience from each book.

Rather just focus on getting, like, making sure they're reading a variety of books. There might be a couple of books that don't really work out those muscles, but as long as that's one of several books that they're reading that provide a bunch of different competing perspectives and requiring a bunch of different kinds of emotional and critical thinking skills, that's what's going to lead to well-roundedness, not trying to specifically curate or reading list for your son based on like, oh, I think this one would be good. And I think this one might be bad.


Rebecca

Yeah, don't make reading homework, guys. Just make like. But this thing is, it's like anything else. You can have a balanced diet while still having some fluffy things that are just for fun.


Josiah

Yeah, right. And engage in conversation with your kids, right? Like, yeah, it's ask them what they're reading. Ask them. My kids love to talk about the books that they are reading with us. I mean, I'm reading it in conjunction with them and that I'm sure will change as they get older. Right. But engaging with your children and not, "what are you reading?" But, "hey, tell me about the book that you're reading." Like, what do you what do you think is exciting about it? What do you think is, what do you think the character main character is struggling with? And maybe, maybe read it alongside them or. Or don't if they find if the kids find that weird, but or maybe read it secretly and then you can ask anyway, I don't know, but, just generally engaging with your kids and treating them as other people is helpful, I think.


Connor

If you need help with that, try reading books.


Rebecca

Haha, Yeah, it might help with your empathy and your ability to take perspective and gain those social skills. No, but that's all we have for you this week. And thank you so much for listening to the podcast that we just wanted to do for fun. And I hope that you feel inspired to pick up a really good book this summer.


Sheila

I'm so grateful for my team. Thank you guys for running this conversation, but also just for everything that they bring to Bare Marriage. This is not a one person show. Even though I tend to be the face of it. Joanna is our stats person, and I couldn't do any of this without her. I'm constantly emailing her and texting her, saying, okay, do we have any stats on this or have we considered writing this?

And she's always coming up with great new stuff for me, and she's working on a whole bunch of papers right now that we're just so excited to, to see, get published. Hopefully in the next little while. Rebecca writes our Friday newsletter that goes out to, I think, about 45,000 people and more people read that than read me every week.

Like, it's wild how many people read our newsletter. She has an incredible open rate. So if you haven't subscribed yet, the link is in the podcast notes to do that, because she's always quite insightful. And she says things in that that you won't see anywhere else. And of course, they both are coauthors for Great Sex rescue for she deserves Better.

Joanna helped with the stats on Good Girl's Guide to Great Sex, Good Guys guide to Great Sex, and on the Marriage You want. So as we as we wrap up season eight, you know this is the season that the Marriage You Want launched. And we spent a lot of time on that book. And honestly, I'm so happy. I feel like, oh, I feel like a lot of peace now.

Like I've accomplished something big because when I sat down, when we were writing The Great Sex Rescue and I read the bestselling marriage books in evangelicalism, and so many of them were teaching such horrible stuff, and I could see that they weren't really based on what is healthy. And I thought, we have to do better than this.

Like, this is crazy. What are pastors going to give people like, that's Christian but is actually healthy and there wasn't anything. And now I feel like that we gave it. This is the book that's healthy. This is the book that when couples read it in the premarital period, it's going to help them. It's not going to hurt them.

And that shouldn't even be a thing. But it is like we shouldn't even have to worry about that. But we do because evangelicals done so much harm in this area. So, I'm just so glad that book is out there. It's available for study guides for- there's a study guide that goes with it for premarital counseling, for group studies, even for you to work through with your spouse.

And yeah, I just think it's time for something healthy. And I'm glad that we got that done. I feel really good going into the summer knowing that we accomplished something really big. And I'm proud of it. I'm really proud of it. And as I'm thinking of the summer, you know, at the end of each season and as we go into sort of more of a period of downtime, you always get more time to reflect.

And I'm, I'm just so grateful for the people who send me encouraging notes constantly, who tell me how our work has changed them. And there are so many of you on a daily basis, just even seeing your comments, and your stories in the comments and on threads, it's, it really does matter to me because sometimes we can feel very alone doing this.

And, you know, we don't get everything right either. We're still trying to figure a lot of this stuff out. And so thank you to those of you who just had a lot of patience with us and grace with us. You know, like if we say something slightly wrong, you know, like, "yeah, I know where their heart is."

And that's just that's what I want to be able to do on this podcast and on the blog is just be real and be who I am. And not have to not have to second guess myself all the time. And I can do that because you guys always show such grace to me. And let me be real.

Because if I couldn't be real, I couldn't keep doing this, honestly. And so thank you first for showing up, for giving us your great comments and feedback and help. And of course, I love the way that you can encourage us all the time is by becoming one of our monthly donors. It really does make a huge difference, especially as Joanna is working on so many papers right now and we're looking forward- We paid some money and some to get actual videos created by actual an actual videographer instead of doing it cheap ourselves. So, that's coming out, that'll be out the fall. So, yeah, we just want to really make a dent. We want to break into some of the areas we haven't broken into yet. And so your money helps us be able to do that.

So if you like what we do and you want us to able to spread our message, you can become a monthly donor, through the Good Fruit Faith initiative. And check out the link in the podcast notes. I we've got a bunch of great stuff planned for when we come back in August and we're yeah, we're already planning a bunch of those podcasts, but I thought I would end this season with something really encouraging.


Sheila

A woman and I'm sorry, I don't know how to pronounce her name. Porsche Veu I think she's she goes as the poetic activist on Instagram and she tagged me in a poem that she wrote and performed about me. And I was really blown away with it, and I thought it was lovely.

And so I just want to play it as we end the end of season eight, and we will put a link to that in the podcast notes, so you can go watch it live on Instagram and follow, follow the poetic activist and support her work too, because it sounds like what she's doing is really amazing. So thank you.

And here she is and we will see you again in August.


Porsche Veu

Ask me who my hero is and I will tell you her name, Sheila Gregoire, a woman whose ministry is to expose one of the biggest dangers in the kingdom of God. Christian literature. It's targeted at women. You children of the Most High. Being fed lies in Godly books disguised as sound doctrine. Quote: A lot of men are leaving their wives for younger women because they yearn for attention from younger women. And God gave him a daughter who can give him that. Quote: The scriptures say the wife should ignore her feelings about the will of God and do what her husband says. Obey him as if he were God himself, Elizabeth writes. Quote: Because of the importance of the Word of God, we ask certain church members to be involved in a scripture reading ministry reserved only for men. Quote: Women are called to submit. In the same way children are called to submit. 


What these fools really mean to say is woman, stay in your place. Stand up straight, about face, fall in line and walk in the army of the Lord. As long as you stay in silence.

Quiet assume the identity of a mouse. Forgetting that you too were called by the creator of the universe have heard that well behaved women seldom make history. It's true. It's the ones who drown their eyes and neighbors that decide to no longer hide the oppression that do. Can you imagine being a woman in 1833, so eager to see him, the one whose body would soon be stretched over a tree, so eager to see him as she puts a fear of rejection, of judgments and of misogyny to the side just to abide in Him.


Walking in a room full of men, hands heavy with an alabaster box worth one year's wages, a woman comes face to face with Jesus. Breaks open the box and anoints His feet. Tens of thousands of dollars in the form of oil poured out for the one who so poured out his blood on the cross and the disciples counted this act of worship as loss.

Foolish woman, unnamed woman, a nobody, just a human being with a past moving out of order, taking up space in a place you weren't even invited.

Ain't it's funny how toxic masculinity and mansplaining are concepts that have existed for thousands of years, long before conservative books and sexist corporate culture and the good old boys Club. There were men of every background, including the disciples, silencing women with no shame, bruised egos, picking up brushes to paint the deceptive picture that what a woman has to offer is simply a waste, and the woman couldn't possibly have anything important to say, and yet the Messiah they claim to serve heard every word, affirmed a woman in her most vulnerable state when he said, "why do you trouble this woman?" Surely wherever this gospel is preached, what she has done, will be for many never forgotten. To every woman in this room who has ever felt forgotten, lost under the stench of misogynistic, false doctrine. God would say to you...


Quote: Blessed are you who believe that what the Lord has said would be fulfilled. 

Quote: You are God's accomplishments, created for Christ to do great things. 

Quote: God forgave you. You will not fail.

Quote: You are far more than rubies. 

Quote: And you know that because you have come to a place like this. You are chosen.


I've heard that well-behaved women seldom make history. It's the rebels that do. Beautiful woman. Called woman. A somebody. Never be afraid to step out of order to pour out the oil you carry for Jesus. Take up space in every place and know that you were invited by him.


(Applause)