5 Techniques for Relearning to Read: Opening Up New Ideas About Yourself and the World with Ann Morgan

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2:02throw some older upcoming booking emails at it and see what it can do, tripwaffle.com. The way that I had learned to read, everything I expected about how you should read wasn't going to work when I was really reading internationally because I'd been taught to read, or I'd grown up expecting that you should read by bringing knowledge to the things that you read and trying to understand, which sounds obvious. It's like, of course, you'd read to understand that. Why else would you? And yes, in some senses, yes, we do read to understand. We want to understand, and that's the joy of it. But the problem is that if you think that reading is only about trying to understand everything, you can miss out on a lot. For those of us who are mainstream English speakers, we may not realise it, but a lot of culture, traditionally, has been tailored for us. So it's catered to us. So very carefully, what we need to understand has been explained to us, the assumptions that work and it have been sort of aligned with our broadly,

3:04with our worldviews. And so if you're used to being in the centre like that, if you're used to being centre and having things sort of prepared for you, it can be a real challenge to step outside that. That is today's amazing guest, Anne Morgan. And I love this idea of freeing yourself to learn about the world and yourself through reading in a more open way. Many travelers were driven by this uncontrollable curiosity about the world. I think that's what gets us out there. And it's no surprise that many travelers are avid readers because we're seekers, right? We're trying to take in as much as possible. We're letting it in. We're marinating it in our souls and in our minds and using what we've experienced in the world to try to somehow make sense out of the world, right? Or maybe our place in it. And maybe something else who knows? If I had to sum it up more succinctly, I'd just say that we seek to understand. And a lot of that is baked into reading as well. It's a not so distant cousin, let's say.

4:06And Anne's here to share five techniques for relearning to read, something you thought you already knew how to do. And of course you do, but this gives you a different way of looking at reading. We talk about embracing incomprehension. You think reading comprehension, well, that was always a staple of my English classes. But why should we embrace not comprehending what we are reading? How some forms of curiosity can even be damaging. And she shares a powerful travel story that gave me the shivers as you'll hear. And so much more, if you love to read or you just want to open up to new ideas about something that has been around for about 5,000 years. Buckle up, you're going to enjoy this one. Strap in thanks for being here and welcome to the Zero to Travel, podcast my friend. ["The Zero to Travel Podcast"] You're listening to the Zero to Travel Podcast, where we explore exciting travel-based work, lifestyle and business opportunities, helping you to achieve your wildest travel dreamness.

5:09And now your host, World Wanderer and Travel Junkie, Jason Moore. Hey, hey, Jason here with Zero to Travel.com. Welcome to the show. Thanks for being here, letting me bring you a little travel into your ears today. This, of course, is the show to help you travel the world on your terms. The book, once again, re-learning to read, adventures in not knowing this book, quote, invites you to turn the way you read upside down and see what falls out. I hope you enjoyed this one. I'll leave you with a little quote on the back ends where I've this one up, maybe even a couple book recommendations since we're talking reading today, who knows? And if you're not part of the community newsletter, just sign up over at Zero to Travel.com slash newsletter. You can get all the goodies off the pod. Thanks for being here. Thanks for being a member of the community. Get in touch anytime. And I hope you enjoy this conversation. I'll see you on the other side. And Morgan, welcome back to the Zero to Travel Podcast, my friend.

6:09Great to see you. That's great to see you too, Jason. Thanks so much for having me back. Congrats on the new book. If people don't know, we'll link up to the episode we did before, which was about your 2020 challenge and did yourself 2012, excuse me, challenge to read a book from every country. And you've recorded everything about that quest on a year of reading the world.com, which is where people can find more information, links to your other books and so on. And you shot me an email mentioning that you have this new book called Relearning to Read, Adventures and Not Knowing, a huge reader. And I just thought, wow, this is a great opportunity to kind of take a fresh look at the, did we call it the art of reading or the skill of reading? I don't know. I haven't thought, you know, usually you just pick up a book and kind of read it. And I haven't really thought too much from a med of viewpoint about reading. And I thought, well, this could be a great opportunity because everybody listening, obviously, whether you're reading guidebooks, reading travel logs,

7:12reading fiction, nonfiction, whatever, we're all reading something. So let's just take this as an opportunity to perhaps see reading through a different lens. So anyway, welcome back to the show. And thanks for coming here. Thank you. No, it's a pleasure. It's a great pleasure. When you were thinking about writing this book, you've done nonfiction, you've done fiction, you've done a lot of different writing. Why was it important for you to write this particular book? Because a book is a labor of love. Yes, it can be critically acclaimed, like this has been from some of the reviews I've heard about. And you know, you can have all those accolades and things like that. But at the heart of it, you're the one that has to sit down and put it in the work. So what was it about this topic that resonated with you that made you think this is important to get something down and out into the world? Yeah, well, I found with all my books in different ways, their books that have needed to be written, they sort of books that have demanded that I write them. And often, particularly with my nonfiction, they've been books that other people have said, you should, that should be a book. So, it's always a good sign.

8:14It's a good sign. Yeah, the reading the world, but my first book, that came out of a newspaper editor saying, oh, surely you're going to make a book out of this quest that you're doing to read a book in every country. And I really naively haven't even thought of that at that point. With this relearning to read, it was actually my husband, who said, that sounds like another book. When I was talking about how I'd realized that, when I was doing this quest to read a book from every country and the international reading, I've continued to do since then over the last 13, 14 years, the way that I had learned to read, the way that I had, everything I expected about how you should read, wasn't going to work when I was really reading internationally because I'd been taught to read, or I'd grown up expecting that you should read by bringing knowledge to the things that you read and trying to understand, which sounds obvious. It's like, of course, you'd read to understand that. Why else would you? And yes, in some senses, yes, we do read to understand. We want to understand, and that's the joy of it.

9:17But the problem is that if you think that reading is only about trying to understand everything, you can miss out on a lot. So I don't know what it was like where you went to school, Jason, but when I grew up in the UK, and still today, it was really popular to have these things called comprehension exercises at school where you'd be given an extractive text and you'd be asked questions about it. What does this word mean? We write the shins. Or reading comprehension. Reading comprehension, exactly. And obviously that demonstrates lots of useful skills, but it carries the implication that there's one right way of reading something, and if you can't explain everything that's going on in a text, you're failing. Now, when it comes to reading internationally, there are going to be loads of things. No matter who you are, no matter how many countries you've been to, how many languages you speak, all these things, there are going to be loads of things you don't understand. References that will go over your head, jokes, you might not understand whether it's funny or not, rituals that you don't know the meaning of.

10:17You might even know if a story has a happy ending or not sometimes, because it might work on such different terms. And when I was reading the world, I was really suddenly stuck because as a literature student, I'd been trained to read around texts to bring lots of research to things. So all in Shakespeare's time, they used to threshold corn in this particular way. And so that means that this metaphor has this resonance and we can understand that he's happy, but he's also expressing pain about this. And obviously that's really interesting. It brings lots of rich stuff to reading. And I'm totally, I love academia, I love study, I'm a big fan, and academics have been a huge support to me. This is not about saying all that's rubbish, knocking academia or anything like that. But it's actually being honest about the fact that none of us, no matter how many countries we've been to, can understand everything about every culture, every story. And if we're really going to read internationally, and I understand reading not just in terms of books, but actually how we interpret situations, how we interpret people, how we read the world in the widest sense,

11:19we can't, there would be gaps, basically, in what we can understand. And so I had to admit that I didn't know. And that felt like an assessed unit. It was something I was a bit ashamed about. It felt like a weakness. It felt like, oh, you know, I'm used to getting the right answer. I like being a good student. I like sounding knowledgeable in clever about things. And I think in our culture, particularly English speaking, anglophone culture, it can seem like a weakness if you say you don't know something. You can sound as they, you know, why, you know, it can sound a bit shameful. But actually, when I embraced that, it was a total revelation. I mean, the world opened up to me in a really different way. And my understanding myself massively changed and deepened as a result by paying attention to what I didn't understand and asking myself questions about that. And so this book, Reloading to Read, was about that process. And I sort of slightly, and not completely,

12:20I took the school comprehension exercise and I turned it upside down. So each chapter has an extractive text. It's likely to be from a book that's going to be outside the comfort zone of most people reading the book. So, and instead of asking questions about it, I get the reader or by describing my process of reading it, I ask questions about it myself. So I ask myself questions. So it's, what don't I know? What don't I understand? What's weird? It shocks me, what maybe offends me, or gives me a problem. And by asking those questions by exploring that, I come to understand more about how I read, how I connect with the world, and how I can do that better, and how I can understand my own conditioning, my own biases, my own blind spots better, really. In a way that's honest and hopefully a bit more humble, a bit more curious. And for me, has, has brought a much richer connection with so many people and so many stories around the world? Wow, okay.

13:21There's a lot to unpack just right at the beginning. And I know you have, or you're gonna share five techniques for relearning to read. And I know through that conversation, we're gonna explore some tangents, and I have a feeling that some of these themes that are gonna come up, for example, curiosity, which you just mentioned, or we're gonna pull out some things that I'm sure are gonna, you can apply, not just to reading, but to live, to travel. But this idea of giving yourself permission to not know, it is profound when you dig into it, because when I think about, there's books that are famously complicated, right? And I think of like James Joyce or somebody, and it's just like, you can pick up a book like that and try to read it, and you know this is a quote unquote important book, and if you can't understand it, I think it's just using as an example of, if you're not giving yourself that sort of space and permission to not know and embracing the sort of the beauty, the beautiful elements perhaps that come with that, you might just fall into a pit of mental despair,

14:22or perhaps mostly just like feelings of inadequacy perhaps. You know, it's a blow to the ego, you're like, well, I don't understand. You know, these people, all these literary people are so much smarter than me. Why do I even, but, you know, I'm just gonna stick to my pulp fiction or whatever. And you know what I mean? And you just like, you can start beating yourself up, and that's just not what art is supposed to make you do. Totally, yeah. Exactly. And I think also it, you know, sometimes that bewilderment can be part of what the reading experience is. It can be some writers intend people not to understand everything. There's some North African novels in particular that are deliberately, they're supposed to be confusing. And they say, I'm deliberately messing with you. I'm messing with you. You can't understand this. You won't understand this. That's part of the journey. Right, okay. And that can be really, really challenging if you are used to thinking of reading as being that decoding and being about, you know, understanding everything, making sense. If that's what you think reading is purely about,

15:24then that can be really, really confronting. But yeah, you're absolutely right. That feeling of inadequacy, I think that is a big challenge for a lot of people. And some of us mask that for ourselves by feeling angry, feeling annoyed with something, oh, this is badly written. There's something wrong with this. Because we can't, we're so used to feeling ashamed of not knowing something. We may not even admit to ourselves, we don't understand. We may hide it behind saying, oh, this isn't for me or it's Rome or it's poorly constructed. So actually that can be an interesting tell if we feel irritated by something that we've got to say. Yeah, I think it's maybe something with words too, because you, if you're looking at a piece of abstract art in a museum, let's say, you know that one of the underlying premise of that experience is that it's open to interpretation. Like that's kind of the sort of the foundational element of the viewing experience. But with reading, you expect to read words

16:26and understand them and to make sense of it because you're getting a literal, you're being communicated to in a different way. And so the idea of letting go of that and embracing perhaps parts of a book as a piece of abstract art, for example, it, you know, we all know poetry can be like that very much like that, right? We're just like, you know, I don't expect to understand poetry myself because when I read poems, I just don't, a lot of times I just don't get it. And then I do sometimes accompanied with that as those feelings of inadequacy. Well, I just, you know, maybe I'm not literary enough. I don't quite get it. I'm not academic enough. It's like the business equivalent of this, or the creative equivalent of this is, I always like this idea of permission to suck. When you start something new, you're like, give yourself permission to suck. Like don't come out of the gates expecting to, you know, crush it at the guitar when you just got a guitar three months ago or whatever. You know, that kind of idea, writing, when you start writing a book, I'm sure there were a lot of words

17:28that got thrown out into the, into the computer waste bin. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I think you're totally right. I think I would say though that I'd build on that and I'd say that actually not understanding isn't necessarily sucking. Like I thought it was when I started. I thought it was like, oh, yeah, it's me failing. It's me failing to understand. But actually, if you really dig into it and embrace it, it can be a richer way of reading altogether and being open to never completely getting the whole picture. And I think it's something that is challenging for those of us who are sort of mainstream English speakers. We may not realise it, but a lot of culture traditionally has been tailored for us. So it's catered to us. So very carefully, what we need to understand has been explained to us, the assumptions that work and it have been sort of aligned with our, broadly, with our worldviews. And so if you're used to being in the centre like that, if you're used to being centreed and having things sort of

18:30prepared for you, it can be a real challenge to step outside that. There's an amazing translator called Anton Herr, who translates from Korean. And he says that it's a big challenge for him as a Korean language translated because traditionally, Korean writers are used to being quite lazy. In that what he means by that is they don't feel they have to explain very much. They don't have to give very much detail or do much thinking for the reader. They just say what they want to say. And he said English language readers are used to being quite lazy as well. They used to having things explained for them. So there's a massive gap between what a Korean writer puts on the page and what an English language writer expects to have from the text, how much they expect to be helped to understand. And so for him as a translator, that's a big gap to bridge. If you've lived in a world that has catered to you in that way, it can be really, you may not even know that that's been done for you. You may not even know that you've been taken care of in that way or you've things have been made easy for you.

19:32And obviously if you're someone who comes from a different community, if you're someone who comes from a bilingual family, or you have different cultural heritage, you'll know more about this because you'll have seen what it feels like not to be at the center. But if you're someone like me, who's grown up as a monolingual English speaker and an English speaking country in sort of the mainstream, you may not realize how much everything has been sort of tailored to your needs. And so to step beyond that, and as listening to this podcast, you're a traveler as you will know what it's like to go outside the comfort zone in different ways, that when you first do that, when you do it in books, that can be a challenge. I remember I was at a party once, I live in Norway and we were talking about the differences in language and things like that. And somebody there, I'll never forget it because it was so spot on, they described Norwegian as an economical language, meaning they just sort of get to the point. And through reading in Norwegian to my children and things like that, you can see the difference.

20:34And I also, it's been really interesting to learn the language and then to read a children's book that one in particular that I love, and it's just not the same, the translated version. You can't get the same, they can't get the ideas across in the same way. And that's just, there's always maybe gonna be another gap there. What's the children's book that you love? What's it's in Norwegian? There's a famous author, it's called a cardamomobi. And it's about this town, and yeah, I don't need to go into the details, but it's just the way it's phrased and the way he writes in the way, there's songs throughout it. And so that's like a whole other element, but I don't know, it's just, yeah, it's been fascinating as a reader to experience, to start experiencing Norwegian books and Norwegian culture and reading them in their original language, which I wish I had the luxury to do in every language,

21:38but it's just a different experience to a translated English version. But there's always gonna be a little bit of a difference. And even now I can't pick up on some of the nuances here in the culture as I can through, you know, reading an American author, a British author. Well, even British authors, they have a different, you guys have your own, you know, sort of sense of humor and vibe, and there's nuances there, but you know, that's the thing that's beautiful about reading, you get to be, you get to soak that in a bit, subconsciously and consciously. Yes, yeah, absolutely right, yeah, absolutely. And I think that is a joy. And when you start to pay attention to that, it can be really interesting to notice where those little gaps and jokes are and what that shows you about what you assume and what you think is normal or the default setting and how that's different for people elsewhere. You may have heard about built as the loyalty program

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24:41into a business with for a become a for advisor today at foratravel.com slash zero to travel. That's for a F-O-R-A travel.com slash zero to travel. Make sure you tell them we send you foratravel.com slash zero to travel. Now back to the show. Let's go into these five techniques because I know we've probably already touched on some of them, but we can drill them in bullet point mode. Let's call it. Then through that maybe we can explore a bit more in good temper. So I mean, the background to this is that for the last four years, I've run these incomprehension workshops. I've called them with readers around the world in person and online. Thank you. Thank you. And in this, we do what I was talking about where we turn the exercises upside down, the comprehension exercises, and we use extractive tests. And through this, we come out with various techniques, various things that are useful to bear a mind or can be helpful approaches. So the first thing that I tend to encourage people to do

25:44when they're reading something that is outside the comfort zone, and they don't have the right cultural compass for it, they can't be certain of many things, is to read with questions in your mind. So hold those questions. It's almost like having a mental filing cabinet where you notice a question. What does this word I've never come across before? What does it mean? Why did he make that choice for me? Is he happy here or not? I don't understand why he hit the girl. I don't understand if this is a ritual that is normal in a marriage, sharing me, or something that tells me that this character is a selfish person, for example. I mean, like there's, for example, there's a North African novel I read some years ago, where on the wedding night, the groom holds the bride at knife point. And reading that, I didn't know if that was a ritual that was just a ceremonial, like what is in that society is kind of standard on a wedding night, or was this a really violent thing that this man was doing?

26:45I couldn't be certain in that moment. Much as, you know, if an alien came to a British wedding ceremony and saw a father leading a woman down the aisle, they might say, oh, why is that woman being taken to market like a cow to be sold or from, you know? Right. Because most of us going to those wedding ceremonies would see that as just that tradition. That's just not really read much into it. But for an outsider looking in, they might be like, that looks quite, that woman's being treated like an object or, you know, and there are some people who feel that way. But it's noticing, oh, I can't be certain. So it's noticing those questions and just trying to hold onto them, trying to keep them at the back of your mind. And that's the first technique. The second technique is really pay attention to what annoys you. I think this is so key. It kind of, it links back to what I was saying earlier about how sometimes when we don't understand something, we hide it from ourselves by telling us that there's something wrong with the thing we're looking at with the book or the person or the thing we're listening to,

27:47whatever it is. There's something wrong with this because it annoys us. And that can be a way of protecting ourselves from admitting, actually, I don't understand this. Or this shows up a kind of blind spot in me, something that maybe I haven't thought about very deeply or something that maybe I could adjust in my thinking. And that could be about, this could be to do with the voices that we've been taught to listen to or the people that we tend to think are important. And you know, in our society, I mean, bias is always seen as, you know, that's bad, it's given a bad rap. You don't want to be biased. But the truth is, all of us are biased. That's how human beings work. Bias is save us time. If we had to make fresh judgments about every situation we found ourselves in, we'd never get anything done. So bias is a, when they work well, they're shortcuts that tell us, usually in this situation, the person wearing the uniform will help me go, you know, answer this question or will do this thing for me? Or this person who looks like this will do this for me. But the problem is, as you and I do, Jason,

28:48biases can be based on bad information, they can be based on historic prejudices, they can be based on all kinds of inequalities that actually work to entrench injustice. And so sometimes that feeling that flicker of irritation can be linking back to one of those things rubbing up against something that works and assumption that works slightly differently in a text. So noticing when you get annoyed and asking yourself, why does this annoy me? Why am I, and it might be, sometimes it might be that the book is badly written. It might be that it's not a very good book, that's always a possibility, but it also might be that there's something going on beneath the surface there that you could pay attention to. So that's a bit too. It seems like, yeah, just like with this approach, at least with the first two points, it very much feels like relearning to read is an inside out type of journey. Very much so, brilliant observation. Yeah, it's about relearning to read yourself really, because that's the thing. When I started my international reading quest,

29:50back in those days, reading world literature, as it was called then, was very much an academic thing. It was mostly in the sphere of universities, and most of the people who talked about it would set out advice for how to do it. And there's a Harvard professor called David Damrosh, he's very well respected in this field, and he'd written a book called, How to Read World Literature, a few years before I set out. And he'd set out a load of prescriptions of how to do this if you're a general reader, the best way to get as much as you could out of books. And it was all about context and knowing, doing as much research as you could, and bringing as much knowledge as you could to books, and ideally learning several other languages, so that you could understand how language families work around the world. And if you could do all that, if you had the time and money to do all that, you would read incredibly witchly, but there was no way that I would have had the time to do that for every book that I was trying to read that year. And it's no way that anyone could do that for every book if they're really reading the world. So what I realized was I couldn't understand, I mean, he would say things like try and understand

30:51the translators, choices and biases, understand the social context of the text, understand the historical, all this stuff. I couldn't do that for every text, but I could do that for myself as far as possible. I could understand my context, I could understand my biases, I could understand, not perfectly, I don't think any of us can be fully objective about our own bias is in our own blind spots, but we can try and be more conscious of them. And we can certainly know that we have them. And I could try and be more aware of my conditioning. And through doing that, that was how I could be read more richly. So you're absolutely right, perth of brilliant observation. Yeah, now that makes sense. Yeah, you have this translates to travel as well, right? Like you could research, till the cows come home. I don't know why it's always the cows coming up. But anyway, a country, and you can get the historical context and do all the academic stuff before you show up. And I think that is important, right?

31:53If you know some of the history of the country, you can put things more into context and where they've come from and things like that. And that, to me, is a can be an important part of travel, but there's also the other side where what you're taught, you can sort of do the same thing. You can look at your own biases, your own things, and you can see that culture with a sort of fresh eyes and fresh perspective and just kind of take it in. And that's just another approach, right? Because you can't possibly understand the nuances of a cult. It's just not a possible, it's not attainable. It's not attainable. Yeah, absolutely. And also, I think sometimes if you, you stock yourself up with knowledge and assumptions about how something's going to work or how it's going to be, it's actually actually seeing what's there. So a lovely example with someone I hope will talk about a bit later. My heroes, they're Togelese explorer, Tate Michel Permassi, who lived with the Inuit in two years, for two years in the 1960s. And a story that he often tells, one of the things I love about him,

32:54and in the final chapter of my book, he's an example of what is good curiosity. Because he went there with a really open mind to see what he noticed, to build connections with the people there, with no assumptions about what it would be like really. But while he was there, he met a French ethnologist, he was there to study the Inuit. And he had arrived with crates of tinned food to spend his year living there, and a prefabricated hut that Tate helped him construct. And he lived in his hut, and he ate his European tinned food, and he went out and observed the Inuit, and then he went back to his house, and he ate his tinned food. And he went to end wrote his book. Whereas Tate was living in the houses of the people, he went and stayed with people, he ate their food, he worked with them, he went hunting with them. He engaged with them on their turns, whereas this ethnologist had decided what the trip was going to be in advance, had planned it, had gone with his supplies, and he saw what he planned to see.

33:54And he was very knowledgeable, he had researched the conditions of the country, and he had prepared in order to be ready to meet them. But actually in a funny way, that stopped him actually really engaging with what was there. So your travel devices don't see what you're planning to see. LAUGHTER I guess it's kind of not being... Yeah, maybe that's a nice short way of saying it. But don't be too rigid about what... And also, I think treat guidebooks with a degree of a pinch of salt, because they also are a story. They are someone's perspective. We've spoken before Jason about Manjaro Niavola, the Kenyan travel writer, he wrote, a traveling world black, and she brilliantly exposes how... How subjective many of the travel guides are, in that they're written from a white, Western perspective. This is generally what your experience will be, if you're a white, Western, or traveling in this place. But that doesn't map on to her experience at all, as a black African.

34:54And so... You have to be aware, of course, you know, there's a lot of value in reading things and finding out the context. But be aware that the history you're being presented, but the story of a place you're being presented with is one perspective, on it, and it may not necessarily cover everything, and it may not cover the experience of the people living there. Sure. And that's part of the job as travelers, too, is to seek out those multitude of perspectives. So if you're going to book tours and things like that, there's all kinds of different ways to, I think, do that on the ground. Before we get into the next point, I did have an important question, and this is for myself, but also I'm sure there's people out there thinking of the same thing. And there's no hard and fast rule. I know that. So I'm not going to put you on the spot here. But at what point does reading something that's challenging you in a certain way become something that you should power through? I'm going to use that word, right?

35:55Because there is a sort of like, I read to relax, which is why, yes, I read Norwegian children's books, and my in-laws have very kindly given me some great, full, thick Norwegian books for adults. I'll call them books for adults, you know, regular books. And yet, I can't get through one because I read to relax. And, you know, I like to be challenging a certain way, but not so challenged that I just can't even understand what's going on. And it just gets exhausting. And then it just, you know, it becomes another chore. I have enough of those throughout the day. So, you know, this idea of this balance. Yeah, absolutely. And that will be different for all of us. And yeah, you've got to be realistic about what our needs are, what our life is. And also, this may change at different stages in our life. There may be times where we feel more ready for challenge than other times. We need more comfort and reassurance. And that's totally fine. And I think there's so much joy in reading stuff that is familiar

36:57and comforting and enjoyable and that we can just relax into and don't have to think too much about or feel challenged by, that's, I would never suggest people giving that up. This is not about, you know, it's not about putting on a hair shirt and beating ourselves on the back or anything like that. This is, this is about opportunity. And I think there are ways, so there are ways that you can use what you enjoy to do this. So, one of the chapters in my book is about genre. So, if you are, let's say a crime fiction fan, why not go and see what crime fiction is like in other parts of the world, where the justice system may work very differently? What is a murder mystery investigation like in a country where the death penalty is still used? I mean, well, in the US that obviously is still the case in the UK is not. So, for me, reading an Indian crime novel where the perpetrator's may end up being executed, that brings a different dynamic to it. Or what about South American crime fiction, which works very differently because

37:59in South America, so when I first started reading South American crime fiction, I was really confused because I thought, oh, these stories aren't plotted how I would accept. I think that they don't work. That we don't find out what happened in the end, a lot of the time, the bad people aren't punished. We don't kind of, the mystery isn't solved. And it seems, I was like, these are really badly written, and sluppily written things. But actually, someone pointed out to me that the kind of crime fiction that I am used to reading would feel like fantasy in a country where there has been so much entrenched police corruption, institutional issues in places like Argentina and Chile that still unresolved, that readers there would never buy that. So, actually, the idea that good is prevails and that the police are on the side of right, generally, doesn't wash, wouldn't work in those novels. So, it's quite interesting to read. So, sometimes using your, if you're a horror fan or a romance fan,

39:01well, how does that work? How does romance work in a society where there's polygamy, for example, or all these different things? You can use the stuff that you enjoy as a guide rope. That's one thing. But I would say, yeah, don't, this isn't about beating yourself up. This is about joy. This is about expansions. This is about growth. And that doesn't go in a straight line and it's sometimes, sometimes we don't have energy for that. Sometimes we have to put our focus elsewhere and read, you should, reading is great fun and it should be great fun. And, you know, totally, there are times when I very much just think, like I read last weekend, I read Rosemary's Baby, which is partly for research, for a novel that I'm working on. But I'd never read it. I've never actually seen the film. And I think partly I hadn't read it because I, the film had sort of made me make assumptions about what it was going to be like. It's amazing. It's so amazing, such an amazing book. And it's so funny. It's so funny. But I read that because I wanted something that was just going to be a really

40:03involving story. And I thought, I will just read this. It's not going to be a chance. Actually, it was so much more than I expected. It was amazing. But yeah, that was the time when I really just wanted something to sink into and go with that. Totally. This is not about leaving that behind. No way. It's actually just expanding. I think what it does over time, it expands the pool of stuff you can sink into because you're like exercising a muscle. You get more comfortable with a broader range of things. So it just gives you a broader range, I think. Yeah, with the South American crime story, we're going to get into your next point a minute. But with the South American crime story, it just reminded me of how similar some of the things you are saying is in the film and TV world because coming up in America and just being young, everyone had everything had that quote unquote Hollywood ending and it would all get tied up. And it was always this. And he just thought, well, that's just how things end. That's just how you do it. But then you expand and you start to see. And then now even living in Norway for so many years and seeing the pace,

41:07even just the pace of shows and how they, and then seeing a lot of British shows and how those are, you're exposed to different things. And it's just different the way things end, the way things are paced. It's not you don't always get the happy ending. And that's just like, and that man, after just being exposed to that stuff, you're just like, this is just refreshing. This is different. This is different art. It's presented in a different way. The stories are presented in a different way. It's more real in a lot of ways. And you just, yeah, like you say, your appreciation just grows and you can draw from a deeper well. So I, I think that's, yeah, those are all great arguments to, to quote, unquote, power through some things every once in a while, right? But, you know, yeah, exactly. You totally have permission if you hate something, put it down, life's too short. I guess it's making you sad. Put it down. Seriously, because that's okay. You have my, you have my blessing. Yeah, I don't remember where I read this, but somebody calculated somewhere online, like how many books you can read in your life.

42:10And they were just like, so, you know, if you don't like that one, put it down, because he only gets so many. And I like more of an abundance mindset, but it's just like a time thing, right? You're only gonna read so many books. College football is back. So Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwick up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. Literate, electorates. Now, back to the show.

43:12Okay, what do you have next for us here? What do I have next? Okay. Okay, so this is an interesting one. Notice who the book expects you to be, which sounds like a weird one. So, so books. So the books give away all kinds of clues about who they think their reader is all the time. So one of the easiest examples is what words are italicized? If words in certain foreign languages are italicized, the underlying message there is usually this word is going to be foreign to you as a reader. So you as a reader, this word is not in your vocabulary. So what that does is that tells me okay, this kind of the reader of this book, the reader of this book imagines or the reader of the publisher imagines, the reader of the writer imagines, doesn't speak this language. Which can exclude people who do speak that language.

44:12And there's been an interesting shift, for example, in Indian literature, Indian publishing in the last 10, 20 years, where there's been a marked move away from italicizing words in Indian languages other than English that appear in English language books. Because previously the assumed reader was a British reader who didn't speak other Indian languages. Now the assumed reader is an Indian reader who might well speak several other Indian languages and those words are not foreign to them. Another way that a book tells you who it expects, who it thinks you are, who it expects you to be is by what is explained and what is left assumed. So if it assumes you know certain things, it doesn't explain certain terms, that tells you, oh, you're this kind of person, it thinks that you culturally, you know this stuff, but you don't know that stuff. So a good example of this is if you watch a news bulletin, if the news announced, there might say Joe Biden and not explain who Joe Biden is, but they then

45:15might name a Latinx superstar from one of the telenovelas and explain who that person is. So what the covert message there is, the person watching this newscast, those who Joe Biden is, but doesn't know who that star is, so is probably not in the Latinx community. And again, it's about who's excluded and who's, and that's sometimes particularly when you're reading texts from elsewhere, you may not end up being the reader that a book expects. And that can be a really interesting experience because you're sort of like listening in on a conversation that isn't for you. You learn some stuff that you didn't expect. And sometimes it can be uncomfortable because you hear yourself talk about in ways that maybe you don't like. But that in itself can be instructive. So noticing, oh, and the more you start paying attention to this, what is being explained, what's being left assumed that I know, what's being declared

46:18foreign, what is being declared as something I would understand, that you'd start to notice more and more of these little tells that, ah, that's who this book expects to be reading it. That's really interesting. Yeah, it is. And I have to credit you on that point with just after we had our first conversation, it just brought in my book search when I was looking for new books to read. And so I ended up diving into different things that maybe caught my eye before, but I didn't dive into. And yes, and it's been so eye-opening to read books from different cultures, different perspectives, different backgrounds. It's just been a great journey. So thank you for that. We have my passion. And you've done that for who knows how many people now, tens of thousands, at least, I'm sure, which is probably a great feeling for you starting off with the first, the original project and now with this book continuing. We have two more here.

47:20Let's get into them. Okay, so the next one is a human thing we do. And what books expect us to do when we read all good writers leave gaps that we feel part of what's so satisfying about reading is it isn't a passive process, it's an active one. So we feel like books have really rich descriptions, but actually when you look at the number of details that are given on a page, it's not usually that many. There are lots of gaps. And what a writer expects us to do, what a story expects us to do is to fill those gaps so that we create the world together with the text. Now when we're reading a book from a very familiar culture, familiar environment, by a writer who shares much of our perspective, we will tend to plug those gaps with things that fit, that roughly are what the writer expected. But when we're reading a book that's written from a very different cultural perspective, we will plug those gaps with things that might not fit at all, and that might lead us off in all kinds of weird directions and expect the text to do all kinds of things that it doesn't actually do. So what's really interesting is starting to notice what you

48:25tend to reach for when you don't understand. What do you plug gaps with? So I might reach for biblical references or pop culture references or things from fairy tales or things from my own family experience or a whole range of stuff. But what I reach for, what I tend to reach for, will be different to what you reach for. So for example, so lovely example of a workshop I did in Assam in India with students at a university there. And I was a bit nervous about doing this workshop because I'd run the workshops with readers all over the world or a whole mix of people, but I'd never really run a workshop with a group of people raised in a very, very different education system to my own and purely that group of people. And I wasn't sure how it was going to go down. But one of the texts I did at the time in that group was a transcript of a Grier's performance, a West African storyteller's performance of a saga from Niger. And it had been recorded on a rusty old tape recorder in the 1980s and then transcribed and then translated from the

49:29song gay into French and then translated from the French into English. But then they realized that the person who transcribed it hadn't spoken the version of song gay that the storyteller spoke. So had miscellaneous things, the story, the tape recorder was bad anyway, so there were gaps. So they had to re-translate it. It was a whole saga. It took 10 years to get this thing. And even when they had it, there were loads of gaps. There were bits that said, undecisurable, undecisurable. And I asked that we discussed this in the workshop. And the students all half the room roughly thought it was the transcript of two spies discussing an assassination attempt. And I was like, what? This is like a 12th century saga, you know, that's been handed down through these storytellers. That is an explanation I would never reach for, but that is what you reached for. That's so interesting that that is the surface of mind for you. And so learning to pay attention to, oh, when I don't understand, this is my default, this is where I go to. That can be so interesting.

50:29And it's paying attention to what do you assume when there is a gap? How you co-create. Yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And then the final one is pretty simple, which is that you have to accept that you may never get all the answers. So some answers. So that filing cabinet of questions that I talked about as the first point, some of those questions you will answer through reading the book. The book may answer it yourself, itself, you know, it may provide the answers that, oh, actually this character is a good character because they go on to do this or, oh, okay, I understand now by the use of that word in this context that it's a cooking pot or whatever, you know, it could be a load of stuff like that. Some of those things you may decide to go off and research yourself, you know, you may go and look for and that's totally valid, like researching and learning more is a great response to not knowing, but I think it shouldn't be the automatic first response. It shouldn't

51:31solve in the problem straight away, shouldn't be the first response. But some of those things may not be doable. Some of them may not be researchable and there may be some things that we never come to understand. Or we may understand five years down the line. Those answers may come, but that's okay. That's that's fine. And that in itself is quite interesting and something to think about, I think, and I think makes us rich ultimately, if we can be comfortable with their limits to what we can know. Yeah. And those answers, it's so funny. I mean, you could even just read something as short as a quote, and you don't understand it because there's some obscure Zen Cohen, and you just can't wrap your head around it. And then three years later, you're like, I get it. It makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because you get it or because, you know, things happened in your life that allowed you to get it. Who knows? I don't know. Absolutely. It's a mystery. I wanted to add, thank you. Those were some incredible techniques that you shared. And I know they're

52:34vetted because you do these in-person workshops. And you've had a lot of these discussions on the ground. So I appreciate you taking the time to bring these to to the show today. And I should mention one more time. Of course, we'll link up to the website and your book, Relearning to Read Adventures in Not Knowing. I feel like travelers like one of our shared values is we love to not know. I mean, that's part of the thing about travel. You show up somewhere. You don't really know what you go into the grocery store. You don't even know. It's like you're a kid again in some places. You like, where do I get money? How do I, you know, where do I buy toothpaste? You just don't know. And that freshness is like a, if you're going to use an Eastern philosophy, it's sort of like a beginner's mind approach. Is there a philosophical, I should say, a philosophy that resonates with you when it comes to your, you know, the five techniques you shared in this approach is they're just like one overarching kind of philosophy that you embrace as an umbrella to all of this. Have you

53:36thought about that? I mean, well, the simple answer would be I don't know. But the, I think it's funnily enough in the book. There's a chapter on religious faith. What do we do if we're reading a book from a religious viewpoint that is right on nine to us or something that we don't share? And I give an example of a Buddhist text. And actually, there's quite a lot in Buddhism about humility and not knowing and that, which I don't, I'm not enough of an expert on Buddhism to say precisely how much, how much, how how aligned it is. But certainly there are elements that I've found that really seem to chime with some of that. So yeah. I very much enjoy sort of the mystical up for interpretation type of writing and those types of texts. I think that's yet that you get to fill the gaps in different ways, like you mentioned. One or two more questions here. I know

54:36you just came back from a pretty cool trip. So I want to hear about that and, you know, travel podcasts. Talk a little travel. Before we move into that, just one last question on reading. I'm just wondering where you think reading is going. I mean, you have the impact of technology on reading, right? So you can think about it in terms of having the oral history and how that there was there were arguments or there are arguments that, you know, going from the written word from oral to the written word, things were lost, things were gained. And now with AI, I mean, when now we, it's almost like you can't have a conversation anymore without involving AI, because it's impacting everything. A technology short form content, the way people are consuming information nowadays. How is that impacting reading just in your opinion? I think it's interesting, isn't it? I mean, certainly, attention span is a challenge. I think for a

55:41lot of people, I've found this myself in the last few years. I've had various family issues and bereavements, which have meant that my attention has been quite scattered and I've had to be quite reachable and messages and things. And so I've found I've become much more used to having my phone involved in a way that I never was before, which I think has affected my attention span. But I think what's interesting is the human act type for story remains undenied. So an example I can give of this is I ran an incomprehension workshop at a sixth form college near where I live. So this is teenagers age 16 to 18. And it was a world book day. So I started it by asking these teenagers to complete three sentences. Reading is the world is stories are. And at the end of this session, I asked a few of them to read out what they'd written. And there was one girl sitting at the back who was really not, she didn't look to impress, she didn't want to

56:44share what she'd written, but I kind of pushed her. And so she ended up saying she'd written, reading is boring. The world is crazy. Stories are exciting. And I think that is the nub of it there. Stories, we will remain hungry for stories. And it may be that people can see them in different ways. I think that I see a huge hunger for reading among young people around the world. So the majority of people who engage with my project are aged under 35. There's a huge number of people, particularly in the global south who will be in touch about books they love. And so I think that that appetite for stories is always going to be there. I think storytelling has shifted shape. I mean, we tend to think of books as quite fixed, but actually the traditional paperback that we think of as a book has only really been around for a hundred years or say before that they came in different forms. Stories were published in serial form and magazines

57:47and in volumes and hardback volumes. Things shift form and it can feel quite threatening at the time. But human beings work by stories, storytelling is a universal human impulse and it's astonishing what it does to bring people together. And I don't think that's going to change. So the packaging may change, but the love of stories and the consuming of stories and the reading of stories privately is one of the best ways to access stories. So I think that will continue. You have a story to tell about a recent trip speaking of stories. I do. So I mentioned earlier my hero, Tettin Michelle Pemassie, and his book, An African in Greenland, which is re-released as a Penguin modern classic Michelle, The Giant, the new title translated by James Kerkup a few years ago. Here and I, when I first discovered his work, I called him the writer I would most like to read to meet. On the blog, my pace I wrote about his book, his extraordinary journey from Togo to Greenland

58:48in the 1960s. I called him the writer I'd most like to meet. Never thinking that I would ever meet him. But it so happened that because of my writing about his projects and various people getting interested in his book as a result, we got in touch and became friends. And anyway, long story short this summer, I ended up going to Greenland with him. 60 years after his first visit there, we cruised along the west coast of Greenland on this new route that this expedition cruise company was running. It was a strange story because basically, because of our friendship, when people look for him online, they often find my name. And I sort of sometimes I'm a bit of his, a sort of unofficial PA for him because people will email me saying, can you put me in touch with him? And one of the people who did this was a guy who worked for this cruise company said, we're doing this new route. I'd like to invite Tessata to come along because you conduct us. I did. And Tessata said, well, can Anne Morgan come too? Because she'd like to write about me going to Greenland. So so anyway, long story short, that's what we did. So we spent two weeks traveling to many of the places

59:53that he first visited in 1965 and seeing the changes. It was absolutely extraordinary. One of the most extraordinary things that happened was in one town we went to, we were having a bus tour and the bus driver said to Tete, oh, there's someone who'd like to meet you. And we got off the bus and there was this woman standing there. She had been a four-year-old girl when Tete arrived in 1965 and he had stayed with her family for three or four months while he was in Greenland. And now she's a grandmother and she came to say hello, he was absolutely overjoyed, he burst into tears, he was so so thrilled. And she and her husband, we had coffee with them and talked to them and it was just an extraordinary, extraordinary thing. But also to see the changes. So something that really struck him was the difference in the way sled dogs are treated now. Back when he went in the 60s, they were really quite vicious and frightening. And he was kept awake by dogs fighting outside his window when he first arrived. And he had to go out with a stick to beat them away

1:00:55because it was not unusual for them to eat small children. They were really kind of, whereas now they live in these beautiful little areas called dog towns. They have the little canals, they're on long chains and they're given free-dregula because they didn't used to be fed properly when they got water delivered by the local authorities. And so it's a really different, so for him that was a real change, you know, to see that. But it just an extraordinary experience in an amazing place. And it must have been so powerful for him to revisit these places so many years later. And for you as an observer, to see his reaction and to take it all in through his eyes in some ways, what a powerful journey. Absolutely. And I think for me, it was just a sort of a validation of what good curiosity can do, the way it can bring people together. I think there isn't always, I think some forms of curiosity can be a little bit damaging. I think sometimes we can be a bit voyeuristic in the way that we treat other people. We can make people into

1:01:59curiosity sometimes when we think about looking at other cultures. But really good curiosity. And I think Tess and Michelle is a brilliant example of that, is a desire to learn what someone, how someone lives, and to be changed by what you discover, to exchange, not to observe from a superior viewpoint, a bit like that ethnologist who came and looked for what he expected to see and wrote about it. But more, I will adapt to this. I will be changed by this. I will share my own experiences and it will be a two-way process. And I think that is such a joy. And something I had a huge privilege to observe when I went to Greenland this summer. And always a pleasure to chat with you. Do you want to share, what is the best place for people to go and check out your work, the website, your... I would say yeah, a year of reading the world.com, you'll find everything there. Yeah. And if you want to get in touch, tell me about what you're reading. That would be great too.

1:02:59Amazing. Thanks so much Anne. Great chatting again. Oh, thank you Jason. It's a pleasure. Appreciate your time. There you have it. Thank you to Anne Morgan for stopping by the show. I love that one. I love these unconventional approaches to conventional topics, trying to see something as simple as reading, which is something I thought I knew how to do. And looking at it in a totally different way. So I got a lot of value out of this one and I hope you did as well. I'm a bit of a book junkie. I would say maybe we should start a reading club here in this community. Who knows? I'm going to leave you with a quote on reading in just a moment. First two quick reminders, you're at a travel.com slash newsletter where you can sign up for the community newsletter. And we are part of the airwave media podcast network. Now if you want to check out some of the cool shows, you can check out the network and see some of the other shows they're rocking on there. Now before I get to the quote, I'll leave you with a few book recommendations. Why not? I love to

1:04:02get book recommendations. Some that have impacted me. The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer. I really love that one. I've reread that one several times. I occasionally like to dive into some good history books. And I really enjoyed Black AF history, the Unwhite Washed story of America by Michael Harriet. That one is a great read is one several awards. That's Harriet H-A-R-R-R-I-O-T. Let me think of a couple others. The Power of Intention by Dr. Wayne Dyer. If you want to get into the woo-woo type of stuff, you could call it that or not call it that. That book made an impact on me's and mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunru Suzuki. And if you can get the audiobook narrated by Peter Coyote, that is quite a journey. It's a best-selling zen classic. Basically on meditation, keeping an open mind, minimalism, in a way. All that good stuff. So

1:05:07anyway, there's a few and fiction-wise, I am Pilgrim. That's a great thriller. And I'll stop there. I could go on a non with books. Anyway, before I let you go, I will leave you with this quote to wrap it up. I think this is a good one by George R.R. Martin who said a reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time. Peace and love to you and yours, cheers. This podcast has been brought to you by zerointotravel.com. Ideas and advice to make your travel dreams or reality. On any journey using Uber, it helps to know you're getting into the right car. Pin verification adds an extra step to make sure your ride is your ride. Before the trip begins, your app gives you a unique pin. Just tell it to your driver and they'll enter it in their app before the ride can start. Hey, what's your pin? Mm-hmm. 2538. That way you know you're in the

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