The Invention of the Index

[MUSIC PLAYING]pamela paulWhen and how and why did we come up with the idea of an index? Dennis Duncan will be here to talk about his book “Index, A History of the.” What happens when a violinist’s recently discovered Stradivarius goes missing? Brendan Slocumb will be here to talk about his debut novel, “The Violin Conspiracy.” Plus, my colleagues and I will talk about what we’re reading. This is the Book Review Podcast from The New York Times. It’s February 26th. I’m Pamela Paul[MUSIC PLAYING]Dennis Duncan joins us now from North London. His new book is called “Index, A History of the.” Dennis, Thanks for being here.dennis duncanThank you so much for having me.pamela paulI guess British people would say, “A History of the.” And some Americans. That sounds much better. But either way, it is such a brilliant title. And I need to know at what point in the process did you come up with it? Like did you even just start with that title and say, this should be a book, because it’s such a great title?dennis duncanWell, it came about halfway through. The idea actually was that I was going to write an academic book— a dry, scholarly book that would come out with an academic press and be sold primarily to libraries. At some point along the way, I published a little bit of journalism about it. And there was some real interest from trade publishers who said, “You could make this into a trade book.” So the difference between the way this would look as an academic book and how it looks now is just slightly turning up the levels on the characters and on some of the anecdote.And I think once that was OK— once I thought, oh, right. You know what? I can write this for a broader book nerd audience, if you like. Then I can be a bit more playful. And then the title occurred to me. So the title occurred sort of halfway along through the process.pamela paulWell, there’s a lot of play in this book. I would imagine it would be hard to suppress the playful parts, if you had to write a dreary academic book. Your previous book, “Book Parts,” which you edited, cataloged all the various parts of the book, from the dust jackets to the index. Was it obvious to you that— OK, this is the one I want to take and grow into a book?dennis duncanYes, it was. In fact, I’d already been doing more with the index. When Adam and I put together “Book Parts,” Adam Smyth and myself, we knew some colleagues who were working on other things. So Adam had already done quite a lot of work on errata lists, and I was already thinking about indexes. And so, we got hold of people who had specifically done work on dust jackets or title pages. You’d be amazed, there really are academics who have these as their specialism. So it wasn’t that I cherry-picked a chapter, having done “Book Parts.” It was that I was already thinking about indexes specifically.pamela paulThat’s just an interesting sentence in and of itself. I mean, what— why were you thinking about indexes? What is your area of research generally? You are a lecturer in English at the University College London. How does one come to specialize and be interested in indexes?dennis duncanI lecture in literature, in English literature. But my Ph.D. was on French literature. And particularly, it was about a group formed in the 1960s in Paris called the Oulipo.They are a group of writers, mathematicians, chess players. Marcel Duchamp was a member. And they would think about ways of introducing ideas from mathematics or constraints into the production of literature. So notoriously, a member called Georges Perec wrote a novel in 1969 that doesn’t have the letter E.pamela paulRight. Quite the challenge in French.dennis duncanExactly. Yeah. So this is an interesting way of thinking about narrative. And some time, maybe about 10 years ago, it just occurred to me that several novels by the members of this group— there’s this Perec’s masterpiece, “Life: A User’s Manual.” There’s also a book by the American member of the group called Harry Mathews, called “The Sinking of The Odradek Stadium,” and Italo Calvino’s last novel, “Mr. Palomar”— they have indexes. This is really unusual. Novels, as we know, tend not to have indexes. Indexes are the kind of marker, if you like, between fiction and nonfiction.Nonfiction has an index. Fiction doesn’t. So what was it about the way that this group think about narrative that led them to playfully include indexes in several of their novels? And I thought, well, I’ll do an academic article on this. And in order to do that, I will need to find out a bit more about the history of indexes. So I assumed naively that there would be a history of indexes. And I asked my colleagues, “Where do I go? What’s the standard history of indexes?” And the answer kept coming back— “I don’t know, I’m afraid.”So it turned out there was a gap. Somebody needed to do this. Somebody needed to helpfully, for future literary endeavors, write the history of the index. And I thought, right. I’m going to fill that gap. But I do like the idea. I mean, this bibliographic book, which you very kindly say is quite playful, comes out of thinking about the most playful literature. Books like Perec’s books, like Calvino’s, that are about playing with what the novel can be.pamela paulWhy did they use indexes in their novels?dennis duncanWell, I never got to write that article. But it’s a really good question. I think partly, when you’re taking ideas from mathematics in order to structure your narrative, the narrative becomes— well, becomes unusually structured. It’s not free-flowing imagination. It’s more like writing a novel as the solution to a crossword puzzle that you’ve set yourself. Queneau, the founding member of this group says that the Oulipo rats trying to escape from the maze of their own creation, so you set yourself up a puzzle, and then you have to write your way out of the puzzle.And it turns out, I think, that that mode of narrative production lends itself to what we might think of as kind of micro-narratives— things, small incidents happening in text. Because each of these is the solution to part of the bigger problem. So the index becomes kind of a useful way of marking these points of solving the narrative problem.pamela paulIt didn’t catch on, though, in fiction. I mean, I don’t think— well, footnotes have had real popularity in fiction in recent years. I don’t think that’s happened with indexes after this group.dennis duncanNo, that’s right. And when you get indexes in fiction, they tend to be markers of a certain kind of playfulness. They tend to be fiction that’s pretending not to be fiction. So Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando” has an index. Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” has an index. Both of these are novels that pretend that they’re not novels. “Orlando” pretends that it’s a biography of Orlando. “Pale Fire” pretends that it’s a scholarly edition of a poem. So the index is there as part of that kind of cross-dressing, part of that pretending that this novel, this fiction, is something else.What you find actually is in the very early days of the novel, before the novel settles down— so we’re talking about the mid-18th century— you do find indexes to fiction. Samuel Richardson writes an index for “Pamela.” He writes an index for “Clarissa.” These are really early novels, before the idea of what a novel should look like. Because it kind of settled down before we reached the sort of golden age of classic Victorian realist fiction, by which point, everybody knows that fiction doesn’t have an index. And it takes somebody like Lewis Carroll, in the 1890s, to start playing around with that.Lewis Carroll has an index for his last novel, “Sylvie and Bruno.” And in doing so, he’s playing a joke. He’s being kind of Carrollian about what a novel should look like. You know that they shouldn’t have indexes, but I’m putting one in playfully. There is another category of novel that does have an index though, and that’s the uber classic. So people have produced indexes for Jane Austen, for the novels of Walter Scott, for Proust. And this is to do with the way that we use those novels— those uber classics. Usually, when you read a novel, you read it in a linear way: You start at the beginning, you read through to the end, then you take the book to the charity shop or put it on your shelf. And you don’t revisit it. And an index is like a road sign. If you have a long straight road with no exit, you don’t need any road signs. But when you have a book that you know you’ll be returning to, I know that I’m going to want to look something up in Jane Austen’s “Emma” or something like that, because it’s so famous, because it’s such a classic, that we return to it. Then we do need to know, what are my points of entry? Where do I find that bit?So like I say, Proust, for example, has an index produced for it. “Lord of the Rings,” people have produced indexes for it. So it’s to do with the way that we use books. If we’re going to return to something, like a reference book, like a history book or like a very, very classic novel, then there is a point in having an index.pamela paulI actually liked uber classic better than very, very classic novel. Did you just make that up or is that a word that’s used in the U.K.?dennis duncanI think I might have made up uber classic.[LAUGHTER]pamela paulWhen did the first index come about? What was the first index, and where did this happen?dennis duncanIt comes about around about the year 1230. So we’re talking about the start of the 13th century. But what’s really interesting is, it’s invented twice at the same time. So it’s one of those inventions, like the light bulb or like mathematical calculus, that the moment is so ripe for it, that two people in separate places invent it. So the index gets invented once in Paris and at the same time in Oxford. And there are very slight differences between what these inventions look like. The one that’s invented in Paris is invented in the Dominican friary of Saint-Jacques.And it’s what we would call a word index or a concordance. The friars at Saint-Jacques took the Bible— great big collective endeavor within the friary— and they broke it down into its constituent words, and then they put them in alphabetical order. And said, here are all the instances where this word can be found. The first one, they’re talking about the Latin Bible. The first word alphabetically in the Latin Bible is— it’s actually a phrase. It’s A, a, a, which translates loosely as “alas.” And it occurs four times in the Latin Bible.And they work their way through to Zerubbabel, a name, I think he’s a judge in the Old Testament. So breaking the book down into its words, breaking the Bible down into its words and pointing to all the moments they occur. The other time it was invented, also round about exactly the same year in Oxford, was by a man called Robert Grosseteste. Now, Grosseteste was an absolute polymath of the Middle Ages. He had read philosophy. He’d read the Bible, the scriptures, the church fathers. He was interested in science.He was very interested in lenses. He wrote a book on rainbows. He’s a total, total polymath. He’s not only read Christian writers, he read Greek writers. He’s also dabbling in recent Arabic philosophy. And with an intellect like that— this completely encyclopedic intellect, he needs a way of cataloging it, essentially. Where do these ideas occur? So Grosseteste draws up a list of about 440 topics, ideas. It could be religious ideas, like the idea of the Trinity, the notion that God exists. And every time in his reading he sees this topic mentioned, he does a little sign in the margin. So 440 little signs, they look like emoticons.And if you run your fingers down the books that Grosseteste used, some of his books still survive in various libraries. You can go and look at his actual copies of these books. You see these streams of emoticons running down the margins. Then what he could do was go back to these books and put together all of the moments that that particular sign exists. So where are all the instances that God exists? Well, Genesis One, in the beginning, God created heaven and Earth. Well, that means God exists, so I put a reference to that and all of the other instances from St. Augustine, even from Platonic thought.So he has what we call a subject index. It’s an index not necessarily where a word occurs, but every time a topic or subject occurs. The other thing about Grosseteste’s index is that, it’s not limited to one book. He doesn’t just break down the Bible. His index is like a search engine. It’s like Google. He’s read everything. And he’s made a note of wherever any of these ideas that you want to look up occur in the vastness of his reading.pamela paulSo what you’re saying is the British system was more sophisticated than the French one?dennis duncan[LAUGHS] I’m not saying that. And I think it’s the French system that really caught on. When you’re working with documents today, if you’re working with a PDF file or a Word document or you’re scrolling through a web page, and you hit Control F to find the string that you want to find, you’re really doing what those French friars were doing. So I think we’re coming into an era of the concordance now, the way that we do text search now. So I don’t want to be partisan about the British system.pamela paulAll right.dennis duncanThe French one was very good too.pamela paulSo did they continue— the French version continued as it was along those lines? And in Britain, it was using this more subject-oriented kind of index?dennis duncanNo. You find that the national barriers don’t really exist. So we find concordances in both cultures, we find subject indexes throughout Europe, really within a few decades. So by the end of the 13th century, you can find books not just in France but all over that use— both types of index. So they really sort of catch on in both ways. The thing that really kick-starts the thing or gives the thing an enormous boost, though, happens about 200 years later.We’re still talking in the 1200s. Every book is a handwritten copy. So if you have a copy of St. Augustine, and I have a copy of St. Augustine, you might have a really big book. I mean, just takes up a lot of space on your shelf, whereas I might have a really small but thick book. So the person who’s copying it out copies the words exactly, but they’re not sticking to the pagination. So if I say, you’re really going to enjoy what’s on Page 64, that doesn’t work in the manuscript era. It’s only with the invention of print in the 1450s that we can really be on the same page, that we can start to produce indexes that use page numbers as standard locators.You can be in New York, I can be in London, we can have a friend in Venice, and we can email each other and say, Page 116, you’re going to love that, and know that as long as it’s the same edition of the book, as long as it’s come off the presses at the same time, that will work. So things like footnote referencing, but particularly things like index referencing, really come into their own in the middle of the 15th century with the invention of print, which standardizes the page.pamela paulAnd is it completely standardized across cultures, across different print traditions?dennis duncanMy book has a very kind of Western lean to it. There’s research being done by American academics, though, on the index in other cultures, in Chinese culture for example, where it arrives quite late. I think in the late 19th, early 20th century, and part of that is to do with alphabetical order. One thing that the Roman alphabet is very good for is memorizing alphabetical order. There’s only 26 letters. And we can look something up in the left hand column of an index, because we know that ordering system. If you move to a new geographic alphabet, that becomes a lot more difficult. Now in the late 19th century, the Chinese became interested in Western medical textbooks, which were being translated. But in order to be useful, you need to be able to look something up in these sort of medical textbooks. So the index comes into its own, and that causes a problem for these books’ usefulness in cultures where you use a different alphabet. And so, I’m not the expert on this. I have to confess. But I understand that what’s called the four corner system of putting the symbols of Chinese writing into an order, so you can look things up in an index, comes in round about the early 20th century.pamela paulAll right. I’m going to stay in the 20th century, and actually go into the 21st, so skipping over hundreds of years of index history, who now creates the index in a book? Is that a job? Are there people that specialize in indexes?dennis duncanIt really is. There are professional societies in this country where I am, in the U.K., we have the Society of Indexers. In the states, you have the American Society of Indexers. There’s a Canadian society and Australian, New Zealand society, a Dutch society. Yep. There are professional bodies of indexers. And these indexers will have specialist expertise. I talked about medical textbooks. You don’t want your medical textbook indexed by somebody who doesn’t understand medicine. You don’t want your science textbook indexed by somebody who doesn’t understand that, because it won’t be useful. They won’t get the nuance.When I did a book, you mentioned “Book Parts” earlier. When Adam and I did “Book Parts,” a lot of it is set in the Renaissance. And it involves quite a lot of Latin, so we got an indexer who would be able to spot that, the Latin, to get those things correct. In the index, if you’re doing a gardening book, similarly, plants have both botanical names, Latin names and common names. And you want somebody who’s good on gardening to do that. So yes, you have professional indexers. Lots of academics think they can index their own book and come a cropper, because it’s really hard.And the professionals are sort of trained in trying to project, what is somebody who comes to this book? How are they going to use it? What are the things they’re going to want to look up? What are the ideas here? Now, I say that indexing is a profession. It’s done by these specialist humans who have a real capacity for deep reading, for A) understanding the book, and B) thinking how is this book going to be used. There is also software to produce indexes, as you can imagine, using rudimentary artificial intelligence. But it’s not very good. At the moment, the state of the art for commercial indexing packages isn’t very good. So in my book, I’ve included two indexes. I’ve included one—pamela paulI was going to say, you’re giving away the ending to your book!dennis duncan[LAUGHS] It’s fine.pamela paulGo ahead.dennis duncanI’m going to tell you anyway. One that I produced by using this commercial software, and I wanted to show, it’s interesting. It’s not as bad as you think, but it’s also not very useful. And another produced by a lady called Paula Clarke Bain, who is a professional indexer over here. And it’s a masterpiece. Paula’s index is not only conspicuously, substantially more useful than the one produced by the software, but it’s also funny. It’s full of Paula’s personality. Paula is trained to be a crossword setter, a cryptic crossword setter. And it’s got all sorts of anagrams and little bits of Paula’s personality, which I think mirror the humor hopefully of the book there.She’s done a job of representing, hopefully, the playfulness of my writing in her index. So hopefully, that really shows the difference between current state of the art in computerized indexing software and a really good human indexer.pamela paulSo very last quick question: Excluding your own index, your own Paula-generated index, not the computer-generated one, do you have a favorite index?dennis duncanOh, I have a few. There’s a really good one from 1929. It’s from a book called “The Stuffed Owl,” which is a poetry anthology. Early 20th century poetry anthology, but of bad poetry. It’s an anthology of all of the moments where the great poets— Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, have written really rubbish lines. And its index is really snarky. Its index is full of— index is a great way of sort of burying snark. There’s something about the brevity of index syntax that makes it a good place to be sarcastic. And so, “The Stuffed Owl” is this wonderfully sarcastic index poking fun at the greats of the English poetic canon. I think that’s my favorite.pamela paulAll right. We will end there with the owl. Dennis, thank you so much for being here.dennis duncanA pleasure. Thank you.[MUSIC PLAYING]pamela paulSo here’s a request for our listeners. I get lots of feedback from you, some complaints, lots of kind words, really appreciate it. You can always reach me directly at books@nytimes.com. I will write back. But you can also, if you feel moved to do so, review us on any platform where you download the podcast, whether that’s iTunes or Stitcher or Google Play or somewhere else. Please feel free to review us. And of course, email us at any time.[MUSIC PLAYING]Brendan Slocumb joins us now from Washington, D.C. He is the author of a debut novel called “The Violin Conspiracy.” Brendan, thanks for being here.brendan slocumbThank you so much.pamela paulSo congratulations on the book, which was a Good Morning America February Book Club pick, very big deal right out of the gate.brendan slocumbThat is insane. I’m just— I’m blown away.pamela paulSo you are coming to this as a second profession. You are a classical violinist. Can you talk to us a little bit about how you came to play and study the violin?brendan slocumbWhen I was 9 years old, the orchestra program in Cumberland County, Fayetteville, North Carolina, Susan Ellington came around to all the elementary schools and said, yeah, we are offering strings lessons— violin, viola, cello, bass. Anyone who wants to take lessons— the lessons are free, you just have to rent an instrument. A couple of my friends said, yeah, I’m going to do this, because we would to get out of class twice a week. So I was definitely, definitely down for that. They ended up not doing it. And I ended up doing it. And it just was a life-changing experience.pamela paulWhat appealed to you besides the obvious getting out of class?brendan slocumb[LAUGHS] It was the fact that it was something new. And I had heard a little bit of classical music before that day, and I loved it. I just absolutely loved it. It was something new and exciting. And it just resonated with me.pamela paulDo you currently play with an orchestra?brendan slocumbI do. I play with the Nova Symphony in Annandale, Virginia.pamela paulAnd you also teach violin. You said that learning violin helped save your life in other interviews. Tell us a little bit about that, and then I’m curious if you find yourself mentoring other young aspiring musicians who may have been in a similar place that you were.brendan slocumbTo answer the second part of your question first, I hope so. I hope that all of my interactions with not just musicians but with people in general, I hope that they are inspiring and uplifting. Just the smallest gesture, you never know how it could change someone’s life. But in regards to music saving my life, when I say it’s a life-saving force, that’s not hyperbole at all. When I was younger, I didn’t live in the greatest neighborhoods. My family and I, we had each other.And the friends that we would play with and run around with, a lot of them today are in prison or dead. And had I not been in my music classes, had I not been on a trip with my orchestra, had I not been practicing, I would have been right there with them, breaking into people’s houses or stealing things and just getting in trouble. So music really did save my life.pamela paulWhen and why did you decide to write a novel on top of what sounds like a very successful and fulfilling career as a classical musician?brendan slocumbIt was the events of 2020. With the pandemic, you’re stuck in the house all day long. And in addition to that, the events that took place involving George Floyd. I think that the time was right for people to really receive the stories that I had been carrying around for years and years and years. In 2020, we were all stuck inside. There’s nothing to do but eat or write, so I decided I’m really getting fat, so I should probably start writing more, and “The Violin Conspiracy” was born.pamela paulWell, not just stories that you’d heard about, but also things that you’ve perhaps experienced in your own life, in your own career as a Black classical musician.brendan slocumbAbsolutely. I would say 99 percent of the events that take place in the book are either directly from my life or modified events from my life. People would say things like, “That didn’t happen. No, no, no, you’re exaggerating. Uh, come on, you’re like— no, no really. That doesn’t happen.” But they do, and they did. And I felt that the time was right for people to actually receive these stories, just to let them know that, hey, there’s a different perspective out there. It’s not just what you see and what you think. Other people have different perspectives. And their perspectives, although different, doesn’t mean that they’re any less valid.pamela paulGive us some examples. What is one of those stories that you would tell people, and they would just say, no, no, no that’s not possible.brendan slocumbWow. The wedding scene in “The Violin Conspiracy,” a modified version of that event took place with my quartet when I was in college. The quartet played at a wedding, and we thought everything was fine. And the father of the bride got us out of the church as quickly as possible, didn’t pay us, saw hatred in his eyes. And he told us that we ruined his daughter’s wedding, and we still tried to figure out why until certain things were said. And we knew exactly what he was talking about. And it was just a devastating feeling.And the other big event was Baton Rouge, the Baton Rouge scene. I was driving cross-country with a friend back in 2000. This is pre-GPS, so we had to use road maps. And using the road map, I was in the right lane, but the hotel was on the left side. So I had to make a left turn. I put my left turn signal on, got over. Nobody on the road, mind you, because it’s like Sunday evening. And two seconds later, there’s a cop pulling me over and my passenger, my friend was white. And he’s in the car. He’s like, “What’s going on?” He’s like, “Well, here we go. It’s about to— it’s about to go down.” “What are you talking about?” He’s like, “Just wait.” The cop gets on his bullhorn, tells me to get out of the car, just me, just the driver, get on my knees, hands in the air. And he’s got a gun drawn on me. And I think that this is it. I’m done. This is it. And he comes up and tells me, after he looks at my ID, that I can go because it was just an illegal lane change. And I was like, you have got to be kidding. You draw a gun on me and make me get out of the car on my knees for an illegal lane change, are you serious? And had my passenger not been in the car to view it, people just wouldn’t believe it. “No, that’s— you’re over-exaggerating.” Really? Yeah, things like that happen.pamela paulSo you take some of those true stories and then obviously, this is a novel, it’s fiction. How much of a leap was it to come up with story? Because this is also, we should say, a thriller, so there’s very much— it’s very plot driven. How did you come up with the idea?brendan slocumbAgain, that was really easy to do. Because the whole premise with the stolen violin, that also happened to me when I was a senior in high school. We came home from a family trip and my violin, I actually make reference to it in the novel, my 1953 Eugene Lehman violin was stolen along with a bunch of other stuff that I didn’t care about like appliances and TVs and radios and whatever in the house, and the violin was gone. And if your instrument is taken, as a musician, it’s like a part of you is missing. I felt like I was missing a limb.It was right before I was supposed to go to college. It was supposed to take me through school, and I had nothing. And it was a devastating experience.pamela paulAll right, before we get to the fictional violin which, we should say, is a Stradivarius in the book, what was the story behind your own instrument? How did you get it? And why did it mean that much to you?brendan slocumbThat violin, that 1953 Eugene Lehman that I had— oh, and by the way, if anybody’s listening, and you see a 1953 Eugene Lehmann, I would love to have it back. That instrument— that was the first one that I owned outright. First one that was paid for, and it belonged to me. And it was mine, and I was so proud of it. And it was a fantastic instrument. It was actually sold to me by one of the teachers in the county that I went to school in. He saw that I had some talent, and I needed a better instrument. And he sold it to me at a really, really, really good price.And my mom scrounged up the money to buy it. And I was really happy to get it. I loved it. I love that violin. To this day, I think about it. It’s just an empty sinking feeling when I don’t have that instrument.pamela paulWow. There’s not a happy ending there, or did you— I’m assuming you got another violin. What was— did it not fully take the place of that original in your heart?brendan slocumbWell, this is a really interesting thing about it. This is why I really want people to understand the power of music and what it can do for you. A patron, someone in the county who had an old fiddle in their family for years and years and years and years that wasn’t being played, heard about my story. And they offered to let me use their family instrument through college. So this wonderful patron gave me a violin for four years as I went to college. It was a nice instrument. It wasn’t as good as my Lehman, but it was something, and I appreciated it.And it took me through school, and it gave me an opportunity. So I feel that it’s really, really important. I will always do everything I can to give back, because that opportunity was given to me by someone.pamela paulLet’s cross over to the world of fiction, because some of this is mirrored in the story of your protagonist. Tell us about Ray.brendan slocumbRay is an everyday, just— he’s a nice kid. He’s a little bit dorky, but he is a really cool guy. He’s dorky and cool, because he plays the violin. But that’s the only thing that people would consider dorky about him. Good guy, just wants to play music. That’s all he wants. And people don’t necessarily understand that about him, because you don’t see a lot of Black teenagers who want to play violin and pursue it as a career. So they think it’s a little bit odd. It’s not odd,it’s just who he is, and I wanted to write Ray as the person who stays true to himself. He’s got a lot of good influences in his life. He does run up against a lot of adversity, but the positive role models in his life really, really shine a good light on him. And you could tell that their influences come through in the character of Ray.pamela paulAll right. For those who have not read the novel yet, just set up the basic premise of what happens to Ray at the outset of the novel. We don’t want to give any plot twists away.brendan slocumbOK. “The Violin Conspiracy” is basically the story of Ray, who discovers that his old family fiddle is actually a priceless Stradivarius violin. And that discovery catapults him into superstardom in the world of classical music. And right before the Tchaikovsky competition, which is basically the Olympics of classical music, his violin is stolen. Will he get it back? Will he compete? Will he win? You have to read “The Violin Conspiracy” to find out.pamela paulAll right. You said you wanted people to understand the power of music. What did you most want to convey in the novel about the violin and the experience of performing? And how did you do that?brendan slocumbI really want people to know that, that music, in general, it’s such a powerful force. It’s such a saving force. It can do so much for so many people. As a teacher, I’ve had kids come into my classes who are basically outcasts in their other classes. Teachers say they have a lot of trouble with them. They’re not doing well in any of their classes. They have home problems, and they can’t get along with anyone. But they’ll come into my class, and they’re a part of a family. We all support each other, and music really does that for you. Music is one of the only things that you can experience that you can go across the world and not speak the language, and you can have an instant connection with someone else.And it can just do so much for you. And classical music in particular, it’s not just for people within a certain zip code or a certain bank account or a certain socioeconomic status, it is for everyone. And I really want from this novel for people to understand that it’s all a matter of perspective. Just because you look different or just because you come from a different place, doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily a different person. It’s just where you live or how you dress. That’s all it is. It’s just physical stuff. We are all pretty much the same, and music is a great way to bring everybody together.pamela paulAre there any similarities between practicing music and writing or editing a novel?brendan slocumbI think so, 100 percent. I don’t think, had I been so disciplined in my music studies, that I would have been able to sit down and write as much as I did. In college, I would practice 3 and 1/2 hours every day, rain or shine, felt good or not, whether there was my favorite show was on, or if there was something I needed to do. It was always worked in around my practicing, every single day. And with the writing, I literally— 2020 helped, because we’re stuck inside all day. But I wrote every day. I would try to do at least 2,500 to 3,000 words daily. And I did it every day, and I had a great agent who, he would edit some things for me on the fly and throw some ideas back at me.And we would have arguments, and I would usually win. And I would insert those into the book. And it helped. It definitely helped.pamela paulYou had a choice, given the inspiration behind the novel, to write a memoir, for example, instead of a novel, or to write a coming-of-age novel, but you chose to do a thriller. Are you a fan of the genre?brendan slocumbI love thrillers and mystery. I love them. I love them. One of my favorite books is “Death on the Nile” by Agatha Christie. And that was one of the first books that I read cover to cover. And I was angry, because I could not figure out— I couldn’t figure out who did it. I love that genre and it started off as, oh, this is kind of a nice sweet autobiographical thing. But yeah, it needs to— let’s bump it up a couple of notches. I wanted to write it like I was watching a movie.pamela paulYou’ve also said again, that you really want people to understand the power of music. In addition to inspiring people to pick up the novel and read it if they haven’t, why don’t you leave us actually with some music of your own?brendan slocumbI would be happy to. I’m going to play just a small excerpt from the Seitz concerto, like the 3rd Movement.[MUSIC PLAYING]pamela paulWe’ll end there. Brendan Slocumb’s new novel is called “The Violin Conspiracy.” Thank you, Brendan.brendan slocumbMy absolute pleasure. Thank you.[MUSIC PLAYING]pamela paulMy colleagues MJ Franklin and Lauren Christensen join us now to talk about what we’re reading. Hey, guys.mj franklinHi.lauren christensenHi, Pamela.pamela paulLauren, let’s start with you. What are you reading these days?lauren christensenSure. So I just finished listening to the audio book of André Leon Talley’s memoir, “The Chiffon Trenches.” I had read the hard copy when it came out. And then, went back to listen to it again after he died. And it just— it was even more magical the second time around. I mean, he was a brilliant fashion editor, but he was also this really— just a really obsessive historian and a gifted writer of narrative— fashion and otherwise. So those gifts were really self-evident in the book, but I just recommend the audio over and above the hard copy, just because his voice— if you’ve heard his voice in any context, his voice really, really makes the narrative.So the story is that he was raised by his grandmother, who was a maid at Duke University in Durham in the 1950s, in North Carolina. And I think, what will stay with me forever, just from his childhood, are these images that he draws of Sunday services at this Baptist church that his family and community went to. And the women in this Black community really treated church services on Sundays like front row of Paris Fashion Week, and just his memories of their finest shift dresses and hats and gloves and handbags and mid-size heels. His real passion for that is this beautiful blending of religious community and his love of dress and art and style.So this is just a beautiful beginning. And there’s something later in his career, there’s something really fearless and frankly heroic about how he recounts this world that he joined. That was— was/is— maybe unwelcoming to everyone. I don’t know, it just seems like high fashion is just kind of built on this exclusivity.But especially unwelcoming to a gay Black man from the South. And so, he’s really heroic about recounting the racism he encountered during his fashion career. I mean, we think of him as the sort of pinnacle of that world. But there were all these rumors that were spread about him sleeping with Diana Vreeland, who was his mentor, who really began his career, or sleeping with Karl Lagerfeld.And these assumptions, that it was something other than his sheer talent that built that career. And there were whispers that people— I mean, maybe louder than whispers— that people were calling him an ape behind his back. And he really goes into the history of that insult and the kind of institutionalized nature of that insult and what that meant to him. And throughout, there’s this really aching loneliness to the book, which also really comes through in his voice. And he speaks with candor and vulnerability of sexual abuse as a young boy and his hesitation toward intimacy in adulthood, grief, shame over his sexuality and his physical size.He had a pretty serious binge-eating disorder that kind of plagued his later life. But throughout all that loneliness, you know he has this constant thread of a humor— it’s a self-aggrandizing humor, but it is so infectious. And he has this really unmistakable conviction in himself and his own talent, his self-worth. I could go on and on. I’m sorry. I’m rambling, but it’s a very—[INTERPOSING VOICES]I was going to say—pamela paulThat sense of confidence, I think, was totally justified. The man was a genius.lauren christensenIn so many ways, in this kind of polymath— in so many ways. And it’s just inspiring for all of us, whether you’re interested in fashion or not. I think some people think it’s just kind of a fashion memoir, but there’s really a lot there. So I recommend that. And MJ, what are you reading?mj franklinBefore I get to— what I was going to say, I just wanted to mention, like you said that he narrates the audiobook and so?lauren christensenYeah.mj franklinHe had such an impact on the industry. And his voice meant so much. And so, I can only imagine how incredible it is to literally hear the sound of his voice, which is so dignified, which has such character throughout this already very personal memoir. That recommendation sounds incredible.pamela paulLongtime listeners of the podcast may remember that he was a guest on the podcast two years ago. So I highly recommend listening to that as well.mj franklinI read Toni Morrison’s newly published story, “Recitatif.” And it has a really, really interesting publishing history. It’s Toni Morrison’s only short story, and it was originally published in, I think, 1983 in an anthology. And now, just a few weeks ago, it was republished as a standalone book by Knopf. And it’s pretty short. The story itself is only about 40 pages. And it has a foreword by Zadie Smith that’s also about 40 pages.So it’s a pretty brief read, but I think it’s always a gift to read Toni Morrison. And so, I picked this up. And before I dive into what I thought about or what I’m thinking about still, I just want to talk about that— it’s going to set the scene, as they say. The backdrop of this story is the civil rights movement. It takes place in the ‘60s. And it’s about two girls— one Black and one white, who meet at an orphanage at a young age, and then it follows them throughout their lives, as they bump into each other repeatedly.The twist, though, is that although the two girls are of different race— one white and one Black— you don’t know which one’s white and which one’s Black. And throughout the story, Toni Morrison kind of scrubs anything that could be used as a racial marker. What I loved about this book is that from the start, the wheels as a reader just start turning, right? Like even knowing that the race of these characters are obscured, you start immediately looking for this detail in the story. Is that a clue? Is that to give away that this character is white or this character is Black?What about this thing about their mom that they mention? Is that a clue? Then you kind of pivot, and you start to wonder, What even is a racial marker? How does it appear? What do we identify as racial markers? And then you start to think, Is it even possible to determine in the story, what race each character is? And then you start to think, Does it matter? But then you push back, and you think, Well of course, it matters. Because it matters to the girls. They say something in the story like, My mom would be upset that I’m rooming with this person in an orphanage.And then it matters to the story. There’s a reason why Toni Morrison set this in the backdrop of the civil rights movement. There’s a reason why she scrubbed these racial markers. And so, in such a short amount of space, again only 40 pages, and the book is pretty like, physically small, and the print is pretty big. And so, in a short amount of space, Toni Morrison invokes in the reader this type of very, very rich searching, that I think is just the sign of a master. She’s such an impactful and smart writer. And what I was especially interested in is how this book differs from some of her novels.When I think about her novels, I think a lot about the images that she creates, these very sharp unforgettable scenes. From “Sula,” for instance, I think about Sula on her porch, watching her mom in the yard on fire as her grandmother on the ground tries to crawl and save her, right? That’s an unforgettable portrait. And from that same book, too, Sula at her friend’s wedding, giving her friend a hug, then leaving the festivities and standing by herself in the rain to leave, right? The scene of Sula by herself in the cold and the rain and the warmth of this jovial setting, like those are such rich scenes. Because Toni Morrison, I think, as a writer, just captured community, captured people, captured Blackness.And in this book, she kind of takes that all away. And there are certainly rich details in it, certainly signs of— this is a Toni Morrison story. I’m thinking about, for instance, one of the mothers in this book has these very vibrant green pants that her daughter is super embarrassed by, for instance. And so, you just see Toni Morrison in her craft, but now in a new way. She’s not necessarily capturing a scene, but she’s using the tools in her kit to get at these big ideas of what does race mean to us, and how do we see race? It’s a challenge to the reader, but such a rewarding one.One of the things I love about Toni Morrison is the depth of the writing that comes out around a newly published Toni Morrison. And so, in this case, Zadie Smith wrote this incredible introduction, where she talks about the impact of Toni Morrison, what she’s doing in this short story, and how the kind of ladder is up to how we think about race today. Likewise, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers wrote an incredible review for The Times Book Review, where she talks about the impact of Toni Morrison, about how Toni Morrison was one of the first writers that wrote about Blackness, yes. But then, also wrote about whiteness, that whiteness had markers too.That it’s not just a neutral kind of blank zone, that there is something there that we can also explore and also see. And so, just overall, it’s a short story. But it’s an incredible one. What about you, Pamela? What have you been reading?pamela paulI read a book that I wasn’t planning to read. The book is called “How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question,” by Michael Schur. And I never heard of Michael Schur. He is a TV writer and the creator of the show “The Good Place,” which is a show I’d never seen. But I knew Alexandra Alter was working on a story about him. And I just thought, Oh, she’s doing something about some TV guy I’ve never heard of. But I read her story and it piqued my interest. “The Good Place,” for those who haven’t seen it, is a comedy that ran about a sort of bad person, quote-unquote, who is sent to the Good Place by accident, which is a version of heaven.And it shows us how she tries to fit in to this place that’s largely occupied by good people. And I put little quote marks around the words good and bad for that whole description. Anyway, Alexandra’s story piqued my interest. I picked it up, and really read right through it. It’s a subject, actually, that’s interesting to me. He looks at several schools of thought around moral philosophy. And there was some overlap to things I’d studied in philosophy classes in college and things I argued with an ex-boyfriend who was a Ph.D. in philosophy. And there was also some overlap from a class I took in the philosophical underpinnings of the Society of Ethical Culture, which is a movement that I feel aligned with.And in that class, we read a lot of Kant. And not surprisingly, Kant is a part of this book. But actually, it’s written by a TV guy. It’s written with a lot of humor. It’s really accessible. I actually think it’s a great book for teenagers. And as soon as I finished it, I gave it to my 12-year-old, who also blazed right through it. And now of course, as a consequence, we’re watching “The Good Place,” which I guess is how book people maybe generally operate, is that they go in the opposite direction, from the book to the TV show. Whereas, maybe most people, I don’t know, go from TV to book. But in any case, it’s clear from the TV show where this book came from.Because Michael Schur started to research and talk to many philosophers in order to have the knowledge that he needed to write that TV show in a persuasive way. And the chapters are organized in a really fun way. I’ll just give you a couple of chapter titles, which will I think make clear why this is a really good book for kids. So one chapter is called, “Should I Lie and Tell My Friend I Like Her Ugly Shirt?” Another chapter is called, “Do I Have to Return My Shopping Cart to the Shopping Cart Rack Thingy? I Mean, It’s All the Way Over There.” Then there’s another chapter called, “Should I Punch My Friend in the Face for No Reason?”So it really is very accessible. And it wasn’t a surprise to me that it debuted on our best-seller list— I think at No. 1 on the combined list. So clearly, it’s striking a chord with other people; other imperfect people out there.mj franklinHelping people kind of tackle those big conundrums. Should I put the shopping cart back?pamela paulI actually, I really— that drew me in, I have to say. That was the one for me. Maybe, MJ, you always put your shopping cart back?mj franklinI am an anxious rule follower, so I do. But I have not thought about the morality of that decision. More just like, am I going to get in trouble?[LAUGHTER]—the anxiety of that decision.pamela paulWell, you know what? Michael Schur writes that he also is an anxious rule follower. He’s what, I think, Gretchen Rubin, in one of her books about these sort of four tendencies, calls an upholder, someone who’s always trying to do what’s right. And I think again, the corollary as you said to that is, because you’re afraid that you’re doing it wrong, or you’re going to get caught doing it wrong, or that someone is going to know that you’re doing it wrong. And maybe, it’s not surprising, I am one of those too? I don’t know about you, Lauren? Are you?lauren christensenYeah! Like is it ethical that I’m always like trudging through the rain to find the place where the shopping cart goes or is it just paranoia that someone’s watching me?[LAUGHTER] So I too am an anxious rule follower.pamela paulThis is a book then for both of you, too.[LAUGHTER] All right, let’s run down the titles again, starting with you, Lauren.lauren christensenI’m listening to “The Chiffon Trenches: A Memoir,” by André Leon Talley.mj franklinAnd I am reading “Recitatif,” the newly published story by Toni Morrison.pamela paulAnd I read “How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question,” by Michael Schur.[MUSIC PLAYING]Remember, there’s more at nytimes.com/books. And you can always write to us at books@nytimes.com. I write back; not right away, but I do. The Book Review Podcast is produced by the great Pedro Rosado from HeadStepper Media, with a major assist from my colleague John Williams. Thanks for listening. For The New York Times, I’m Pamela Paul.[MUSIC PLAYING]