Handwriting a Novel with Rahul Bhattacharya

And we always like to end The Right Club with a book recommendation for our listeners.

Is there something that you've read recently that you'd like to recommend for us? So

I want to recommend the book that I'm currently reading, but is it a cheat to kind of just recommend an out-and-out classic?

No, absolutely not.

I mean, if you want to recommend one of your own books as well, that's absolutely

fine.

That's not how narcissistic I am.

But I'm going to recommend a classic, which, but however, one I suspect has not been read as much in the English.

I mean, everybody in the sense of literary Anglosphere probably has heard of this book, but I'm not sure why.

So many people have read it.

And this is Don Quixote by Cervantes, which is, of course, one of the great and one of the founding novels.

And I'm only reading it now.

This is the Burton Raphael translation.

I've heard the Edel Grossman translation is excellent.

This is the copy that they had in my library.

It's a Norton Critical Edition.

And it is so funny and it's so great.

And it reminds me of one of my other favorite novels, which is Gogol's Dead Souls, which is one of, among the Russian classics, I feel it's one of the kind of underrated novels.

Russian classics, Nikolai Gogol.

I feel he owes, reading Don Quixote now, I feel that Gogol probably owes some debts to Cervantes.

But then again, this is possibly true of every literary novelist almost who's come after Cervantes because that's how kind of important Don Quixote is meant to be to modern novels.

I'm enjoying it thoroughly.

oh excellent yeah this is yet another book that i feel i must read but haven't yet

yeah well it's it's only 746 in very fine print i'm sure if they have to do a generous typeset this would be about a thousand pages so oh wow i won't beat