Welcome to the first installment of my 2025 interviews with bibliophiles I know and love. I will ask questions about tastes, reading habits, and preferences. This is to pique some interest among friends and family about new book finds, to perhaps stir up some thought provoking ideas, and to simply share our mutual love of books. If you love books, I hope you will join us and take a look!
Today, I am interviewing Benjamin Trull. Ben graduated from Thomas Aquinas College in 2019 and received his Masters in Theology from the Dominican House of Studies in 2021, but is determined never to return to academic life, preferring to get his intellectual fix by writing the Substack Theories of Everything. Ben is a lifelong thespian who has recently returned to his roots by becoming a high school drama teacher, and has recently written a commissioned play called: Passion’s End. He also has novelistic aspirations. Right now, he is chipping away at a noir novella (a “noirvella”, if you will) in the spirit of Raymond Chandler. He is a dedicated fan of Russian literature, in particular of Chekhov and Turgenev, and is determined to experience Russia through as many senses as possible without actually going there. He has recently purchased a samovar and some smoky Russian tea, and has set his sights on learning how to pickle cucumbers and apples. He has grown to have a great penchant for rye bread. Ben loves crafted music, whatever the genre, whether it’s classical, romantic, synthwave, or metal. On that note (no pun intended), let’s get down to books.
ME: You obviously have a great love of music. Does your choice of music have similar emotional tones as your poetry and literature?
BEN: I’ve composed music and written stories, essays, poems, etc. for years, pretty much always for fun. But a side effect is realizing how difficult it is to produce something you’re proud of: it’s easy to impress others, it’s harder to satisfy yourself. As a result, I admire craft in both, and craft comes in many kinds. William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler are both craftsman, but their art couldn’t be more different. A consequence of craft is richness: lazy artistry produces literary junk food, but craft gives you a meal. That’s how I’ve developed, anyway. A consequence of that, though, is that I’m not a voracious reader, merely a steady one: you can’t eat steak every day. I want a book that engages my mind, my imagination, and my emotions in subtle and unpredictable ways, but that can be hard on my mind, my imagination, and my emotions. It’s a bit like swimming in the clear waters of a coral reef with goggles but no snorkel: you never want to stop looking at that strange world of colorful polyp colonies unfolding for miles, but you have to break for air. I prefer not reading or listening to music to reading a paperback thriller or listening to some crooning androgyne strum the same four chords ad nauseam.
ME: Do you read poetry for pleasure on a consistent basis or only once in a while? Who are your favorites?
You know, I think of myself as more poetry-centric than I actually am. I pick up a collection of poetry maybe once a week, if not less often, and usually read just one or two. Granted, I read them slowly, and several times, to savor the words and the verse. But I don’t feel the poetry pinch often; when I do, it typically emanates from a specific angst or sorrow. There’s nothing like the consolation of finding the right poem at the right time, but you don’t want to spoil the efficacy of a medicine by over-indulging. In fact, there’s a phrase for that: substance abuse. Like any pill head, of course, I have my favorites: T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Frost, and William Stafford.
ME: As a highschool teacher, what are your thoughts on helping to instill good and long-lasting reading habits in your students? If you were asked to suggest 5 books you would want a teen to read, what would they be?
I’m still new to teaching, so this is hard to answer. I didn't have great reading habits until college — which was entirely my fault, though I can’t say I regret it. I’m glad I came to literature later in life, and freely. I think I was averse to reading because it “felt like school.” I guess that would be my goal with teaching English: do your best to prevent reading and writing from becoming “subjects.” How? I don’t know. But having a goal helps.
I don’t know if I have five books I’d list with confidence, but I’ll list the ones I can: 1. A Wizard of Earthsea — an excellent fairytale depiction of what it means to grow up and face your limitations.
2. A Canticle For Leibowitz — both an interesting book in its own right, and a good illustration of the many ways that faith and reason interact.
3. Picture-heavy encyclopedias and coffee table books — these were the bulk of my high school consumption. Seeing the juxtaposition of images and words in the work of explaining history and culture did a lot to show me, long before I formed any settled opinions about the matter, that the past is made up of fragments which we assemble and reassemble into stories, often to suit our own purposes rather than to tell the truth.
4. The Dictionary — my first favorite book. If you want students to experience the depth of their own culture, the dictionary will show them, especially if it’s not some cheap college edition. The OED and the tripartite Merriman-Webster interlard hyper-specific scientific terms with Arabic cognates and Shakespearean slang. An excellent inoculation against the narrow-mindedness endemic to an overly defensive conservative education.
ME: You love plays. What is your favorite? Is simply reading a play a different emotional experience than seeing it acted? Or can you feel it just as deeply reading it alone?
BEN: Plays aren’t a big part of my literary diet. The two sources from which I draw most in my own playwriting are my experience as an actor (“Does this line actually play onstage? Would I enjoy acting this role?”) and screenwriting, especially for structure. It helps that the screenplays I admire most tend to be for more subdued movies, or, at least, less conventionally “spectacular”. I dislike the theater “feel,” that intangible ethos that reeks of Whole Foods bohemia and the back pages of The New Yorker. I want to write plays that feel like films, because the cinematic experience, at its best, hits you with nuclear force. Imagine combining that vibe with the native power of live theater, and you’ve got something thermonuclear.
That being said, I have been trying to read more plays than usual, out of a sense of duty to the art form I profess to practice — Strindberg, Chekhov, Beckett, and so on. But I don’t love doing it alone: it feels so lifeless. I prefer to read them aloud with friends. That better approximates a script’s natural habitat: a novel lives and breathes on pages, a play onstage. My favorite plays, to make an end, are Shakespeare’s King Lear, Othello, Coriolanus; Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard; and — because I need at least one comedy, one dim ray of light — Moss Hart’s Light Up The Sky.
ME: What was your life-changing novel? The one it was hard to put down to return to real time? You can have more than one.
BEN: I promise I’m not being contrarian, just consistent with my own answers: since my favorite books are those that fully engage my heart and mind, the better and more engaging a novel, the slower and more deliberately I read it. That may not be the case for others, but it is for me. A life-changing book grabs you by the collar and demands that you change your life, and since I have a naturally zippy and restless mind, a book I can zip through with ease tends not to leave an impression.
Okay, with that wordy preface behind me, here we go. You’re going to regret allowing me more than one…
1. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy) — my all-time favorite book. I read this comparatively fast in the summer of 2018, especially given how long it is, but there were extenuating academic circumstances. Tolstoy is the best character painter ever to write prose, and he does it so effortlessly. And the contrast between his fiction and his convoluted philosophy of history actually amplifies the drama of the story he’s trying to tell, and forces you to confront the world as never before.
2. The Third Policeman/At Swim-Two-Birds (Flann O’Brien) and The Gormenghast Trilogy (Mervyn Peake) — intense and demanding trips of the imagination that left me “changed, changed utterly.” Gormenghast is what Wodehouse would have written if he’d gone on a macabre acid trip. I’m not even going to try to explain The Third Policeman or At Swim-Two-Birds.
3. The Razor’s Edge (W. Somerset Maugham) and The Unquiet Grave (Cyril Connolly) — books that I disliked intensely while reading them, but which have haunted me ever since — and not just because of their fluid prose. Won’t say more.
4. Buddenbrooks (Thomas Mann), The Goldfinch (Donna Tartt), Torrents of Spring/Smoke (Ivan Turgenev) — lush writing, deep sensitivity to “the human heart in conflict with itself,” and marvelous evocations of their respective places and times. No feverish moralism, no preaching: just humanizing, ennobling fiction.
ME: You have a self-professed passion for all things Russian. What is it about Russian writers that appeals to you?
BEN: There’s definitely a Russian ethos, but the more Russians I read, the harder it is to articulate it. Regrettably, the most enduring idea in most people’s minds about “Russian literature” seems to be the impression left by Dostoevsky, and to a lesser extent by Tolstoy: long books, neurotic characters, incisive psychologizing, and hysterical social conservatism. Blessedly, there’s more to the Russians than that. Pushkin is playful and beautiful (nothing at all like the proto-nationalist that Dostoevsky imagines him to be). What stands out most about his narrative poem Eugene Onegin isn’t so much the plot (though you can find echoes of it everywhere in the rest of Russian literature) as the charm and humor with which Pushkin narrates it. Chekhov and Turgenev are both lighter in style, though not always in content, than the titans I mentioned above, and they’re often very funny, too. As an artist, Turgenev is a bit like Mozart: not so much a formal innovator as a master of squeezing every last wonderful drop of potential from inherited forms. Chekhov, by contrast, is like an impressionist sketch artist: he deftly captures people and moments, some poignant, some farcical, and some devastatingly sad, in spare, un-lyrical prose. His collected letters, by the way, are among my all-time favorite non-fiction. If I had to venture a guess as to why the Russians move me so, it’s that they often show a disarming and refreshing bluntness about their problems. English novels of manners are often a slog because the English are congenitally incapable of saying what they mean when they should. How many times does an English drama fall back on hero and heroine misinterpreting each other because they’re both too damn discrete to just say, I don’t know, “Lizzy, Wickham’s a predator, don’t let him near your sister!” A Russian novel might begin with the hero saying that, and who knows what’ll happen next? That unpredictability makes it a lot more exciting — and it allows their characters to reflect on social and spiritual problems in their dialogue without it feeling unnatural and forced. But in the end, I think it’s an affinity deeper than words: either you melt to Rachmaninov and want to bury yourself in the soil that burgeoned his every note, or you don’t.
ME: How would you convince adults that reading is vital to their growth as a person?
BEN: At the risk of offering a utilitarian justification, I’d advise people to chew on Kevin D. Williamson’s quip that “law is carefully written language carefully read.” You can’t be a responsible citizen in a democratic republic without being a habitual reader. Sorry if that sounds elitist, but it’s the truth.
Still, to go beyond utilitarian and political considerations… humans are social creatures, and we are social primarily through being verbal. If it’s true that you can only find yourself through the sincere gift of self, à la St. John Paul II, then you can’t begin to love someone without competence in language — sometimes spoken, but more often unspoken. Literature and poetry furnish you with both: they can reveal your own heart and mind, as well as those of others. You learn to live by living, yes, but you also learn by imitating, and by studying how others have lived.
Do those arguments sound flat? Yeah, they do. I wouldn’t be convinced. In the end, as with so many things, it takes an act of faith and a plunge to see the truth that reading, for all its great effects, is its own reward.
ME: Thank you for a splendid and thought provoking interview here. I confess myself NOT a fan of Russian literature but you might have changed my mind. I thank you for that! Happy reading through all your present and future stacks!
BEN: Thanks! And thanks for having me!
I do not feel inclined at this time to have a paid substack. But if we were together in a cafe discussing all these thoughts, I would not be opposed to you buying me a cup of coffee - with cream, of course. In that spirit, if any of my posts resonate with you and you feel so inclined, you can donate here: buymeacoffee.com/denise_trull
"If it’s true that you can only find yourself through the sincere gift of self...then you can’t begin to love someone without competence in language."
I only ever find this to be truer and truer each day. Yes, we are creatures of speech, word-beings. We have a responsibility and---to dare the dramatic---a destiny to articulate ourselves (and comprehend others) through speech.
I agree with Ben's following clarification that self-articulation occurs just as often---if not more often---through unspoken, rather than spoken, 'language'. Nonetheless it is in some way always through 'language', 'speech', 'words', that the human soul becomes articulable; and therefore always through language that we are capable of expressing and receiving love.