Welcome back to Hardcore Literature, your favourite book club.

Deep dives into the greatest books ever written.

Provocative poems, evocative epics, and life-changing literary analyses.

We don't just read the great books. We live them.

Together we'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more.

We'll relish the most moving art ever committed

to the page and stage from every age. Join us and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy, on the reading

adventure of a lifetime with hardcore literature. Hello everybody, how are you doing today?

I hope you're keeping well and I hope your reading is going well. We're going to have a little bit of a different show today because we're just going to have a little bit of a chat. We're going to have a chatty show and we're going to do some important consolidation work or or at least I'm going to, and I would

like to invite you to come along for the ride. What do I mean by that? Well, towards the end of every

year, I like to do three things, and I typically take many weeks doing this. I like to look back

over the year just gone, and we use our books. The books we read

across the year, they scaffold on to key moments in our life and in our personal development,

our psychological, intellectual, spiritual, emotional development. So looking back across a year of great reading is

reflecting on all the powerful growth that has taken place. So I like to go through every single

book that I have deep read across the year with the hardcore literature book club. And then I like to

take stock of where I am right now.

Once I've done that and I usually do this going into the next year, I then look forward.

I start setting goals for every area in my life, interpersonal, intrapersonal.

So your relationship with others and your relationship with yourself,

spiritual, intellectual, health goals, those are really, really important. So I like to plan the

athletic movements, the athletic program I'm going to be following, and of course, I like to get

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