Now that I'm working from home and teaching very little, I'm a little lonely, to be honest with you.

I need to form a book club. Get 10 people around, offer them some drinks, get him discussing something substantive.

Glenn, his brother Nehemiah, and I have a book club every other month or so.

There'll be a new book. Babel, it's set in early Victorian England,

I think in the 1840s at Oxford,

at a language institute where colonials from China, India,

the Caribbean have come in to be trained as linguists as translators.

And they form a society that's in rebellion against the empire.

Because they're the in-betweens between the

British colonial military slash merchant class who want to sell opium, for example, to the

Chinese. On the one hand, and the local population's leadership who don't speak English and there

has to be a translator. So these people are translators. You know, you can easily translate that circumstance

into contemporary times.

You've got the people who are tech wizards

or something like that, who are on the inside

of the imperial machine, and who decide

that they're going to take up arms against it in a way,

devote themselves to being countercultural.

And I think she pulls it all brilliantly in this novel.

This was a little excerpt from this week's bonus episode of The Glens Show,

which is in turn a little excerpt from a work call I had with my editor, Mark Sussman, and my creative director, Nikita Petrov.

We kick around various ideas for the show, try to develop a bit of a strategy going forward, and go on a few tangents.

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