Show Notes
Introducing The Lit Path
This spring, podcast host and producer Jack Aldane will launch The Lit Path, a powerful new literary series dedicated to exploring the novels that have left an enduring mark on men’s lives.
Following the success of The Booking Club and My Martin Amis, this latest project makes a timely cultural assertion: that literary fiction can change men’s lives for the better.
The Lit Path’s mission
The Lit Path’s mission is to engage with the crisis of masculinity head-on by looking to the transformative power of the novel for answers. Each episode will feature a guest — they could be an athlete, a musician, a writer, broadcaster, comedian, entrepreneur or public servant — reflecting on the novel that has resolutely altered their perspective and made them wiser as a result.
Whether an episode involves a man telling his story, or someone telling that of someone they know, love or admire, the show will uncover how fiction (not self-help manuals, not productivity guides, not scientific explanations of phenomena) can change the depth and texture of a man’s inner and outer world.
Against the broader backdrop of men’s mental health challenges, The Lit Path addresses two main concerns:
That male literacy, including pleasure in reading, lags significantly behind that of women and girls, and That many male readers demonstrate a marked bias toward non-fiction titles that trade on facts, systems thinking, and broadly rational solutions to life’s myriad challenges.
While such books have their value, The Lit Path asks instead: What happens when men turn away from the quantifiable world and towards the psychological, moral, and emotional vistas opened up by great works of fiction?
What Next?
Stay tuned for updates on who will be The Lit Path’s first guests, and follow
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More from The Lit Path
In the fourth episode of The Lit Path, Jack Aldane sits down with journalist and author James Bloodworth to discuss George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).
What’s the one book that cracks a reader open (and up), and never quite lets them go?
Boys do not generally grow up believing that men are forged under the reading lamp, but that’s how the journey unfolded for Ioan Marc Jones.The reading lamp, and the rugby pitch. His father (his biggest influence) was Welsh, after all.
On this first episode of The Lit Path, TV Writer, Producer and Author John Yorke sits down with the podcast’s host and producer Jack Aldane to explain why Gulliver's Travels redefined the point of reading for him, after he initially rejecting classical literature at a young age.