The Phantom of the Opera: Introduction

Storytime for Grownups

Faith Moore welcomes listeners to Season 6 of Storytime for Grownups, introducing The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux as the season's

Key takeaways

• The podcast format blends audiobook narration with real-time explanations to demystify older language and historical context without spoiling the story.

Main topics

• Introduction to The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
• Podcast format: audiobook with built-in notes and listener interaction

Notable quotes

It's like an audiobook with built-in notes. So brew a pot of tea, find a cozy chair, and settle in. It's storytime!

Conclusion

Faith Moore closes the introduction by expressing excitement for the upcoming chapters,

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hello, and welcome to Storytime for Grownups. I'm Faith Moore, and this season we're reading The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. Each episode, I'll read a few chapters from the book, pausing from time to time to give brief explanations so it's easier to follow along. It's like an audiobook with built-in notes. So brew a pot of tea, find a cozy chair, and settle in. It's storytime! Oh, welcome back. This is so exciting. I am so happy to be back with you. I missed you. Welcome to season six of Storytime for Grownups. I'm Faith Moore, and this is the introduction episode to The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. So we always do an intro episode before every book so that I can give you kind of just a little bit of context, some historical information, some details about the author, just... things that I think might be helpful to know going into the story. But I never do spoilers. I hate spoilers. I never do them. So I won't be doing any spoilers today. And I won't bog you down with information because I think it is totally possible to pick up a book like this or any of the books that we've read on this show. It's totally possible to pick them up with no prior knowledge whatsoever and really enjoy them. But since this is a show about finding a way into these books that might feel inaccessible, because of the old-fashioned language or historical details that we didn't know, I think it makes sense to give a little bit of information at the beginning. But I won't overload you, and hopefully you'll want to come back on Monday to actually start the book with us. But before I get into all of that, we do have a few housekeeping things to take care of, as usual, in these intros. First of all... I want to welcome back everyone who has been with us before, whether you joined us all the way back at the beginning with Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, or during our last book, which was David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, or anywhere in between. Welcome, welcome back. I am so glad that you came back for more. That makes me so happy. And I want to give a very special welcome to those of you who are joining us for the first time. I am so glad that you found the show. I'm so happy you're here. And hopefully you will stick around for this book and for many more books to come. Just in case you are new here or just in case you need a refresher, let me just tell you a little bit about this podcast. It's a podcast that aims to make classic books more accessible. It aims to make them less... boring texts that you have to read and analyze in school, and more like what they are meant to be, which is amazing stories that you read with as much emotion and as much interest as any of your favorite modern novels. The way that we do that is that we read each book out loud. So I'm going to be reading The Phantom of the Opera to you a few chapters each episode. So the actual book, not just like a summary or discussion of it, the actual book, so that you can say that you have read it by the time this season is over. You will have read it. So we will read the book aloud with notes along the way, meaning if something is confusing or unclear or a word is unfamiliar, I will just... pause as I'm reading and give you a little tiny explanation, not more than a sentence or two, sometimes just a couple of words. The idea is not to stop the reading to talk about the book. The idea is simply to give you the tools that you need to experience the book the way it was meant to be experienced or the way it would have been experienced by people reading it at the time. But then... But wait, there's more. Ben, I take your questions and thoughts and comments, and that's when we discuss what we've read so far. So at the end of each episode, I always invite you to contact me via my website. The link to that is in the show notes, which is the description of this episode. Just scroll down in wherever you're listening, whatever podcast player you're listening in, just scroll down. Or you can go to faithkmore.com. That's my website. You can click on the contact there, and you can fill out the form. it's the same thing. You will see very quickly if you're new here that I really do mean it when I say please contact me. This show is nothing without your questions and your comments. I cannot do it without you. So really, do not be shy. Please do write in. I reply to every email I get, and then I pick one or two, or sometimes more, to read out loud on the show at the beginning of each episode, and then I use those to talk about the chapter or chapters that we read the episode before, and that way we build a deeper understanding of the story, we get to experience it with each other and to share our reactions, and I can explain anything that was confusing that I didn't happen to cover in the notes along the way. So... do get in touch. That is important. And you can get in touch after this episode too. If there's anything that I say here that particularly interests you or was confusing or that you'd like to know more about, you can get in touch. So again, it's faithkmore.com and then you click on contact or you can just scroll into the show notes and check out that link. Speaking of the show notes, there are a lot of links there that you can check out. I'm not going to go over all of them now, but I will just highlight one, which is that we have an online community where you could go between shows to chat about these books, to chat about literature in general, whatever you want. It is called the drawing room, not because we do a lot of drawing there, but because every lovely old Victorian house would have had a withdrawing room, a room where people would withdraw after dinner to chat or read or play cards, play music, drink tea, do all of the lovely things that I wish that we could do together in person, if we could be in person. So we have a drawing room. This podcast, I like to think of it as the main room of our lovely Victorian house, but we also have a drawing room where we can withdraw after the show. It's very active. There's always somebody commenting there. I check in from time to time. It's great fun. And depending on which membership tier you choose, we also have monthly voice chats over there and we call those tea time. I'm there. You're there. It's kind of like a group phone call and we talk about the book. We talk about any questions you have. It's wonderful. I love it. We will be having... one near the end of September. So I will let you know in the next week or so once that is scheduled. But if any of that sounds interesting to you, then please just check out that link in the show notes to join us because we would love to have you over there in the drawing room. Other than that, please make sure that you subscribe to the show and your podcast player. That way you'll get... all the chapters in order automatically and you won't have to go looking for them and you won't potentially find them kind of out of order and get confused. Speaking of that, just to let you know, we are sometimes going to be reading more than one chapter during an episode. Some of the chapters in this book are really short, so I grouped them together. So I will always post in the show notes which chapters we'll be reading next time, since I know some of you like to keep track of that. Also, for those of you keeping track, this book is going to take us until November 12th. So it's a much shorter book than David Copperfield. The final chapter will air on November 9th, and the conclusion episode, which will be like this intro episode with no chapters to read, but just a kind of general wrap-up of everything that we've been discussing along the way, that will happen on November 12th. And then we will have a Christmas special for the rest of November and December. So all of that is to say, Please subscribe. Please get all the episodes and stay with us. Also... If you are new or if you haven't listened to all of the books that we've done yet, please feel free to scroll through the Storytime for Grownups feed in your podcast player. All the books that we've done are still there. You can listen to them. They're completely free. Lots of people like to listen to some of the other books during the days that aren't Monday or Thursday when the new episodes drop. So you're welcome to do that. You can also go back and listen, if you haven't already, to a special announcement that I dropped during the break that we just had. I'm not going to go into that. too much now because I don't want to overload us with information. But I did announce that I have a new book out. So a book that I wrote rather than one that I'm reading to you on the show. It's a romantic comedy. It's called Wooing Jane. And you can learn more in that announcement. But also I've put some links in the show notes where you can learn more about that. It comes out October 2nd. There is an in-person event in Franklin, Tennessee on October 3rd. I'll be in conversation with my brother, Spencer Clavin, about... this book, Wooing Jane, and it is available now, the book is available now for pre-order. So it would mean the absolute world to me if you would pre-order a copy. So... That's all I'm going to say for now. I will come back to it in later episodes and we can talk about it in the drawing room as well if you have questions or you can email me. But I don't want to take up any more of this episode with those details. So please just scroll into the show notes, take a look at the information that's there about my new novel. I'm really excited about it. And please pick up a copy, pre-order it, pre-order several. give it away as gifts, whatever. That would really, really help me. I would really appreciate it if you would do