If you establish that two stories’ guts are the same, how different do the bells and whistles need to be for the authors to feel comfortable? The British journalist Christopher Booker might not be surprised to find people squabbling over a scarcity of material. He recently published The Seven Basic Plots, a 728-pager explaining that all the stories people tell fit one of seven templates, and, further, relying on Jungian psychology to suggest that these seven stories are all really the same story: achievement of a mature self. Many reviews have suggested that Booker’s recaps of stories (everything from ancient epics to Spielberg blockbusters) are quite entertaining and even brilliant, but that things get a bit murkier when Jung is brought in. Worse, novelists such as Proust and Joyce are accounted failures because their work doesn’t fit the theory. Yes, our eyebrows are raised, too, but given the critical enthusiasm for the first part of the book, we feel inclined to check it out. (In case you’re curious, the seven basic plots are: overcoming the monster; rags to riches; the quest; voyage and return; comedy; tragedy; and rebirth. Gothamist believes some stories, such as the classic tale “Hunting for an Apartment,” could be cast in any of these moulds.)

If we know too much about how a book or film or someone’s psyche is put together, are we less able to appreciate it for what it is? Last Sunday Lee Siegel wrote about Freud in the Times Book Review because Civilization and Its Discontents has been reissued to mark the 75th anniversary of its publication. Though Siegel goes on to make a larger point about the clash between people of secular and religious worldviews, we found this essay particularly interesting for its suggestion that “if we have Freud to blame for the long-drawn-out extinction of literary character, we also have Freud to thank for the prestige of film.” We love us some movies, but we also spend a lot of time wondering about novels and what kind of audience they’ll command as time passes and visual culture grows ever more dominant. Gothamist wants to know: which are more relevant to your life, books or movies? Which post-Freudian novels do you admire? We liked Middlesex, but give us Middlemarch any day.