Michael picks at the banality of evil portrayed in Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World, while Emily desperately wants to finish Isabel Allende’s enchanting work of magical realism, The House of the Spirits, but is prevented from it by living on a windswept rock in the North Atlantic. They talk about art that depicts difficult and unpleasant things, spoilers, moral culpability, second-guessing your tastes, and history repeating itself.