Do You Even Lit?

This week's between-novel quick read is Stefan Zweig's The Royal Game: A Chess Story, written in 1941, immediately before Zweig obliterated his map.

We argue over the perfect answer to the 'desert island book' question, whether it's possible to fracture your own mind into pieces, why Cam sucks at chess, and whether we should pressure our kids to become pro athletes/chess prodigies/concert pianists.

CHAPTERS:

Tell me if you've heard this one: A mentally unstable old man abuses his position of power to pursue his own personal agenda. He alternates between smooth talking—tremendous moxie, the best speeches—and threatening the LOSERS and HATERS who stand in his way. He runs roughshod over checks and balances, ignores the norms of civil society, and whips his followers into a fervour against an imagined enemy. In his egotistical mania, he t...

Quick film review before we get back to the final part of Moby Dick.

Guillermo del Toro's long-awaited Frankenstein adaptation is absolutely cleaning up in the Oscar nominations, including a nod for Best Picture.

Benny and Rich make the comparison with Mary Shelley's source material and find it to be sadly wanting (altho we do have some nice things to say).

On the dumbing-down of nuanced morality stories, and the ubiquity of daddy ...

We continue our voyage with chapters 40-80 of Herman Melville's leviathan MOBY DICK.

Talking nihilism and meaning-making, the deeper significance of making the whale white (seriously), the terrifying vastness of the ocean, animal welfare and charismatic megafauna, and whether we're OK with reading an abridged edition of the book. 

In short: we're having a whale of a time. Tune in next week for our third and final instalment. 

CHAPT...

Starting the year off right by signing on for an epic voyage with Herman Melville's MOBY DICK; OR, THE WHALE, published in 1851, and widely considered to be the great American novel.

It's quite the beast so we're dividing it into three parts, with this first convo covering chapters 1-40.

Call me Ishmael: Dissecting the iconic opening line, why we love Ishmael as a narrator, on the optimal strategy for getting snuggly in bed, the pr...

Yeah fuck this book. After much blood, sweat, tears, and other unspeakable bodily excretions, we've had enough.

This is our first ever DNF after 50+ titles, so we thought we should do a postmortem of what went wrong.

Did we not try hard enough? Is Pynchon basically an asshole? Do we have a problem with postmodernism as a tradition? Or the maximalist writing style? How is that we (mostly) love David Foster Wallace, who copied so muc...

Some festive chit-chat and navel gazing on the year that was. 

CHAPTERS:

(00:00:00) big tiddy goth gfs and rival podcast recs (00:10:09) DYEL wrapped stats analysis (00:19:39) Third best book of the year (00:23:41) Second best book of the year (00:29:01) Best book of the year (00:33:11) Biggest stinker of the year (00:40:13) Best non-book club book or blog (00:56:25) Favourite movie or TV show of the year (01:03:53) What we...

We've been making eyes at the postmodernists for a while, but up until this point have lacked the stones to go take a ride on daddy Pynchon's rocket ship.

Now that we have a little experience we thought we were ready for a mature and sophisticated lover like Gravity's Rainbow (1973): 800 pages long, and widely considered to be one of the greatest novels of all time.

...we were not ready.

It's right back to clumsy virginal fumblings...

In 1987, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami set himself a challenge: to set aside his magical realism schtick and try to write one 'straight' novel in the realist tradition.

The result was Norwegian Wood, in which the author-insert protagonist is transported back to his college days, breaking free of ennui and depression just long enough to sleep with a string of hot but crazy chicks (and giving each of them the greatest sexual expe...

This week we're reading James Joyce's semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916.

Moments of adolescent significance: on heated dinner-time conversations, a child's keen sense of injustice,  the fear of burning in Hellfire, contemplating eternity, sexual guilt, and teenage rebellion. Which did we relate to the most? 

Theory of aesthetics: why are evo psych explanations distasteful? Do Aqu...

This week we're discussing C.P. Snow's influential 1959 lecture 'The Two Cultures', on the growing division between literary and scientific intellectuals:

"So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had."

Why do literary types tend to be Luddites? Is it kinda good that hubristic tech bros ref...

Back to the novels. This week, the DYEL boys decide to try Butcher's Crossing, the first novel from John Williams, the author famous for writing the so-underrated-it-might-be-overrated-but-probably-is-now-just-correctly-rated novel Stoner. As to be expected, it's not on the same level of Stoner but we still enjoy it. 

Decline of the buffalo: Rich reminds Cam that we already had this discussion in our episode of Blood Meridian but ...

The Do You Even Lit boys put down the heavy tomes and choose a short story. Well, we're not sure if it counts as a story. Maybe a thought experiment? This week we’re talking about one of our favourite authors: Jorge Luis Borges. We read The Library of Babel, Borges’s classic meditation on infinity (well, not infinity exactly — but an almost-might-as-well-be infinity). There are a lot of books.

Nonsense: Not to complain about pLoT ...

What an absolutely dogshit ending to an otherwise incredible book. We made it through 800 pages for this?? I still love you Tolstoy but seriously wtf bro.

This discussion covers parts 6, 7, and 8 of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. 

Anna's unhappy ending: Look how they massacred my girl. Is this a tale of a wanton harlot who got what was coming to her, or a good woman driven mad by society's strictures? What is it exactly that Tolstoy ...

Levin is a turbo nerd who runs away from social awkwardness to theorise on agrarian economics or whatever. Sound like anyone you know??

Anyway he finally touches grass and gets the girl. 

Meanwhile we are falling out of love with Anna. It feels like something bad is gonna happen? The foreshadowing is very subtle, only experts in Media Literacy will be able to catch it.

On Levin's journey away from intellectualism: Is the peasant li...

Benny decided it was time for the boys to read Leo Tolstoy's 800 page whopper Anna Karenina. Today we discuss parts 1 and 2 of the novel.

Rich immediately fell in love with all the characters. He wants be Levin, be with Anna, and be... something with that majestic horse Frou Frou. 

On the famous opening line: Are happy families alike? Are any of Tolstoy's families happy? Rich argues the line is actually about statistical mechanics....

Everyone loves Gabriel García Márquez' 1967 genre-defining classic One Hundred Years of Solitude.

At first we were charmed. But after trying to track a complex web of births and deaths and affairs and inc*stuous unions all taking place in the first 100 pages we found ourselves mired deep in the swamp.

When we reached the halfway mark we recorded an episode so hopelessly confused that we had to junk it. As we trudged through the sec...

we have very premium episode for you this week. welcoming special guest Nicole (@elocinationn), one of the great up-and-coming poasters of our time.

We revisit one of her younger self's favourite books, Jonathan Safran Foer's ambitious 2002 novel Everything is Illuminated.

On being disconnected from history: can you be traumatised by losing connection with your past? how reliable is our conception of history anyway? can the stories...

This week we tackle another short story by Ted Chiang: From his 2019 Exhalation collection Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling.

Luddism and cognitive tool breakthroughs: we go through the pros and cons. Rich wants to go to the moon. We're not sure how much of a luddite, or dare we say relativist, we should make Chiang out to be.

Fallible memories: just how bad are our memories? Benny and Rich have opposing intuitions,

Special guest epi...