Do You Even Lit?

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...

This week we wrap up our discussion of Ursula LeGuin's 1974 classic The Dispossessed.

Simultaneity physics: just a mcguffin, or deeper thematic significance? How is it different to a block universe? Does this count as hard sci-fi?

on the [redacted] scene: why would LeGuin include this? how are we supposed to feel about our hero Shevek? why would capitalism make me do this??

Final thoughts on the book: was Shevek's arc satisfying? w...

A brilliant physicist grows disenchanted with the stifling anarchist society of his home planet, defecting to a capitalist world in the hopes of finding true freedom...but what he finds only horrifies him.

Cam says Ursula K. Le Guin's 1974 award-winning piece of sociological fiction is a leftist pamphlet. Benny and Rich call bs.

who's right? let us examine the textual evidence.

On incentives: Are social sanctions powerful enough to...

“All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.”

After a break, the boys jump into the 1980s po-mo White Noise by Don DeLillo. We talk about the denial of death, toxic airborne events, and Baudrillardian copies of copies of copies (of copies...)

Simulacra: The boys shake off their reddit I Love Science teenage years and start to embrace all things post-modernism. Namely, Baudrilliard's idea of the Simulacra where so...

This week we finally shut up about translations and get into some juicy themes and character analysis.

Telemachus: why is he such a dweeb compared to his dad? Rich argues that he's doing the best he can growing up with an absent father. The others are less sympathetic.

Odysseus: is his paranoid murderous rampage justified? what are his singular heroic attributes? Is he portrayed more as admirable or a hubristic figure? Why won't hi...

WOKE classics professor DESTROYED by three random guys who've never read homer before!!!

just kidding we love it.

Wilson translation discourse: is she really importing her feminist beliefs into the text? has she stripped the grandeur out to take 'complicated' Odysseus down a peg? what are the connotations of sluts and slaves? is the fancy language of other translators really just stylistic anachronism? who would win in a fight betw...

"For how could the nose, which had been on his face but yesterday, and able then neither to drive nor to walk independently, now be going about in uniform?" We take a break from reading novels and take a quick nose dive into Gogol's famous 1830s short story, talking absurdity, bureaucracy, and Russian wives. Status and bureaucracies: The most straight forward reading is a satire 19th century Russian bureaucracies and status seeki...

"He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die."

Wrapping up the second half of our discussion on Cormac McCarthy's 1985 classic, in which various chickens come home to roost. The Glanton gang's downfall: on the run from the Sonoran cavalry, mercy killings, greed and symbolism of coins, the takeover of the ferry, the Yuma strike back, the judge's apocalypse-chic fashion, the Idiot plays his par...

Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Yell wake more than the dogs.

Rich is a big McCarthy head. For Benny and Cam, it's their first taste, and we're going straight to the top shelf: the 1985 epic historical novel Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West.

In this discussion we cover the first half of the book (chapters 1-12) as a meditation on violence, manifest destiny, sel...

A bit of festive fun looking back on the year that was.

Which books have stayed with us? Which were forgettable? What was the best reading/watching we did outside of book club? What did we learn about podcasting? Are we gonna keep posting this stuff in public?

and MORE

CHAPTERS

• (00:00:00) festive chit chat
• (00:07:35) Revealing our favourite books of the year
• 00:34:13) Biggest STINKER of the year
• (00:48:25) Our #1 (non-book clu...

A paradox: how can an author—say, Walker Percy—get the reader to care about a protagonist—say, Binx Bolling—who is stuck in a malaise and doesn't himself particularly care about anything?

A corollary: how can a book club have an engaging discussion when they don't particularly care about said book and said protagonist?

Honestly you might as well skip the first 10 minutes or so in which we half-assedly try to talk about the actual p...

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul... You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

Nabokov had a lot of trouble getting anyone to publish a story about a grown man falling in love with a 12 year old. After multiple bans and scandals, Lolita caught fire in America, and is now considered perhaps his greatest work (altho you still cop some dodgy glances reading it on the train).

The great cent...

These days every bestselling author writes novels about how their dad was too strict and they got bullied for bringing stinky indian food to school etc.

But Karl Ove Knausgaard walked so millennial narcissists could run.

This week we get absorbed in part 1 of his epic six-part autobiographical novel My Struggle, published in 2009.

The big central question: what makes a book which spends five pages describing the author making a cup...

Yeah, it's big brain time. This week we're reading 'Understand' from Ted Chiang's 2002 collection Stories of Your Life and Others.

what is the ceiling on human intelligence? can we jooce it up? did Chiang inspire the whole AI doomer movement? would superintelligence beings have to annihilate each other instead of cooperating? Do we buy the orthogonality thesis?

Also: introducing David Deutsch's 'universal explainer' theory of intel...

This week we're reading three of Anton Chekhov's most beloved short stories: The Man in the Case, Gooseberries, and About Love (The Little Trilogy, 1898).

We get a minor assist from George Saunders and his fantastic book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain but have no shortage of stuff to discuss.

Talking big 5 personality traits, the degree to which people oppress themselves, why Rich fell out of love with the early retirement movement...

Hemingway's 1929 semi-autobiographical classic tackles two big timeless themes: love and war.

Two out of three of us can relate to the first one, but war feels pretty alien to us. How would the boys do if they were conscripted? What made WWI so uniquely dispiriting? What is it about this novel that so faithfully captures the experience of war?

We also talk quite a bit about Hemingway's laconic characters and terse writing style. Ho...