Do You Even Lit?

"If I'm out of my mind, that's okay with me." 

Part 1 of our dive into Moses Herzog's breakdown. Like all the best books, Herzog follows a manic academic, freshly dumped by his second wife for his own one-legged best friend, who processes the whole disaster by firing off unsent letters to everyone from his mother to Eisenhower to Spinoza.

We get a peak into the 1964 version of the suffering olympics, which Rich obviously tries...

"The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts."

— Middlemarch

The DYEL boys finally finished George Eliot's Middlemarch and finally answered the question of what this thing is about. At least we think we did: A 900-page long cope on being mid. 

Updated Website: We unveil the new Do You Even Lit website: doyouevenlit.com. It now has searchable tags by the...

Rich reflects on his truly deranged reaction to the film, after entering a manic state and staying up all night penning a 2500 word rant.

Meanwhile Cam had a nice time at the cinema and gives it a soft seven. Benny liked it too, until he thought about it, and is now hopelessly hung up on whether you can fairly judge an adaptation of something you know so well.

Just after we recorded, Emily Wilson came out swinging with a review in ...

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock The meat it feeds on.

Tackling Shakespeare's 1604 play Othello. It goes a lot better than last time, altho Rich gets a bit of a fright when the lead actor comes out in blackface.

Othello the outsider: Was interracial marriage an uncrossable divide for a man of Othello's station? What do we think of race-swapped casting? What exactly is a Moor anyway? A sp...

"In such a crisis as this, some women begin to hate."

Let's go baby, things are getting steamy.  Rich isn't sure if he's turned on or terrified by Dorothea, Cam can't figure out whether he'd take blood money, and Ben is torn about whether marrying a psychopath is worth it if she's a hottie. 

The middle section of this 800-page whopper is a tournament of injured pride. Casaubon exits early, Will (stupidly?) can't take...

For our big summer read we're cracking into Middlemarch, the 1871 doorstopper written by Mary Ann Evans under her pen name George Eliot.

This chat covers the first 30 chapters. Not a whole lot has happened so far but it's a very cosy read.

On Eliot and Tolstoy: which way does the influence go? How does this compare with our beloved Anna Karenina?

Worst honeymoon ever: did we buy Dorothea and Casaubon as a couple? how were age-gap r...

Raymond Carver's Cathedral might be one of the most simple and beloved American short stories, but Benny is determined to overthink it anyway.

On meta-deception: before we dive in, Benny obsesses over “meta-deception” and feels betrayed by magicians.

On jealousy: is it OK for your wife to write intimate poetry about another man tenderly stroking her face? Also, what does it take to be a good host?

Moment of transce...

Ursula K. Le Guin's 1973 story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas has been discussed to death, but the boys have finally cracked the ONE TRUE reading. huddle in

Rich remembered this being a glorified trolley problem that would allow us to settle the question of 'who i...

Wrapping up our discussion of Philip Roth's American Pastoral, in which the Swede is finally reunited with his missing daughter. it's bleak.

On losing your daughter: Can you save people from themselves? Should the Swede have dragged Merry out by the hair? Did he do anything wrong, or is he torturing himself for nothing?

The American berserk: Was '60s c...

The Swede was the poster boy for the American dream.

Football star. Marine. Marries a beauty queen. Inherits dad's glove factory and treats the workers like family. Buys the stone farmhouse in Old Rimrock, New Jersey. Loves his daughter unconditionally. Protests the Vietnam War in his own measured way, just to show her he's on her side.

Then his precious little girl blows up the local post office and kills a man.

"This says a lot a...

Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde really gets the juices flowing. Rich tells on himself big time, we find out we're all faking our authentic selves, and Benny is forced to bite some weird philosophical bullets.

The Ring of Gyge...

IMMORTAL ASEXUAL CLONES: YES NO? Did aella's birthday gangbang generate positive externalities? Why is Cam's fridge full of dead chickens?

These are the big questions of our age and we are the only ones brave enough to tackle them.

Join us as we wrap up our discussion of Houellebecq's Atomised (also known as The Elementary Particles).

The sexual m...

Houellebecq's 1998 novel Atomised (also known as The Elementary Particles) is prophetic, provocative and absolutely filthy.

This chat covers the first ~200 pages:

On the sexual revolution: Are inceldom and looksmaxxing the inevitable consequences of the intrusion of market forces into every facet of human society? If Clavicular did not exist, would it be necessary to invent him?

Fertility crisis: Can we rely on new technologie...

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...

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.&n...

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...