Do You Even Lit?

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 market...

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 technologies to ...

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 ...