Do You Even Lit?

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 favouri…

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 …

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 w…

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 wan…

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 an…

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 boo…

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. …

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? …

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 horrifie…

“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…

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 …

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 t…

"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 t…

"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 h…

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 go…

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 abou…

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…

“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 gro…

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 n…

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 C…