Episodes
All episodes of Do You Even Lit.
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52. Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow: It's not rocket science
Clumsy virginal fumblings as the boys attempt to decipher the first 100 pages. A shameful and frankly demoralising experience. Does it get easier? Please dear god let it get easier.
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51. Murakami's Norwegian Wood: the sadboi and his manic pixie dream girls
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 experience of their life).
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50. A Portrait of the Artist: James Joyce on the difference between tasteful nudes and porn
Moments of adolescent significance: heated dinner-time conversations, a child's keen sense of injustice, the fear of Hellfire, contemplating eternity, sexual guilt, and teenage rebellion. Which did we relate to the most?
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49. C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures: the original stemcels vs shape rotators beef
Why do literary types tend to be Luddites? Is it kinda good that hubristic tech bros refuse to read the classics? Has the gap narrowed or widened in recent decades?
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48. Butcher's Crossing: John Williams's rougher cut
Not as good as Stoner — but is anything? An anti-Western about a Harvard transcendentalist who heads west to slaughter buffalo and find himself.
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47. Borges's Library of Babel: Ctrl + F for meaning
The boys put down the heavy tomes for a short story — well, maybe a thought experiment. A meditation on infinity (or almost-might-as-well-be infinity). There are a lot of books.
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46. Anna Karenina FINALE: Revenge of the Reddit Atheists
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.
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45. Anna Karenina part 2: I am begging you to touch grass
Levin is a turbo nerd who runs away from social awkwardness to theorise on agrarian economics or whatever. Sound like anyone you know??
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43. One Hundred Years of Solitude: The optimal amount of incest is non-zero
The elephant in the room is magical realism: have we found our kryptonite? An often-maddening, always-magical journey to Macondo.
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44. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: Real Housewives of Russia
Rich immediately fell in love with all the characters. He wants to be Levin, be with Anna, and be... something with that majestic horse Frou-Frou.
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42. Everything is Illuminated: Cultural Learnings of Trachimbrod for Make Benefit Glorious Book Club
Can you be traumatised by losing connection with your past? How reliable is our conception of history anyway? Can the stories we tell ourselves be 'truer than true'?
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41. Truth of Fact, Truth of Fiction: Is Ted Chiang a Luddite?
We go through the pros and cons of cognitive tool breakthroughs. 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.
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40. The Dispossessed part 2: Why would capitalism make me do this?
Simultaneity physics: just a MacGuffin, or deeper thematic significance? How is it different to a block universe? Does this count as hard sci-fi?
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39. Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed: Real anarchy has never been tried
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.
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38. DeLillo's White Noise: psy-opping ourselves on death and po-mo
A post-modern meditation on the denial of death, toxic airborne events, and Baudrillardian copies of copies of copies (of copies...)
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37. The Odyssey, part 2: Failsons and deadbeat dads
The whole poem as one big Ancient Greek marshmallow test: self-denial, time preference, binding mechanisms, and playing the long game.
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36. Emily Wilson's The Odyssey, part 1: Bronze age perversion
WOKE classics professor DESTROYED by three random guys who've never read Homer before!!! Just kidding, we love it.
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35. Nikolai Gogol: Cutting your nose to spite the faceless bureaucracy
We take a break from reading novels and take a quick nose dive into the famous 1830s short story, talking absurdity, bureaucracy, and Russian wives.
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34. Blood Meridian, part 2: It's time for some game theory
On violence and human nature: humans don't have a 'true' nature but respond to local incentives, conservatism as a check on fragile civilisational norms, and the game-theoretic case for a third party that can make credible threats of violence.
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33. Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, part 1: A legion of horribles
A meditation on violence, manifest destiny, self-mythology, and one author's cunning plot to position himself within the literary canon.
