Episodes
All episodes of Do You Even Lit.
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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.
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32. DYEL Christmas party: The most beloved and hated books of 2024
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?
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31. The Moviegoer: In which we escape a deep existential malaise
Honestly you might as well skip the first 10 minutes in which we half-assedly try to talk about the actual plot elements. Luckily Cam saves the day with an impromptu lecture on Kierkegaard, and we get to yapping about the meaning of life instead.
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30. Banned books: Vladimir Nabokov's infamous Lolita
The great central tension is between Humbert Humbert the monster and HH the sensitive and sympathetic aesthete. How reliable is HH as a narrator? Is he deluding himself?
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29. Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle: Autofiction and autofellation
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.
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28. Ted Chiang's Understand: Intelligence explosions and AI doom
Yeah, it's big brain time. Could two superintelligent beings cooperate, or would they have to annihilate each other? An AI doom classic from 1991.
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27. Chekhov urself before u wreck-ov urself (The Little Trilogy)
Three of Anton Chekhov's most beloved short stories, with a minor assist from George Saunders and his fantastic book *A Swim in the Pond in the Rain* — but no shortage of stuff to discuss.
