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? Are we gonna keep posting this stuff in public?
and MORE
NEXT ON THE READING LIST:
Blood Meridian — Cormac McCarthy
The Odyssey — Homer (Emily Wilson translation)
festive chit chat
Cam: Merry Christmas!
Rich: Merry, merry Christmas. Oh, he said Merry Christmas, not Happy Holidays. The vibe shifts here, ladies.
Cam: Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!
Benny: Cancelled.
Rich: And gentlemen, yeah, this is our first ever Do You Even Lit Christmas party.
Cam: We’re bringing Christmas back.
Benny: Rich is sloshed already.
Rich: I’m getting handsy. There’s going to be multiple HR complaints against me tomorrow, and I’ve somehow managed to do it — I’ve managed to harass people over Zoom, which is really hard. So it’s actually kind of impressive if you think about it.
Cam: No, you can do that every week.
Benny: There’s a pattern of behaviour here, I would say.
Rich: I really wanted to have a drink or two, but it is Monday 10:30 a.m. I guess it’s like 8:30 a.m. for Cam, and he actually has a real job that he has to do. I mean, is there, like — for programming and stuff like that, is it the same as when you’re playing pool or darts or something, where a drink or two actually improves your fluidness because you lose a bit of inhibition? And then three or more, the curve starts tanking again.
Cam: I imagine that could, because a lot of it’s about flow state and getting in the zone. I mean, I’ve never tried it. Now I think about it. Well, my optimal programming level…
Benny: Yeah, I think it does. There’s a peak creativity zone, right, which is one or two in. But I would imagine it would also reduce your hand-eye a slight amount, so you might be a slower typer or more prone to making mistakes while you were coding, but your ideas might be better.
Cam: Maybe it would help me become one of those employee programmers, so I actually know how to program, rather than be one of the many that don’t.
Benny: How much novel code do you need to write, though? Can’t you just ChatGPT everything?
Cam: Oh yeah, I know. Well, I feel like a noob because everyone uses Claude, right? But yeah, I still just use ChatGPT. If that shit was down, I wouldn’t be able to do my job.
Rich: We should do a sweep on whether or not you’ll get fired next year or replaced by an AI bot.
Benny: Prediction market.
Cam: If the podcast becomes too successful, right?
Rich: Yeah, that’s true. It’s really undermining your natural work ethic for your nine-to-five.
Cam: I don’t know — everyone knows what my Monday’s going to be spent doing.
Benny: Are you working, Cam? What are you doing there?
Cam: Well, I’m on post-recovery, so I actually have a doctor’s note for today, but I’m going to do a few hours. Check a couple of emails after book club.
Rich: Are you floating on those sweet, sweet opiates?
Cam: No, no, haven’t for a few days. You sort of think, after your 20th, you’re kind of thinking, maybe I should get off the oxy.
Benny: And then you have a drink while you’re on it. Flying real high.
Cam: No, well, I gave some to the missus accidentally and she had all sorts. She wanted some ibuprofen and I gave her like two oxys, which were pretty high for her body weight and size and stuff.
Benny: Did you have a great time?
Rich: It worked for the headache though, right?
Cam: Well, it was at night, so she kind of slipped through it, but that’s what I told her — they just enjoy it. Just enjoy the high.
Rich: There’s a funny feeling if you ever take too many benzos or things like opiates, or something, where you’re drifting off to sleep and you’re like, oh fuck, have I taken too much? What if I die? But you’re also so relaxed and calm that you’re like, oh, and you just go to sleep. I’ll either wake up or I won’t. So it sort of just takes care of itself.
Cam: You can play a game of, like, how many do you take until that anxiety takes over — the downward pressure of anxiety.
Revealing our favourite books of the year
Rich: No, it’s a perfect equilibrium. All right, so what we’re going to do is look back at the beautiful year of book club that we’ve had and pick out a few of our favourites, and try and get a sense of, like, with a bit of time between us and what we’ve read, what stayed with us and what we’ve lingered over, and what has maybe become less important over time.
So a few quick stats: we read 19 books, five short stories, and two plays this year, which is a pretty good haul. And that’s a cumulative 4,920 pages. So we’re just shy of the 5,000-page mark. Pretty fucking good, boys.
Benny: Wait, was that this year or all time? Because we started in 2022, right? December 2023 — wait, what fucking year?
Cam: It’s not the end of the month. Not the end of the year.
Benny: That’s just this year? Okay, well, nice.
Rich: Yep, just this year. And it’s not including our work-in-progress books, although I’ll be honest, I didn’t adjust it for the fact that I personally did not finish The Moviegoer. But, you know, it’s pretty close.
Benny: Well, we didn’t finish To the Lighthouse.
Cam: Asterisk.
Benny: So it’s okay.
Rich: I did. Well, at least one of us — if the three of us combined have read 4,920 pages…
Cam: Benny’s at at least 3K, probably.
Benny: I just skipped the good stuff.
Rich: So it’s pretty good. But of course there’s an opportunity cost — we could have read Infinite Jest 4.5 times instead.
Cam: Wait for yourself.
Rich: Cam’s already read it four and a half times, right?
Benny: Which Cam would have preferred for sure, yeah.
Cam: If we’re rounding up.
Rich: Yeah, in the Australian rounding system. All right, so we’re going to go three, two, one — bronze medal, silver medal, gold. Go for either your favourite book, or, you know, most underrated, or however you want to interpret it. Like which book made you think, yeah, it’s quite…
Cam: Whatever you say will be forever your favourite.
Benny: There’s no takesie-backsies.
Rich: Yeah, it’s quite freaky having to commit like this, right? Like, you could feel foolish in future years — feel like, ha ha ha, your favourite book was this.
Cam: I think it’s like — yeah, like Roger Ebert famously rated Godfather Three — oh, sorry, Godfather Two — like a two-and-a-half star or three star or something.
Rich: Is that bad? Isn’t it four stars for Ebert?
Cam: Yeah, but it didn’t make the four.
Rich: Yeah, okay. Well, look where he is now.
Benny: At least the books we’re reading, half of them were from the 90s, so at least we have some sense of how they were received culturally.
Rich: Well, actually I did the maths on this. I didn’t do it by frequency of decade. It probably would have come out in the nineties, but the average book we read was 1830 — wait, no, no, no. Sorry, 1930. Yeah. So we actually did pretty good. The most modern book was Piranesi, published in 2020, and the most ancient book was Hamlet, published in 1600. We did Frankenstein and — oh yeah, Candide’s older, yeah, 18th century.
Benny: Nice. We did a second pretty old one though, didn’t we?
Rich: Non-canonical.
Cam: All right, who’s starting us off with their number three?
Benny: All right.
Rich: Benny, Benny, what’s your number three, third favourite?
Benny: Okay, my number three is —
Cam: And then here we go, we’ll go Benny’s three and then someone else’s three —
Benny: Yeah, no, we’re doing all of mine.
Cam: Yeah, we’re getting out of the way the three books Benny read.
Benny: I don’t want to be copied. Third favourite: Frankenstein.
Rich: That was my honourable mention. That was tying for third place for me.
Benny: We can’t have honourable mentions. This is too much, man. We can’t.
Rich: No, you asked, you asked.
Benny: No, that doesn’t count. We can’t have honourable mentions. None of that. Three is already stretching it, honestly.
Cam: Yeah, Frankenstein was great. It was surprisingly great.
Benny: Yeah, it was just a hugely enjoyable read. And I think we did a good job of dissecting it and understanding what the text was about, really exploring the themes. I feel like we didn’t leave a lot on the table with respect to that book. I felt like we had done a relatively comprehensive analysis of what you can get out of the book, and then also tied it to recent AI stuff, which is always fun. But also, just for a book written in 1815, hugely enjoyable and still relevant read. So I was sort of expecting a Hamlet-style experience with that one, and ended up being so pleasantly surprised that it exceeded expectations pretty drastically. So that was a lot of fun.
Rich: Hell yeah. Also, most impressive author, I think — 17-year-old girl writing in a patriarchal society, writing maybe the first ever sci-fi book, and with themes that perfectly resonate and are relevant today. Like, just insane. Yeah. Cam, what you got?
Cam: Thank god Percy wrote it for her. Number three for me was John Williams’ Stoner, which I know we all loved, and we’ll probably talk about this a bit more. It’s a book I really look forward to rereading. I’m excited about recommending it to others. I recommend it to friends now. It’s just a great, accessible, understated, you know, 300-page book that people like us, I just think, would really love.
Rich: Nice. Yeah, we may end up saying more about that if Benny or I pick it.
Cam: Yeah, I’ll save. Were you surprised it was so low for me?
Rich: I am, actually, yeah. I actually thought of all of us, you would probably go — that would be a slam dunk for number one. But I’m intrigued to hear your others now.
Cam: I can imagine over time…
Rich: You’ve done a good job of building up the tension, because otherwise it would be so deflating.
Cam: I can imagine over time. Like, I think I’d like to reread it in a few years and see what I think about it.
Benny: Same, yeah.
Cam: It’s hard to choose, right? It’s hard to split the difference.
Rich: Okay, so my number three — I picked Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace. Short story collection. I am slightly interpreting “best” differently, where it’s more like, for me, the best are the ones where I’ve learned something or had an interesting critical engagement with the book. So even though I’ve read quite a lot of David Foster Wallace, I think that was the first time I’ve really got a strong sense of exactly what his project is as a writer, and pinned down my feelings around him — the aspects of his writing that I really like and aspects that I don’t like — as well as, we had a big discussion kind of reconciling David Foster Wallace the person and the guru with his personal life and his personal actions and the content of his books. And it feels appropriate that the act of engaging really actively with the book is what elevated it so much for me, because I know that that is something that he is trying to get the reader to do. So it was a very active read and we had really good discussion about it.
Cam: Didn’t you say you’d even recommend this as a starting point for Wallace? Or maybe for Wallace as fiction?
Rich: I think maybe, like, not necessarily what’s the best thing to read for enjoyment, but if you want to understand him, I thought that the Zadie Smith essay in conjunction with this collection would be really great. And I still think that’s true. Or just read the book and listen to our series on it, which is just as good as Zadie Smith — no, better. Anyway, yeah.
Cam: If you want to keep engagement with the wanking story.
Rich: Yeah, oh, that one was almost a bit too close to home, you know.
Benny: Yeah, I’m probably a couple of months away from being ready to do some more David Foster Wallace. I think at the end of that we were a little DFW’d out of some of his techniques, but I’d be keen to dive into something again in a few months — just another collection or Consider the Lobster or something.
Cam: That’s non-fiction. Quote, non-fiction.
Benny: Well, yeah, there’s definitely some fiction in there.
Cam: You’re not allowed to read any more non-fiction.
Benny: His review of a dictionary. I’m going to call that fiction.
Rich: Yeah, we should definitely do DFW this year, or DFW-adjacent figure like Pynchon or — yeah.
Benny: Some Pynchon, yeah. We should do some Pynchon. I think we’ve been scared by it, but we’re ready.
Cam: DeLillo.
Rich: I’m ready, I’m ready. We’re so well placed to do it now.
Cam: I’m ready for DeLillo.
Rich: Like, way better than we were before. Yeah, we’re David Foster Wallace scholars.
Benny: We’re experts, scholars. Well, put on our bandanas and roll. Okay, I’m surprised there hasn’t been any overlap yet, but I will continue the trend and say my number two pick is Crime and Punishment. Probably not too much surprise there. This was a last-minute decision. I actually had something else, and then right before we started recording I switched it up. So I’m a little schizophrenic about my choices, but that’s okay, I’ll stand by them with some severe post-hoc rationalisation.
But I think part of C&P for me, to be honest, was the set and setting of reading it. Like, it was in the summer, I was in Amsterdam, and I would go to the bar after work, sit there, order a beer, and read Crime and Punishment. And it was awesome. And so that’s hard to disentangle from the whole experience with me. And then also just, recording when I was in Europe and stuff was great. So I think that shaded perhaps how much I liked the book, which I think is inevitable and also fine.
And also, I thought we had nice disagreements — but fruitful disagreements — about what that book was saying and whether it was good at all, and whether it was overrated or underrated. And we all sort of stuck to our guns, but I thought we all made pretty decent points. Points that would — it’s probably helpful, you know, if you read that book for the first time and then you listen to us talk about it, I think it would be legitimately a helpful conversation to help navigate reading it, because we had extremely different but I think pretty valid interpretations of the work and its meaning and what it was saying. And so I thought we did a good job of sort of litigating those disputes and giving each side a fair hearing.
So I don’t think I’ll re-litigate those disputes and maybe say what I thought about it, but I just thought, overall, we did a nice job as a book club traversing that territory.
Cam: And you can read some of it and then listen to our part one discussion and then continue reading.
Benny: True, yeah, exactly. Three-part Dostoevsky series — I’m proud of that one too. Like, just looking back, I’m glad we did it, thought we did it well. Proud that we have this nice little content gem out there. It just starts playing out of my phone on dates, I —
Cam: You give that out to your students at university, right? You want to learn about Crime and Punishment with another —
Benny: Oh, whoops, I don’t know what this is. Sorry, sorry, put this back in my pocket. All right, Cam, what’s your number —
Rich: I might just cut the queue here, Cam, and do my number two before you, because it’s also Crime and Punishment. Yeah, very similar reasons. Like, I think we did a good job and I had substantial beefs with the book, but still — like, the act of wrestling with it was really fun. And actually, yeah, arguing with you guys about it was really fun. And again, similar to DFW, I just feel like I earned the right to have an opinion about Dostoevsky now. And I actually think that, well, I’m obviously nowhere near an expert, but I think I can weigh in on what he does well, what he does not so well, what he’s trying to achieve, whether or not he achieves it.
And then just in terms of the ideas — I definitely have been thinking a lot more about the influence of Christian morality on Western culture and how important and load-bearing it is. And I don’t think I’ve changed my mind exactly about, you know, coming away from rationalism or utilitarian or consequentialist ethics, but definitely more intrigued by virtue ethics. And hopefully this will be a nice bridge for us to talk about master/slave morality and the Übermensch if we do Nietzsche. I think we’ll be well equipped from having learned about the great man theory of history. And yeah, I think there’s a lot more interesting stuff to mine there. So it’s a super solid step that will get us to some other interesting places. Like, hopefully we can do — I would like to do Thus Spake Zarathustra, you know, maybe next year. If not next year, then at some point. And just nice to have it done. Extremely uncontroversial, cowardly choice, but yeah, it was good, it was good.
Cam: Good book. What a take.
Rich: Good book, yeah.
Cam: Ground punishment. Okay, my number two is also Crime and Punishment.
Rich: Oh, sorry, damn, I didn’t need —
Cam: No, no, it’s fine.
Benny: No way. That’s hilarious.
Cam: Yeah, I mean, you guys have said a lot. It’s great. It’s interesting. It’s one of those books you know is great going into, so you kind of have to navigate that, but it lives up to itself. I’m not actually sure it’s better than Brothers Karamazov or even Notes from Underground. And it’s not perfect, but we discussed in our episode where we think actually maybe it should be longer. Like, it’s maybe even missing a kind of third or a denouement.
Benny: An ending, yeah?
Cam: Like, it should be Crime and Punishment and…, I don’t know, Redemption or Atonement, or, you know, quote, an adequate ending. So it’s not a perfect book, but it’s still a great book. And yeah, as we’ve talked, dealing with this sort of proto-Nietzschean extraordinary man thesis and the implications of that, the power of the unconscious — which is easy to take for granted — did that really, really well. And not only in, you know, Raskolnikov and his psychological break, but Svidrigailov, whether he’s an extraordinary man and what his dreams tell us about him. And even, like, the role of self-deception, I think again is easy to take for granted now in a lot of fiction with unreliable narrators and stuff, but, like, Katerina, the wife of Marmeladov — she’s a little bit deluded in terms of social status and stuff. And then Raskolnikov’s mother is a bit deluded in terms of the nature of her son. It just has a lot in it. It was a super generative discussion.
And yeah, it’s tough. It’s tough reading. It’s long, it’s old, it’s boring at times. But it’s really worth it, and probably more accessible than —
Benny: It’s because of the translation you read, dude. You read the wrong translation, I think.
Cam: Yeah. And you can talk about translations for sure. I’d say read a modern translation of Dostoevsky if you can, and then if you get really into them, then read, compare and contrast the different translations.
Rich: Good book.
Cam: All in all, good book.
Benny: That’s hilarious it was all number two for us. That’s insane.
Rich: It can’t be a great book —
Cam: Yeah.
Rich: — because it was number two across the board.
Cam: Perfectly adequate book.
Benny: Okay, are we on number ones?
Rich: Yeah, let’s go. We need a drum roll. Need a soundboard.
Benny: Okay, so I cursed us because I said we hadn’t done any repetitions, and then as soon as I said it, all picked the same number two. And now my number one — I’m also going to have a repetition. My number one, I’m also going with Brief Interviews, actually.
Rich: Oh, no way. All right.
Cam: What’s your real number one?
Benny: I think I’m a bit schizophrenic about my choices, but yeah, like I said, looking back, I think we touched on so many fun themes: depression, narcissism, therapy, great lovers, fatherhood, childhood, nostalgia, sincerity, empathy, recursive self-reflection — all this sort of stuff. And I think when you’re in the moment of reading DFW it can be a bit overwhelming, because he touches on a lot of these topics in a lot of the stories in very intense ways. So when you’re going through story after story, especially if you’re reading linearly, once you’re halfway through the book — and you could see this in some of our episodes — I think by the end of episode two, I think we’re all kind of like, okay, like we have maybe had enough of this guy. But I think, stepping back and then re-listening to those episodes, we just cover so much cool territory and there’s so much to discuss there.
And so I didn’t want to fall prey to the peak-end rule of literature, where you only remember — like, I think living in my memory from that reading was basically thinking, I’m kind of sick of this guy by the end, and so I didn’t really want to give it a fair hearing. But then, reviewing all we had said about him and stuff, I realised, like, holy shit, that was an incredibly generative book for us to read. And let’s remember, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is only like 300 pages or something. And it took us three episodes to get through, for a reason. It’s because a lot of these stories, like, we couldn’t stop talking about. And we didn’t even talk about all of the stories, right? We didn’t even cover them all.
Cam: Yeah, no, we needed it longer.
Benny: Like, half our episodes, we would just say, okay, we can’t possibly cover all this territory, so we’ll just pick and choose.
Cam: I think that’s partly a function of short stories — like, you can do an episode on a single unit, where, you know, 100 pages of three short stories could be three episodes potentially, where a 100-page novella would be one.
Benny: Yeah, yeah. But it was just a lot of fun, jumping around to all these different themes from all these stories.
Cam: That surprises me.
Benny: It surprises me a bit too, but I think — I’m standing by it.
Cam: I mean, I had you Stoner higher and I had you Lolita much higher, I thought.
Benny: Lolita was really great, but it felt too recent, almost. It felt like cheating because we had just done it, and it was sort of living in my head already. And it was so much fun to go back through our archives and then try and remember what we had talked about and stuff. And that’s when I dragged this out.
Rich: Wait, so Stoner wasn’t on your podium at all?
Benny: No, Stoner wasn’t on the podium at all, and that’s because — I think it’s my favourite book, or at least among my favourite books, but I thought our discussion of it wasn’t the best. Our discussion was — we were all enthused, we were all thrilled that we had read this book, but it was fairly early on in book club and we hadn’t quite hit our cadence. Not that perhaps we’ve hit our cadence now, but even less so had we had our cadence then. And I felt like, if you hadn’t read the book and you listened to our episode, you would be intrigued, but I don’t think we really sold people on why it was so good. And we did touch on some good stuff, and it wasn’t bad — it was a super fun episode to do. And like I said, it’s my favourite book. But I think, in terms of actual book club episodes, it’s not up there with the best of them. So I sort of interpreted “best” very holistically, meaning, like, great read and great discussion, great experience all around — and try not to be that predictable.
Cam: And exploit’s favourite books of all time.
Benny: Yeah, that was definitely a consideration. Also, I knew we were going to talk about Stoner. So it was kind of like, for the good of the group, I’ll sacrifice my picks. But maybe we won’t — depends what Rich’s number one is, I guess.
Cam: Well, I mean, Rich, is it your number one? Should we talk about it now?
Rich: Yeah, I’ll just go to it. Yeah, it is my number one. Now I feel embarrassed, because, like, I feel like the basic bitch.
Cam: No, I’m relieved because we’re all lying.
Benny: Yes, mission accomplished. Yeah, you have — only Cam had chosen it for number three.
Cam: I felt embarrassed.
Rich: Yeah, putting it so low. I wanted to be a contrarian and be like, it wasn’t that good. But the more I thought about it — yeah, I overcame my reflexive contrarian spirit to say, you know what, it just is — it just is good. You just have to be sincere.
Benny: DFW would be proud of you.
Rich: So why did I love it? I think it’s so well written in a sort of sparse, unaffected way, for one thing. But mostly, it just weirdly spoke to us, I feel — or at least to me — very much addressing, like, yeah, the kind of quandaries that we probably will face in our lives, and the love of learning awakening, and what that trades off against. And also, like, maybe coming to terms with being a smart, capable person, but realising you’re possibly not going to be a famous scholar, or you will pursue your own self-interest in didactic learning and things like that, possibly at the expense of other things. And I don’t even think it changed my mind on anything, or necessarily gave me new ideas, but it is an interesting meditation on how to live your life in a fairly dignified way and what a good life can look like — a non-showy, non-glamorous good life can look like. And yeah, like you said, Cam, you can very easily recommend it to others. Definitely want to reread it. It’s easy to read.
And I will just say, our episode was not good. But in our defence, that was when we were just having book club. It wasn’t when we — that was just a recording of our book club, before we thought anyone — before we were going to let anyone listen to it. Like, I leaned on the record button.
Cam: Just haven’t had to record — accidentally hit record.
Rich: I lean — I fell over and hit record. Yeah, so that wasn’t intended for public consumption, which is part of the reason why it’s probably not very interesting to listen to.
Cam: I mean, we could do a reread in the future, right?
Rich: Well, my only regret is that we did it so early. But who cares, it doesn’t matter. It was still fun.
Cam: Yeah, I’ll add a few things to Stoner. I think it’s easy to underrate things when they’re also well-liked by, you know — it’s kind of like, I don’t know, a good Tarantino movie or Scorsese movie. You could show that to your philistine dad and he’ll love it, but it could still sit on the top of the list with other directors like Bergman or Kubrick or whoever that dad might not watch. So it’s easy to kind of underrate a book like Stoner. But I just think it’s so good. And also, because the theme is mediocrity, that kind of taints it a little bit, and you kind of think, like, is this great? I sort of thought that. But for me, the things that were captured — these sort of tensions between the sexes, rivalries, like male rivalry, becoming a man, failure, and then this kind of love of literature, which speaks to us — it was just really good.
Rich: Good book.
Cam: Yeah, good.
Benny: It was nearly in my top three. It was definitely my honourable mention. But I thought that was going to be your number one, to be honest. That was going to be my prediction for you.
Cam: I had Wolf higher for you, Rich. I thought it was sneaking. And I was hoping it was sneaking.
Benny: Just to show us up.
Rich: Nah, I couldn’t do that. I want to read more Woolf for sure. Like, The Fall was in my top five, but what I thought about it was, that felt more like I’d already thought about it so much and puzzled it out a lot, and it felt more like I was sharing a book I loved with you guys. Which was fun, and the discussion went deeper than what I thought about. But it almost felt like a previous year’s book, you know? Didn’t feel new enough for me. Maybe the pitfall of doing a book that you’ve already read before. And also, maybe, I’m penalising us that we always keep talking about signalling and stuff, and it’s like, okay, we’ve talked about that enough for a decade. Or we should talk about it more, just to piss off Vaden.
Cam: Can never talk about it enough.
Benny: All right, Cam.
Cam: Nice. Okay, so my number one — drum roll — is Borges, Garden of Forking Paths. Which, I don’t know, because, you know, it’s a single short story, so I felt kind of cheating there. And there’s also this thing where that was quite early on for our reads — like, it was maybe a third read. That was my first Borges. I think, unlike you guys, I hadn’t read it, and it was like a “quake moment” — quake book or quake read — for me. This erudition mixed with the weird, almost proto-postmodern, metatextual philosophical thinking around, you know, something like infinity, which I loved in Infinite Jest, which we didn’t read this year, but —
Rich: As if it’s noteworthy that we didn’t read it.
Cam: Or, like, why would it not be on our list?
Rich: Right, right, right. I had noticed a distinct lack of Infinite Jest this year.
Cam: Sorry. Yeah, sorry, no, I wasn’t — but yeah, I will remind you guys that we —
Rich: Well, we had to make it fair for all the other books, otherwise, you know, it wouldn’t be competitive.
Cam: No, no. Yeah, I had to read this story three times before we talked about it, and I’ve read it once since. And I just remember the first time just not — I was so confused, like, what the hell was going on. There’s this Chinese spy for the Germans in England being chased down by an Irishman, who then also looks for another Chinese sinologist who happens to — you know, it’s just weird, and it all kind of works. And yeah, it’s mind-bending. It’s fun if you’re wearing philosophy, just to start talking about things like Infinite Jest and recursion. And was also cool just in the kind of history of ideas sense, of, like, the multiverse — I think we landed, didn’t quite originate here, but maybe originated independently with Borges. So I think that might be an independent founding.
Rich: Yeah, it was very early. Olaf Stapledon, we decided, was the first guy.
Benny: But we also weren’t sure if Borges had heard of Olaf, right? Like, he might have done it independently.
Cam: Uncanny now. I mean, we’re all more than average — we’re all sympathetic with the multiverse idea as a description of reality. But, you know, when you read scientific expositors around this idea, like, it’s very close to reading that story. And I can imagine, in a science class, like a reading recommendation that they’d put the story in there, it wouldn’t be out of place. Which is quite remarkable.
And I think everyone just has to read Borges himself. He’s right near the top of my list now. And this is a great place to start and end.
Rich: Nice. So we got to get Borges in the mix again next year for sure.
Benny: Yeah, seriously, yeah.
Cam: Did you guys consider that, or do you kind of forget that that was eligible?
Rich: I considered, but it wasn’t on my short list. But I definitely enjoyed it.
Benny: Yeah, me neither, yeah.
Rich: Yeah, it could be again the effect of reading something for the first time versus appreciating it more on the second or third time. But you don’t get that big rush that you got, like, your first Borges. You know, that’s awesome.
Benny: Yeah, it’s amazing.
Cam: Cool. Nice picks. I mean, with a great list of books.
Biggest STINKER of the year
Benny: All right. Least fave. I bet you we all have the same one.
Cam: You said that last time, and I couldn’t predict either of your lists.
Rich: I wanted to go off-canon for this, but sticking to the canon —
Benny: Which would have been what for you? Candide?
Cam: Let’s bring that discussion into it, because I’m interested.
Benny: Yeah, what did we read?
Cam: Should we change the order, or do you not mind going to —
Rich: Should we all say it on the count of three? Ready? No one ready? On the count of three.
Benny: Yeah, let’s try it.
Cam: Wait, no.
Benny: Cam’s like, I’m not participating.
Rich: Okay, all right. So who’s going first, Benny?
Cam: I don’t mind going first if people don’t want to go first.
Rich: You go first, yeah, you go first.
Benny: You go, Cam, you go.
Cam: Well, I just actually realised, I think mine’s technically off-canon. Well, okay. My worst is Candide.
Benny: Yeah, that is off.
Cam: Which I thought would maybe surprise you guys.
Rich: You didn’t hate it in the discussion.
Benny: Yeah, I am surprised, because I thought you wanted it to be included, I think, right?
Cam: Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, maybe — I don’t know, depending what I say about it. Yeah.
Benny: You wanted the audio to be released.
Rich: I’m going to do a supercut where it’s just you saying neutral-to-positive things about the book.
Cam: Yeah, well, okay, but I think my view of the book — Voltaire’s Candide — is that I just think it’s probably not worth reading for people like — I think it’s the quintessential book that falls in the category of stuff books you should know about, and you should know details about, but it’s not really worth reading, I think. And if you’re going to read it, you can read 20 pages of it and you get it. Like, that’s the point. But I think they’re very important ideas — like the idea of Dr. Pangloss, and this kind of optimism bias, and what the ideology was. People should know about that, that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and then how obviously absurd that is, and Voltaire just from a common sense angle points that out. And how this is a great criticism of just the academy, and how stupid it can get to fly in the face of common sense and totally lose the plot, and sort of continues to this day.
I read 20 pages of it, and you already — it’s so fast paced, you get through a lot of that. And then I just really struggled reading the rest of it. And I find it hard saying that’s essential reading. Like, even if you just listen to my description now, like, I’m not sure how much more you get out of reading this book. Compared to some of these other books we’ve read, like Crime and Punishment and Wallace, where the actual reading of it is kind of hard to substitute. That’s kind of where I came from, I suppose.
Rich: Yeah, fair enough. I won’t even try and defend it, I don’t think. I mean, it is very short. It’s, like, short and fun and quite funny. It could be not very arduous to read. If you would rather not read a dry description of it and just read the thing itself, there’s not much time investment difference. Just, you know, read the thing itself. It’s probably 70 pages, 80 pages.
Cam: That’s fair, I suppose. I didn’t quite find it as easy to read as you guys, I think, because of the —
For an old book, it was very readable.
Benny: Yeah. Okay, yep, I agree. All right, Rich, what you got?
Cam: But yeah, I have some honourable mentions. We’ll get to you guys.
Rich: Oh, we’re doing honourable mention?
Cam: But we’ll get to you guys.
Rich: All right. Benny, I’m guessing — I don’t know, maybe you and I have the same one.
Benny: I don’t want to guarantee we have the same one.
Cam: I think there’s two out there that I can’t pick between, you guys.
Rich: Well, mine’s Waiting for Godot. Yeah, the emperor has no clothes — Samuel Beckett is overrated.
Cam: Two stinkers.
Benny: Same, yeah. You go though, why?
Rich: I’ve thought about it more, and I’m doubling down hard on my hater stance. This is controversial, though, because obviously we’re out of step with the literary public, and I might be really embarrassed about this in future, especially seeing as I’ve read one of his plays. But yeah, I still think he accidentally stumbled onto success by creating a cold-reading version of a play that everyone can interpret in whatever light they like. And then he in fact doubled down in the rewriting and translation, by making it even more so. There’s nothing to redeem it for me, because it’s not particularly fun to — I’m sure the stage performance is better than reading it, but still, I don’t want to see the stage performance.
Cam: You would, if Ian McEwan and Patrick Stewart were coming to New Zealand to perform Waiting for Godot — you and your wife, I reckon you’d be there front row.
Rich: Yeah, but I think I said in the episode, like, that’s too strong a defence. I’d watch them read the back of my cereal packet, you know. So it doesn’t — yeah, but my stronger critique is that I think this is, like, the progenitor of a bunch of really unfortunate trends in this — the start of the post-modernist movement, before the post-modernist movement became fully formed. Where you have, basically, not just playing with metaphysics — which I really like, I love the Borgesian playing with metaphysics — but discarding it altogether, discarding narrative conventions altogether, and not replacing one set of rules with another more interesting one, but just throwing everything out the window. And then, like, everything is permissible in the Deutschian sense — that’s a very easy-to-vary work of art or explanation. And if you want to create great art, you need to set some set of constraints, and you choose an interesting set of constraints and work within them. And then you can have really cool virtuosic works that break the form in interesting ways, but you can’t just break everything at once. You just get slop, basically.
And this is my very emerging opinion about this, because obviously I’m not really schooled in the movements. But this is my initial sense — like, I don’t like this kind of thing, and I think it leads to unproductive types of writing and types of art. So yeah, and if he had a hand in pushing people in this direction, then yeah, fuck Beckett — basically, that’s my title.
Cam: So Benny, was it your pick as well? Do you have anything to add?
Benny: Yeah, that was also my pick. You know, the play was — who summarised it as “happens twice”, and then I think our book club discussion was basically just “nothing happens once”. And so I think we weren’t particularly illuminating about it during our discussion, but then I also just stand by what Rich said. And it’s funny, I guess, probably as a result of us talking every week about books, how much we’ve converged in terms of what we look for in literature. But I’m so much more impressed by authors like Nabokov, for instance, where serious literary critics can sit down, posit some sort of interpretation of the work, and then actually be able to summon a bunch of evidence to support this interpretation, and importantly summon evidence to try and falsify people’s interpretations.
And I think that’s important for an author to be able to do — is to be able to lay enough clues for you in this world they’re building to not give away the game immediately, but to have enough structure, like you were saying, Rich, such that you can’t just impose whatever you want onto this world. You can’t impose any sort of reading you want onto it. And that’s why it’s so much fun to read good critics write about good works of art. That’s why it’s so much fun to read about Brian Boyd, or to read Boyd talking about Nabokov, right? Because there’s a world there to discover, and it’s not whatever you want it to be there. It’s structured. And there’s right or wrong answers — and that’s not to say there’s one right answer, but there are better and worse ways to interpret a work.
And so I’ve just basically come to the view that if you’re writing something where every single person can have a different interpretation, and there’s absolutely no way to litigate disagreements about those interpretations, then you’ve written something that’s basically useless.
Cam: Yeah, but I just think that’s not true, right?
Benny: And then I think it is true with respect to Waiting for Godot. I just think I line up with Rich, where you have — like, look at the Wikipedia page. You just have all these different schools of thought, superimposing whatever they think about the world, basically, onto the work.
Cam: No, it’s not. No, I mean, it’s not whatever they think. And there are lots and lots of great works as well. I think I’m in this weird position where, you know, it wouldn’t be close to my top five or anything reads, but I think you guys are underrating it. I think you’re overstating its level of arbitrariness as well.
Rich: So there’s this soliloquy where the guy just says like a string of gibberish for like —
Cam: Yeah, that was weird, but, like, it’s —
Rich: I mean, Shakespeare, he ain’t.
Cam: Shakespeare with less words.
Benny: Sure, like, yeah, it’s too far to literally say you can impose anything you want on it. You can’t make the case that it’s about, I don’t know, a space colony on Mars in 2060 — that’s probably hard to do. But that’s not the bar. The bar can’t be literally any interpretation. But there’s hundreds of interpretations you can map onto this thing.
Cam: No, this is also not true. Like, you’re being hyperbolic. Like, hundreds, yeah? You’re a bigger fan — name all the interpretations.
Benny: No, I’m not, because you can — people do this. Look it up, dude. Just go into Google Scholar and type “interpretations of Waiting for Godot”. And you have every single psychoanalysis…
Cam: Okay, but I think there is kind of a major interpretation that kind of fractally feeds off to other ones. You know, it’s this kind of absurd meaninglessness of, like, what are we waiting for? And, like, the waiting itself is this activity that kind of feels absurd. And I think there’s a reason why a lot of people — it speaks to a lot of people. You give it to prisoners, or people that have just been through war, or people that have just been through Hurricane Katrina. I relate to it when I think about COVID. I just remember the waiting through COVID — of this realising that this is still life. And it feels like there’s no end to this, or you don’t know what the end is, and you’re not really sure what to do. And we maybe try to fill it in with fucking around and making a podcast, or making a performance or something like that. And that’s still kind of life. And that’s still kind of just waiting.
But that said, I didn’t love it. But it was also just — I felt useful as this kind of concept handle for me, of these two guys you don’t really know. They are sort of in limbo and they’re kind of waiting for something — I’m not quite sure what. I think you guys are underrating it a bit. But that said, you know, it would be low. Out of all the books I read, it would be right down there for me.
Rich: Yeah, like, for context, Benny and I gave it two, two and a half stars or something when we did our numerical ratings out of five. So that’s not zero. We’re trying to pick the worst book of what we read. And I think in the episode, I’m pretty sure we all roughly agreed that that central interpretation was the one which actually has some merit to it and is sort of at least somewhat interesting. But yeah, I mean — anyway, I don’t want to try and litigate it any further, but…
Cam: Yeah, the other stinker — I thought would be out there, but maybe it wasn’t contestable because we didn’t complete it in time — but I thought The Moviegoer by Walker Percy would get very close to you guys’ lists.
Rich: I didn’t want to do that because, A, because it was recent, and B, because as I realised in that episode, I don’t think I gave it a fair chance, and it would have been — I wouldn’t have felt good standing behind a negative review of it.
Cam: It’s funny, maybe we pulled each other, because you guys pulled me down to actually — I just think, yeah, like, it wasn’t a great book and I don’t know why it’s on these lists.
Rich: I still wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Put it that way.
Cam: Yeah, you’d be — imagine recommending it to someone and just knowing they’re on, like, page 60.
Benny: Let me do that. Be ostracised.
Cam: And you see them like two weeks later. Like, you feel so guilty — does it get better? Jesus Christ.
Benny: They’re poor bastards. I’m so sorry. Yeah, nope.
Rich: Benny, if you have a bad Hinge date, you don’t want to see them again — just recommend them that book. And tell them you’ll see them again by the time…
Benny: And ask if they can borrow it. I’m giving The Moviegoer for sure. Oh my god. That was a huge mistake.
Cam: Maybe that’s why he didn’t put Stoner in his top three — because he keeps giving it to girls and never gets it back. No one likes him to —
Benny: Yeah, because it’s fucking — I had to order another one just to have it. I used coffee just so I can pretend it’s the OG. That one I read. Yikes. Yeah, if she’s out there listening, you know who you are. Give me my book bag.
Our #1 (non-book club) book/essay/blog
Benny: Okay, recommendations for non-book-club things.
Rich: Shit, I just realised, Benny, I wonder if you and I have an overlap. Probably not.
Benny: Oh, we might.
Cam: Guys literally read everything the same, even non-book level.
Benny: That would be crazy. Of all the wide world of non-book-club picks.
Rich: Okay, I picked Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. Did you pick that?
Benny: No, no.
Rich: Okay, sweet. All right, good. So this is by Anil Seth, who’s a neuroscientist. It came out in the last couple of years, and it’s a super good primer on the latest thinking in philosophy of mind and consciousness research from the neurological perspective. Basically just goes through the history of how people have tackled the problem, both philosophically and with technology, empirically, and what’s working and what’s not, what has given some useful clues and insights for future experimentation. And he in particular has this really neat dissolution of the hard problem of consciousness, which is basically just the question of why there should be subjective experience that accompanies anything else, like what — where does it come from and what is the point of it. I think he has convinced me that the hard problem is possibly not even a real problem, which is huge if you’re interested in philosophy of mind.
Benny: Wow, that is huge.
Rich: I don’t 100% buy it, but I think he could well be right. So if you’re interested in that kind of thing, that’s a massive update. And he also just has nice mechanistic theoretical explanations of, basically, all the way up from how sensory experience probably gets turned into things like emotions and perception, and how it’s all presented through this prism of predictive processing and free energy, which are the big upcoming central new paradigms in biology, which I’ve also been reading about this year, and I think is a fascinating theory-of-everything contender. So yeah, I want to learn more about it, but I think he gives a really nice primer if you’ve never heard of any of the stuff that I just said. It sounds like gobbledygook — you’ll still be fine. It’s quite challenging going, but it is a pop science book. It is written for a lay public. And I’ve got so many ideas from it, and updated my thinking a lot. So that’s probably my favourite non-fiction book of the year.
Cam: It just occurred to me, I’m changing the order — might confuse people with knowing who’s who. So that was Rich, lover of Stoner and hater of —
Benny: Cam’s like, don’t associate me with predictive processing. I can’t have anyone out there thinking that I abide by such nonsense.
Rich: Trying to make Vaden as mad as possible. Vaden, if you happen to be listening, I’m sorry. Not really, not really.
Benny: He’s not that sorry. He’s laughing at you. He’s flipping the camera.
Benny: We didn’t have to do non-fiction, right, in the sense that —
Cam: No, I was hoping for Rich, being our resident novel reader. You might have to fill that mantle, Benny.
Benny: No, minor — both non-fiction.
Cam: What’s going on in the book club book?
Benny: So my first one is Glenn Loury’s autobiography, which was, I think, released this year, so I’m even up to date with —
Cam: What was that? Like, trials and tribulations of a black right-wing economist or something?
Benny: Yeah, shit, what’s it actually called? Oh no, it’s called Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative.
Rich: I mean, that at least sounds like a good summary of the content matter, even if it’s not the title.
Benny: So I won’t even try and summarise it here, because, honestly, people have had him on their podcast to try and summarise it, and even just having him talk about it doesn’t do the book justice. So there’s no way I, as some third-party commentator, can even begin to do the book justice. So instead, I’ll just say, yeah, it’s extremely raw, strikes me as extremely honest. Obviously you have to judge that for yourself, but it really feels like he’s just pulling back the curtain, being as honest as possible about all the motivations, what was driving him throughout his life. And he also just had a fascinating life — like, very troubled childhood, escaped that because he had a mathematical genius, basically, and that let him escape into the upper echelons of academia. But, you know, his childhood and his history followed him to some extent. And he’s had some epic highs and some epic lows of his life, more so than anyone I can think of, really, in recent history. And so it’s just fascinating from a content point of view, but also the way it’s written, and the way in which he just really seems to be totally unvarnished with you as a writer trying to communicate his life to you as the reader, feels different than any other autobiography I’ve read. So yeah, highly recommend that. The audiobook is also good.
Cam: So even if you’re a white libtard like Benny, you’ll still like the book.
Benny: Yeah, exactly, you know. If you’re a white anti-Trump libtard like me, you can still appreciate it. And anyway, we got a year into no cultural discussion.
Cam: So mine was — mine’s kind of a dual pick, because they’re related. And I’m not sure which one to recommend to people. But it’s David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here, slash Razib Khan’s blog in general. So I’ve forgotten the name. I think it’s Unsupervised Learning — or maybe that might be his podcast — but is that his blog as well?
Benny: Yeah, yeah.
Cam: Yeah. And this is just about, like, ancient DNA and what it tells us around the history of people and ancient migrations, and our ancestry essentially — our lineage. And I read David Reich when it first popped. I didn’t finish it. But I’ve kind of re-entered this world, and I’ve been a bit obsessed with it, and I just think it’s great if you’re interested in — I mean, David Reich’s probably slightly more accessible, and he focuses on a really, you know, important story of the lineage of modern Europeans. You know, it started as hunter-gatherers that were there, and then 10,000 years ago these farmers on modern-day Turkey, Anatolia, came in. And then 5,000 years ago, these kind of like — you know, kind of where Ukraine-ish is, in between Ukraine and Georgia, these Pontic steppe kind of Chad horse-riders just came and, like, wiped everyone out, you know.
But Razib Khan’s blog — like, there’s a piece on everyone, you know. One of his most well-read ones is looking at the lineage of Ashkenazi Jews and how it actually makes sense that they’re kind of a genetic cohesive unit, as opposed to Sephardim, less so. But, you know, you can look at Egyptians or Australian Aboriginals. So it’s more exhaustive than Reich’s book. However, I think rather, you got to pay to read it. So I’d probably recommend, I don’t know, paying for a month or so to see if you like it, and make sure you remember to unsubscribe if you don’t — which I think I probably need to unsubscribe myself because I’ve read most of it.
Benny: A recommendation with a caveat — I always love it.
Cam: But yeah, I mean, the beauty of this stuff is, it tells us stuff that we don’t have written history of, and now we can create history of migration and conquest via this new scientific methodology.
Rich: Do you want to do a second one, Benny, or should we just leave it at one?
Benny: Nah, I should leave it.
Cam: At least say what it is. You don’t have to get into it.
Benny: Okay, it was just Ben Recht’s series on his Substack about Meehl — Paul Meehl’s political —
Cam: I thought you were saying Ben Rex, like you recommend.
Benny: Oh, sorry, no, yeah, that’s confusing. Yeah, Benjamin —
Cam: I mean, yeah, Ben Rex.
Rich: Ben Rex, Ben Rex.
Benny: Yeah, Benjamin Recht is a professor at UC Berkeley of computer science, and he did this good series on Paul Meehl’s philosophical psychology. And Meehl is an interesting character, but it’s more that Ben really does a good job of diving into the history and foundations of statistics. And there’s lots of interesting questions there. So if you’re at all interested in the philosophy and foundations of statistics and social science, then I recommend that. So that’s what it is. You guys have a second?
Cam: My honourable mention was Infinite Jest.
Rich: Which reading of it?
Cam: Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve lost count. One fraction.
Rich: Mine’s called When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, which I do think you guys would actually love. It’s kind of, like, a fusion between fiction and non-fiction. It’s like narrativised non-fiction, where I think he’s filled in the gaps of some conversations. But it’s stringing together a bunch of prodigies — Einstein, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, mathematician Mochizuki, some vignettes from
their life which all sort of overlap and relate to one another. The writing is crazy good — you can’t put it down. It’s so fascinating. It’s almost a new kind of style, almost like literary fiction. Really fascinating. And he’s got a new book called The MANIAC about Johnny von Neumann and the development of the bomb, which I’m super hyped to read. Phoebe’s read it, I haven’t read it yet, but yeah, I think he’s one of the hottest interesting new writers.
Cam: It’ll be on everyone’s podcast soon, if not already.
Rich: Maybe. It seems underrated. If you guys haven’t heard of it, then it’s still underrated, I reckon. Put it that way.
Benny: Oh, isn’t the MANIAC one part fiction? Is that right?
Rich: I think it’s walking this strange line.
Cam: Wasn’t it Big Yeshiva?
Rich: Yeah, where it’s maybe somewhat fictionalised.
Benny: Honestly, there’s something about that that does give me pause. Like, if you really recommend it, then I’ll read it, but there’s something about that line where it’s like, if I’m reading something that’s close to accurate, I just want it to be accurate, because then I want to know what happens, and I’m scared of then carrying around these stories in my head of things that didn’t actually happen but I think they did.
Rich: Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about that. I mean, I don’t — like, The MANIAC, I haven’t read it. But on When We Cease to Understand the World, don’t worry about it, just read it. It’s like, if you’re watching a movie, a biopic or something, it may or may not — it’s going to be creating some conversations from whole cloth, but that’s okay. And you’re having to make decisions about the interior state of someone’s mind that you won’t have perfect access to, and so on. So anyway, I do think you guys would like it, check it out. I’ve got a copy that you can borrow.
Favourite film or TV
Rich: Best movie or TV that you saw this year? Cam’s film corner.
Cam: Whose turn is it? Where do I start? Whose turn is it to start? Okay.
Rich: You only get one.
Cam: Yeah, so it’s actually a recent TV series I’ve watched since I’ve had the operation and not been working. It’s funny because, in general, I’ve scaled back how much TV I watch, which has been intentional, because I think we shouldn’t watch too much TV because of the opportunity costs of, you know, what else you could be doing. But I think Tyler Cowen — and like, Tyler Cowen has this post which is a bit longer, where he’s asked what’s the best TV to watch, and it’s a bit longer than his usual posts. And he pretty much spends the whole time talking about why watching TV is overrated, and he doesn’t recommend anything. Which, like, the Straussian — I mean, it’s not even that Straussian — but the Straussian take is kind of like, you know, don’t watch any TV. Which is hyperbolic, but I think has a point. And he has this kind of one of his classic, like, you know, on-the-margin arguments, where it’s because of the incentives of creating TV, you want to create more seasons, which maybe isn’t fully true with the new kind of model where you create these mini-series and then potentially a second season which is the same theme but different story.
But that said, I’ve been watching HBO’s Rome, and I think it’s really, really good. I recommend it to you guys. I recommend it to people that want to learn about Rome. I recommend it to people that already love learning about Rome, even as a first step. Because, you know, there’s that meme that every guy’s into ancient Rome, which is somewhat true. But also, like, you know, reading about ancient Rome can be overwhelming because it’s so long. You have like 300, 400 years of the republic and another double that for the empire, and it’s just, there’s so many characters and all these Latin names. And, yeah, like, this is just a good first port of call, which is a genuinely good show. It’s made in 2005 and it adds the kind of visual memory of, like, who’s who. It covers the moment of, sort of, Julius Caesar’s rise, and the political infighting with Cato and Cicero and Pompey, and then his demise, which is famous murder, and then the rise of his great-nephew Augustus. So that’s the period it covers, which is, you know, just around the birth of Jesus Christ, really — 50 years before and after that.
Yeah, I’d highly recommend it. And then it spurred me to read a bunch more about ancient Rome and be far more engaged. Enjoy that funnel.
Rich: Cool. I’m definitely going to check that out.
Cam: Yeah, it’s cool.
Benny: Yeah, same. All right, mine is the war film 1917, which is very recent, made in 2019, which I only watched a couple of months ago, maybe. Directed and produced by Sam Mendes. And anyway, it’s about a specific operation on the German front during World War One. And what’s amazing about it is they shot the film in such a way that it’s intended to look like it is only two continuous shots throughout the film. I think there are actually like 36 cuts or something, but you really, unless you’re looking extremely closely, you can’t really notice them. Actually, I’ll take that back — you can’t notice them, like, if you sat there and really tried to count, it would be hard. And so it looks like it’s just two continuous shots the whole thing, and it’s astonishing to watch. So the cinematography is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and I think it won a bunch of awards for that. And I have no idea how historically accurate, etc., it is, but it is a phenomenal film to watch. So highly, highly recommend.
Cam: I’ve heard from some others that it’s kind of, like, upper-mid, but I will watch it now because you — yeah.
Rich: Is it depicting one battle nonstop? One continuous chronology?
Benny: In some sense. So it’s about these two guys who are tasked with crossing over enemy lines to deliver a message to another battalion of theirs — to another English battalion — to not attack. There’s some attack that’s doomed because the Germans have lured them into a trap, basically. And they’re tasked with crossing enemy territory to get the message to this commander. And so you’re following — basically, you just imagine them going through hell, crawling through these pits, and almost getting bombed, and getting attacked. And the camera’s just following them around the whole time. And yeah, it’s astonishing.
And I think it’s possibly one of those things where I watched it, had no idea what it was about, and then was just blown away by what I was seeing. The difference between what it was and what my expectations were were so large that I can’t help but be very impressed by it. And maybe if you go in with high expectations, you won’t be as impressed. But I told my dad immediately to watch it, who was a producer, and he was blown away by it too. So I don’t think it was just me being a naive film watcher. I think it was genuinely good cinematography.
Cam: I wasn’t saying that cinematography was necessarily murder-up-in-it. The problem with all these military and history recommendations is, it’s hard to convince the missus to watch this. You can have to have some time for yourself.
Benny: Yeah, but it’s less battle-focused than it is about the journey of these two guys, so you can, like, you can get behind them, and, you know, she might like that more. So I don’t know, you can sell it to her that way.
Rich: I got one for the missus for you, Cam. It’s called Perfect Days, and it came out, I think, last year. It’s a Japanese-German co-production. So what happened was, in Tokyo, in the Shibuya prefect, there’s a thing called the Tokyo Toilet Project, which is — basically, they made a whole bunch of nice, kind of artistic toilets. And they invited this German filmmaker called Wim Wenders to come and do some kind of promotional video around it, like make a little short video or something. And he decided to make a feature film instead. So he made this wonderful art film about a Japanese toilet cleaner.
It’s basically a kind of slice-of-life film about the minutiae of his life. It’s not plot-driven at all. It’s about, like, paying attention to the small details, and on the honesty and taking pride in your work no matter how mundane. And, like, a very Japanese aesthetic as well, of attention to detail. It’s got an amazing soundtrack. And yeah, you just have to sort of immerse yourself in it. Watch it with your missus or whatever, and just, like, wait half an hour, because I was in the first half — I was kind of bored, because I was like, what the hell is this movie? And then by the end, like, the final scene, which is — just thinking about it kind of makes me feel emotional, the closing scene of it. Yeah, really beautiful movie.
Cam: Yeah, cool.
Rich: Definitely check it out.
Cam: That was actually on my list. It was cool to hear that, so I’ll put it higher, I think.
Rich: Oh, yeah.
Cam: Yeah, I’m not sure if maybe you’ve mentioned that to me or not.
Rich: Can’t remember.
Benny: Yeah, I think you might have mentioned it, because I remember — yes, that sounded familiar as you were describing it. That’s awesome.
Cam: There’s also an East Asian great 90s slice-of-life movie called A Brighter Summer Day, by the way, if you enjoyed that, Rich.
Rich: Okay.
Benny: Nice. All right, fellas. Well, any reflections?
Cam: I’ll just throw out a couple of films quickly.
Benny: Oh, here we go.
Rich: What? One pick, motherfucker.
Cam: I re-watched A Separation —
Benny: Just steamrolls over here. He’s like, ha ha ha, that’s funny.
Cam: I re-watched A Separation this year. Iranian film, 2011. I just think everyone should watch that.
Rich: That’s on my list. I’m going to watch it.
Cam: On your list? Cool.
Benny: Wait, what’d you call it, sir? I missed you. I was laughing. Okay.
Cam: A Separation. And kind of, like, just comfortable recommending that to anyone — kind of like Stoner. And I watched, for the first time — I kind of missed it when it came out, but a few years ago — Burning, a Korean film from 2018 by, I should know his name, sorry — by Lee Chang-dong. Especially for you guys, like, it would be a good discussion film, to be honest. It has just that kind of, I don’t know, not quite philosophical, but almost — yeah, that was really cool. So I just throw those out there quickly.
Benny: Nice. All right, now that you’ve run rampage over our —
Cam: I thought you’re going to say Band of Brothers, Benny.
Benny: Oh, that would have been a good one too.
Cam: Was that too old? Anything World War One —
Benny: No, no, no, I also —
Rich: Oh, I was watching Band of Brothers for the first time this year.
Cam: How was it? You making me confused? It’s good. It’s really good.
Benny: No, I also started watching it for the first time, that’s funny.
Rich: Oh, really? No way. What the hell?
Cam: You guys, not only do you read the same…
Rich: We’re like the only two dudes on the planet who’ve never watched Band of Brothers.
Benny: I’m one, I know, who haven’t seen it. I actually haven’t finished it yet. I’m on episode — I’m not done though.
Rich: Oh, so good.
Benny: Yeah, it’s been amazing so far. All right.
Cam: All right. Do you want to do reflections of life — of the year of books?
Navel-gazing on the book club meta and podcasting lessons learned
Rich: Yeah, one year of podcasting. I mean, Benny, it’s not new for you, because you — how long have you been — you’ve done Increments for several years, right? You’re a seasoned pro.
Benny: Yeah, I’m an old pro, baby.
Cam: Your reflections of Heaven aside, but for one year.
Benny: Exactly.
Rich: Yeah, so I mean, my main thing is just, like, it’s interesting how different it is to just talking normally. Like, maybe this is too boring actually to talk about, but —
Cam: If we were just talking normally, it would be fine.
Rich: Yeah. You have to, like, perform and ham it up. And I think it feels fake and artificial to do that, but you actually just have to do it. And that means things like not interrupting and talking over each other as much as you normally would and would be fine in a normal conversation. And calling each other by name — so yeah, a guy wrote in and told us he has no idea who any of us are, and we have to actually start, like, addressing questions to one another by name and things like that. And that’s Cam speaking, who just interrupted me, but it was a good interruption. And it penalises lack of verbal fluency as well, I think, pretty badly. Which you don’t notice in a live conversation, but when you’re listening to something, you want it to be pretty smooth. Like, you can speed it up, which helps a little bit, but to be pretty tight. Whereas when you’re just having a conversation, you don’t really mind the ums and ahs and stuttering and things like that. But it sounds really unprofessional when you’re listening to someone.
Cam: Yeah, it gives you newfound respect of seasoned podcasters or lecturers, who potentially without that many edits can really craft a sentence, you know, in the moment.
Rich: Yeah. What do you mean, edits? This just goes out completely untouched.
Cam: There’s this funny thing where sometimes you can get lost in flow and natural conversation, and that works well. And then as soon as you’re slightly out of it, you’re suddenly more mindful that this is being recorded, or it’s like not good radio. And then that adds this kind of spiral. It’s kind of hard to get out of there sometimes. That’s one thing I noticed.
Rich: Yeah, like, simultaneously mindful of the medium, so that you behave in a certain way, and trying not to overthink it, and trying to be really natural and like have normal conversational dynamics. Yeah, like, don’t get self-conscious, basically.
Benny: Do you guys find it rubbing off in your day-to-day conversations — your podcasting style of being a little more concerned about how you’re crafting your sentences, a little more cognizant of ums and ahs and likes and things like that? Do you find that affecting your speech day-to-day?
Rich: I don’t think so, but I do notice it’s really cool having, like, cached — cached, you say cached or cashed? Cached thoughts available to you on a certain topic. And if we’ve talked about a book, and then say, like, Phoebe asks about, you know, what did you think of the book, I can pretty much just dash off, like, a pretty tight summary of what the things that we talked about, the points we liked and disliked, and it feels good. And also, I feel like, when we have a good session, it’s often because I’ve actually cached some thoughts. You know, I put a lot of thought in advance, and it comes across better than when I’m groping around to try and figure something out in the moment.
Cam: Yeah, I think that’s the biggest thing that I have gotten from this — is the importance of putting an effort to, you know, truly great pieces of work. And this is just kind of a commitment device to do that. And then you add in that if we’re recording it and making it a product, then we’re going to put more effort in. And yeah, just how important it is, and how easy that’s not to do just when you’re reading or watching something. And, you know, everyone kind of knows the thing — someone asks you, like, how is that? You’re like, yeah, it’s good. And then they sort of ask you why, and it’s kind of hard to say why, and then you suddenly realise you’re not very insightful about it. But, you know, you put in this work and you can actually have several insights. And especially when you have this discussion, it’s useful not only for further discussions, but just for your connection with that book. Like, I have a different connection with some of the books we’ve read now — you know, the ones that we put on our top three lists, because we do this.
And yeah, also just my reflections at book clubs in general: I’m a lot more bullish on the idea of a book club, whether or not you record it. I’d recommend it to people — everyone that reads a lot or wants to read a lot. Like, they have their list of, like, books you want to read. Everyone’s inflicted with what’s that word, tsundoku or something. You know, you just keep buying books that you want to read, you keep adding them to your online lists, and it’s hard to actually do them. And these are hard books. And this is just a way to, like, kind of trust in a process that it’s going to be closed. Like, you put on Dostoevsky, and we’re going to get there. Or, like, we can put on something like The Odyssey, or, you know, some tough read, and we kind of trust we’re going to do it. And that’s just awesome.
And the second part of doing the book club or doing a podcast is this kind of social side, where, you know, we’re getting older and having kids and stuff, and you know, it’s hard to maintain — some of us, it’s hard to maintain friendships, or grow new friendships. And this project is awesome. But, like, if you’re going to do a book club, you kind of want it to be with people that are similarly enthusiastic about it. I can imagine doing this with the wrong group — you know, it becomes a bit more forced.
Benny: Yeah, I think it would just disintegrate with the wrong group is my sense. Which, you know, I’ve had book clubs in the past that have disintegrated. That’s normal until you find the right group of people.
Rich: Yeah, you have to match the energy.
Cam: But you can also do, like, a book club of a book, and then once you’ve done that, you can choose, you know, different members for a future book. The only thing is, if you’re someone who has thought about it, it’s worth trying, yeah, to get through some books.
Benny: One footnote on the being bullish on book clubs — I absolutely agree, but I would add that I’m even more bullish on small book clubs. I think there is something special that happens when it’s like, you know, I think 10 people, for instance, way too many. Even five, pushing it. I mean, yeah, three to four seems perfect. You just don’t want to be in a situation where you’re only saying a few sentences about a book. Not because you necessarily have tons to say, but because it’s too easy to opt out of the conversation if there’s too many people. And it’s easy to let yourself off the hook of not reading it or not bringing insights to the table that you want to talk about, because you feel like, oh, other people will take this on board, right? There’s enough people there that I don’t really need to do anything and I’ll just chime in. But when there’s three people, you know, one of us leading the conversation every week, you can’t just take a backseat. You have to show up with some things to talk about. And that makes you, one, actually do the reading, but then two, actually try and process the reading and come up with things to say, which is the most helpful part of the process. Because without that, I think you’re just going to forget basically everything that you’ve read.
Rich: Yeah, 100% cosign. And it’s also good from, like, the other side, for, like, inveterate yappers like Cam and I who love the sound of our own voice. We would really struggle if there’s, like, eight people in the group and we have to patiently sit there, like, waiting to be allowed to say something. So yeah, it’s good to be able to, you know, get it all out.
Benny: To dominate.
Cam: Whenever you’re talking, it’s like, I’m metaphorically doing a prone hold for, like, two minutes. I’ve improved my PB.
Rich: Yeah, like, you’re clenching all your muscles, and yeah, like, come on, come on.
Cam: I think also, just, there’s someone, someone leading discussion every week, you know, adding a little bit of structure, just adds a little bit more — to kind of push it and get it across the line.
In terms of my style of reading, it’s made me more effortful. I suppose that is just writing notes. But, you know, Mortimer Adler has that classic How to Read a Book, and the four types of elementary, sort of just reading, inspectional, skimming, and then this kind of analytical, and then even syntopical or something like that, but around like reading with other books and taking notes. And I’m just doing that a lot more with these books. I’m using ChatGPT. And I just — that elevates — I may be repeating what I said earlier, but it just elevates the reading experience for truly great books that become worth it.
Rich: Just books that are worthy of doing that kind of close reading, right?
Cam: Yeah, exactly. And, like, maybe it wouldn’t be worth reading if you weren’t doing that, I kind of think. You know, some of these tough books.
Rich: Just some goals for, like, next year, a couple of points. So one thing that we’re going to start doing is we’ll read the odd bit of criticism or essay, like a little bit of odd meta non-fiction. So I think it would be good to try and, like, sharpen up our critical chops, which, to be clear, have improved a lot, because I think we’ve, like, basically horribly butchered some old classics, but we’re, like, getting better. And the pieces are kind of falling together — a much better sense of where things lie in the literary landscape, even though we’re still, like, totally rank amateurs.
But yeah, so I think we’re going to do something by Susan Sontag, maybe C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures. And also, there’s a section from Popper’s memoir that I really want to do, which I think will be really helpful for, like, giving us better vocab even to talk about what we were talking about before, about whether or not Waiting for Godot — like, why it doesn’t live up to our expectations. It’s like, I think it’ll be really interesting to try and incorporate some stuff around art as problem-solving or art as exploring problem space. And yeah, that could be a fun frame that sort of joins up our other interests. So yeah, I’m pretty excited to do that. Like, definitely not overwhelming the fiction, but just maybe every few months or something.
And the other thing I wanted to say is, like, if anyone is listening this far and you’re obviously like a super fan — we’re not entirely clear on whether we’ll keep doing this indefinitely. So we’re going to keep doing book club, but we may or may not keep publishing it for other people to listen to. So if you are listening to this and you want us to keep doing that, then I guess, like, send us a note basically. We do get some feedback, but it’s, like, I don’t know, it’s not clear whether it’s worth doing. So yeah, send us an email — douevenlit@gmail.com. You could even just say, like, keep going or stop. If you heard this, I guess you hate listening and you tell us to shut up.
Benny: Yeah, shut up.
Rich: But yeah, that would be good. Do you guys have anything else that you want to do next year? Like, any directional changes?
Cam: No, I’m keen. I think it can be tough sometimes when we get a book but not loving it, to have the gumption to keep going. But I sort of trust this process that there are just enough great books. I feel like we’re already doing one at the moment. And when I look back at this year in reflection and we look at these 20 books and we’re struggling and choose the top five, you know, it feels great.
Benny: Yeah, that feels good.
Rich: Yeah. Or even looking back on Crime and Punishment, which I know I struggled with in the moment, it’s like the type-2 fun where now I can look back on it and I only have good feelings about it, even though I’m sure I was slogging it at times. Those actual accomplishments — and I couldn’t have done it without my beautiful boys.
Benny: Hells yeah. Nice. All right, well, to the next 20.
Cam: Yeah, see you next year, happy holidays.
Rich: Yeah, I’m so hyped. Yeah, see you next year. Merry Christmas, everyone.
Benny: Sick.
