Some festive chit-chat and navel gazing on the year that was.
Big tiddy goth gfs and rival podcast recs
Rich: Sucks, man. Getting old is so undignified. I hate getting old. I need to make a billion dollars and become Brian Johnson.
Benny: You’re the closest of all of us, I would say. Cam and I have some catching up to do.
Cam: You’re dating 23-year-old goth girls, Benny.
Benny: I do what I can to keep myself young, you know?
Rich: Have you got a steady girl on the go, Benny?
Benny: No, no, no. We should also cut this, maybe.
Cam: Oh no, I was just joking about the Brian — I didn’t mean it. Now Brian released that he’s seriously dating someone, but it’s quite cute and endearing. They seem pretty happy.
Rich: Wait, I mean, that is one of the time-honored methods, right? You’re only as old as the woman you feel.
Cam: I thought, now we finally understand his motives for his last five years of experimenting.
Benny: I mean, surely that’s not a non-trivial part of his motives, right? That would be crazy if that wasn’t even a bit of it.
Rich: He’s leaning right into the immortal vampire archetype, right, where you become this pale creature that lives forever and feeds on the flesh of young women — young gothic women.
Benny: Injects yourself with your kids’ blood and stuff like that.
Rich: Yeah, that’s awesome. He’s leaned into it so hard that I can’t help but like him again.
Cam: Yeah, no, he seems — I think that’s quite a common sentiment as well.
Rich: It’s like that Steve Bannon flood-the-zone thing. It just totally works. If you just go full send on everything and just be your full self as obnoxiously as you like, then after a certain point you’re like, wow, this guy’s got some moxie.
Cam: I suppose he’s a good poster as well.
Rich: Are you guys ready for 2026 when I become my full self unrepentantly and I stop holding back?
Cam: I don’t know what direction that’s gonna take you.
Benny: I’m scared what that does for book club.
Rich: You’ll love me in the end. Could be a difficult transition period.
Benny: What will your new statistics look like if we run the transcripts through AI again? What would be the differences?
Rich: I’m going to become even more overbearing. I’m going to try and boost my stats. Talking 50%, I’m going to try to hit 60, 70%.
Cam: 20% improvement of articulation and word variation.
Rich: Yeah, I’m going to just put a thesaurus on the other screen.
Benny: Do you guys finish other people’s sentences?
Cam: Like with a partner, or just with people?
Rich: Oh yeah.
Benny: Just with people.
Cam: Probably. I mean, I do interrupt.
Rich: If they’re a slow talker, and then they get mad because you finish their sentence with the wrong thing.
Benny: Yeah, that is annoying when someone finishes your sentence and it’s wrong.
Cam: Why is that?
Benny: I think I’ve sort of realized that about myself, that I do — I mean, it’s a little harder in audio form, so I don’t think I do it over podcast, but I guess you guys let me know. I have realized that in person I actually finish other people’s sentences, and I don’t like that about myself at all.
Cam: Yeah, it’s pretty normal.
Rich: No, they should speak faster. They should get to the point. It’s their fault. Never change. You listen to podcasts at 1.5x and then it changes your brain.
Benny: Oh, two, baby, come on.
Cam: Nah, he’s two-plus, man.
Benny: 1.5? What is that? That’s crazy.
Rich: Wait, what speed are we talking?
Cam: He’s finishing podcast sentences and then “one more, five, mate.”
Rich: Do you go higher than 1.5?
Benny: Oh yeah, I go two, and then I trim those silences and everything, all the little cheeky shortcuts. It’s like an effective rate of 2.3.
Rich: Oh, holy shit. Okay, well no wonder you’re finishing people’s — imagine, it must be painful listening to people in real life at normal latent speed, at thinking speed.
Benny: So I’ve actually thought about this, and I think there’s somewhat of a paradox here, but I have an answer. In conversation, I actually don’t feel as if other people are speaking really slowly. But if I listen to an audiobook or a podcast at one-time speed, then it’s absolutely painful. Seriously, I have to listen — if I listen to one of our podcast episodes, it’s gotta be at least two-times speed, otherwise I’m pulling my hair out.
Cam: It’s the most boring thing in the world.
Benny: That’s a weird phenomenon, right? But I’m convinced it’s because if you’re interacting with someone in person, a big part of your brain is actually thinking about what you’re gonna say in response to them. So it lowers your effective processing speed.
Rich: No, I’m just listening. I’m just listening and just being present.
Cam: I disagree with that from the other end. When I’m listening to a podcast, I’m always thinking, what am I going to say? Including our podcast.
Benny: Cam, jump in here. Jump in. Get him. Yeah, so that’s my answer.
Cam: I saw Luli, kind of from the PUA area, and she was pushing up crazy numbers. She had this whole guide of how to get to 4x — I mean, I can’t remember, maybe it wasn’t that hard, but it was, no, seriously, it was high. I forgot the exact number, but it’s just incrementally — you get to two and then you eventually get to two and a half and get to three. It might not be four, I should find out what it was. It was definitely surprisingly high.
Rich: If she’s processing all that information at 4x, then I’m impressed.
Benny: That would be nuts.
Rich: There must be a huge variation in people’s processing speeds if that’s true, because I could absolutely not take in anything at 4x.
Benny: But you can’t just jump right to it, right? You’ve got to slowly build yourself up to it. I do think an interesting question is, if you take someone who’s normalized at, say, 2x speed for audiobooks, and then you ask, okay, do you absorb information better if you listen to the same thing twice at 2x speed, or the whole thing once at 1x speed? Like, which one will you grok more of?
Rich: That’s a good question. I think for me, it’s more like, the faster it is, the more intently I have to be very, very carefully paying attention. But the context in which I’m usually listening to podcasts is when I’m not in a position to pay really, really careful attention. So if I was sitting at a computer just listening and maybe taking notes or something, that would maybe make more sense. But if I’m out and about, it’s like, if my attention slips for 10 seconds, well, now I’ve just missed like an entire connective passage of ideas that might totally have disrupted the whole conversation. And I’m like, don’t know what’s going on or whatever. If I was listening at 3x speed or whatever. But if it’s at talking speed, they probably haven’t gone too far, or you can scrub back 10 seconds.
Cam: Yeah, the whole thing of, don’t know how many times to press the “go back 10 seconds.”
Benny: I guess we don’t have a favorite podcast on the end of your list.
Rich: We can’t afford to direct any listens away from ourselves.
Benny: We should be the only podcast in your feed.
Cam: This is the great literary podcast.
Rich: Do you guys listen to other book podcasts?
Cam: I did a couple early on. He’s got a few.
Rich: Then he — I see that face.
Benny: Yeah, no, I have a couple.
Rich: He’s like, should I tell him?
Benny: Yeah, do I say it? You gotta scrub this part out.
Cam: Well, then the listeners will listen to them and see where you get your insights from.
Rich: Hmm, true.
Benny: I don’t have any that I listen to.
Rich: Unlike Cam’s brilliantly hidden sources — the Wikipedia page for the book.
Benny: The New York Times review on the book. Yeah, never would have found that one.
Benny: No, I don’t have any that I listen to on a regular basis, but I do have a couple in the directory that often, after we’ve done an episode, then I’m curious about how other people talk about it. And so I’ll look it up in theirs. But honestly, we do a pretty weird collection of books, and it’s very, very rare that I’ll find — unless it’s a very famous book, it’s pretty rare that I’ll actually find what we’ve done among their archive.
Cam: I definitely watch some YouTube summaries of books, especially the ones we have read sometimes.
Rich: There’s some good stuff like the Yale great books lectures and things like that, but I haven’t found a podcast that I love yet apart from Very Bad Wizards, but that’s almost sort of incidental to the main thrust of what they do.
Cam: Yale has an American Novels one, doesn’t it?
Rich: Yeah.
Cam: Have you seen it? Yeah, yeah.
Benny: Funnily enough, there’s actually two other book club podcasts that I found, both of which have three guys running it. One of which actually has, as one of the central guys, like some crypto investor guy. And I was like, oh, he’s our Rich.
Cam: That’s Richard’s double.
Benny: Yeah, that’s Rich, seriously.
Benny: And then one of them is kind of like a tech guy. And then they actually went to CMU. They went to Carnegie Mellon.
Cam: There’s one with Nat.
Benny: Yeah, that one, that one.
Rich: Nat — who’s that?
Benny: What’s his last name, Alisson or something?
Cam: Alisson, who wrote the non-fiction Crypto Confidential.
Rich: Ah, yeah, yep, I know his name. So he’s me. Is that any good? Maybe I’ll check that out.
Cam: He used to write about Rome Research, was my joke. It’s mainly non-fiction, I think. I haven’t checked it out, but…
Benny: It’s mainly non-fiction until recently, and they’ve been doing some more fiction, but I don’t think they’ve done anything that we’ve done.
Rich: Because he’s writing a fiction book, I think. Or — yeah, wait, anyway, just stop advertising other people’s podcasts. They’re all trash.
Cam: That’s a midwit, for sure. That’s what Benny listens to on his phone.
Rich: Well I mean, no, he’s brilliant and insightful if he’s the me of the podcast, and it’s justified that he talks for 50-plus percent of it.
Cam: He’s your midwit double — crypto midwit.
DYEL wrapped stats analysis
Rich: Um, let’s get into it. Okay, look, first question for you guys: do you perceive that we read more this year, less this year, or roughly the same amount this year compared to last year? Whichever — well, Cam, I don’t know if you already started doing calcs, so if you did, then don’t.
Cam: Pages or books, or should we answer both?
Benny: Last.
Cam: I did start doing some calcs before I messaged, but my perception certainly was less this year. How about you, Vinny?
Benny: Yeah, I would say less on books, and pages is my guess, although my guess is that pages are closer to last year than books. But both were still less. Yeah, we did some big books.
Cam: There’s some big-ass books.
Rich: Yeah, you guys are dead right. We actually — I was really surprised — we read 4,323 pages this year, which is only 12% fewer than last year. I thought we read way less than last year, but actually no. And the reason I thought it is we read way fewer titles: 14 complete works, which were nine novels, three short stories, one essay, and one epic poem. Whereas last year we did — I just don’t have the numbers, but it was like 29 or 25 or something like that. So maybe like half as many things, but about the same amount of stuff.
Cam: What you’re saying is we need to do more small ones next year.
Rich: Yes.
Rich: And we’re off to a really great start with the first book of the new year.
Benny: Drive up the episode count. It’s going to take us till June to finish the first book of this year.
Cam: Plus another 400 pages, right?
Rich: We need to talk about that after this record, by the way.
Cam: It’s gotten bad again. Another 400 pages to our total, as well. You know, another half-book.
Rich: No, I think that has to — we have to like cut that off and put it for next year.
Cam: All right. So I need to read smaller books, man.
Rich: You can’t — we can’t include 0.5s of things.
Benny: Yeah, exactly. Because I think we actually technically started Blood Meridian in 2024.
Rich: Yeah, exactly. So it was a good reading, you boys. And of course, the opportunity cost: we could have read Infinite Jest 4.1 times.
Cam: I only read it once.
Benny: Not worth it at all for Cam.
Cam: At that point, it’s probably diminishing returns, I would say.
Rich: After what, what’s your N for diminishing returns after the Nth Infinite Jest read?
Cam: Well, now it just reminds me of that whole Brian Johnson leaning into the cringe of being like the weird vampire guy. You know how there’s that whole trope of, like, the Infinite Jest bro — he hasn’t read much else. Just lean into it and just like double down and be like, yeah.
Rich: I’m sure I’ve said before, like, someone — maybe you should do the Infinite Jest podcast where you literally just infinitely read Infinite Jest section by section and start again when you get to the end.
Cam: Well yeah, I think that would be worth doing twice at least. That first one’s like — but you’d want to do the first one with someone who hasn’t read it, and that’s like the first read-through, no spoilers, and then the second time is like the re-read.
Benny: Oh, every time you reread it, you could bring someone else on, so you go through it with different people every time. Could be cool.
Cam: Yeah. Not sure who’s listening to that fifth season.
Rich: Yeah, the fifth season is where they drop off. That’s art, man. That’s an art project.
Cam: Oh wow, that’s surprisingly close.
Benny: It is surprisingly close.
Cam: Feels like we read way less. I suppose it’s — I think it’s a few things. It’s fewer titles, it’s a few times of, like, are we gonna do this book club anymore, and some books that maybe we didn’t like, and it just felt like, you know.
Rich: A bit of slogging. I checked and rechecked the numbers because I was that unsure about — like, I thought I’d made a miscalculation. Are you gonna put him down, or should I — I’ll take. Yeah, hello. He’s got a strong opinion about Gravity’s Rainbow.
Cam: Hey Phoebe, I’m not sure you can hear us, but nice to see you.
Rich: Too long.
Rich: It’s too weird.
Cam: Yeah, we agree.
Rich: All right, we’ve got the fourth mic.
Cam: Oh man, another blondie, man.
Benny: Stealing my thunder. I don’t like this one bit.
Rich: This is Alexander Thomas Pynchon Harriet Meadows.
Benny: All right, it’s cute as hell.
Rich: I think we’ve had a weak finish — and that we haven’t had a banger book that we love for a while — but there was lots of other good stuff earlier in the year. I mean, I didn’t find it that hard to find three good books.
Cam: Yeah, yeah, like a year, yeah. There’s about three of them.
Rich: So Mike-style — yeah, this is going to be funny. I’m so curious to see if we’re going to get total overlap or not, but I reckon Benny’s going to go contrarian like he did last year, where he didn’t even put Stoner in the pantheon. Made me look like a basic bitch.
Benny: Now, I think I’m pretty down the line this year, except for my third pick, which I think will be not on either of your lists, is my guess.
Cam: Benny, what the fuck was that? Just imagine a five-year wrap and Benny’s story doesn’t have Stoner like anywhere near the top 10 — your viral book review on Stoner being the best book ever.
Benny: I’m doing the Lord’s work out here, writing about it. I don’t know what you guys are doing. I’m trying to attract eyes to this thing, or ears.
Cam: I’m getting Stoner for a friend over here actually, for Christmas.
Benny: Oh, nice.
Cam: Trust the process. He’ll be listening soon. Do you have any more stats, Rich? I got a couple more. Demographics, I got some demographic stuff.
Rich: Oh yeah, what else you got? On the listener chat, boy.
Cam: Uh no, I wish. Yeah, all girls man, they love us. Well yeah, so I did do gender — we did less women, but only slightly less. So we did kind of one to two, like one and a half kind of. Because of the translator, yeah — Ursula K. Le Guin and Emily Wilson — but Homer is probably a dude, we’re not sure. And last year we’ve done three. But, you know, since we’re reading less books, higher rate. The median, like how long ago were these books published, has gotten slightly younger for us. It was 60 years ago, the year before it was 70 years ago. So we’re getting slightly younger. We’ve got the big obvious one, which is the Odyssey, which is an old one — but we did less books before the 1900s and before the 1800s. So in 2024 we had Hamlet and Candide and Frankenstein, and we didn’t really have, I think…
Rich: But if you averaged it instead of taking the median, the Odyssey would be doing work.
Cam: Exactly, yeah. Anna Karenina is like an 1800s one.
Benny: Especially if you averaged it weighted by page count. If you did page-adjusted time, we’d be way back there.
Rich: Is the Odyssey count negative 3000, or 2016 — or what was it, 2018?
Cam: 2017, yeah. It’s kind of like that the gender one too, because it’s kind of recent.
Rich: That’s so funny. Like, don’t let anyone accuse us of not reading works by contemporary women — and you’re like, well, we read the Odyssey by…
Benny: Having it both ways.
Cam: And I also looked at the authors’ age.
Rich: Bro, this is fucking Spotify Wrapped over here. It’s getting tenuous.
Cam: It’s getting boring.
Rich: I got an email wrap-up from my meal delivery website that was like, here’s the recipes that you ordered the most this year or something. Like, I don’t need to know this.
Benny: No one wants to see that.
Rich: Everyone’s getting way too excited about AI.
Cam: Median age of the author is 44, and it’s the same as 2024. So that remains the same. That’s our sweet spot.
Benny: That’s crazy.
Rich: What did you put for Homer?
Cam: I think I put Emily Wilson’s age, and she’s about 40.
Cam: Anyway, that’s “do you even lit?” wrapped.
Rich: Cool. Should we get into our faves? So Benny’s got an unconventional third. So Cam, why don’t you go first?
Third best book of the year
Cam: Yeah, sure. Just get my list up. My number three was Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. This was the one that was least clear for me. I probably had a couple options, but yeah, I mean, it’s lindy, it’s good. Tolstoy writes people well and writes women well. I don’t have too much to add. I was less disappointed in Levin’s arc, like finding God, as you guys were. We all loved — yeah, because I’m making that arc as well.
Benny: Because you’re about to make the same turn — that’s why.
Cam: Yeah, no, it was good. I think we got a lot from it, and we talked a lot about it. I was a big sucker for Anna’s arc. You guys have anything to add?
Rich: I’ll jump on it because it’s also my third place. I was listening back to our final episode and I actually said in that one that I couldn’t, hand on heart, recommend it to others. But as I think back on it, I only have fond memories. I think of it fondly and I’m excited to read War and Peace. The fact that I feel that way, I think sort of speaks volumes about my overall relationship with the book.
Rich: In terms of my development, I think this book helped me realize that you can have a great work of art that contains flaws, or that you don’t agree with ideas, or even — I think it actually has literally bad philosophy especially towards the end — but that doesn’t matter. So Benny, you said something to me which was like, why do you need to agree with all the ideas in order to like the book? And I think that’s a good point. And my instinct is to be very totalizing, to have really high standards for everything and need to agree with everything. But I think that’s kind of a silly way to engage with art. So I think it’s a good step in my development to be more pluralistic and more holistic, rather than trying to make everything fit into my conception of being right about things.
Rich: And yeah, like you said, Cam, it’s so wonderfully written. I love the characters, I love Tolstoy’s insights about social relations and everyday life. And yeah, I hope that we read more Tolstoy in the future.
Benny: All right. My number three was not Anna Karenina. It was Everything Is Illuminated, which I think is perhaps slightly surprising. No, I’m pretty sure the first and second picks for everyone will be the same. This one is actually — because it affected me afterwards in the sense that, the next time I saw my parents, I sat down with them and made them tell me their life story. I just wanted to get it all down in audio because I realized sort of how important history and shared history and memory is in that book. And so at the time, I think I was sort of ambivalent about the actual reading experience, but it actually had an effect on me and sort of stayed with me longer than a lot of the other books we’ve read have done. So yeah, I felt like I had to honor that somehow in the list.
Benny: And also, it was a fun reading experience, I thought — slightly frustrating at times. Then the episode was fun because we haven’t done — that was our only guest episode, right? That was a good time.
Rich: Yeah, I listened back to that as part of my decision process and it was a good episode. We did a really good job and it was really fun. So we should have, at the very least, more guests, or Nicole back. It was good.
Second best book of the year
Benny: All right, Cam, number two.
Cam: Number two is where this is going to be the same as Rich again, but it’s the Odyssey, Emily Wilson’s version, which we read. I think it does matter as well. I mean, it’s really important to read the Odyssey in general, but I’ve totally come around to like — Emily Wilson’s version is awesome. I couldn’t really imagine starting with anything else. I know you did, Rich, but yeah. And maybe that’s surprising for me. It’s important, you know, to have some understanding of some of the commentary around it — but actually, if you just avoid reading the commentary, like her commentary and the cultural commentary around it, I don’t think there’s going to be any issue. It’s just going to be an easy, nice way to read the Odyssey.
Cam: I think you kind of have to delve into the surrounding arguments to notice — like, if any politics have come into it, you either have to be an Odyssey expert or a Roman-statue-avi Twitter profile to notice any potential issues with it. I’m definitely going to reread it. I could even imagine doing it as a reading group with others or something. The Odyssey is obviously as lindy as it gets. Really, really good.
Rich: Yeah, cosign, also my number two. We’re gonna have — we’re definitely gonna have the same. I’ve noticed that sometimes when we are doing books that are big canon books, if we don’t enjoy them that much on their own terms, we do it more as a history of ideas or a history of form — like kind of what ended up happening with James Joyce. I feel like that wasn’t the case with the Odyssey, or rather, it was, but only in a way that enhanced the underlying story, which just straightforwardly is a great story. It’s just fun, purely on its own terms. And it’s so surprising how the first story of that nature is a banger, starts in media res, has all these features of storytelling that seem familiar today.
Rich: So yeah, I loved it. I loved reading it with you guys. I loved reading the Emily Wilson translation. And I really enjoyed having the translation discourse, because I’d never really thought about the art form that is translation. So it was cool to read her note at the start and then have — we had quite a big debate in our first episode about the criticisms and the various trade-offs involved. It was very interesting. It’s just something that I’d never thought of, but it’s its own literary art form. It’s not at all mechanical in the way that Google Translate is or something like that.
Rich: And I also really liked being transported to a really alien mindset. You know, the past is a foreign country, both geographically and in time. It’s so cool to just see how values, morality, culture can be wildly different to our modern stuff that we’re steeped in. I’d like to do more stuff like that. I think we should try and be brave and read more historical epics or things that are super alien to us, because it’s actually paid off here. I’m sure the Iliad would be great and we should definitely do that, but maybe we should do some other epics, from other places around the world. We could do Gilgamesh, something like that.
Benny: Oh, we should do some Beowulf or something. Let’s go.
Cam: The epic itself.
Rich: Yeah, anyway, obviously it’s a wonderful book, so it was going to be in here. What you got for number two, Benny?
Benny: I got Blood Meridian at number two. I think I see where this is going.
Rich: Well, do you want to talk about the Odyssey, or do you want to talk about it later?
Benny: Blood Meridian.
Cam: Do you have the Odyssey somewhere? Was that in your top three?
Benny: Yeah, so Odyssey is my favorite. That was my number one. Which I’m assuming is just reversed for you guys.
Rich: Maybe you have to wait and see.
Benny: I mean yeah, I won’t say too much about the Odyssey because you guys just enumerated all the reasons it was awesome, but the whole thing was great. One, actually just sitting down and sort of expecting an extremely hard read and then having it just be pretty easy, pretty delightful — that was a fun experience. It made me regret actually not just reading it earlier in my life. But like, having that experience now of actually being caught up on what’s in there — all the subplots, all the substories — I put it all in my Anki deck as well, which is awesome, so to have all that on instant recall is fun.
Cam: You know the great gods now.
Benny: Yeah, exactly, they’re in there.
Cam: But yeah, the cultural knowledge I think’s a big part of it as well. Like, even since we read it, you just see it popping up — whether it’s online discourse or in literature or essays, allusions and stuff — and it adds to that.
Benny: Yeah. And it’s just like, the OG hero’s journey. It was so cool to read. So yeah, the whole experience was great. And then by the same count, because the hero’s journey has become so popular, it was awesome to read something where the arc of the hero’s journey is pretty much broken, which was Blood Meridian — and which is like a totally different style of author. And to just sit in the grotesque and the hideous, and to be introduced to, I think, still the most epic villain that I’ve ever read in my life, as the Judge — that was an incredibly cool reading experience.
Benny: And also, to have that be my first McCarthy, and then have Rich sort of be able to walk us through a little bit, was a lot of fun, as a McCarthy head. So that reading experience was also awesome. Short and sweet. Every page was like fun and an adventure, and also totally unpredictable. Like, I was doing no summary reading or anything for that one. Every page could shock you and often did shock you, because of the grotesquerie on display constantly. And just tons of subversion of expectations. There was some cool historical knowledge of expansionist America and the actual Wild West in there that I didn’t know before — including learning about the flight of the buffalo and all of that stuff, and the Apaches and their style of fighting. So that was a blast. Anyway, those are my one and two.
Best book of the year
Cam: Interesting that you shaded it to Odyssey, though, for number one.
Rich: Oh, so could have gone either way though, right? Like it was kind of a coin toss for me which one was in which spot.
Benny: Yeah, it’s hard, but —
Rich: Okay, well, do you want to talk about Blood Meridian?
Cam: That was more clear for me.
Benny: Blood Meridian was number one for you?
Cam: Yeah. I don’t have too much to add. I just — I don’t know, it’s like, it could easily be someone’s best book of all time. Especially if you’re a dude who reads books, just like put this to the top of your list of to-reads. Ask yourself why, if you haven’t read it. It’s an epic, it’s violent. It’s the stuff that Benny said around this kind of biblical villain, and hero — ambiguous hero. I did wade into some of the discourse online around certain readings of the book, which I don’t really buy into. I think they’re odd, around the main Kid being the bad guy. But yeah, it’s great.
Cam: Rich, did you want to add anything?
Rich: Yeah, so I’ve read almost all of his stuff now and can say that this really is his most ambitious work. And actually, I want to separate that away from whether it’s his best work, because I think it’s going to be a matter of taste. This one is stylistically — his prose just runs the wildest. And also it’s got this real mythic-mode advanced storytelling, the lack of interiority, the characters as archetypes as much as they are meant to be real people. Which is challenging. And the guy’s got serious balls on him and is just trying to do really hard things and pulling them off. And that’s what I admire.
Rich: I’m a McCarthy guy. I’m going to read everything. I’m going to reread everything probably. So it was awesome to do that on the book club. And maybe we’ll do something else by him one day, or explore some of his influences like Faulkner and Melville. I just picked up a copy of Moby Dick, just saying.
Benny: Another light, 800 pages.
Rich: Oh, hello.
Benny: Why don’t we alternate weeks between Moby Dick and Gravity’s Rainbow? I think that would be good.
Cam: Just give up Gravity’s Rainbow, maybe.
Rich: We’ll talk about that after.
Biggest stinker of the year
Benny: All right. Worst?
Cam: I don’t want to go first this time.
Rich: I’ll go first. I think — well, this would be a no-brainer if we included the book that we are currently reading, for me. But because it’s not, I’m kind of piking on the question. I didn’t dislike any of the books we read, even if I didn’t love them. So I’m not ready to say that any of them are bad books — or I guess like worst is ordinal, not cardinal. But okay, so I’m going to tokenly choose One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.
Rich: I’m not going to go through all my criticisms all over again, but I think we did a really good job in the episode of working through why we didn’t like the book, and why other people might like the book, and also in what other formats we might like that style of thing. So I think we gave it a pretty fair shake after a frankly terrible first attempt at it. And I’m gonna load up on more magic realism and Latin American fiction over the next month or so, while I’m in South America. So I’m not even ready to give up on the genre. I’m gonna keep trying to be open-minded, and especially playing with shorter formats, the short stories. And, you know, Borges I obviously love, even though it’s not wildly dissimilar to Marquez. So yeah, even the worst book was in my mind still really interesting and thought-provoking. It was a slog to read, but I’m not ready to say it’s a horrible book or anything. So that’s my milquetoast-ass reply.
Cam: Yeah, I’m surprised that One Hundred Years, that’s your choice though.
Benny: Me too, yeah.
Rich: I mean, well, what have you guys got?
Benny: Uh oh, I’ll just — okay, I’ll just follow up that because that’s also my choice. But I had just gotten the sense that Richie liked it more than I did and was more patient with it than me. I don’t want to rehash the whole thing. It wasn’t a terrible reading experience. It just wasn’t what I expected, but also it just really didn’t live up to the hype in my head. I can’t get this sort of — I can’t sort of get like the naive simplicity of it out of my head for some reason, or like the naive pessimism out of my head. I wrote a whole blog post about it. So I won’t go on at length here, but it was definitely my least favorite experience and also the biggest fall from expectation, given that it was so culturally hyped up. I just found it pretty lacking.
Cam: Yeah, I mean, I almost said there’s this sort of opposite thing of not living up to hype. I think we trashed on it so hard and it felt like the worst thing ever, and then when I think back to it and to the whole place of Macondo and the family, there is this magical, mythical, epic element to it that does stay with me. But yeah, I wouldn’t put it as great, but it definitely grew on me.
Cam: My worst — yeah, I agree with Richard’s overall point, that mostly everything felt a little bit mid rather than obviously bad. But my worst was The Dispossessed. I just think it’s not that great. I feel like it’s kind of borderline communist agitprop. And yeah, I think, kind of more so than you guys, I just disagree with the view that it’s kind of fair-minded and honest with both sides. I just think it’s wrong-headed. And there’s some brain-dead stuff, like, you know, we’d have no crime without police because crime wouldn’t technically exist, and stuff. And like, 100 Years grew on me, and this one didn’t. This one kind of did the opposite, I think.
Rich: So would you read Ursula K. Le Guin again?
Cam: Yeah, I mean, she’s got a couple big books. I know this is one around gender, sort of gender discourse as well, which would be interesting.
Rich: I was going to suggest that Omelas is like a no-brainer.
Cam: Oh yeah, that’s a banger as well. So I don’t hate Le Guin. That’s a really good short story.
Rich: So you just hate the ideas.
Benny: You just hate that she’s a woman.
Cam: Well, I loved Emily Wilson, right?
Benny: True, she’s only half, though.
Cam: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I was going through all these ones — I said Anna Karenina, I was like, yeah, pretty good. A little bit vanilla, like Portrait — sorry Rich, sorry PhD English erudite listener of ours, but like, not quite my cup of tea. Everything Is Illuminated — sorry, Nicole. 100 Years, as I said, we all trashed it, but it grew on me. Butchers Crossing — no complaints.
Rich: So you — it sounds like, I mean, you haven’t really said much about The Dispossessed, so you don’t even really hate it. You’re just, again, it just sounds like you just like —
Cam: I just felt like — I mean, maybe it was me bringing too much politics into the reading or something, but it did feel like — I know it’s not technically communism, but kind of like communist activism in a book.
Rich: It’s not communism, it’s anarcho-syndicalism.
Cam: I know. I’m sure there’s a few PhD theses on the technical differences between those two.
Rich: I think you weren’t paying attention. You need to read it again.
Cam: I remember you guys having the take as well. You were like, you know, it’s fair-minded because she shows like everyone’s poor in the Anarres place. I was like, yeah, but she’s — I don’t know, it felt obviously sympathetic to it.
Rich: I don’t think — at risk of relitigating the whole thing — like, he very definitely was criticizing the society. There’s the whole thing about locking the kids up in that little room and stamping out all self-expression and individuality. It’s in no way a pamphlet for wonderful utopian philosophy. Like, you could say it leans that way for sure, but it’s more exploring what would that society look like, for better and for worse. And you might be mad that it seems like she landed on him going back to his planet and him preferring that way of life. But if you think it’s like a glowing endorsement of that society, you’re in crazy town and you got your ideological blinkers on, because that’s not how it was.
Cam: Yeah, no, I mean, I take your point as well.
Rich: We won’t relitigate, he says. By which I mean, I get to say something. You’re not allowed to reply.
Best non-book-club book or blog
Rich: All right, best non-book-club book.
Cam: Was that in the —
Benny: Someone put two picks each. I think I just grabbed the thing from last year where it was two picks each.
Cam: Because you picked two books, but Rich, you don’t have two — you had two last year.
Benny: To be honest, this was embarrassingly hard for me. And I realized I’ve been reading nonfiction much, much less than I should be, or at least did the year before.
Cam: It doesn’t have to be non-fiction.
Benny: I know, but the only fiction I read is with you guys. So the whole thing’s a mess. Genuinely, it was a bit depressing trying to answer this question, because I realized there’s not tons of blogs that I love right now. Like, there’s no one I really look forward to reading every day, or whenever a new essay comes out, I’m like, yes, I’m going to sit down and read this person’s essay. There’s no one like that. There’s been a couple good essays this year, but I don’t know — maybe it’s just me and I’m just in a work headspace and just not giving enough things time or space to let them grow on me.
Cam: Alexey Guzey’s recent essay on recommendations for blogs was pretty good.
Benny: Yeah, that was great. Excellent taste. He has truly excellent taste. Yeah, but it was kind of hard to answer for that reason. I gotta get myself back into consuming more random non-fiction stuff, I think. But I guess, given that I can just drop my two recs — so yeah, mine is two from one, somehow, that I squeezed out. One is A Maverick, which is a biography of the economist Thomas Sowell, written by Jason Riley.
Cam: I’m sensing a theme every year. I think you had a Glenn Loury biography last year.
Benny: Oh, did I? Wait, what did I have last year? Is that what I had?
Cam: Glenn Loury’s biography, and something else, which I’m forgetting.
Benny: You know what, I think it was Ben Recht’s series on Paul Meehl last year. That’s what it was.
Cam: Yeah, yeah.
Benny: Oh, that’s too funny. That’s a little too close to home. Yeah, yikes. So, Maverick. I won’t say too much about it. He’s a pretty fascinating and often overlooked public intellectual, in a style that makes me wish — he feels like a public intellectual from the ’70s, when public intellectuals were actually public intellectuals and not just brain-rotted ideological culture warriors. It just makes me a bit sad reading the book, because I’m like, damn, I really just don’t trust academics or anyone to do deep research like he’s done on so many topics anymore. He’s like — it feels like he’s out of a different age. I really respect the shit out of him. It’s worth a read.
Cam: Funnily enough, 2020 Thomas Sowell feels a little bit like — your description of modern-day intellectuals — and 1970s Thomas Sowell.
Rich: And what is the titular maverick? Like, did he come up with some groundbreaking ideas or turn the field upside down?
Benny: Sort of yes, sort of no. There are many economists who think he should have won the Nobel Prize, especially for his book Knowledge and Decisions, which a lot of people view as building off of Hayek basically. Hayek and Friedman and all of them very highly recommended it. But he really went against the grain on a lot of cultural issues, especially in the ’80s and ’90s, and against the sort of Black intelligentsia at that point about what was best for Blacks in America, like trying to dig themselves out of poverty basically. And he’s just been at crosshairs on many issues — he’s been a maverick. He’s been somewhat controversial and hard to predict, in a way. So it’s not like he’s a knee-jerk reactionary or a knee-jerk contrarian or anything like that. But he’s just pissed off enough people on both sides of the aisle on every issue imaginable under the sun. It’s very hard to make the case that he’s not basically coming up with his very own novel, brand-new theses on all these topics that he’s touching — whether it’s culture stuff and race stuff, or whether it’s more academic heavy-hitting economics stuff. His actual formal training is as an economic historian.
Benny: Yeah, very extremely impressed with him. He also just totally stays out of the spotlight. It’s very, very hard to actually find interviews of him, especially recently. He used to write a column and would go on Bill Buckley’s show every once in a while.
Rich: Is he still alive?
Benny: Yeah, he’s still alive, approaching age 100. So this book — I think it came out of, they recently organized — he works at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, and they recently organized a big celebration of his life’s work, and he just Zoomed into it. He didn’t even show up in person, which I think is hilarious. He holds some opinions that I disagree with, fine, but yeah, it’s quite clear that he’s really his own thinker on a lot of these issues, and it’s just hard to really not respect the shit out of him after reading this book and just wish there were more people like him. And it sadly doesn’t seem to be that many people like him these days.
Benny: And then the second pick is also a recent book, written by a friend of mine actually. It’s The Sovereign Child, written by Aaron Stupple, which advocates for the philosophy of taking children seriously — which is sort of this niche Deutschian philosophy about the attitude of non-coercion towards kids and in some sense just treating kids like adults.
Cam: Eating as much ice cream as you can.
Benny: Yeah, packing the house with ice cream, whatever you want. Not caring about cavities. Who cares about cavities? And the reason I recommend it is not because I agree with everything in there, but it really did push my intuitions around in a pretty delightful way. It had a lot of interesting, fresh ideas. It’s really made me rethink how I would approach parenting if I were a parent. You know, I wouldn’t say I’m 80% of the way there with him on his sort of absolutist philosophy — I’m maybe 50% of the way there or something — but it definitely did push me in that direction.
Benny: And also, I met him and some kids who have been brought up under that philosophy recently, in October when I went to Rat Fest. And all those kids were fucking brilliant and delightful, to be honest. It was pretty — I mean, obviously there’s some selection effects and there’s genetics and all this stuff, but you can yell selection effects all day, and in some sense, like, okay, it doesn’t really matter — if you’re the one attempting to adopt the philosophy, then you might be part of the group of people that are being selected for here, right?
Cam: If you pass the filter.
Rich: If you’re reading it, it’s for you.
Benny: So yeah, it made me think a lot harder about stuff that I kind of took for granted. It’s pretty good. It’s also very short, very readable. It’s like 200 pages, I think. You can read it in an afternoon.
Rich: That’s funny. I also read The Sovereign Child this year as one of my vanishingly few nonfiction books. And yeah, I got a lot out of it, but definitely disagree with it pretty strongly in parts. So I’ve come in his direction, but it read to me as a polemic and like stupidly dogmatic, or something like that. So I’m not ready to sign on the dotted line. And I’ve implemented elements of the philosophy with my children. And just towards the end of this year, have started walking them back again. Not in full, but partly — where it’s just like, I am not confident that this is working for anyone.
Benny: Can you say which ones, or no?
Rich: Sure. So stuff around meals and food in particular, where I just basically was taking the approach that Desiree can eat more or less what she wants. I’m not going to force her to eat certain foods. His line is that kids will learn to self-regulate in time, and they’re not going to — you know, they could get an eating disorder or something if you’re telling them exactly what they can and can’t eat, and what foods are good and what foods are bad. Which falls in line with my own philosophy around food as well, where I love junk food. I love to integrate it into my lifestyle, and I think maligning certain foods is really stupid.
Rich: But I’ve come to see that, like, a two-year-old just cannot make those decisions. And not only is she not developing a better relationship with food, she’s developing a worse relationship with food. And I’m just not ready to let her rot her teeth out, or eat sugar for breakfast and then have a horrible energy crash and a massive tantrum later in the day. I’m like, nah, fuck this. This is stupid. I’m going to do the sort of halfway approach where I try and give her as much freedom and autonomy to express herself as I possibly can, and not be a tyrant — but I am going to have some boundaries around a small set of things, which I think are important for her wellbeing and for my life too, and which she’s not in a position to be able to make good judgments about.
Rich: And the reason that I — I know he would hate me saying that, and that’s my beef with the book — is it’s like, there is no room for shades of gray. It’s absolutism. He posts memes where he’s like, you know, if you think you’re mostly following it, then you’re not following it at all. And this kind of thing. And I hate that. So I’ll look out for a book review or a blog post or something at some point, I reckon, in the next year or two.
Cam: Yeah, that’d be good.
Rich: My best book — I mean, I had a bad year for reading too, outside of book club, which is maybe why I had the impression that we didn’t read much for book club, that I didn’t read much compared to how much I normally read. But I’m going to pick a Western I mentioned on the pod a couple of weeks ago: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, which is just this absolute banger of — what I would guess to be a straightforward Western story, with cowboys and herding and Indians and saloons and gunfights and last stands and everyday terrorism. I don’t know if it’s a super sophisticated book — but maybe it is. I kind of want to read it again. I think it probably has hidden depths.
Rich: But I read it while I had my newborn son, you know, overnight giving him feeds and stuff like that. So it’s really a page-turner that you can just pick up and drop into and just be transported to the Wild West. Just fun. Very, very different tonally to Blood Meridian. And just rounding out my year of Westerns — Butcher’s Crossing, Blood Meridian, and Lonesome Dove. So if you’re looking for a fun beach read, or a going-to-sleep-at-bedtime read, then I highly recommend it.
Cam: Yeah, I’m gonna note that down on my list. Okay, so it seems to be a theme. I went for a blog. Mr. and Mrs. P. Smith’s Bookshelf — Smith with a silent P. Have you guys read that?
Benny: No, I’ve run across it.
Cam: Or do you know of it?
Rich: I came across that recently and I really enjoyed a couple of their posts actually. So I’m curious which one you’re about to mention.
Cam: I think it’s a great way to read books. Well, I suppose not read books, but read reviews of books, which is an important way, I think, to read widely. Especially when you find someone who is a good writer, erudite, even-handed — which, you know, a lot of people in our space — I think Scott Alexander used to do more book reviews — but this is just another resource like that. And you have two different authors. It’s kind of like marriage goals, you know — reviewing all these different books. You can just go on their archive and just see what takes your fancy. It’s a non-fiction-leaning blog, although they do sometimes review Dostoevsky’s Demons, for instance.
Cam: I noted down some ones I enjoyed — Fussell’s Class. They did one on The Ancient City by Coulanges. And they had a good one on South Africa’s Brave New World, a non-fiction book there. But generally just the blog, rather than any particular post.
Rich: I’ve got one here called Family Unfriendly by Timothy Carney, which I jotted down as being one of the most insightful looks into the fertility crisis. Like, why people are having fewer children, from a status point of view, or a raising-the-standard-of-care-required-for-having-children point of view, which I think is a really important piece of the puzzle. Yeah, it’s good stuff. I’m gonna — I need to go through and read more of it too.
Rich: And there’s another one that’s a pushback against Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success, which is about some of the really gnarly cultural practices of pre-Western-contact civilizations, and I guess pushing back against the noble savage type stuff — which I found interesting. Around like, a lot of things do not fit nicely into the pattern of cultural evolution. They’re doing it for this arcane reason that’s not plausible to you, and it’s like, no, they’re just doing really horrible, grotesque things, because they have always done it. Which I think — well, I was reading Secret of Our Success this year as well, but I didn’t choose it because I couldn’t think of a pithy way to talk about it, but it would be a good companion piece with that book.
Benny: Deutsch’s worldview be so good.
Rich: I know. I really want to do that. I have so much to write and I’ve just been writing nothing. I’m just really getting hammered with having two kids.
Benny: Fair enough.
Rich: Yeah. And there’s just no — that’s just not going to change anytime soon, but I’m loving my life. It’s just that that side of things I can’t.
Benny: Yeah, can you sneak in like 200 words a day, though, that sort of thing where you just sit down for 15 minutes to write a hundred or 200 words a day?
Rich: No, because unfortunately I’m useless. I can’t do things in little time blocks. I need three hours or nothing. Like, I will just twiddle on my phone. It’ll take me that long to get up to speed. So I get lots of little 15- to 30-minute intervals throughout the day, and I squander every single one of them.
Benny: Bro, you gotta change that.
Rich: I can’t. Dude, this is my lifetime struggle. I can’t ship stuff and I can’t write stuff.
Benny: Can’t ship and can’t write. That’s rough.
Rich: Yeah, seriously. It takes me like 20 hours to write a blog post. And that needs to be five times four-hour blocks or something like that. And it’s totally disproportionate with the size of my audience.
Cam: Or when you slice off 80% of them.
Favourite movie or TV show of the year
Rich: Yeah. All right. Best movie, TV show. Benny, what you got?
Benny: Sure, mine’s a movie, We Live in Time, which I think was released actually in 2024. It’s a movie with Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh — I don’t know how to pronounce her last name, “P” or “Pew.”
Rich: A few, I think.
Benny: Yeah, I watched this on a plane coming back from — I happened to be on layover in Japan, funnily enough — so it was like Japanese Airlines from there to New York. It was a long-ass flight, and I watched it like the first two hours and started crying. The dude next to me was like, oh god, I gotta deal with this monster the whole flight. But it was freaking delightful. Extremely sad. It’s like a romantic movie that I didn’t think I was gonna like, but I just totally fell in love with, and now I recommend it to everyone. And Andrew Garfield’s honestly great. I’m extremely impressed with his acting. He’s come a long way since Spider-Man.
Cam: That fits for some reason. You like Andrew Garfield. This kind of fits.
Benny: Yeah, you know, roughly the same salary. Fame and everything.
Rich: That’s high praise — watching a movie on the plane and having a transportative experience.
Benny: Yeah, that was great. I would recommend it.
Rich: What’s it called again? We Live in Time. Cool.
Cam: I found this — agree, almost harder than the non-book-club book. I just don’t really watch many movies anymore. I don’t know why.
Rich: Well, no, he watches movies, he doesn’t watch TV.
Benny: Okay, Tyler Cowen.
Rich: It was a bad year for movies, to be fair. I don’t think you missed too much in terms of 2025 movies.
Cam: Yeah, well, I certainly don’t watch modern movies. I mean — because Benny’s gone on a potential date with an Iranian girl, I need to remind him to watch Farhadi movies. A Separation, obviously, but also like A Salesman. But my choice is Alexander Payne as a director. Recently he had The Holdovers, which was very good. I think it was a couple of years ago. But if you haven’t watched his movies, like Nebraska and About Schmidt and Sideways, they’re all very good. I like him. I think he shows middle America without being condescending — which a lot of media can do sometimes. He’ll point out flaws in people, but it won’t be this “look at these rubes” — it’s like, this is what being human is like. I think they’re pretty easy to watch, and not super-sophisticated. I’ve realized I’ve grown to quite like his movies.
Rich: Which movie would you pick as the go-to?
Cam: Well, if we’re picking recent ones, The Holdovers was good. I mean, I’m kind of stuck off for like ’90s movies as well, like Citizen Ruth and Election, or About Schmidt. Sideways is really good. I’d suggest Holdovers. Holdovers is a recent movie, Paul Giamatti.
Rich: Cool. So you’ve picked like 10 movies for your best movie.
Cam: Yeah, I picked a blog, a blog writer, and a director.
Benny: All right, Richie, what you got?
Rich: My pick is called Small Things Like These, which is an adaptation of a novella by a really good Irish contemporary writer called Claire Keegan. It’s about the Magdalene laundries in Ireland, which were these Catholic sort of boarding houses for fallen women — like young girls who’d gotten pregnant out of marriage or things like that — and the abuse that was uncovered there. It stars Cillian Murphy, who’s probably one of my great all-time favorite actors.
Rich: I just love to look at him, I think, is actually my favorite attribute about him. There are better actor actors, but he’s just a beautiful man. Like, I don’t know, I just love to look at his face. Genuinely, I mean that. And the whole movie is beautiful. It’s got very particular color grading, a carefully chosen color palette. It’s beautifully shot. It’s at Christmas time in Ireland, so it’s all snowy and grim, and he’s like a coal merchant.
Rich: And the reason I love it is that, apart from the aesthetics, which are top-notch, it’s a very humanistic film about the importance of caring for individual people, being sensitive to other people’s suffering and those who are worse off than you. And the sort of feeling of helplessness of not being able to do anything about it, and the guilt that comes up when you feel like you’ve made it out of a certain background of poverty or something like that, and other people haven’t, and you wish you could really help them have the life that you’ve managed to have.
Rich: I just found it really moving and sort of, I don’t know, like a good affirmation of virtue ethics over consequentialism — or just doing the right thing, even when you are going to bear significant personal consequences or something like that. Yeah, highly recommend it. I will say it’s slightly heavy-handed, and it could have been a little shorter, and they’ve been a little heavy-handed in hammering home who the baddies are and who the goodies are, which is a shame. So it’s a four-star movie for me, not a five-star movie. But I still really loved it. If you want to have a little cry — not on an airplane, but in the comfort of your own home. I saw it at the cinema, so yeah, but I’m sure you can get it on streaming.
Cam: The poster in your room of Oppenheimer now makes more sense. Close-up of his face.
Rich: Do you know what I mean, though? Like, his eyes — look in his eyes. He’s good at playing sort of tormented, suffering people. I think — I’m not sure how much range he has as an actor, but he’s also just a lovely guy. I happen to know — I mean, I know that he’s a really nice guy off-stage. He’s very uncomfortable with celebrity. He doesn’t like doing interviews. I think he refused to shake hands with one of the English royal family or whatever. He hates it when people think that he’s English.
Cam: Via his YouTube interviews, yeah. I think he’s totally offline as well — he’s not on social media at all.
Rich: It was cool to see him act as an Irishman as well, which I don’t actually know if I’ve seen him do. I’ve seen him be English and American many times. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him actually be Irish. So it was good.
Cam: I wonder if he knows about how there’s a couple of memes of him. He might not even know them.
Rich: Maybe not. A blessed, too-innocent-for-this-world. Keep it that way.
Benny: Nice, fellas. Well —
What we’re gonna do differently next year
Rich: Is that us? What do we want to do next year? What do we want to do differently?
Benny: Well, this year we already gave up our YouTube, so next year, what are we giving up? Giving up the ghost, the whole thing? If we make it to next year, it’ll be a miracle.
Cam: I mean, it’s one thing with these end-of-year wraps — I do think, yeah, I mean, we did have less books, so, how to read 10 books in a year. But it is nice. It’s nice to have this catalog now, which is two and a half years long, that we’ve got a long list of novels. And I’m keen to keep going. And yeah, maybe — it’s hard to pick books, hard to pick going in. You just sort of don’t know how they’re gonna turn out sometimes.
Cam: I don’t know how to fix that — no problem. I like how we pick our two.
Rich: I mean, maybe just shorter books. But I think it’s important. I think we are doing something important for ourselves, not for other people necessarily.
Benny: Yeah, I agree. We’re doing the Lord’s work for our own souls. Trying to save ourselves from the great overfitting.
Cam: I was also talking to this guy. He was in his 60s, right, and he was looking for something to do a long read for this year. But he’s just been doing that for like 40 years, right. He was so well-read, mainly in fiction. It just reminded me that this is a long-term game of reading. I mean, we don’t have to do the book for 40 years, but in terms of really attacking some of these authors and difficult works…
Rich: I’ll be disappointed if we don’t.
Rich: Yeah, we definitely lost our mojo mid-year — like, behind the curtains for anyone still listening right now, which is probably no one. But we pretty much quit. We were like, we’re gonna go all out on this thing and make a real effort, and then we were immediately like, nah, just joking, we’re gonna quit and not do anything at all. And now we’re finding our way back to a more middle ground of — we are going to do fewer books, probably monthly-only meetings, and hopefully just get some good picks and keep going in a more sustainable way.
Cam: What about you, Vinny?
Benny: Yeah, I mean, I think of the two of you, I’m gonna be the one who maybe keeps pushing for meeting more often. I think meeting monthly — it’s still great, still much better than nothing obviously — but I think I did get more out of it when it was constantly on my mind and we were meeting pretty frequently. Obviously that clashes with an actual podcast release schedule, and I think that’s a tension we have not figured out how to resolve, because Rich ends up doing all the editing and he just gets buried under mountains of rubbish. So a bit unclear what to do there.
Benny: But just from the perspective of, you know, forget the podcast side of things — I think it was more gratifying when we were meeting more often, we had sort of these weekly targets. And I also think I absorbed books better. I think our original model, when we were reading Infinite Jest, was to meet weekly, precisely because it was a hard book. And so we said, okay, we’ll read 100 pages a week, sit down together and figure out what on earth just happened. And that worked extremely well, and would not have worked at all if we’d said, we’ll meet once a month and we’ll read 500 pages a month. We just would have been lost and confused, and would have spent the time just figuring out what on earth had happened, and there would have been no leftover time for any actual theorizing or anything about the book. So that is a tension that I’m not fully satisfied we’ve ended up on the right side of. So yeah, I don’t really know how to think about that. But I do notice that I’m getting less out of books if we only meet once at the end to talk about it.
Cam: It has been nice having the flurry of recent comments from our listeners as well. Quite varied as well — they obviously had different reading patterns, I think, from a few of the comments. But it’s nice. We like hearing from you. Keep them coming.
Rich: Yeah, please do write in. I mean, criticism too — it doesn’t need to be praise or agreement or whatever. All right, cool. That was a really energetic end. Like, oh yeah, we’re sort of going all right, and I suppose we’ll do it next year.
Cam: Well, we gotta get through this book first, fuck.
Rich: I know. All right, well, should we say goodbye to our listeners and then have a chat about that? A quick chat about that. Bye, everybody. Have a wonderful year. Thank you for being with us. Write to us at doyouevenlit@gmail.com with praise and love and affection. Also, if you do have criticism and bad things to say, write to us at cam.peters@gmail.com. If you want to send dick pics, it’s also the specific address for those types of comments and messages. And yeah, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Cam: Christmas come early for some of those picks.
