A provocative listener question has us reflecting on what we’re getting out of the project. should we go back to reading more nonfiction? or succumb to TikTok and brainrot? What’s the point of being alive at all?
A quick inbetween ep before we get into to our next read.
Transcript
Rich: Alright. We’re live?
Benny: How’s it, baby?
Rich: Alright. Welcome to a very special episode of Do You Even Lit. We’ve got some listener mail that was too good to tack onto the end of something, so we thought we’d do a quick one-off episode.
First piece: shout out to friend of the pod, Adam G, who just had his baby, I think, last month. Congratulations.
Benny: Oh, congrats.
Rich: Yeah. I hope bub and mum are doing well, and dad. And secondly, we got this good question from our other friend of the pod, Sonnie, asking us to look back on our journey and whether what we’re doing is actually worthwhile. So, deeply existential question.
Benny: With certain pessimistic undertones.
Rich: Quite confronting, especially because it was written in all caps, which I kind of like. It’s a bit of a blast from the past. It’s like a boomer move or something.
Benny: Oh, that’s funny.
Rich: He actually said his caps lock key got jammed down or something like that, and he didn’t realise until he hit send. I don’t know.
Benny: That’s awesome.
Rich: Yeah. Anyway, I’ll read it, not shout it, but imagine me shouting this:
Reflecting on what you’ve learned from reading and reflecting on all of these works of literature, do you think you’ve benefited from doing this exercise at a personal level? Putting aside the value of spending time discussing the work together, has the exercise so far made you more or less confident in the value of reading these works for most people, especially in light of the opportunity costs to your time?
So I put some thought into this at the outset of our experiment, which was more than two years ago, but I haven’t deeply reflected on it since. So I think it’s actually a good provocation to ask ourselves what the fuck are we doing, and should we continue doing it?
Cam: There hasn’t been time to reflect with all the reading we’ve been doing.
Rich: Yeah. Totally. So I suggest that we break the question up a little bit, splitting it into several possible categories for what the value might be. One being pure entertainment. Another being learning about ideas or facts or history — like, learning facts and theories. A third being learning something about ourselves: self-knowledge, or how we should conduct ourselves in the world.
And then finally — I think he meant to say disregard this, but we should still talk about — the value of spending time with the boys.
Cam: Yeah, I was gonna say. I will not disregard that part.
Rich: Yeah. We will disregard the suggestion to disregard that. And all of that versus the counterfactual of what we would otherwise be doing. So are you guys happy with that framework? And we’ll just go through each of those.
Benny: Yep.
Rich: So if we start with the entertainment value. Cam, are you entertained? How does reading these books do for you versus a counterfactual? Which for you, I’m guessing, is watching videos of talking vegetables having affairs with each other or something like that.
Cam: Yeah, yeah. I hope that they’ve dropped off now.
Well, sometimes my relationship with reading these sorts of works is almost exogenous from the actual work. It kind of depends on what’s going on in life. Because if you’re tired and flat, or going through a bit of sickness or something, sometimes the hardest thing ever is to read this difficult work, and I can get overwhelmed.
But I think there’s an obvious lens around the remembering self versus the experiencing self when you think of the benefits of reading, especially reading quite difficult works. A lot of times you’re not enjoying it as much as other things in the moment. But then when you look back on it — and it can even be immediately after you’ve set it down and you’re thinking about it — there is pleasure and enjoyment. We often talk about that when we chat: we’re enjoying this discussion of the book so much, when the reading of it was maybe less pleasurable.
Rich: So type two fun, not type one fun, for the most part.
Cam: Yeah, I think it has to be both, but I think that’s a big part of it. And to a certain extent, you should only be reading things that you enjoy. I’m a big believer in putting things down, although that goes slightly against what we’re doing — we try to finish the books before we talk about it. But as your general approach to reading, I think if you’re really not enjoying it, you put it down, you pick something else up. I think we’ve all talked about that.
You want to be addicted to reading rather than a particular book. And one of the reasons why people don’t read is because they’re stuck on a book. And our phones — that’s the main other reason.
Rich: No, the main reason is everyone’s halfway through Ulysses. It’s not the short-form video and the Twitter.
Cam: Yeah, yeah. But you know when you talk to someone who kind of reads, but isn’t a big reader? They’ve been on this book for months, and they’re not really reading it now, and they’re sort of halfway through it.
Rich: Yeah, no, I agree. I’ve always argued that you should bail out of a book as soon as it’s not serving you well — outside of a context like this, where there’s more benefits of doing it, seeing it through.
Cam: But I think that shows there’s two sides of the story, right? Some works, you do want to stick at, and you’re glad that you stuck at it. And sometimes you’re not. We put down Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. We put down Nabokov’s Ada. But I imagine you could get to a place where you get to the end of it and then you’re pleased, so there’s kind of a risk in that. But I think for most people, we should err on the side of: put things down, grab something else, and enjoy it.
What about you, Benny? Are you enjoying your time?
Rich: Remember, we’re just talking about entertainment versus other types of entertainment.
Benny: Yeah. I mean, I think reading for me is something like one of Bentham’s higher pleasures, versus watching Netflix, which is a lower pleasure. Are you guys aware of the distinction he drew between higher and lower order pleasures?
Cam: No, but you just made it.
Benny: Yeah, yeah.
Rich: Sounds pretty complicated. It’s all the same.
Benny: Yeah. So I think, for him, a higher order pleasure was something that’s perhaps more difficult to do in the moment, but you feel much better about yourself afterwards having done it. He would use maybe more spiritual language than I’d be comfortable with, but something like: it elevates your spirit, right? You feel replenished. You feel good about yourself afterwards. Whereas a lower order pleasure is pleasurable in each individual moment, but afterwards you might not feel good for having indulged in it. So Netflix, you know, various… I can give lots of examples.
Rich: Like what?
Cam: Like, even porn, or some styles of sex versus making love. You could probably even make a distinction with that, right? And in modern society, I think it’s really put a torchlight on these lower order pleasures that don’t ultimately nourish you. And sometimes we can be a bit snobbish about them.
Benny: Yeah. I don’t know, I go back and forth about it. I think some of the snobbishness is deserved, though. There are Netflix series that I’ve watched — I can’t even remember now. Years later, I don’t even know if I’ve seen certain things. Or you find it in your history and like, holy smokes, I totally forgot about that. That very rarely happens to me with books.
Cam: Oh, yeah.
Benny: And a lot of books just are pleasurable in the moment of reading. There is a higher barrier to entry for some reason that continually confuses me, to be honest. Even when you are liking and enjoying being in the middle of a book, sitting down with the book somehow requires more effort than sitting down at your computer.
But I wouldn’t discount the effect that it has on you afterwards. I feel good. Days that I spend more time reading, as opposed to more time jerking around online, I feel better about myself. And plus, you get the benefits of being able to talk to other people about the book, the benefits of having the book relate to your life in interesting ways, the benefits of knowing that I’m gonna be able to chat with you guys about it, especially if I’m excited about some section of it, some idea in it. Those can all be cashed out in terms of other values that I hold as well, but I wouldn’t discount the raw pleasure I get from those consequences either.
What about you, Rich? How do you think about it?
Rich: Yeah. I think it fails versus the counterfactual on entertainment alone, not counting all those other things you mentioned. Some of these books are very entertaining and have been page-turners, and I’ve loved the reading experience. But many of them haven’t been that way, and I’m doing it for other reasons — either type two satisfaction or the other stuff we’re gonna talk about.
And I know for a fact that I would have more fun if I was… I actually don’t really like watching TV, because I just don’t find it interesting or satisfying. But I know I have more fun reading some science fiction that I like, or fantasy, or even just rereading books that I love, like Cormac — I’m tempted to reread all of Cormac’s books again. And I know I would love the experience of that. I wouldn’t be trying to eat my vegetables or whatever.
In the best case you can get both, and we often do get both. But if we weren’t doing this, I would have DNF’d out of Moby Dick. I would have DNF’d Middlemarch. I would have DNF’d many or possibly even most of these books, because they weren’t entertaining enough — or at least not entertaining enough in the opening 100, 200 pages.
Benny: Yeah. Interesting.
Cam: Your rereading point’s interesting, I feel, because part of the point you’re making is that there’s some books you enjoyed, and you would like to reread those. But I think there’s also just the act of rereading, which I find quite enjoyable. I think rereading Middlemarch would probably be more pleasurable and entertaining than reading it for the first time.
When we watched the Odyssey movie, and we’d read it a year ago, I think a few of us read parts of it — I reread it before and after the movie. And I really enjoyed that, in that entertaining, pleasurable sense. And I have that with rereading other books. So arguably maybe we turn this program into the Rereadables, modelled after the Rewatchables movie program.
Rich: So now you’re saying we have to read all of these hard books twice. Great.
Cam: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the problem with the Rewatchables is: everyone watched Superbad in the 2000s, so you rewatch it. But no one’s read books. So you can’t just be like, yeah, we’re all gonna reread Moby Dick. You have to read it in the first place.
Rich: I guess once we’ve read every book, this will turn into that project.
Benny: We’re not that far away, I think.
Cam: Yeah. One simple trick for making reading fun.
Rich: Okay. Should we go to the second element, which I think is learning about ideas — just picking up facts and theories? What I’ve found really cool is that this project has given us a fairly shallow but broad sampling platter, where we get to have little tastes of all kinds of intellectual movements and ideas which we weren’t familiar with before. A little bit of romanticism and transcendentalism and Emerson and the whale fishery — just little windows into all of these worlds, and opportunities to do quick, rapid study sessions to help come to grips with the text as well.
But from the opportunity cost point of view, if you took the eight hours or however long it takes us to read some of these books — probably more — and you just studied those subjects, reading up on them, creating Anki cards and doing reviews, testing yourself on the core concepts, talking to your favourite chatbot to get a deeper understanding, I think you’d go a lot deeper and you’d have a much better understanding. But for me, counterfactually, I just wouldn’t be doing that. I’m not gonna proactively go out and read about romanticism or something like that.
Cam: Or even 1860s Russia, right? Eventually you’d get there, probably.
Rich: Well, I haven’t. As I’ve said before, I have a total blind spot for history. I just have such a poor understanding of history, and I’ve never been able to get into any kind of history books or podcasts or anything like that. So this is like a backdoor into it.
And it makes me think that a lot of fiction is an attractive way of packaging up memes and ideas that you’d be unlikely to go and engage with if they weren’t packaged up with entertainment value, cultural touchstones, hanging out with friends, and all those kinds of things.
Benny: That’s funny. I think I feel quite differently than you about the extent to which it introduces me to ideas. I feel like I would just be spending more time reading about random periods in history if we didn’t have book club. Sometimes book club gets in the way of learning about other things. So I actually don’t feel like they’re great exposures to ideas I wouldn’t necessarily run across otherwise — especially because you often only get a very opinionated, specific snapshot of a movement via the perspective of some characters. Whereas if I’m learning about a movement, I’d rather start with a much higher level, dare I say objective, picture of what was actually going on at the time. And then maybe I can appreciate some narrative on top of that.
Rich: Yeah, but we read around the text pretty often, right? That’s more what I mean. We don’t just get the info from the story. I more mean independently going off on a bit of a wiki rabbit hole and taking notes to contextualise what you’re reading.
Cam: Yeah, I was just gonna say that. You read about Dostoevsky’s life, and the era of the time, and what he was influenced by, who he influenced. And you can do that anyway. But I think often having read this in helps, at least.
It’s hard to talk about this without talking about opportunity costs as well. Because sometimes you can overrate these saved efficiency gains or something. You’re like, if you can eliminate this part, then you could do so much more stuff — even in a work context. But a lot of times the time is spent doing fuck all anyway. You’re talking at the water cooler or you’re on your phone. And to some extent this is what the modern human struggles with: you’d just be fucking around anyway. So if you do this, it’s not lost time.
But that’s not completely true either, because we do personal projects and stuff like that. There’d be other things we’d do, and sometimes even now — you might be doing some programming project or something, and that’s all you want to do for a few days, and you don’t want to read the two chapters of Tolstoy or whatever, because it’s just gonna get in the way.
Rich: Maybe to get the cleanest counterfactual: what if instead of this book club, we had a nonfiction book club, where we read nonfiction books or papers or essays? Would that be better for learning? I think, yes, it would.
Benny: Yeah. I think yes, it would. Absolutely.
Rich: And that might even be a live question for us to consider.
Cam: Well, yeah, we could do both, for sure.
Rich: Oh, both.
Benny: Woah.
Rich: Oh, you’ve got an appetite for more.
Cam: Oh, no. I mean, alternate. We got them, Benny.
Benny: I do think in terms of psychology and personal development and stuff, literature is much better than just reading your average Thinking, Fast and Slow or something. I’ve gotten a lot of insight about me, how people see things, what sort of characters I’m like and unlike, via these books.
I guess I’m pushing back on the idea that learning about the world is efficiently done by reading fiction widely. I think you can learn a lot about yourself. You can learn a lot about how people act in certain situations, and pressures people are put under — there’s a lot of psychological and sociological insight. But insight into history and ideas and science and whatnot — you’re not being efficiently exposed to those worlds.
Cam: There’s something more fun or entertaining about critically engaging with a piece of art and the surrounding context of that work than just some sterile facts. Sometimes you listen to a podcast or just a conversation, and you might not have even consumed the work or the movie or something, but you listen to someone critically engaging with it, and it’s just really, really fun. So you’re learning something in a fun way. Trying to express an idea while touching on a piece of work is entertaining, I find, and informative. So you get both. We don’t want to be reading facts all day, right?
Rich: Well, that’s the question that’s up for discussion.
Benny: Sometimes don’t you want it, when you’re just going down a rabbit hole to freaking nerd the shit out of some subject? Just like, I need to spend all day on this wiki page so I understand all angles of this thing.
Rich: Yes — the question of opportunity cost, and what you’re lacking in your life at any given moment.
But I will go to bat hard for what you brought up, Benny, as being maybe the true redeeming value of this, which is learning about yourself and others and social relationships, and how the world works or ought to work. Via what I originally thought of as incompressible knowledge — that you have to read a novel-length treatment sometimes to truly understand it. And what you more recently wrote about is fiction as an extended thought experiment, where it lets you really get deep into the messy details of human life.
And I would argue that a novel is uniquely well suited to doing that, because typically it gives you interiority into one or more characters. So to compare against other ways you can do that — say, gossiping about celebrities or fighting with your real-life friends — A, it keeps it at arm’s length, because it’s fictional characters. It gives you a neutral way of debating what’s right or wrong, in your book club or just with yourself, where you don’t have to worry about actual real-life people’s feelings when we’re talking about what’s admirable, what’s dishonourable, and how I might relate to this or that character.
And then the other thing is that if we were debating whether Kim Kardashian did so-and-so and what does that mean, we don’t know what her inner world looks like, or the other party’s inner world, and we don’t know all the details. So it’s not a good way of coming up with intuitions about people’s psychology and how we ought to behave and so on. But a novel gives us a huge amount of context to pore over and consider.
So I think it’s a wonderful art form, and I don’t think there’s anything that compares to it on that basis. I really think this is the one element where I’m willing to say: yes, you can’t get that anywhere else to the same degree. But of course, maybe you don’t need to be doing that all day, or at the expense of learning about actual facts and theories and ideas and so on. So it comes back to that question of what the right balance is for us.
Benny: Nice. Nice report.
Cam: I think we’re over-indexing on the self a bit, actually. I agree with what you said, and maybe I was a little bit confused earlier around even just distinguishing these two areas. All of what you said is included in understanding how the world works and how human nature works. I get the distinction — there’s periodic table facts versus social dynamics, right? But I don’t know. Maybe it’s a bit of an artificial demarcation.
Benny: So would we be comfortable with some sort of distinction like: literature belongs mostly to the introspective world, as opposed to learning facts or knowledge about the objective world? And so when you’re reading, it’s usually best thought of as spending time on self-work or introspection, those kinds of activities. Or is that too simplistic?
Cam: Well, I don’t think it’s limited to that at all. And I’m not even sure if that’s the main area. Because I think what Richard was also saying was this understanding of social dynamics and society as a whole, and politics and culture wars and whatever. Just what it is like to be human, right?
Rich: But yeah, I see your point, Cam. There’s no clean division between them. I would say I put more stock in insights at the level of individual psychology, and less stock in big-picture cultural and political critiques. So I’m more interested in knowing how a certain person in a certain described situation handles that situation. Do they behave in ways that are similar to ways that I might go wrong, or other people I know? What does it make me think of? How do I evaluate their actions? And so on.
I’m less convinced that books are a great source of wisdom on how to organise society. That’s something I’ve criticised a lot, even in the context of some of the greats like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who I think are interesting psychologists but not necessarily wonderful philosophers — or at least their ideas haven’t always held up very well by my lights. But I think their observations of human nature are timeless and fascinating, and useful to me in the way that I’ve ended up reflecting on ways that I’m like or not like certain characters.
But do I need to do that forever? No, I don’t think — I hope not. Maybe a little bit, because you always find yourself in new situations and facing new problems and challenges, and you need reminders of things that you knew as well.
Cam: Uh-oh. I’ll pause.
Rich: Well, our last point is a pretext for hanging out together, which honestly I think is a huge one for us, and probably the defining one.
Benny: Yeah. It’s a huge one.
Rich: If we could have a standing date to go to the pub and have a beer and just talk shit, or go for a hike, or play tennis or something, I’d actually rather do that, to be completely honest.
Benny: But we don’t live in the same city.
Rich: Yeah. I think I would rather do that, but we don’t live in the same city.
Cam: Same.
Rich: My friend Connor always used to say — or I remember him saying — that friendships always need a mutual project if you want them to keep going. And for some people, the friendship itself is the project, where you’re deeply caring about the details of what’s happening in each other’s lives. I think women in particular are really good at that. Men, including myself, much less so. And it’s true of me that anyone I don’t have a project with, I just more or less drift away from — including Connor, ironically. So yeah, I think if I wasn’t in book club, I probably would hardly ever talk to you guys.
Cam: They’re as close to you as the phone.
Benny: Yeah. I’m sure.
Rich: I wish I wasn’t that way, but I kind of am that way.
Benny: That’s fine.
Cam: No, it’s relatable. It’s a classic thing. You’re on the phone with a friend, you come back, and then the wife asks something about their family. And you’re just like, I haven’t asked. Yeah, yeah. Like, what do you talk about? Some esoteric thing.
Benny: Yeah. You know, like, I have no idea.
It’s funny that you guys feel that if we were in the same city, the book club wouldn’t be worth it. I don’t feel like that.
Cam: Well, Rich said that.
Benny: Oh, didn’t you agree, or no?
Cam: Yeah, maybe I did. I held back on a defence of the book club, and then I didn’t say it. But you go. Make the case.
Benny: Yeah. I don’t feel like that. Maybe my feelings would change if we were in the same city, but I like the reading enough. I like having read. I like being the kind of person who’s in a book club and spends part of my time doing that.
I don’t know whether you want to call this social signalling — probably not, because I don’t tell that many people about it. I don’t know whether you want to call it some way to make myself feel better about life, but that’s fine. I do all sorts of activities to make myself feel good about my life, and this is one of them. And it is nice getting something constructive out of it, right?
I feel completely differently. I’m super happy we’re doing the book club. I like it a lot. Unlike with my other podcast, I will actually go back and listen to past episodes sometimes to remind myself about the book or what we thought about it — especially if I have a friend reading it and I want to refresh my memory. I like the product. I like doing it. I like deciding what book we’re gonna read next. I like complaining about the book and then reading it anyway. I don’t know. I like it all.
Rich: Yeah. Maybe we would still do it, or do something like it, if we lived together. But just on opportunity cost — honestly, it is a bit shocking. I feel often that I have very little idea what’s going on in your guys’ lives, because we just talk about the book to the exclusion of our personal lives or whatever other interests we have.
Cam: Well, that’s what I was gonna say.
Benny: Because you guys are pussies, and you couldn’t keep up a weekly cadence.
Rich: Well, then we’d just talk about twice as much book.
Cam: This is all we have. If we lived in the same city — I would love to play tennis with Rich once a fortnight, or whatever cadence works, and go over and see his kids, right? And wife, and just have a cup of coffee, just checking in. At times it feels like we don’t have that. That’s sort of the dysfunction of living in different cities. But then when you do this book club, everything’s about the book club.
So if we all lived together, I think we’d probably still do those coffees and go for the game of squash or whatever. And then maybe not do this as regularly. But there’s still this urge to — yeah, I would love to tackle this hard work, and it would be fun to do it together.
And even with this question, I think it’s not just hanging out with people. That is part of it. It’s a good way to hang out with people. It’s like some productivity hacks, like doing Pomodoro with someone: the main thing is you’re getting the task done, but you’re doing it with someone else. And you get this ambient feeling of hanging out regularly that you otherwise wouldn’t, like once a week or whatever.
But there’s also, I think, a big social aspect to fiction. Most people have this with movies and TV, right? Every now and then you meet someone who goes to a lot of movies by themselves. And I don’t think it’s all works. There are some things I do watch by myself, and it’s usually YouTube shit. I haven’t thought enough about it. Maybe it’s infotainment more than works of art.
People like to consume art with others mainly to talk about it, I think. But I think it’s also to have a simultaneous experience. Talking about books is fun. It’s more fun. It’s just nice, you guys having read the same stuff, and then we talk about it and get the reference.
Benny: Trying to predict all the ways in which Rich won’t like it, all the ways in which Cam didn’t read it. That’s great.
Cam: Yeah, yeah.
Rich: Yeah, that’s true. The shared cultural touchstone argument, which lends itself well to reading the classics in particular, right? Because then we hope we are being connected to a lot of people through time and space. But if we really were optimising for that, we’d be reading whatever the latest trendy book is, or romantasy or something like that, to have more water cooler chat.
Benny: Is that true? I mean, those are only popular among a certain cohort of people. Honestly, we’ve covered enough territory now that if I’m hanging out with people who are, like, 30 — or an older cohort of friends, or my parents’ friends, whatever — usually I’ve at least read the author of whatever book people are talking about, if it’s among the classics at all, right?
Cam: We haven’t read that much, brother.
Benny: I don’t know. Occasionally.
Rich: Yeah, but unlike you, Cam, Benny occasionally reads books outside of book club. It is allowed. It is permitted.
Benny: Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but I guess I am pleasantly surprised often at knowing what book people are talking about — sometimes having read it, often having read the author. That happens to me much more frequently than it would’ve in the past, and that’s very enjoyable. That serves a very useful social function. All of a sudden, I can bond with someone who I might not have had anything else in common with. And the fact that we talk about it, often multiple times, usually embeds it somewhere in my head such that I have a little spiel about it, or I have thoughts about it, right? It gives me takes.
Cam: It gives you takes, right? And you might like it or not like it.
Benny: Sometimes I steal your guys’ takes, whatever. They don’t know.
Rich: So that’s why you don’t tell people about the podcast.
Benny: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. I write about your guys’ takes, and I tell other people about them. That’s my only output.
Cam: There is this thing where sometimes someone has a take, and it convinces you. And then in a sense it’s become your take as well, even though it’s not original to you.
Benny: Yeah. You’re like, this is sick. I have no original thoughts.
Cam: But you’re not being fake about it. It’s difficult. We’ve talked about this so much, but it is relevant. It’s always difficult — how much of the benefit of reading is signalling stuff. Even what you’re saying there, those benefits. And one of the things about successful signalling is you’re often blind to your real motivations. It’s always hard to know and hard to interpret how much it is that.
But it’s fun. You see those lists that go viral — your top five books, your top nine books or something. It’s fun having a genuine list of good works.
Benny: Yeah. I saw you tweeting about that.
Cam: Yeah, yeah. And it’s fun having takes on books when they come up. And you don’t even have to like it. Because sometimes these classics are also boring, right? And sometimes when someone dislikes a classic, that’s fun as well. Like, Patrick Collison recently somewhat countersignalled against The Brothers Karamazov.
Rich: But he didn’t countersignal. He gave his opinion of the element that he found lacking.
Cam: Yeah. Okay, sorry, I shouldn’t have said countersignal. But my point was he didn’t like it. Well, even that — he’s a bit ambivalent.
Benny: Which was what? What did he say?
Rich: I’ll link it to you. It’s interesting. He said that the brothers have essentially fake problems that they’ve made up for themselves, that they’re sort of hysterical, and they’re not placed in positions where you could actually see them being truly tested.
Benny: Interesting.
Rich: I thought it was an interesting take. I was meaning to send it to the group chat, but I forgot.
But just on that for a second: if people are playing a signalling game, to the extent that we are or anyone is, then wonderful. It’s the most benign — well, maybe not positive externalities, but it’s one of the most benign signalling games you could hope to play. Like, oh, what if we played this game and we all ended up reading lots of great literature?
Benny: Yeah. Exactly.
Rich: How terrible.
Cam: Well, here’s one of my issues, though. There’s this thing in this project of ticking off the classics, where you have this metaphorical box and you want to tick them all off. Everyone kind of does this, and it’s a normal feeling. You want to catch them all. And you’re like, I’ve got this Nietzsche gap, or a Kierkegaard or Shakespeare — we gotta get there. You want to fill it up.
And sometimes you can have this relationship a bit like when people talk about superficial travel, being a tourist or something. You go here and you do the Eiffel Tower, and you go to Montmartre. You tick off these things and you don’t really engage or connect with it deeply.
Maybe it’s going back to that rereading point. It can be more enjoyable, in that soul-filling way, to really engage in a few works super deeply. But in some sense you’ve got to put out this big search, right? There’s this Pareto distribution aspect to it. A lot of these books maybe weren’t worth it, but there’s maybe a handful of books that are, and the only way to get to them is to keep reading — and maybe discard them.
Rich: But you don’t think we’re doing the box-checking exercise, right? Because we try to read fairly deeply and thoroughly, even if we don’t reread.
Cam: I think I’m in tension with it. We’re not superficially doing it. But in some sense, we are trying to touch all the great works — which, in one sense, is a noble goal.
Rich: Well, let me throw out one last provocation, which is: my observation is that this process has actually awoken, or reinvigorated, something in me, which is a love of reading literature. I feel really intrinsically interested in all of this stuff, and I do want to read all of the authors and so on. And I feel very strongly that it’s not signalling, or box checking, and it’s not having good cocktail chat, because I just want to learn it all. For example, I’m reading lots of other books outside of book club, just because I want to.
And I know that Benny reads fiction books as well, but maybe is somewhat less fascinated by it. And Cam, my perception is that you don’t read any other fiction books, maybe not nonfiction either, and that maybe you’re more drawn along by some of these other reasons, but that you’re not particularly fascinated by — you’re not in love with fiction. So I was actually wondering if you would go for the bait of: maybe we should change the format of book club to be nonfiction-oriented.
Cam: Yeah. I think that’s partly true. One of the problems with thinking about signalling and stuff like that is that people can be more insightful or correct on it — maybe it’s just a personality difference, so it’s more true of them than others.
Rich: Yeah, I’m not really accusing you of that. It’s more just that, to me, it’s very obvious that I feel in love with reading, and reading fiction, again. So I think if you had that feeling, you would know that you had that feeling. And by revealed preference, you would be doing that. But you’re not. So what does that mean?
Cam: Yeah. Well, I’m rereading some works, and I’m reading mostly nonfiction. Again, sometimes it’s a bit of a slog. I’ve read quite a lot of nonfiction this year.
Rich: So you might just feel that you have things in balance for you. Fiction does provide value, but you don’t need to be endlessly reading fiction.
Cam: One of my favourite things is people critically engaging with movies and books. Sometimes you don’t even need to have read it. You get people talking intelligently and insightfully about something, and I find that really engaging.
Benny: Yeah. I don’t know, the signalling accusation is just not really landing for me, because I feel like there are lots of other things we could be doing to signal to the kinds of people we hang out with, much more than some super niche book club that no one really knows about.
I get the sense maybe I just enjoy it overall more than you guys, or regret the time less, maybe. My sense is maybe you guys are more torn about what else you should be doing with your time, which is fair, I think. I get to spend a lot of my time in intellectual land just because that’s part of doing the PhD. Whereas Rich, you have parent duties and stuff, which presumably don’t involve you thinking about all the ideas you’d like to think about. And Cam, you have a real job, so ditto for that. So maybe your time feels a bit more precious, and you want to really think about the trade-off between reading the next 10 pages of whatever book we’ve chosen and reading Scott Alexander’s newest blog post or something.
I feel some of that. But overall, even though in some fundamental way time is obviously zero-sum, I really don’t feel it at a visceral level that I’m trading off between these two activities. And I just fucking like book club. It’s fun. The reading’s fun. The discussion’s fun. It’s fun having read. I enjoy the whole thing. Fuck tennis. If we lived in the same city, I would refuse to play tennis just so we’d have to read books.
Cam: We’d play pickleball or something as well. No, you’re right. It is fun, a lot of the time. It’s just — there’s a lot of it. I think sometimes you’re not in the mood, right?
Rich: Benny’s energy versus Cam’s energy.
Benny: Yeah. You’re right.
Rich: “I love book club. I love it.” “Yeah, sometimes it’s fun, but, you know…” Oh, well. Much to think about.
I was gonna propose a couple of experiments. One being that we switch to nonfiction, if people wanted to do that. And/or stop the podcast and just meet, old-school style. But it sounds like maybe we just keep on keeping on. We can talk about this more.
Cam: We can chat about it when we see each other.
Benny: Nice. It’s interesting to try and articulate why you’re doing something. And sometimes you realise you don’t have fantastic reasons for what you’re doing, but in some ways that’s okay. Overthinking everything is a disease of its own, I think.
Anyway, apologies to listeners if I was a little low energy. I had an interview right before this that destroyed me, so my head was in the clouds the whole time.
Rich: No, you ended strong. You ended with justifying our existence.
Benny: Or at least my existence. Yeah. This is gonna be the last episode, and it’s just gonna go dark from here. Both of you have realised, wait a second, we don’t actually like this very much. We should stop doing this. Sonnie, what have you done?
Rich: No — I thought it would be good to just precipitate those kinds of questions. But yes, we’ll talk about them more in December, in real life, when we go play tennis and have a beer.
Cam: Offline.
Benny: I better learn how to play tennis before that.
Cam: Could do pickleball. Thanks, Sonnie.
Benny: Thanks, buddy.
Cam: Comments like this make it all worth it, you know?
Benny: Yeah. Exactly.
Rich: Yeah, it’s true. Well, it would be nice to get some more. We probably need to release some actual episodes in order to generate any actual listener mail. But if you do want to write in, you can write to us at douevenlit@gmail.com — just the letter U, not the word “you”. And we’d love to hear from you. And we’ll see you next time for an actual book discussion of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.
Bye, guys.
Cam: Take care.
Benny: Peace.
