A bit of festive fun looking back on the year that was.

Which books have stayed with us? Which were forgettable? What was the best reading/watching we did outside of book club? What did we learn about podcasting? Are we gonna keep posting this stuff in public?

and MORE

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Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

The Odyssey - Homer (Emily Wilson translation)

A paradox: how can an author—say, Walker Percy—get the reader to care about a protagonist—say, Binx Bolling—who is stuck in a malaise and doesn't himself particularly care about anything?

A corollary: how can a book club have an engaging discussion when they don't particularly care about said book and said protagonist?

Honestly you might as well skip the first 10 minutes or so in which we half-assedly try to talk about the actual plot elements.

Luckily Cam saves the day with an impromptu lecture on Kierkegaard and we get to yapping about the meaning of life instead:

I can't be bothered doing chapter markers for this one so just take a leap of faith you cowards

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Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

The Odyssey - Homer (Emily Wilson translation)

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul... You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

Nabokov had a lot of trouble getting anyone to publish a story about a grown man falling in love with a 12 year old. After multiple bans and scandals, Lolita caught fire in America, and is now considered perhaps his greatest work (altho you still cop some dodgy glances reading it on the train).

The great central tension is between Humbert Humbert the monster and HH the sensitive and sympathetic aesthete. How reliable is HH as a narrator? Is he deluding himself? Did he successfully hoodwink certain critics? Is he truly capable of love and redemption, or is everything staged for effect?

On the murder mystery: is HH really any better than his nemesis Clare Quilty? What's the significance of trying to kill one's shadow? Did we catch Quilty's lurking presence throughout these pages? Does he even exist at all?

What's the message of this story? On didactic vs aesthetic fiction, whether this book is meant to be moralising, Nabokov's instructions to the reader, and an overall vibe check on how we feel about his tricks after reading both Pale Fire and Lolita.

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The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

These days every bestselling author writes novels about how their dad was too strict and they got bullied for bringing stinky indian food to school etc.

But Karl Ove Knausgaard walked so millennial narcissists could run.

This week we get absorbed in part 1 of his epic six-part autobiographical novel My Struggle, published in 2009.

The big central question: what makes a book which spends five pages describing the author making a cup of coffee so good? The prose is nice but prosaic, there are few major insights, and no plot beats or narrative tension. But we (mostly) agree that it is in fact a good or even great book.

CHAPTERS

• (00:00:00) intro

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Lolita - Nabokov

The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

Yeah, it's big brain time. This week we're reading 'Understand' from Ted Chiang's 2002 collection Stories of Your Life and Others.

what is the ceiling on human intelligence? can we jooce it up? did Chiang inspire the whole AI doomer movement? would superintelligence beings have to annihilate each other instead of cooperating? Do we buy the orthogonality thesis?

Also: introducing David Deutsch's 'universal explainer' theory of intelligence, which gives radically different answers to all of the above. Is the dumbest guy you know really capable of making novel advances in quantum physics? The answer may surprise you.

On abstractions and 'chunking': how important is working memory? Should we expect our high-level explanations to converge on a theory of everything? Would super-smart people really communicate in short series of grunts? Could they hack their own autonomic nervous systems or incept a linguistic killshot?

tl;dr: gestalt gestalt gestalt gestalt gestalt gestalt. gestalt gestalt? gestalt gestalt, gestalt.

CHAPTERS

• (00:00:00) intro and synopsis

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My Struggle, volume 1 - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Lolita - Nabokov

The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

This week we're reading three of Anton Chekhov's most beloved short stories: The Man in the Case, Gooseberries, and About Love (The Little Trilogy, 1898).

We get a minor assist from George Saunders and his fantastic book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain but have no shortage of stuff to discuss.

Talking big 5 personality traits, the degree to which people oppress themselves, why Rich fell out of love with the early retirement movement, whether it's OK to be happy in a world full of suffering, and if having to settle in romantic relationships is antithetical to true love. Also: Cam takes a controversial and brave stance against home-wreckers.

CHAPTERS

• (00:00:00) intro

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My Struggle, volume 1 - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Hemingway's 1929 semi-autobiographical classic tackles two big timeless themes: love and war.

Two out of three of us can relate to the first one, but war feels pretty alien to us. How would the boys do if they were conscripted? What made WWI so uniquely dispiriting? What is it about this novel that so faithfully captures the experience of war?

We also talk quite a bit about Hemingway's laconic characters and terse writing style. How representative is this of his broader work? What do we think of the 'iceberg method'? Why did he go with the most depressing possible ending?

and MORE

CHAPTERS

• (00:00:00) first reactions and synopsis

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My Struggle, volume 1 - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Not too much plot to cover in parts 5 and 6; mostly we're hashing out our final thoughts on the book and Dostoevsky's legacy.

First up is the controversial epilogue. The boys are not sure how believable Rodya's redemption is. It feels kinda cheap? Dostoevsky is not very good at character development but maybe it doesn't matter. Sonya is a perfectly implausible character who exists only as a sort of a prop for Rodya. How on earth does Dosto have a reputation for writing realistic characters? Again, it prob doesn't matter.

Svidrigailov sneaks up on us as perhaps the most interesting (or at least the most underrated) character in the book. We talk about the three incredible scenes that bring his journey to an end: kidnapping Donya, the feverish hotel dream, and the dramatic exit.

Finally quite a bit of discussion about whether Dostoevsky is actually any good as a thinker. Rich is not sold: the critique of utilitarianism is unfair, blind deference to tradition leaves no room for progress, and God has been pretty neatly replaced by secular humanism. Benny pushes back and adds some nuance to the problem Dosto was trying to describe, and Cam talks about how he still feels the tension between nihilism and common-sense morality.

Don't miss the surprise guest appearance from Cam's manager. Is this the week he gets busted? will he live to skive off another day?? Tune in now to find out.

CHAPTERS

• (00:00:00) intriguing and important discussion on different translations (do NOT skip)

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Candide — Voltaire

A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway

we're just normal men. We're just innocent men!

In parts 3 and 4 of Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1866 Crime and Punishment we get a lot more meat on Raskolnikov's 'extraordinary man' thesis.

How does it overlap with the concept of the Übermensch in Nietzsche and Hegel? Are we too deeply steeped in Christian morality to become 'extraordinary' without destroying ourselves?

We reconsider Raskolnikov, Svidrigailov, and Luzhin through this lens.

Plus: cam's obligatory sibling inc*st fantasies, rich tries to give dostoyevsky writing advice, etc

CHAPTERS

• (00:00:00) hangry

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Crime and Punishment - parts 5 and 6

Candide — Voltaire

A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway

Cracking into the first two parts of Dostoevsky's 1866 classic Crime and Punishment.

The first surprising thing is that this is a conservative/reactionary book: it mocks the fancy new ideas of the youth, the spirit of revolution, naive utilitarianism, etc. Jordan Peterson laps this shit up. But did the moral panic over materialism hold up? Does modern society in any way compare with the turmoil of Dostoevsky's Russia, or are we at the end of history? How relevant are Dostoevsky's concerns today?

We argue quite a bit about that but we're more aligned on the brilliance of Dostoevsky as psychologist, and especially the character of Rodya 'mister schiz' Raskolnikov: what causes his mind to fracture so spectacularly? What motivates him to do the deed? why does Rich kinda relate to him? 

plus a masterclass on freestyle rap. and much more

CHAPTERS

• (00:00:00) opening rap

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NEXT ON THE READING LIST:

Crime and Punishment - parts 3 and 4, then parts 5 and 6

Candide, by Voltaire