Do You Even Lit?

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 CHAPTERS (00:00:00) festive chit chat (00:07:35) Revealing our favourite books of the year 00:34:13) Biggest STINKER of the year (00:48:25) Our #1 (non-book club) book/essay/blog (00:59:39) Favourite film or TV (01:10:05) Navel-gazing on the book club meta and podcasting lessons learned WRITE US: We love listener feedback. Send us a note at [email protected] to correct our bad takes, add your own, or just say hi. NEXT ON THE READING LIST: 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: Is it patronising to claim that everyone is living in a state of despair? Is self-gratification and individualism actually bad? What are the main avenues for having a meaningful life? How does society stigmatise or incentivise meaning-making activities? Has the existentialist project more or less been a success? Which of Popper's three worlds does 'meaning' fall into? I can't be bothered doing chapter markers for this one so just take a leap of faith you cowards   WRITE US: We love listener feedback. Send us a note at [email protected] to correct our bad takes, add your own, or just say hi. NEXT ON THE READING LIST: 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. CHAPTERS (00:00:00) life imitates art (00:04:11) the two faces of Humbert Humbert 00:13:42) is HH an unreliable narrator? (00:26:32) Trying to distinguish between love and lust (00:36:50) Sympathy for the pedo (00:40:32) the questionable reality of Clare Quilty (01:04:49) Quilty vs HH (01:08:45) Does Lolita have a moral? (death of the author redux) (01:14:22) comparison to Pale Fire and Nabokov vibe check WRITE US: We love to share listener feedback. Send us a note at [email protected] to correct our bad takes, add your own, or just say hi. NEXT ON THE READING LIST: 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. On the performance art aspect to Knausgaard's project, the barriers to being truly sincere and honest, pathological self-awareness, why early memories are so often dominated by shame, nostalgia for premature ejaculation, and MORE.   CHAPTERS (00:00:00) intro (00:00:56) patient zero for the autofiction disease 00:11:40) My Struggle as performance art (00:20:20) Shame and pathological self-consciousness (00:30:38) what is it exactly that makes Knausgaard so good? (00:40:12) next book announcement WRITE US: We love to share listener feedback on the pod, so send us a note at [email protected] to correct our bad takes or add your own or just say hi.   NEXT ON THE READING LIST: Lolita - Nabokov The Moviegoer - Walker Percy