A Book Club For Reformed Nonfiction Supremacists
We are keen nonfiction readers who recently emerged mewling and pissing our pants into the world of literary fiction. This book club is our support group.
Rich is a finance guy. Cam is a data scientist with an economics background. Benny is a PhD student in stats and machine learning. Our quest: to fuse the typically non-overlapping domains of stemlords and lit bros, and become perhaps the most annoying type of person of all time.
Check out The Case for Reading Fiction for a proper explanation of why we started doing this, and the big takeaways from the first year.
We’ve just started making our discussions public, in the hopes that we might be able to attract a little community of fellow travellers. If you’re reading/listening along and have any insights or feedback, send us mail! We’ll read out the best stuff on air.
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Here’s a list of all the books we’ve read so far.
UPDATE: This list is defunct. Visit the fancy new Do You Even Lit site for episodes with rich transcripts, fully searchable by theme, author, etc.
One Hundred Years of Solitude: The optimal amount of incest is non-zero (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Everything is Illuminated: Cultural Learnings of Trachimbrod for Make Benefit Glorious Book Club (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Truth of Fact, Truth of Fiction: Is Ted Chiang a Luddite? (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
The Dispossessed part 2: Why would capitalism make me do this? (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: Real anarchy has never been tried (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
DeLillo’s White Noise: psy-opping ourselves on death and po-mo (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
The Odyssey, part 2: Failsons and deadbeat dads (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey, part 1: Bronze age perversion (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Nikolai Gogol: Cutting your nose to spite the faceless bureaucracy (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Blood Meridian, part 2: It’s time for some game theory (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, part 1: A legion of horribles (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
DYEL Christmas party: The most beloved and hated books of 2024 (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
The Moviegoer: In which we escape a deep existential malaise (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Banned books: Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous Lolita (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Autofiction and autofellation (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Ted Chiang’s Understand: Intelligence explosions and AI doom (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Chekhov urself before u wreck-ov urself (The Little Trilogy) (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: War and love (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Crime and Punishment finale: is Dostoevsky…overrated?? (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Crime and Punishment, part 2: Three extraordinary men (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Crime and Punishment, part 1: Mister Schizo and the First Trad (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi: Gaslight gatekeep girlboss (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Hamlet: The original whiny theatre kid (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Albert Camus’ The Fall: Signalling, scrupulosity, and pathological self-consciousness (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Philip K. Dick’s paranoid classic Ubik: Fluttering at the windowpane of reality (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis: A Bug’s Life (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Frankenstein, part 2: Nature vs nurture (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, part 1: Post-nut clarity and forbidden knowledge (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: The One TRUE Interpretation (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
The Razor’s Edge, part 3: Climbing off the wheel of suffering (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
The Razor’s Edge, part 2: Lay your hands on me Larry (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, part 1: Nobody loafs like Larry (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, part 3: Was David Foster Wallace a hideous man? (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, part 2: If you can fake sincerity you’ve got it made (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, part 1: Weaponised therapy-speak (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
To the Lighthouse, part 3: We finally get to the fucking lighthouse (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
To The Lighthouse, part 2: Portrait of the autist as an old man (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, part 1: Skill issue (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths: a ramble through the multiverse (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
John Williams’ sleeper hit Stoner: Finding perfection in mediocrity (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
The Map and the Territory, part 3: The world is weary of me and I am weary of it (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
The Map and the Territory, part 2: Post-industrial society and its discontents (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)
Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory, part 1: Memeing big fat juicy asses into reality (Listen on Spotify | Apple | YouTube)