Drunk Literature

So if you spend time on the internet, chances are you have heard of a little show called Drunk History. Basically it's this show when people get absolutely wasted and try to explain history. For some reason, my best friend Claire and I decided to make our own version of the show last December.

We did Drunk Literature instead of History, since we're both avid readers. As you know, I'm working at a bookstore while trying to get a full-time job in the book publishing industry. Claire is a certified English teacher. So yeah, you could say we like books.

Our first season (aka all the videos we filmed in one night before Claire threw up on herself; know your limits, kids), which you can watch below, consisted of the following titles:

• Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
• Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
• The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• The Giver by Lois Lowry
• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Macbeth by William Shakespeare
• A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Now that Claire has returned from Salt Lake City, (and then again from Greece,) we're talking about doing another season. We'll be a little safer about it this time; shots are only for if you're multiple drinks behind the other person. The problem is that we don't always read the same books, especially when it comes to the classics.

Last season we went into my basement library and just pulled books off the shelves that we thought we could talk about. We want to plan this one a little bit more. Thus, I made a list of classic literature that I have read that we have yet to discuss. I defined "classic" here by looking at the selection on the $5 classics table at a local Barnes & Noble and by what books had Sparknotes versions available. Thus, my list is non-exhaustive and includes some titles that some (or even most) would argue are not "classics." Nonetheless, these are the titles I put forth as potentially for season 2:

• Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
• Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
• Night by Elie Wiesel
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
• The Odyssey by Homer

Of course, there is no way we could get through all of these; some Claire hasn't read (like Moby Dick, which I actually read twice before I even met her, which is weird) and some (*cough*Hunger Games*cough*) she vetoed.


We ended up filming Season 2 last night*. Many of the titles were on the list, but we also came up with a few more. Nevertheless, we will probably continue to use this list for future seasons.


*All of the footage, we discovered, went missing when my laptop died. We re-shot an abridged version in half an hour, so S2 will be kind of weird.