What are you reading right now? -

[Bastard_Call]

I'm a huge fan of the movie and decided to pick up the book and see how it compares. More rape, and clearly it's framed more to highlight how the teenagers are awful as opposed to contrasting Alex's brutality with the bureaucracy that want to make an example of him. I get the impression Burgess is kind of a curmudgeonly old boomer scared stiff of young people. Also, this cover is pretty sweet It'd fit better on a poster than a novel but whatever. Too bad it's a paperback.

I just finished the first Terry Pratchett book, loved it
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Which one should I read next? I've seen the animated versions of Soul Music and the Wyrd Sisters, and the Hogfather special

Read Reaperman. It's his best book in my opinion. People criticise it for having a lot of fluff, but I really think the B and C plots really tie Death's story together.

When I was in high school the remedial reading classes read it but the higher level classes read other stuff, I have no idea why.

Because Animal Farm is a children's book.

 

[Nykysnottrans]

Michel Houellebecq's 2005 novel The Possibility Of An Island. This guy has to be a closet KFer. It's supposed to be a sci-fi novel but it's really just a misanthropic comedian bitching about everything for pages on end. I know there was no KF in 2005 but he must've discovered the forum since then and secretly joined it by now.

 

[Harlay de Champvallon]

Ivan the Terrible, Robert Payne, Nikita Romanoff. Killing his son with an iron staff to the head seems to have finished him off. It mixes his usual stuff be it creative executions (he loved what gunpowder could do and anything slow), following by money to monasteries to pray for their souls, massacring the populations of his own cities where he got notions they were plotting against him, with wry jokes played on a the Papal envoy. Anyhow, good, evocative book.

Knew Michel Houellebecq was based even before I knew the word.

 

[Stilgar of Troon]

Read Reaperman. It's his best book in my opinion. People criticise it for having a lot of fluff, but I really think the B and C plots really tie Death's story together.

Bill Door is a treasure.

Because Animal Farm is a children's book.

Disagree. Because a book can be read and understood by children does not ipso facto make it a children's book.

 

[Bastard_Call]

Bill Door is a treasure.


Disagree. Because a book can be read and understood by children does not ipso facto make it a children's book.

I agree with the sentiment, Discworld books are pretty much that after all, but Animal Farm is a pretty childish and simple summary of ideas explored in far better books and essays written by Orwell.

 

[Medical Hawaii]

The first two volumes of Dream of the Red Chamber/Story of the Stone finally arrived--the Hawkes translation! Very excited

 

[Local FloRida-man]

Burning through the moist von lipwig trilogy from discworld. Partway through raising steam atm. Love the character, and it's cool to see the different era's of pratchett's writing style.

 

[Jet Fuel Johnny]

I bought about 100 paperbacks of Deathlands at a yard sale for $5.

So I've got lots of reading material for awhile. It's not amazing, but it's not bad. It can be a little repetative, but it's nice to read post-apocalyptic fiction where there isn't pages and pages of political sperging.

"The blew it all up, we get to live in it, eh, whatcha gonna do?"

 

[shameful existence]

Had this one as an audiobook. It felt very podcast-y, which is what the author does as his main thing. Has a lot of these memorable historical pieces of information and speculation (like whether the Assyrian army would defeat armies of the Middle Ages or what the impact of black death on marriage rates was), which make it quite entertaining. The multiple apocalyptic moments serve as studies in how extreme conditions toughen or scar both individual and collective psychology and how many things human are relative to circumstances. Not too original and feels a bit like he was just trying to tie all his podcast content into something cohesive but a fun read overall.

 

[need shoeonhead nudes]

Finished this, Edward Dutton is the Jolly Heretic on Youtube. I don't really like his British accent but he's very intelligent so his writing is succinct.

Currently reading this after it got recommended in a moon conspiracy thread on 4chan.

 

[shameful existence]

Starting the last two chapters this morning. A comfy audiobook, I'd say more focused on Einstein as a person than getting super deep into his theoretical work. Not a hard listen. Rejects some myths (no, he didn't fail math at school, even though he never became as good a mathematician as he was a physicist) and helped anchor Einstein in his time and circumstances for me. Captures his evolution when it comes to both personal philosophy and science. The book does a good job handling more controversial issues of his age - like antisemitism or skepticism of the abstract - pretty objectively. Same can be said about the way it deals with Einstein's messy relationships, personal and professional.

Einstein would have been, and later was, appalled at the conflation of relativity with relativism. As noted, he had considered calling his theory “invariance,” because the physical laws of combined spacetime, according to his theory, were indeed invariant rather than relative.
Moreover, he was not a relativist in his own morality or even in his taste. “The word relativity has been widely misinterpreted as relativism, the denial of, or doubt about, the objectivity of truth or moral values,” the philosopher Isaiah Berlin later lamented. “This was the opposite of what Einstein believed. He was a man of simple and absolute moral convictions, which were expressed in all he was and did.” In both his science and his moral philosophy, Einstein was driven by a quest for certainty and deterministic laws. If his theory of relativity produced ripples that unsettled the realms of morality and culture, this was caused not by what Einstein believed but by how he was popularly interpreted.

 

[polayent]

Just finished Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. Maybe I'm cynical, but I just don't understand the appeal of it. He took all of the retardation of the late 60s way too seriously. The White Rabbit scene was pretty funny though.

 

[Purple Pepsi]

Finally got ahold of my library's only copy of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It's a large print so it's been weird reading one for the first time, but since some cunt damaged the only regular print copy beyond repair and made it permanently withdrawn it's all I've got. It got recommended to me after a friend heard I really love A Confederacy of Dunces and I can see the similarities between them here and there.

I also have two books that were gifts from years and years ago that I still haven't read, so I'm trying to get at least halfway through by the end of summer (How to Understand Hinduism and The Best American Essays of the Century)

I'm also reading a bunch of manga but I'm here to sperg about non-weeb books in this thread

 

[polayent]

Nico, Songs They Never Play on the Radio by James Young. Interesting account of the places, people and events suurounding the singer Nico from 1982 to 1988 (her death). The book is written by her keyboardist during that time.

 

[Ric Flair Woooo]

Currently reading through The Wheel of Time series for the first time. I don't know if I will finish it. On my road trips, I'm listening to Thr Reckoners series. Just started it and I'm enjoying the premise.

 

[shameful existence]

I've been dealing with this one for a couple of months - only getting half way through so far. The expertise and amount of detail in the book are both admirable and overwhelming. I'm not new to Russia's history, but I still struggle to keep up, have given up on taking notes and basically do five pages at a time. Not so much about Lenin as it is about war time diplomacy and the international chessplay behind Russian revolution. A gem for those who are able to appreciate it.

An OK introduction to Galileo, unfortunately the author couldn't help himself and brought in Donald Trump, climate change, fossil fuels, education system and a bunch of similar topics (to his credit, the "science deniers" part of the title is a fair warning). Interesting parallels between Galileo, Milton (whom he allegedly met personally) and Einstein.

Spoiler

The meeting of old Galileo and young Milton is kind of controversial - when researching it I found a paper summarizing all the conflicting scholars' opinions, including those claiming Milton wasn't telling the truth about it, but barely anyone in the pop history questions it these days because it's such a nice symbolic thing and has a clear reflection in Milton's work.
Solomon Hart's idealized depiction, 19th century.

 

[Abyssal Bulwark]

Going to finish 1776 by David McCullough tonight. Starting Mein Kampf tomorrow.

 

[Eto]

I'm hoping to finish Founding Myths by Ray Raphael before the end of the month. It goes over myths pertaining to America's history, such as Patrick Henry's "Give me Liberty or give me Death" speech possibly being a collection of people's account, and being made up along the way. And then there's the story of Margaret Corbin, who took up her husband's cannon at Fort Washington after he fell in battle, and she fired the cannon until her arm was hit and disabled. She was the first woman to receive a pension from Congress.

My next read will either be The Supreme Court: Landmark Decisions, The Element of Style, Frankenstein, or something else entirely on my list of reads. Decisions, decisions!

 

[Hugbox Kommissar]

Recently finished reading The Mercenaries by John Harris, a novel set in the 1920s about a motley group of ex-Great War pilots and mechanics who are hired by a Chinese warlord to train and build him an air force. Very good at capturing the feeling of the period with misfits from the Great War desperately trying to refit fragile, temperamental third-hand biplanes with no spare parts or logistics and train Chinese peasants to fly them in service to glorified bandits whose greatest concern is extracting wealth from their territory. Not a history book but does give some perspective to the rise of Chinese nationalism under Chiang Kai-Shek in response to centuries of government corruption and European exploitation. until they get humiliated all over again by Japan in the 30s and 40s

 

[Commander X]

Robert Bloch's "Psycho". The novel as a novel, has been paved-over with several layers of other media, the films, TV series, Bloch's own novel sequels, and so on.

Norman Bates, the original, is a flabby, lazy, lethargic, middle-aged alcoholic who likes reading outré non-fiction about human sacrifices and pop psychology and the occult. He's encased himself quite cozily in the prison of his own psychosis. And then there's dear old mom...

"That's the real reason you're still sitting over here on this side road, isn't it, Norman? Because the truth is that you haven't any gumption. Never had any gumption, did you, boy?

"Never had the gumption to leave home. Never had the gumption to go out and get yourself a job, or join the army, or even find yourself a girl --"

"You wouldn't let me!"

"That's right, Norman. I wouldn't let you. But if you were half a man, you'd have gone your own way."

He wanted to shout out at her that she was wrong, but he couldn't. Because the things she was saying were the things he had told himself, over and over again, all through the years. It was true. She'd always laid down the law to him, but that didn't mean he always had to obey. Mothers sometimes are overly possessive, but not all children allow themselves to be possessed. There had been other widows, other only sons, and not all of them became enmeshed in this sort of relationship. It was really his fault as much as hers. Because he didn't have any gumption.

"I understand. I'm well aware of the situation. As I told you, I've done a bit of reading. I know what the psychologists say about such things. But I have a duty toward my mother."

"Wouldn't you perhaps be fulfilling that duty to her, and to yourself as well, if you arranged to put her in an--institution?"

"She's not crazy!"

The voice wasn't soft and apologetic any longer; it was high and shrill. And the pudgy man was on his feet, his hands sweeping a cup from the table. It shattered on the floor, but Mary didn't look at it; she could only stare into the shattered face.

"She's not crazy," he repeated. "No matter what you think, or anybody thinks. No matter what the books say, or what those doctors would say out at the asylum. I know all about that. They'd certify her in a hurry and lock her away if they could--all I'd have to do is give them the word. But I wouldn't, because I know. Don't you understand that? I know, and they don't know. They don't know how she took care of me all those years, when there was nobody else who cared, how she worked for me and suffered because of me, the sacrifices she made. If she's a little odd now, it's my fault, I'm responsible. When she came to me that time, told me she wanted to get married again, I'm the one who stopped her. Yes, I stopped her, I was to blame for that! You don't have to tell me about jealousy, possessiveness--I was worse than she could ever be. Ten times crazier, if that's the word you want to use. They'd have locked me up in a minute if they knew the things I said and did, the way I carried on. Well, I got over it, finally. And she didn't. But who are you to say a person should be put away? I think perhaps all of us go a little crazy at times."

He stopped, not because he was out of words but because he was out of breath. His face was very red, and the puckered lips were beginning to tremble.

Mary stood up. "I'm--I'm sorry," she said softly. "Really, I am. I want to apologize. I had no right to say what I did."