Recently:
No Longer Human
The Doors of Perception
Animal Farm
Propaganda
Society of the Spectacle
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Walden
Beyond Good and Evil
Can Life Prevail?
The Ego and Its Own
Technological Slavery

Planning on reading something by Slavoj Zizek soon. I would've gotten The Sublime Object of Ideology, but they only had paperback versions on Amazon, no e-books. Any other suggestions by him (or other similar writers/thinkers)? I'm a big fan of Pentti Linkola too, and Uncle Ted had some good criticisms about modern life too, but anprim is a load of shit in my opinion. Just some impossibly idealist neoluddite stuff. But Linkola is more pragmatic, despite his edgy worldview. Walden is interesting, but I think Thoreau's attitude of just opting out instead of trying to fix things is kind of a cop-out. But for some people, that's preferable, since many obstacles seem insurmountable. Animal Farm reminds me of a lot of reactionary stuff that's happening now. Propaganda was interesting because I think a lot of Bernays' techniques are still being used to this day, but with added technology (social media instead of radio or newspapers, for example).

I read No Longer Human because someone on /so/ mentioned it. It was a really introspective and self-deprecating read. Very honest and mentions things many people don't like to talk about. It was really sad but also very relatable.

What have you read lately, OP?

I've been reading the Raildex series (and a few other LN series) and Lolita. Not entirely related, but I really love the feeling that image gives off.

Just read The end of eternity.
Interesting little book, I found the first chapter confusing as hell however and it felt like gibberish until I got a handle on the concepts. The book is about a secret organization called Eternity which uses time travel to change and alter the course of human history along with reality for the overall betterment of mankind across the many millennia.
It's not what I'd call bad book but I'm not too crazy about the ending. Seems just as things start to get really interesting it dumps the message of the book and ends somewhat abruptly.

That message being that safety and comfort will lead humanity to stagnation and eventually a slow death. Where as hardship and struggle are necessary for the true betterment of mankind to drive and motivate humans to reach their potential.

Unfortunately this message isn't something the main character slowly comes to learn but is instead trusted upon him in an exchange that honestly kind of makes the main character feel like a complete tool, which is something he complains about moments before, almost as if to say he hasn't changed at all.

I have been reading Gene Wolfe's "Book of The New Sun" series. It's a science fantasy series, and I've been finding it highly enjoyable.

The setting is really interesting - It occurs on an Earth (Urth) that is in regression. The sun is dying and society has gone back to the medieval ages. Despite that there is still advanced technology available - There are laser guns and steel towers and airships. Alien species were scattered all over the planet because most animals went extinct.

The protagonist is a member of the torturer's guild who is exiled because he "showed compassion" to a female prisoner that he fell in love with. It follows his adventures as a "chosen one" type of character. He claims to have hyperthymesia (perfect autobiographical memory). He is also kind of a liar, because he will often backpedal on certain topics. The author described him as a "bad man trying to be good", and he often comes across as a weird asshole.

The author throws in a ton of old Greek and Latin words that are intended to be evocative more than descriptive, it's a really cool way of adding jargon into your book. Rather than make up words he re-appropriates ancient languages.

It's pretty much my favorite novel series. I'm on the last book, about three quarters of the way through.

Bookchin

I read the first Doctor Stone, now I am reading Gurkha, a book written by a Gurkha about an action in Afghanistan. I got given it for free otherwise I would not have read it as I don't have much interest in that war, with good reason, all he is doing is sitting in a compound getting shot at occasionally. English isn't his first language and you can really tell, it comes across as being written by a child.

Read the Economist & Wall Street Journal.

I read the newspaper today. Does that count?

National Geographic
New Scientist

I'm reading The Alexiad by Anna Komnene. It's a Biography of her father, the emperor Alexios.

>>33114
I read it two years ago. Very interesting

industrial society and its future

Spurred by a quote from Gakkou Gurashi, I read Chomei's short essay "Hojoki" (Ten Foot Square Hut) a few hours ago and was captivated. For some quick context, roughly imagine a version of Walden written by a Japanese monk in 1212. Here's some quick quotes to whet your appetite (and yes it is formatted in verse stanza):

>Sometimes the dew falls away
>while the flowers stay.
>But they will surely
>wilt in the morning sun.

>...

>If you entrust yourself
>to the care of others
>you will be owned by them.

>If you care for others
>you will be enslaved
>by your own solicitude.

>If you conform to the world
>it will bind you hand and foot.

Now given my comparison to Walden, I do have to say that having read a few excerpts from Walden some time back, I think Chomei's writing is a lot more direct and earnest. To me Walden always had a slightly sanctimonious air, less a recluse weary of the world than one rising to meet some sort of spartan challenge. Chomei is the opposite though, and he's less self-certain of himself.

I think everyone here would resonate with the words, and the whole thing is a very short 15-20 minute read so I'd highly recommend giving it a shot. Interestingly for what should be a well out of date book, it's very hard to find any freely translated versions available. While it's probably been translated into English by many people, the two main ones I could find were a version translated by Moriguchi/Jenkins (https://files.catbox.moe/kz6jxw.epub) and another by A.L. Sadler (https://files.catbox.moe/aydvqk.epub). The former retains the series of songlike stanzas while the latter is more traditional prose. The stanza style makes very easy yet vivid reading, but it's worth giving the prose a shot as well since it has some beautiful sentences. Note that I had to create the epub for the latter from a plaintext OCR'd rip I found online, but I think I corrected most of the typos and formatting; do let me know if there's anything still off on that though.

Reading the MAHABARATA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42W6axXrIuw

Lately I've read Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days, and also The Judgment and In the Penal Colony.

I've been reading magic books but haven't found much of note in them. I read The Water Margin, Outlaws of the Marsh as well. The moralising is quite poorly done with the protagonists killing innocent people quite often and cannibalism is a recurring theme amongst the heroes in this book.

Post edited on 3rd Mar 2020, 5:37am

>>31665
Right now I'm reading Building Free Life: Dialogues With Ocalan
>>34205
I've had a weird urge to read the Iliad and Odyssey since yesterday

>>34497
>I've had a weird urge to read the Iliad and Odyssey since yesterday
By Zeus! It was exactly on the 2nd that I picked up the Iliad! This is no coincidence, dear anon. It is a prodigy of the Heavens above. So see it, anon, see it that you read the Iliad and learn of the feats of the Achaeans as I am doing now, for so it is the will of Olympus.

>>34529
I'm into antiquity stuff but I always found the Iliad style mostly unbearable, it follows this habit of reciting long lists of names Silmarillion-style that always kill my enjoyment. I just read the Robert Graves sumary for children and that was fine for me.

>>34529
>>34541
I've read that the particular "repetitive" style is because of how it used to be recited from memory, and having a fixed set of kennings to draw form serve as both a memory aide and also provide a way to complete the meter

https://daily.jstor.org/how-do-we-know-that-epic-poems-were-recited-from-memory/

>>34545
This is correct. The Iliad and the Odyssey are older than written language, and originate in Greek oral traditions.
>>34541
I was thinking of picking up Robert Fangle's translation. It focuses on capturing the meaning behind the Greek original and retaining the vivid style of Homeric storytelling, while using more modern language.

Game of Thrones

>>34566
>>34545
Prose or Poetry?

Camilla
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40619

>>33167
There's a very recent translation by Stavros as well which from the excerpts I've seen seems to preserve the poetic stanza meter of the Moriguchi/Jenkins translation but with a slightly more literary bent. Maybe after the single lifetime it takes to learn modern Japanese I'll start on learning classical to be able to appreciate the original text.

>>34566
Lately I've been seeing many people accusing Butler of producing a "abridged" translation of the Iliad. They even say that he removed the list of ships. What on earth are they talking about? I've read the Butler translation and it has the list of ships and all chapters are present and in the correct order. Is there any reason behind these claims?

I just read Salem's Lot. It was a lot shorter than I expected, more direct and straight forward of a vampire story as I thought it'd be too. I had been meaning to give it a go because I'm on the filth book of the Dark Tower and the priest from Salem's Lot becomes a main character in that. Not that reading this really shed any new light on the character or anything, feels like he was barely in it and the only note worthy part he's in was recounted in the dark tower books with much more detail anyway. I'd say the context helps but again, his back story had a million times more detail in the dark tower, I guess King wrote it expecting that no one read Salem's Lot.

Post edited on 31st Oct 2022, 11:51pm

The last few years have been harder for me to willingly read but around a month ago I've been a lot more capable. Read Humble Pi, a non-fiction about math going wrong in the world, and it was pretty easy to digest. The early chapters are a bit more interesting since they deal with physical, practical math rather than probability and computing (which are very interesting in their own right, but made the connections a lot less intuitive).
Followed it with Dune, not necessarily because of the movie but I've had it on my shelf forever and figured I'd try again. Last time was hard because I kept going to the glossary every new word, but pushing through even if I didn't think I understood was a lot easier since most stuff is explained through context. The story itself isn't that interesting but I like the characters and descriptions a lot. The roles of different factions feel meaningful, and focusing a large-scale conflict on a single, resource-deprived planet helps push the characters' actions in interesting directions.
The Dandelion Girl - referenced in Clannad - was also a very nice character-driven story. Much shorter than a book, it reminded me a bit of Ray Bradbury's short stories. The descriptions of the field are very relaxing and the main character reacts to strange information a lot in the ways I think a normal person would.
Not sure what I'll read next, I'm a bit limited in that I can't go and buy books so I'll have to pick off the dozen or so unread mystery and essays I've got stored in boxes and bins.

apart from manga, I've mostly been reading ancient and medieval texts, most of them religious, like for example those of the Nag Hammadi library:
http://gnosis.org/naghamm/hypostas.html
Also have been perusing the Zohar, the Talmud and rabbinic literature. It gets interesting once you realize that Edom and Esau are used as code words for Europeans/Christians, Jacob is code for Israel/Jews, and Ishmael is code for Muslims/Arabs.
https://www.sefaria.org/search?q=Edom&tab=text&tvar=1&tsort=relevance&svar=1&ssort=relevance
Also various non-religious pieces of fiction and poetry, like the ancient Egyptian Tale of the Ship-Wrecked Sailor:
https://www.storynory.com/the-tale-of-the-shipwrecked-sailor/
Just now I found a youtube channel that has good audio books of these kinds of ancient texts, like this one of the Egyptian Book of the Dead:
https://youtu.be/Afj5YwxpZWo?t=15344

>>39130
Did you read the Enuma Elish? I was thinking about reading it, and wondering what the best version would be.

I read Kafka's Amerika. I liked it a lot, I would even go as to say it may be better than The Trial. The biggest issue though, is that unlike the Trial - which is nearly complete - there are many gaps in the latter half of Amerika. The gaps start right at what I consider the highest point of the book. In a way this leaves the book more ambiguous and open to many interpretations, especially regarding the last chapter.
The first chapter - which initially stood as a single short story - "The stoker" is more comical and not as macabre or kafkaesque as the others, it serves as a prequel where Karl sees the suffering of the stoker, and his helplessness in face of his employers, and soon this will be the fate of Rossmann as well.
The following chapters see the introduction of the american characters and the women characters, and the kafkaesque scenarios we are used to.
If you are a Kafka reader you definitely should read this.

Last one I read was Insomnia, much like with >>39114 that series practically tells you to go read it.
It's a side story that takes place maybe half way into the Dark Tower series. It could be seen more as an epilogue to the series though. If viewed as it's own stand alone thing, it's not great and pretty bleh and filled with a lot of stuff that might make little sense and references that would mean even less. Really drags on for the first half. As the tittle suggests, it's about a retired elderly man who gets less and less sleep with each passing day. As it goes on, he starts seeing and experiencing really weird and triply stuff due to being sleep deprived. There's a little hook near the start with a neighbor go has some insane rage fueled fit while spouting crazy talk, but it does take a good while for anything to come of that.

This goes on until he eventually becomes able to freely ascend to a higher plane of existence, and finds that an old lady he has the hots for can do it too. It also turns out that these powers of his were no accident. He's given a task that ties directly into the dark tower series but I won't say more than that.

Reading about the Manhattan Project. It’s fascinating & scary simultaneously…

I give up on newspapers; it's all bad new and there's too much negativity in my life already...

I've finished a book and I feel melancholic. The book has had terrible amount of cliches and dumb... I call structure-it-by-forumula kinda thing, when book has formula driven balance between good and bad things, I find it immensely stupid. But it has got a few gotchas as well and some successful attempts at humor. And it was somewhat what I was looking for back then when I started reading. I was feeling real bad and wanted something you know, that has a way of cheering you up. It's not the first time. I start a nice book to stop feeling bad and when I finish it I feel melancholic, because the good story if over. Saying good, I mean the kind of what I was seeking for, not any objective metric. It's somewhat funny, but I've never enjoyed books I find good. I really get into the story and while it's going it's like you live through it, really, but then it finishes and you just look around your ever empty room, at your ever empty life and... not funny at all. I know it will leave good memory likely, but still. Perhaps I should stop reading fantasy adventures, but the magical (unrealistic) aspect with exaggerated virtues is really needed for the escapism to work. If I start reading something down to earth about real life I just want to kill myself. Whatever. It's not even like I've read many books. How many? Don't remember. Very few. Never had a chance to read much. Perhaps that's why. It was the same with anime, you know? I enjoyed the first, what, five years of actively watching it? I don't remember. But then I just crossed some point of no return and stopped watching anime, because nothing comes along that I would see as worthy, even though there are still a few on the list. Yeah I feel melancholic and that's just it. Don't feel comfortable talking about my activities, like reading, but I figure this site is dead, so why bother. Sometimes you just need to say something.

>>31665
my ereader is still stashed away in my drawer....don't know what to read.

>>42591
what's on your list?

It's been a while since I've been reading at this pace. I guess I'm again at it filling the black hole. I honestly thought maybe two weeks have passed, but actually a few months. Void's like that. I wonder if I wake up in coffin one day with no memory of a life.

>>42591
To me an eReader is still the thing you plug into a GBA and scan cards on.

>>42672
Cool I never had one of those since they were too gimmicky.

I decided to try reading the Bible from start to finish. American standard version. This turned out to be a lot more challenging than I expected. At times it's tedious, other times it's very sleep inducing. And overall I've been finding the further I go the more seems to go in one ear and out the other.
I thought it was interesting at first to see just how quickly they shoot past some rather significant content, while also spending a massive amount of time on detailing family trees.
God of the old testament seems pretty nice at first but it doesn't take long before they start doing some questionable things, like the the great flood. The way it's written makes me wonder why even do a flood at all. He clearly wants to spare animal life, so why not spread a plague among humans, or snap a finger and kill everyone unrelated to Noah?
Then there's that exidus story which was all well and good, but once he helps take the slaves out of Egypt, he suddenly decides to lay down a million laws (with a big focus on leprosy) it comes across as an almost unreasonable amount of strict rules they need to now follow, some of which seem bizarre. I was supprised for instance to learn how demanding God is about lamb sacrifices & burnt offerings. I kept wondering where the hell people are even supposed to get all these goats that God wants them to burn for him. He basically makes the lives of the people he pulls out of Egypt into hell, the book makes these people sound like whiny ungrateful complainers that should be more appreciative, they get stuck in the wildness and while facing starvation they regret leaving, and for complaining so much God makes them all die there. Cool story.
It's also interesting that someone who says "thou shall not kill" is perfectly fine with mass murder and genocide. He supports and even encourages people to kill not only their enemies but even those that just happen to be in the way. There's instances where the Israelis are trying to get from A to C but some people are at B and don't want to let them by (for good reason) and so the Israel's murder all the women and children, keeping some as play things, while taking anything of value while they're at it, and God is apparently behind them every step of the way. Not sure if this is a god I'd really want to follow. There's even a segment where he not only condones slavery, but goes as far as to list off what slaves should cost based on age and gender.
I just got up to the point where satin very easily convinces God to take everything from a good man, but also kill his kids and his servants too, just to prove a point to satin. If you can be a good person that loves God and does everything he asks of you and still be tormented worse than those who have no Fath in him, what kind of message does that send?
anyways, my progress has really been slow on this thing lately because it just keeps putting me to sleep every time I take a crack at it. I'm not even half way in yet.

I apologize in advance if this ruffles any feathers.

Post edited on 1st Jul 2024, 5:20pm

>>42745
Gnosticism is an interesting twist on christianity, and that perspective seems to resolve a lot of apparent paradoxes in the bible. This more philosophically pessimist viewpoint also moves it a bit closer to the eastern religions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_Gnosticism

>>42746
Gnosticism was an attempt at making something coherent out of the bible with retconning, before accepting its insanity at face value was forced upon everyone.

Finished another series. No, not close to suicide haha, but I know it just needs time to catch up. It's become a habit. I always keep some series incomplete, so in case of emergency I can stuck my head in the imaginary world and fuck everything else.

I haven't read in a week or two, but I had been working on The Games People Play by Eric Berne, The Illiad, Jane Eyre, and the Gervais Principle. Enjoying the ones about social mechanisms. It's a subject I've been thinking about a lot.

>>31665
Do light novels count? Surprisingly there are a manga and visual novel boards but not a light novel board. Or threads

>>43156
Just post it! I can't imagine anyone complaining especially since there is almost no discussion going on anywhere on the whole site.

>>43157
Is that just how tc is or is it bleeding active posters over time? I lurk every now and then but I wish this place was a bit more active. Just enough to not make it look like I am talking to myself. Naturally I should start being more proactive myself for that to happen.

Moving back to the topic, lately I've been reading 'The executioner and her way of life'. It's an isekai story from the perspective of the native population. As per usual with these tropes, otherworlders are living weapons and summoned to be taken advantage of. The catch is that they are living time bombs. The longer they stay alive, the more dangerous they get which led to the general consensus that they have to be preemptively taken out when someone summons them. Due to some circumstances one of them can't be physically killed and this leads to the main character and the otherworlder traveling together, with one of them believing to have finally found a friend and the main character secretly planning the otherworlder's assassination. Fights, romance and internal tumult ensue

I'm currently on Eon. A scifi story about a massive asteroid that enters orbit around the earth in the far off future of 2015. (kinda like the Black Knight satellite). Which we quickly find out has multiple empty cities inside of it. This becomes the subject of some research by our main characters.
The book also comes from a time when people were scared shitless about a war between the US and the soviet union, which factors into the story with fears of a war breaking out over the asteroid.
which ends up happening as both countries nuke the hell out of each other.
Much of the surprise and mystery is deflated fairly quickly too, as it doesn't take long to explain the asteroid was made by humans from another timeline/reality after the war already happened.
As for what I think about it. None of the characters are particularly interesting. I was annoyed my copy spoiled most of the book with a summery I thought was an intro, but it turns out they don't really approach this as a mystery anyway and spell out everything fairly quickly, leaving one to wonder what the point of the story is, and as it goes on it becomes clear it's just trying to be preachy about war = bad.

Before that I read to kill a mocking bird, without realizing until halfway in I already read it at some point and forgot having done so, but kept going because why not. It's basically racism = bad, as viewed from the innocent eyes of children who don't see skin color. Story is largely a slice of life that leads up to a court case defending an obviously innocent black man who doesn't have a chance in hell of winning vs the white trash making the accusations.
Deals a lot with the different ways people get raised and what it does to them, phony cultural norms and facades people put on, people lying and hiding who they really are and refusing to see other people for who they are. Needless to say it's not a half bad book.

before that, was the island of Dr Monroe. The story of a man who gets lost at sea and washes up on a mad scientist's furfag fantasy island. There he meets a scientist experimenting on and changing animals on the island into human hybrids and teaching them to act human like for some furry utopia. Like a much less kawaii Japari Park, things go sideways, the furries start reverting back to animals. The protag makes friends with a dogman who helps him survive, but because he's not digging this furry shit all he wants to do is get off this island as soon as he can.
Much like with Jurassic park, which I felt was a more interesting book, I think the moral here was just don't fug with nature.

Going back a bit further I read Gulliver's travels. A fun series of stories about a guy who really hates being with his family and after visiting various bizarre far off strange and exotic lands such as japan, he ends up deciding he wants to be a bronie for the rest of his days.
Jokes aside, the author clearly put a lot of thought and detail into all these fun little worlds the main character visits, how the residents would react to the different situations, and it's done in such a way too you could almost believe he really went to these places. Probably the only one that didn't really work for me was the floating city full of drones. Still, it was enjoyable overall.

>>43174
>read to kill a mocking bird
If you grew up in the US then you probably read this at least once or twice in school. At least narratively I remember it being one of the better books in the school curriculum, although these days given that they've dialed up the "social justice" aspect of everything to eleven I bet they'd basically beat kids over the head with what is already a fairly self-evident theme. Still pretty much required reading as it's part of American literary canon though.