harry potter mabye
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Oh phew. I studied English Lit at university and had to wade through bits of both. I used to feel like I was some sort of uncultured swine for not “getting” them. But honestly, I just don’t think they work as novels. As a piece of art, I guess, sure. Fine and modern art can look like nonsense without context, but often make sense when seen as part of a conversation with other artists and movements. If taken like that, fine, you do you, Joycey-boy, and write incomprehensibly. I’ll be over here with my Iain Banks and Ned Beauman, enjoying them.
For certain sets of people:
Das Capital by Marx
A Critique of Pure Reason by Kant
Ulysses by James Joyce
I think no one has read Manufacturing Consent beyond the first chapter.
I swear I had all the best intentions, but that book literally taunts me from it’s place on the bookshelf where it’s been sitting for the past 2 years. Not sure I even made it to chapter 2…
Well the first chapter is very good and reading it will explain why this book is so influential. It’s also not very long. You can do it 💪
Thank you! I’m sure I’ll get there. So many other books on my ‘to read’ list, but I’m going to bump this one back up.
I’ve read the whole thing, but all the interesting bits were definitely in the first chapter. I didn’t know anything about the political situation in Nicaragua in the 80s, so it didn’t make much sense to me as an example. Was reading more Wikipedia than Chomsky at one point.
All his examples also seemed like very local problems? Like, the New York Times’ reporting on the Nicaraguan situation may have been biased, but international NGOs were reporting the truth (which is how Chomsky himself got his information) and newspapers all over the world were reporting that information. I checked the newspaper archives from my own country and when they reported on the cases from the book (which wasn’t that often, because South America is pretty far away), they had the same narrative as Chomsky.So the interesting mechanical bits were definitely in the first chapter and the rest of it was only relevant to 1980s Americans who got all their information from national media.
A Brief History of Time - a fair number of people do read it but there’s a pretty big chunk of people that just want bookshelf clout.
I was looking for this. 15 years ago this would have been top of the list.
I prefer the album “A Brief History of Rhyme” by MC Hawking.
People don’t read popular science books? 🤨🤨
Okay, I admit, I am deeply perplexed by everything everyone is saying in this thread. Do people seriously keep books on bookshelves not for reading, but for decoration or to pretend they’re well-read? Why wouldn’t they just read the books?
Yes they do just buy them for decoration. If you are intellectually curious you’re in an extreme minority of people.
Which I find strange. Usually anti-intellectualism is open, up-front, and honest about what it is. People buying books and not reading them just to pretend they’re smart doesn’t seem like a thing that actually happens in real life, just a straw intellectual the willfully ignorant like to beat up.
That was legit one of the few books I read halfway through then put down in disgust at how banal, ridiculous, and repetitive it was. The first part was okish because there’s something of a mystery, but the “revelation” that all the industrialists moved to a sort of entrepreneur’s shangri-la and that life without government created this perfect utopian society, it was just such a stupid thing and I was so tired of all the dead horse beating. Anybody who says they like this book is either lying or has mental problems.
When the completed manuscript exceeded 600,000 words, Cerf asked Rand to make cuts, but backed off when she compared the idea to cutting the Bible.
Wow, I didn’t know this author, and it seems I wasn’t missing much.
Her writing is simplistic, but conservatives and libertarians have pushed her as an “intellectual” because it gives them a well-known writer that supports their trash values. She was strongly against the welfare state and altruism, yet she herself received social security, so she was a bit of a hypocrite as well.
She was also an unabashed atheist, which is why she was able to promote the idea of selfishness being good.
What’s funny is it’s the mostly Christian right-wing which has embraced her.
I guess they’re okay with atheism as long as its playing for the right “team.”
She was also an unabashed atheist, which is why she was able to promote the idea of selfishness being good.
What the hell is this non-sequitur?
Nearly every religion preaches to be giving and kind to those in need. It’s absolutely not a non-sequitor to admit that a large number of atheists don’t believe there is any guiding morality to the universe and that we have to come to our own conclusions about morals and ethics. Moral relativism is a generally accepted thing among many atheists. This does not mean all atheists are selfish, I would classify most as Humanists. Rand was mostly an outlier.
She was able to promote the idea that selfishness could be good because she didn’t ascribe to any religion that defined that as a sin.
She was able to promote the idea that selfishness could be good because she didn’t ascribe to any religion that defined that as a sin.
So basically she profited from existing bullshit to promote her own brand of bullshit. That’s even worse.
I’m not an atheist and even to me, that’s a really transparent dig at people who believe something you disagree with. You don’t need religion to be altruistic as you are implying.
I mean, they’ve elevated Trump as their God-Emperor and he’s very likely an atheist, had multiple affairs, and paid women to get abortions, but whatever, none of that matters when you’ve been conditioned all your life to believe impossible things. Next to Jesus walking on water and two of every animal fitting on a boat, the rest of it is child’s play.
It worth reading, because you get perspective on how anarcho capatalist view the world.
She wrote anotehr novel, ‘The Fountainhead,’ with all the same ideas but much easier read. I finished ‘The Fountainhead,’ but it was mostly WTF comes next kind of book. There’s an old B+W movie that sums up her ideas pretty well.
As a teenager I had a crush on Dominique Françon and her sexual assertiveness until I understood how deeply perturbed she was.
She and Howard are supposed to be the sane ones.
[sigh]
Read the whole thing. It’s OK.
The worst part of the book is that stupid chapter in the last third. Which summarizes the previous 2/3.
The
dictionarydikshunaryDo they have those at the lie-berry?
Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, A Long Walk To Freedom. So many people want a copy to signal that they’re cool and love the idea of the rainbow nation in South Africa, and that racism officially ended™ when Mandela wore a Springbok rugby jersey in 1995.
They don’t realise that in his autobiography Mandela says that he takes inspiration from other left wing leaders like Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro, and rips into the ideology of people like F.W de Klerk. If they actually read it, they’d probably be shocked.
I got a really good one that I’ve seen everywhere but most people read summaries of it at best.
How To Win Friends and Influence People
Own it and read it, probably 25 years ago. Just ask all my friends I’ve influenced!
Haha, one ai bought and actually read. It’s a good book
Whats the tl;dr? Is it ‘be hot and/or rich’?
It’s been a long while since I read it, but the one thing I remember is the idea that you should let people talk about themselves and they’ll like you for it.
For Christians, there’s one called The Bible.
Heya fellow raccoon, raccoon Bible is much better than the one compiled by Roman bishops in 325AD in Nicea e.g. “let there be trash for all” and “give to racoons what belongs to the raccoons” :D
The Bible
This was my first thought, and I knew someone had to have said it already.
CHECKMATE
Infinite Jest
My mom is reading it! She said that it is confusing and messy, but wants to finish it anyway.
It honestly feels like something he wrote as a joke
As a jest, perhaps?
And at over one thousand pages long, one can also say it’s infinite
Fuck me it is dense.
I’m an avid reader and I find I have to take breaks every 20-30min with IJ and just let stuff settle. Otherwise I find myself reading the same passage several times while my mind wanders.
Read it twice, absolutely love that book.
Without a shadow of a doubt the Bible.
No, reading the Gospels, Paul’s letters, Revelations, Genesis, Exodus, and selected Psalms doesn’t count as reading the Bible. Do you count reading 10 chapters of a 60+ chapter book as reading the book? Of course not.
I was raised in a Christian household, and I was told that when I turned 12 I could be baptized. I looked forward to, and on the summer I was 10, I decided I wanted to be ready. I sat down and read the bible, front to back. I got to the end, and I paused: this was nothing like what they were telling me! I decided to read it again through, certainly I missed something? At the end, I decided to work through again, one more time, and then I was no longer Christian, at least not like these other ones. Now I’m not at all, but I love being able to source the bible more accurately than my Christian family members.
I grew up in an evangelical house and I constantly get to wield the line: “I guess I took the wrong lessons” as my comeback to literally any political dispute and it is wonderful having the ability to actually quote the Bible when arguing with my child relatives
Atlas Shrugged.
This book gets a lot of shit, probably deservedly so, but I enjoyed the story, but skip over the monologue.
highschool textbooks
