Assuming anyone here can actually read 
I’m almost finished with Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger and it really is a great memoir. It’s almost darkly hilarious how frank the book is about everything from the violent to the mundane. The prose used to describe daily idle work and conversations with French civilians is little different than the descriptions of battles and mangled corpses. It’s a whole novel of “oh yeah and this happened”.
Another aspect that fascinated me was the author’s own views on the war. He fought for four years in the losing army of one of history’s most infamous wars, yet he never seemed to regret it. Never wished he was at home. Never lost his Prussian class and reserve. You could wonder if it’s biased since the author might have left out anything that would make him look bad, but even so it’s notable that the book is too neutral to have that “war is heck” message you see in almost every other instance of WWI material. When stereotypical military aristocrat characters show up in media, they almost always lose that demeanor or die to show how brutal and gritty things really are. But here was a real person who went through all that and still came out with the mindset of an Imperial German patriot. Patriotism is the first thing to go in most war stories, so I was intrigued to see a depiction of someone who suffered same as everyone else but never actually lost it. I suppose there’s no real universal standard on how different people will be effected by warfare.
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His life was actually super interesting after the war too. He saw germany break up amd then reunite within his lifetime.
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well heck, i guess my life is also interesting! i've seen all kinds of historic shit happen.
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Halfway through count of monte cristo and re-reading Brothers Karamazov in Polish. On Jünger, did you read the forest passage? It’s on my list.
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No, but I’m definitely willing to read more of his stuff.
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Trump indictment report
Trans lives matter
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Leonard cohen book of longing, this jew makes me laugh sometimes, love him
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I read Beautiful Losers and it was awful. It made me hate him.
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I prefer cohen post 50 years old when he’s done trying to show off to get laid
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"Hunger" by Knut Hamsun
A depiction of a man barely getting by while going insane from starvation.
Reading in my mother tongue Swedish for once which is quite nice
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herdy kerdy bork bjorn
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Don't have time to bleed/read, but I was listening to this
Maaaan, I want to have s*x with Stephen Fry's voice
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i've had storm of steel on my read list for literally years and have never read it. you describing it as "its not a regular war is bad omg i regret it all" makes me wanna finally do it, but who knows if i will. i really enjoy war memoirs written from the other side.
ANYWAY
i've been reading ty cobb: a terrible beauty by charles leerhsen
the overarching point of the book has been "all those bad things you heard about ty cobb? most of them never actually happened or were greatly exaggerated because the guy who wrote them all in a ty cobb biography was a grifting chump. cobb didn't even want the book released but then he died so it got released anyway.".
which turn out isn't as much of a let down as i assumed it would be, cause the AURA OF COBB is big for me. he's still got it. he's still an angry bastard who will do literally anything to get on base or score a run. he just (probably) didn't kill some random fools who tried to rob him and wasn't exactly the EXTREME RACIST he's been portrayed as, though he DID beat the shit out of a crippled fan who had no hands mid game, cause the fan said something like "you southern dandy! yer basically a BIPOC!". when people in the crowed yelled the guy had no hands cobb allegedly said "I DON'T CARE IF HE'S GOT NO FEET"! cobb then got kicked out of baseball...until the rest of the team said "if he doesn't come back we won't play" and he was reinstated.
long post no one will ever read. i don't care. i frickin' love ty cobb. best baseball player of all time.
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You can type 10,000 characters and you decided that these were the one's that you wanted.
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Darn, snappy just roped at the thought of reading a book.
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Never Enough by Mike Hayes, pretty good so far
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Vodka Politics by Mark Lawrence Schrad, reading it is a wip and I'm trying to find a good audiobook version of it. Liking it so far though, really interesting.
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Kind of a neat premise until you realize that the alcohol intake of Russia is not really that high for Europe.
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Alcohol intake? Sure. Alcoholism? Nah it's pretty high lmao.
Also this book does touch on that. It states that yeah not everyone is a drunk, but everyone in Russia is deeply impacted by alcohol, more than the rest of the world.
The interesting angle is that alcohol has been used as a political and economic tool by the government, in a way most other countries simply don't.
I'm not fully convinced on it's core thesis, but it has brought up information that I was not aware of beforehand, such as Stalin forcing his underlings to drink in excess as a power play.
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trying for the 3rd time to get through dune (audiobook, yea I know it's not real reading)
so far so good. the little excerpt parts at the beginning of chapters are kinda annoying, the voice acting is a bit campy, and there's quite a bit of exposition dumps but it makes sense with such a deep setting
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Not reading anything right now but Stoner by John Williams is one of the best fiction books I've ever read. Not saying much, because I don't read much fiction to begin with. But I tried reading other novels like James Joyce all the way to Murakami and I really didn't like any of it. Either too long and drawn out, or just trivial, shallow nonsense.
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Yes! I love stoner. Definitely one of my favorite books.
It's about a completely ordinary and unremarkable person but his life still has a beautiful and tragic story to tell.
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So he was a sociopath?
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Absolutely fascinating book. I think it had a few different edits he made too throughout the years that people interpreted to various levels of pro war, less pro war. But I don't think he was ever fully out and against war. He had pretty strong warlike beliefs even if he never embraced Naziism.
I am still reading Crucible of War about the 7 years war. This thing is a tome, but really interesting so far. Despite reddits love of alcohol indians they were not peaceful, nice people.
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Maybe I should look into it. I’ve always loved military history on 18th century conflicts and all your recommendations have been solid so far
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I finished The Myth of Sisyphus and now I'm on to The Brothers Karamazov.
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Just finished harassment architecture. I'm not a technophobe nor a humanist, but I thought the writing was incredible nonetheless. He's also incredibly funny - the whole book is a massive fedpost. It's like if /pol/ wasn't r-slurred and good at writing.
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I decided to crack open a Rushdie book since he's probably one of the few people devoted to writing as a craft alive today.
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Just read Dune Messiah. I found it an improvement over the first in the series. A convoluted scheme against an emperor with precognitive powers fits the author's writing style better than the survival/war/adventure themes from Dune (which ended up happening mostly off -page).
Also continuing "I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It" by Norm Finkelstein. I do enjoy reading a takedown of "wokeness" from an academic leftoid perspective, but it still seems like the author is just kind of late to the party. It might be fresh to your liberal parents who love Obama and are confused/perturbed by everything that's happened since then, but if you lurk stupidpol it feels too familiar. "The Holocaust Industry" was much fresher.
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The audible adaptation of Harassment Architecture is actually incredible - you can get it for free on IA tho
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