To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.
I'm about to finish Confessions of a Mask, I'll post a review once it's done. I also bought this book
“Rise and Reign of Mammals”, is by Steve Brusatte, and American paleontologist, his book about dinosaurs was good.
Also @kaamrev it's pass 4pm at Cape Town so you can't complain about timing. Most euros are awake too and soon so will the West-Coastcels
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I finished the 1st book in series of Constable Evans, the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys for adults. I discovered the series from Evan's above, the 4th or 5th book in the series randomly from pirated audiobooks, and read it out of order.
Written by this 82 year old Boomer foid still pumping out books every 4 months. She named herself Rhys Bowen, to be unisex or male sounding author. Apparently this was something all Boomer Bong foids did in the 1990s as it was a common held belief that women authors were not taken seriously outside the romance genre.
So far I like the Constable Evans style, because there is a more logical set of events for the protagonist to solve the crime/mystery, and he's not some fricking mary sue
literally just tripping over clues, that shit is annoying in crime serials for me - also the guy is actual law enforcement and not just some civilian who has automatic access to sensitive gov files and shit.
What's most charming about the series is that the setting is in welsh rural countryside and it's small town small-mindedness lmoa - where there are peeps with redundant names, just like Park for Koreans or Mohammed for towelheads.
There are so many Evans in town, that the locals distinguish between each separate man as, Evans the Post, Evans the meat, Evans the Milk and Evans the Law (our protagonist) lol
Finished the 40kslop of Dark Imperium trilogy, and began The Fall of Cadia, which I so far enjoyed, but holy shit you have to be neck deep into 40K lore to understand what the actual frick is going on lol - like you have to have actually read 10 books to grasp who is who, what factions exist and their relationships are, and how the powerlevels scales, and how the magic space-heck in which the human factions use to warp between the stars in faster than light travel, cuz this books goes off running with ZERO explanantion, this is probably the most noob unfriendly book in the Black library
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This actually sounds like something I'd love. I might read it next.
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Big 40khead
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This is one of the worst posts I have EVER seen. Delete it.
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I've been reading The Silver Pigs. It's a detective novel set during Ancient Rome and it's pretty neat.
!historychads has anyone else read this?
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I read terra incognita which is a detective book set during ancient Rome. Oddly a different author but also really good.
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OOH THAT LOOKS GOOD. Funny how two women both happened to write ancient roman detective fiction. I guess it's a niche.
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Master and Margarita, aditionally im writing an essay about it. I find that writing an essay about the book while I read it makes you think more about it and makes you less forgetful
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Are you studying literature or something?
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No, recreational study. I am also preparing myself for a university degree
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I pray that once you get some proper education, you will finally outgrow your communist phase
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Did you have a pro-Apartheid phase? I think all neurodivergent teenagers have some edgy political phase
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I was never a white-supremacist, I never thought I was racially superior to the other races, but I spent much time with Stormfront, who venerated totalitarian regimes. And I did have an intense need for some boer/afrikaans/white nation state or sense of self worth.
Look at me longposting on rDrama, I've always had an intense need to express something of note to others. But it's kind of hard to be a nationalist, when your nation cant even keep the lights on or the sewage refineries running. You joke about Volkstaat, but like many afrikaans teenagers, seeing the constant decay and wishing to make it better.
But I grew disillusioned when they (stormfront tier fools) would support dictators like Putin who supposedly held up western civilization, who upheld white civilization while all the arab and black savages was reducing european nations which they inherited and so on.
Right wingers would support people like Orban who fricking sold the ground beneath their feet to the fricking Chinese. Look at
@QuadNarca posts. I grew disillusioned at Putin peepeeriders when he invaded Chechnya, and especially in 2014 when he invaded Ukraine teh 1st time. Men and right wing strongmen were just warlords conjuring up an image of strength, while they permitted corruption to fester in their favor. Even back in 2014, we knew russia was an international reputation for corruption to rival the ANC, and was a shadow of the former Sovier threat it once was.
I saw how rightwingers and other afrikaners who wished some segregation, some separatist movement, some volkstaat, fell into this wingcuckery trap. To support blindly, because they were all angry. I mean I was angry too, but i believed in keeping our leaders responsible,
These stormfronters peepeerided russia and Putin, who i saw as a mere warlord enriching himself, yet they saw him as some moral bastion - similar to the insanity of fricking Magatards supporting russian raping Ukraine. That conservative republicans would support russia! Their cold war foe
A similar degeneracy seems to develop in all right wing circles and i quickly jumped ship both online and IRL, so my rightoid wingcuck phase passed pretty quickly
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Really? From all the giga-r-slurred takes from Stormfront that was the straw that broke the camel's back?
I hate Russia simping but it's funny it never took over in my region. The reason is that Putin has strong ties to Latin American left wingers like Maduro, Ortega, Morales, the Cuban Regime and Lula. Not because of ideological affinity but because he inherited them from the USSR, so they help Russia keep a foot in the !americas to exert it's influence, this makes Latin American right wingers anti Russia and more prone to supporting the US and ironically the MAGA movement. Bolsonaro was accused by media of being a Russia cuck because of a meeting with Putin (like it or not Brazil needs Russian fertilizer so that's realpolitik), while Lula, the biggest Russia cuck gets a pass from journos.
Now that's just sad, and judging by your drama-ventings the future doesn't look bright for these youngsters
looks like migrating is becoming the better choice for them.
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It's about keeping to principles fool
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You're very intelligent and eloquent imo and the fact that you were willing to change your own views is a good thing. Everyone has r-slurred phases at some point.
Rightoids have good points but like you said, many of them fall for the illusion of strength and confidence.
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I am no bastion of intelligence lol, I'm a complete r-slur
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The key to life is finding balance. I'm definitely right
wing but I also hold some left wing views. If you go to far in one direction with anything, you'll find yourself 
in a very dark place
Extremism is a cult irrelevant
of what the extremist values are for
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What's your most left-wing ideal? The whole left-right dichotomy is so diverse anyways. I'm generally centre-right mostly on economic issues and a general believer in democracy.
Occasionally I have my extremist moments which tend to last 15 minutes. Like after the floodings in RS the journocels at UOL wrote articles about “See, that's why we need Big Government and why Small Government right wingers are wrong, small government will kill thousands in floods
”
Ignoring small government types in this country don't want to dismantle infrastructure or emergency services but rather focus on cutting useless spending, the level of wingcuckery to make a fedora point over a tragedy is disturbing and disgusting. Reading stuff like that makes me wish we were living through the “lead years” in the 70s, when the “Division of Censorship of Public Funs” reviewed journo articles before publishing censoring them and when journos were exiled, arrest without warrant or murdered by the government. Then I take a deep breath and go back to my senses
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My most left wing position is probable related to the necessity of traditional unions to protect the rights
of skilled labor. Collective bargaining and cooperation between 
skilled workers to ensure upper management treats and pays workers fairly. I despise the entity they've become in the United 
States 
however. Especially government unions.
Honestly it's hard to call something right
or left wing these days with regards to modern 
political 
discourse. The values change darn near daily.
Tolerance (before it became acceptance) would
be another I guess. There 
was a period 
of time I remember when the left truly was a proponent of civil 
liberties but those days are dead and gone sadly.
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Aristotle should
have killed 
himself 
at 30; might have saved millions of lives 
taken by Alexander the great 
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Where are these people?
A lot are done with those subsidies because they'd rather have those billions spent on Americans, but supporting Russia is pretty far-fetched.
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Cope magatard
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What?
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Thoughts on Behemoth?
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Is that a book I never read it
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It's the name of the demonic cat on Master and Margarita. What's his name on the translation?
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Im only on chapter 5 yet, no spoilers
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Ah ok, I don't remember when they named dropped the cat
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I really enjoyed this for book club.
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You should read some of Vladimir Sorokin's books right after
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Some of Saki's short stories. They still hold up really well today after a hundred years. Like The Schartz-Metterklume Method. Lady Carlotta was the original dramanaut.
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"The Once and Future King" by TH White.
I didn't really know anything about this book before I started. Despite being a well-written fantasy doorstopper recounting the legend of King Arthur, it's at least 50% a pisstake set in an extremely anachronistic world. I mostly find it clever rather than laugh-out-loud funny, but every now and then a line really gets me.
Considering this is the best known modern King Arthur book, I have no idea what the most recent "straight" telling is. As a burger I didn't really grow up knowing anything about King Arthur, but I'm not sure if it's still a universal touchstone for young bongs. What do people tend to read?
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I loveeeeee that book holy shit. My grandpa gave it to me as a kid.
Nostalgia 
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King Arthur had many adaptations. Not about King Arthur himself but one of the most famous arthurian legend romances is “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, it was written in middle-english and is earlier than Chaucer so the language is rough for modern readers but there certainly are modern translations.
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Tolkien has a good translation imo
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I finished Europe's Tragedy : The Thirty Years War by Peter Wilson earlier this week, it was basically a textbook, but I enjoyed it.
Rereading Lord of the Rings, just finished Fellowship, still enjoy it as much as the last time I read it.
Just starting SPQR by Mary Beard, can't really speak on how good it is but I've enjoyed the first chapter.
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That's a good one. It's been years since I read but I remember she goes into details about daily Roman life and recent archeological findings.
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I am currently reading Mann's The Magic Mountain and trying to finish Marvin Minsky's The Society of Mind. And also 40k slop, because
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Just started “Shadow & Claw” by Gene Wolf. Which is the first 2 books of The Book of the New Sun fantasy series. I'm only 40 pages in and I'm assuming it will be awhile before the hook falls in. So far just a bunch of explanation of the area of a city the main characters guild is located and reveal of the main character being an unreliable narrator.
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Honestly the Books of the New Sun were some of the best fantasy I'd read in a while. It's a slow build, but once the stage is set it gets really weird. I'd recommend the companion book, Lexicon Urthus if you find yourself confused
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Interesting, I googled lexicon urthus and found there's some more short stories and novellas set in this saga, are those worth reading after finishing the five main books?
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The long Sun cycle is still sitting on my bookshelf and I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. I did recently read The Shadow of The Wolfe, which is a collection of short stories by Gene Wolfe and enjoyed that immensely though
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I read Typhoon by Conrad.
I enjoyed it but Lord Jim was better.
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I'm reading a memoir on a couple's year spent at Scott-Amundsen at the South Pole
I'll probably do an effort comment in one of these threads when I finish it, because it's split between two narrators and the foid drives me up the wall
and both of them are kind of pretentious
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I've been reading mediocre web fiction
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What is it about?
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https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/64916/heck-difficulty-tutorial
Western isekai dungeon power-level autism with a different story on every "floor"
It's not great and I'd rather go back and reread Taint a third time but I get a 403 error on that author's site now so it's fricking gone
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I decided against Mazirian the Magician and Piranesi so I'm currently reading In The Miso Soup, which I've been slow to read as this has been a busy week. So far its really good, the prose are very unusual in a good way, switching between broken English and regular English, which makes me wonder how you would simulate broken English in Japanese. It has some of the usual peculiarities of Murakami, but it is pretty good so far.
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Before they Are Hanged second book in The First Law trilogy. This is the first fantasy I've read in a long time and I'm loving it. Loved the first book, loving this one and I bet I'll love the third.
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I'LL DESCRIBE THE BOOK IN MARSEYS AND YOU GUESS WHAT I'M reading...
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Dune?
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NO, BUT GOOD guess...
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I finished "To A God Unknown" by John Steinbeck. I really enjoyed it and I'm reading "Cannery Row" next.
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Reread of Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed.
Reading Flicker by Rozsak from the library
Started The Pisan Cantos by Ezra Pound
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Horny DMs from ur mom LOL
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You will never be a real wizard. You have no wand, you have no mana, you have no spells. You are a LARPing muggle twisted by nostalgia and schizophrenia into a crude mockery of nature's perfection.
All the “validation” you get is two-faced and half-hearted. Behind your back people mock you. Your parents are disgusted and ashamed of you, your “friends” laugh at your ghoulish appearance behind closed doors.
Sorcerers are utterly repulsed by you. Thousands of years of evolution have allowed magic users of all types to sniff out frauds with incredible efficiency. Even muggles who “pass” look uncanny and unnatural to a mages. Your bone structure is a dead giveaway. And even if you manage to get a drunk thaumaturgist home with you, he'll turn tail and bolt the second he gets a whiff of your diseased, infected mundane nature.
You will never be happy. You wrench out a fake smile every single morning and tell yourself it's going to be OK, but deep inside you feel the depression creeping up like a weed, ready to crush you under the unbearable weight.
Eventually it'll be too much to bear - you'll buy a rope, tie a noose, put it around your neck, and plunge into the cold abyss. Your parents will find you, heartbroken but relieved that they no longer have to live with the unbearable shame and disappointment. They'll bury you with a headstone marked with your birth name, and every passerby for the rest of eternity will know a muggle is buried there. Your body will decay and go back to the dust, and all that will remain of your legacy is a skeleton that is unmistakably muggle.
This is your fate. This is what you chose. There is no turning back.
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