To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.
I'm back at reading "Metropolis" by Ben Wilson and I had left it unfinished months ago.
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Weekly "what are you reading" Thread #76
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Jattuph_Biscuits
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talk about books or smth idk
/h/lit SETTINGS /h/lit MODS /h/lit LOG /h/lit EXILEES /h/lit FOLLOWERS /h/lit BLOCKERS
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My life is stressful atm so I'm rereading Harry Potter, it is cozy and non-threatening
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There's really something about HP and around Christmas time that just really hits
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From Tom Clancy's earliest work (his 2nd book?) before his American cultural chauvinism
became unbearable,
I mean I know Clancy has always been a neoconservative, but his latest work was the yank wingcuckery equivalent of call of duty modern warfare 3 slop shit, even Americans found Blops nr fricking 3/4/5? uninteresting in the end
Instead what makes his earliest work like Hunt for Red October spectacular reads, is that they are war and espionage thrillers rolled into one combo genre.
Clancy brings authenticity in terms of making his fictitious scenarios at least plausible within the realms of possibility, so that they are less fantastical , and more like frictional simulation for Cold War events
Red Storm specifically is great because it changes genre over the course of the book, from spy thriller to war and dread
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Fake fan
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I'm deep in Tolkien lore, though I fear I may have gone too deep, into the Dol Guldur of Tolkien's mind
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Idk, I think it's great that he's shining light on the experience of Black canadian youths!
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etymologicon and elements of eloquence, both by the same guy. They're books where you can read a few pages a day and learn a fair bit about language
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I'm reading about Cisco and the CCNA. I love Cisco!
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Peskin and Schroeder's Introduction to Quantum Field Theory
It's alright
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Lol are you in first grade or something
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No I'm just stupid
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I randomly saw the term Kafkaesque and realised I'd never read any of his stuff and so that's what I'm doing.
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Just started farewell to arms. Hemingway is fricking comfy as heck. I think this is fricking my last novel by him which is fricking kinda sad.
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I've just read 2 by him but enjoyed them. I like that writing style a lot too. Plot focused rather than the author wanking about with obscure adjectives and such
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Intro to mahayana buddhism. Theravada's a good place to start as just a philosophy/understanding the basics.
Now there's all this other shit I gotta learn like zen buddhism, japanese vs chinese buddhism, tibetan buddhism, some other type that starts with a V.
Mahayana is interesting tho, I'll just learn about that as a step 2
I'd like to learn sankrit at some point but I'll get to that later
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Continuing the Warlord Trilogy (modern historical fiction take on Arthurian legend). I just hit the third book.
I think I made a mistake by reading this after The Once and Future King because I still have no idea what the baseline story is.
The Warlord books try to imagine what a "real" Arthur might have been like, but they're still ultimately a response to traditions and stories that were developed far later. It's fun to see the author speculate on the pagan roots of the Grail quest narrative, but for every detail that has some historical element there's an "expectations subverted" version of Lancelot or whatever.
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The Once and Future King's take will always be superior to attempted "realistic" retellings because focusing on the realism misses the larger point to the legends.
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It's pretty good so far
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Rereading Wicked the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, going to go through this and Son of a Witch and finish the last 2 books which I never read.
It's really interesting how it is violently "woke" but it's kino as heck. The story is as much about the story and the people in it as it may have to do with what there are probably YouTube essays over how this or that is coded this. More of a testament to how actual woke modern stuff is badly written. Or maybe I'm r-slurred and it was meant to be written woke at the time, and the dude who wrote it just filled it with the stuff seething that he was owning all the 90s chuds.
It's different from the play though. I haven't seen the movie.
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Most of the great writers in the past century were varying levels of "woke", it's just that modern writers grew up consuming more wish-fulfillment entertainment slop than serious literature so they're shittier writers overall.
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Yeah, but the first chapters have this woman getting treated poorly because she's a slut and cheats on her preacher husband with a black (pink) guy, mentioning his big peepee, then the preacher gets in on it because pink (black) guy's casual cultural ways are mesmerizing. Then the pink guy gets lynched. There's some semi-sarcastic lines a woman makes about her unborn child being a parasite inside her. It's almost a chud parody about BBC cuckoldry and indigenous superiority over christcuckery - it hits every bar that modern slop would love to hit, like it should be hitting you over the head, but it's NOT about all that. It's nuanced and about the characters and I can picture awful ways some millennial would write it. It feels like I'm noticing this stuff because I'm culture war brained, but there is a lot of it. I remember this and the sequel being filled with it.
The question I guess I should research if I dare, was did the writer see this as a vehicle to carry his cultural ideas? Did he write it thinking "everything is political whether you want it to be or not?" I kind of don't want to know and just enjoy the books, but I doubt it.
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From what I remember the reason why the book works is simply due to the fact that it's well-written. Maguire is pretty technically competent with prose, being able to switch back and forth between viewpoints fairly seamlessly, and is able to deal with dramatic situations with nuance and ambiguity.
As for your particular example I think there was a ton of nuance that Maguire added that the vast majority of the culture war brained writers today don't have. The witch's mom refers to the baby as a parasite but I don't think it's meant to be the author's antinatalist condemnation of fetuses, it's just showing how she's kind of selfish and vain (but she's not totally evil or anything). The preacher isn't an strict, joyless caricature of a religious man either, he's someone that genuinely cares about his family and people.
I think you're right that a modern writer would probably be terrible at writing something like this. If I were to try to describe the difference between Maguire's writing and the culture war slop we get today it'd be that Maguire kept the focus on the characters as people with all their complexities as opposed to acting out a morality play with puppets.
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The author is a gay Catholic so idk? Apparently he had one of the first legal gay weddings in MA
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Not one single person is gonna read all that
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WARNING!!!! If you overuse lefty lingo and go over the top, they can smell you out as "sus" and a r-word. you have to play midwit IQ, and agree to other peoples comments, before making them look like leftist cowtools.
THEY TOO HATE BEING SUBVERTED BY ME!!!
But they follow me for years on those sites and on invite only groomercords and on other reddits not in that news link. I CAUSED THE BOTS TONIGHT, SORRY!
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Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros
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