!bookworms when you read your sad boy romance how much spice should there be ?

https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2024/07/10/a-bold-new-look-for-the-a-song-of-ice-and-fire-boxed-set/

The new covers

https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2024/07/09/on-the-road-again-5/

Blog about TWOW where he assures the book reveal will be a huge event.

Let me say a few words about that, though. Last year, when I mentioned seeing my Voyager editor in London, the internet went nuts, throwing up all sorts of theories about how this meant that WINDS OF WINTER was done and a huge announcement was at hand. Uhhhh… sorry guys, but no. That's not how it works. Making contacts… which often turn into friendships… is a huge part of publishing. Most of my communication with my editors and publishers is conducted via emails, phone calls, zooms, and texts (in the old days, we had letters written on paper too)

So calm down, please. When WINDS OF WINTER is done, the word will not trickle out, there WILL be a big announcement… where and when I cannot say.

https://old.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/1dzk4gq/spoilers_main_grrm_when_winds_of_winter_is_done/

ASOIAFcels for the 100th time

!bookworms !kino do you like the new covers?

Gm !bookworms! I am in dire need of some assistance! If any of you can recommend some fiction from new and/or up and coming authors , please share below.

I am open to novels and short stories, I just need to read and review a piece that sorta embodies this new era of literature for a friend's project. I already have ideas, but y'all always have nice suggestions so I'd love to hear what you recommend! Ty sexy

https://boards.4chan.org/lit/thread/23568921

Olga you disgusting cretin sitting in your city book store with a line of cropped hair girls with shitty post modern tattoos thinking they've gone and done the next Instagram safe act of rebellion against their traumatized parents and lanklet boys who smoke thin cigarettes and have porn subscriptions writing about all her little peeves she has with passions and solitude and the quiet fire that burns alive in the countryside she is so brazenly afraid of with her egoistic mantra of spurning every little act of life from a man's heart so she's uplifted by some abysmal NGOs to go to university campuses and watch 18 year old girls bleed menstrual blood down their legs because that's what the old cesspool society told them was hip to do and they'll go on to join the ranks of shoulder length shitty tattooed females buying jackets for their little yapping terriers and stare miserably through time and drop dead in a country filled up with economic parasites yammering in the ugliest languages to ever infest the earth

!CHUDS

According to James Miller, Deleuze portrayed little visible interest in actually doing many of the risky things he so vividly conjured up in his lectures and writing. Married, with two children, he outwardly lived the life of a conventional French professor.

!bookworms

Somebody went and compiled that last 10 years of /lit/'s yearly top 100 books.

• There are now 10 4chan lists which I think is a considerable sample size. My guess is that even given 5-10 more lists, these rankings (especially spots 1-75) will barely sway, which I would not have said about the last list. Also, there are 102 books this time, as spots 15 and 70 are ties, and since everyone last time asked me what books just missed the list, now you'll know (spots 99 & 100).

• Tiering the books by # of appearances can feel somewhat arbitrary but is necessary to prevent books with 3 appearances outrank those with 10. 8+ appearances felt "very high", 5-7 seemed middling, and 3-4 was what was left, and so those are the divisions I chose.

• Like last time, genres and page counts were added "in post" and hastily. Page counts are mostly Barnes and Nobles, and genres are pulled from Wiki. Please notify me of any mistakes in the graphic!

Observations:

• American books dominate (more than last time) with 36 entries, Russian novels (14) overtook English (12) for 2nd place, Germany is 4th with 9 appearances, Ireland & France have 6, Italy has 5. The rest have 1-3.

• An author has finally taken a lead in appearances with the addition of Demons by Dostoevsky which brings the writer to 5 appearances. Then are Pynchon & Joyce with 4 each, and Faulkner at 3.

• The oldest book is still the Bible, but the newest book has changed completely, from what used to be 2018 (Jerusalem by Moore is no longer on the list), to now being 2004's 2666.

• 20th century lit has only gotten more popular, rising to 63 appearances. 19th century has 23, 17th has 3, and both 18th and 21st have 2. There are 5 books from BC.

• This list is more diverse than the last, if by a bit. 2 New Japanese novels make 3 total (though Kafka on the Shore was lost), a first Mexican novel Pedro Páramo, the first Indian entry (though a religious text) with The Bhagavad Gita, and I was pleased to add Frankenstein, which adds a new female writer and brings the total (though Harry Potter is now gone, so the # of female authors drops with the loss of Rowling [ironic]). There are, again, 3 women authors on the list, and 4 books written by women - as Woolf has two.

• The longest entry on the list has changed from the Harry Potter series (4,224 pages), to In Search of Lost Time at 4,215. The shortest book also changed from Metamorphosis (102 pages, still on the list) to Animal Farm at 92. The longest single novel on the list is Les Miserables at 1,462.

The highest rated books on this list that weren't on the last are The Sailor who Fell From Grace with the Sea at 61, and Demons at 64.

Genres, though blurry, are Literary Fiction at 12, Philosophical Fiction: 10, General Fiction: 10, Postmodernist Fiction: 8, Modernist Fiction: 7, Science Fiction: 6, and Epic Poem: 4.

GG effort

Choice comments:

There are almost too many Dostoyevsky books. He is certainly the most "fetishized" Russian author in the West, especially with younger people (maybe 2nd to Nabokov). Don't get me wrong, his works are very complex and profound. But I can almost guarantee you that some of those books are on the list only because people were trying to outDostoyevsky each other. Having read Crime and Punishment or Brothers Karamazov is no longer edgy enough, so they diversify into more fringe works. If they had read them, it was for the purpose of name dropping. Also, how many of them read the Bible cover to cover? I am certain there is a lot of cultural and social pressure (on that platform specifically) towards naming some works/authors over others. So you could say almost the entire list is name dropping.

Dostoyevsky is edgy?

open list

Lolita at 3rd

Infinite Jest at 6th

total of 4 female authors

yep, that's a 4chan list

4chan is literally just reddit for nazis change my mind

Alright I was gonna' be smug about this but the last time I posted on /k/ I was dabbing on how r-slurred the Krauts were for planning a mainland invasion of the USA during WW1 and the whole thread devolved into screeching about Jews.

Bit of a sausage fest.

I won't be giving any authority to a list by people who clearly don't read diversely. I know the stats on men not reading books by women but still 5/100 is a bit of a joke

What are some books that you would've liked to see on the list?

Edit: No idea why this is being downmarseyd. Legit question, and very much interested in new books to read or perhaps seeing books I've already read in a list.

Emma, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Handmaid's Tale, The Colour Purple, Jane Eyre, Beloved, Middlemarch (although it's not to my tastes haha).

Would also replace The Waves with Mrs Dalloway and move it way further up the rankings

Alrightly, gonna' remove these books from my reading list

4chan... Nah I'm good.

It's a much better list than this sub could come up with, I'll give them that.

I think this subreddit would have significantly greater diversity. This list is like all white men.

96 books by men to 4 books by women.

And Virginia Woolf is in at 56

Thanks for sharing.

A couple of notes:

Pride and Prejudice and To Kill A Mockingbird are two noteworthy misses that help explain the groupthink that contributed to this list.

A Stephen King would've been nice.

Why no Peepeeens?

Maybe controversially, I think a Game of Thrones belongs here. I can also see why it doesn't.

Three female authors? That's some list.

This list is a bit... insecure.

Also a /lit/ reaction thread to the reddit thread.

I don't mind fantasy slop occasionally, are they worth reading?

To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.

!bookworms !classics

I'm in part 5 of "Crime & Punishment", I'm currently doing a re-reading. The first time I read that book was 9 years ago, I remember the general plot but I had forgotten many details and there's a lot to the story I didn't understand on my first reading. I know Dostoevsky sometimes gets derided as a book for edgy young men but that's quite unfair considering how much influence he had on writers like Kafka, James Joyce, García Márquez, Mishima, Camus. And I think many miss the point that Dostoevsky critizes the nihilists (19th century edgelords) of his era. He can be quite a vicious satirist, there's a chapter where the proto commie Lebeziatnikov talks about how life in the commune will be and how marriage is outdated and how he's totally ok with cuckery and that he wishes being cucked if he ever gets married while Luzhin bursts in laughter while he monologues on a serious tone. Seriously, the guy vomited so many Rose twitter talking points, I guess there's nothing new under the sun.

Razumikhin is a chad just like I remembered him, he's the friend everyone wishes to have. Rodion is a pseudo-intellectual, he tries so hard to be edgy with his "extraordinary men not bounded to crime" manifesto believing himself as a sort of ubermensch, I love how Dostoevsky shreds his worldview as he suffers from guilt. I never read Brothers Karamazov but now I'm definitely going for it and add it to my reading list.

The conservatives do connect ideologically, like the communists of old. So ideas get copied a lot

Also, since Trump did win, people figure that works, let's do that.

Libre Institute playbook. Koch-funded propaganda outlet for Latin America...

https://thelibreinstitute.org

It's a unified global move to promote Conservative philosophy just as the Allies championed Democracy after WW2. CPAC is an international organization. No election is local any longer.Every election moves the dial for the world's population.

!macacos !latinx come check the"white-saviors". They unironically believe some think tanks no one even heard of has an impact.

When are they going to learn that MONEY HAS NO IMPACT IN POLITICS ANYMORE!!!

So many dem candidates lost despite outspending repubs. In Brazil Henrique Meirelles blew 100 million R$ on campaign just to get 1% of the votes while Bolsonaro won after spending like half a million R$. In the age of social media noise is enough to get you elected.

Not just ideologically, but also socially and financially. US right-wingers pour a lot of money into fellow organizations all across the Western world. Like anti-abortion movements and similar culture war shit

Is Brazil part of the West?

Brazil, nothing new to see here, what do you expect in a deeply racist, conservative, and misogynist country lihe the US? Brazil looks a joyful and open country in the surface, but beneath the reality is ugly, it is just a brutal uncivilized and corrupt, where religious fundamentalist have to much power as in the US.

TIL that southern Brazil is heavily Bolsonarista. I would have thought most Bolsonaristas came from like the "inland" region (north? west?)

Ha! No, southern Brazil is like Texas. They even wanted to secede in the past.

Burgers leftoids learn LATAM uneducated and ignorant poorcels are the core voters of our left-wing parties.

Also, the South is not comparable to Texas, that would be Goias or Mato Grosso do Sul. The Brazilian South is more similar to the Mid-West (soybeans, corn, kraut and slavic descendants). Also people here are quite socially liberal in the cities, Rio Grande do Sul is a famous target of gay jokes, but people here can't stand economic leftism, they're very economically right-wing.

!neolibs !bookworms

Today we release our latest investigation.

Author Neil Gaiman has been accused of sexual assault by two former partners in the first claims of misconduct against him, and is the subject of a police complaint in New Zealand.

Listen: https://t.co/emjtiynCnS

🧵1/6 pic.twitter.com/3eOyxHakcm

— Tortoise (@tortoise) July 3, 2024

!bookworms Here's my TWOW take.

A Dance with Dragons got published in 2011 and he got some leftover chapters for TWOW.

He started writing some of the book in the 2011-14 frame but his ADHD lead him to promote the show, go on tours and write TV scripts. So advancement was slow.

2015-18 he misses his deadline, the show outpaces the books, during this time he writes Fire & Blood (2014 was A World of Ice and Fire and 2015 A knight of the Seven Kingdoms) because he loves the Targaryens and is obsessed with Lore.

2019 the show ends and he gets sadge because it was shit and probably rewrites a ton of TWOW.

2020-2022 Pandemic Years: He said he made tons of progress writing hundreds of pages. By late 2022 he gave the first major update of the book in years, it was 75% done.

Now it's likely his ADHD is striking again with House of the Dragon and the Knight of the Seven Kingdoms show that he's producing himself plus depressed with Drumpf and his old friends dying (the latter I suspect is a bigger cause).

I still believe we'll get TWOW eventually as too much of the book exists but ADOS is getting extremely unlikely as he wants to write another Dunk and Egg novella and Fire & Blood part 2 after TWOW. I hope he at least writes some outline for ADOS to get published if he kicks the bucket before lol.

Also some excerpts from his blog lmao.

There is war everywhere. Ukraine and Gaza dominate the news, but there is a war in Myanmar as well that our western media just ignores, things are heating up in Yemen and the Red Sea, North Korea has nukes and is testing missiles and rattling sabres, Venezuela is threatening to annex three quarters of neighboring Guyana.

Meanwhile the US grows more polarized every day. Hate is rising, democracy is under threat, millions of Americans have swallowed the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Newspeak has taken over political discourse, cancel culture is destroying lives and careers, and we have a disgraced, indicted, venomous ex-president winning primaries despite openly declaring that he will be a dictator on day one and will govern on a platform of "retribution," when he is not busy grabbing women by the kitty. His last attempt to overthrow the government failed on January 6, but some of his more ardent supporters are now saying that "next time" they will bring more guns. There are actually folks out there wanting civil war.

Good morning !bookworms

Since none of you came up with an original/cool idea for a book, instead of going for the same 3 authors, I have selected 8 books for you to choose from (all the books are available for free on Library Genesis, so don't even use the excuse of not buying)

I have decided on 8 recommendations, all are from the last 10 years

2 Sci-fi books

3 speculative science

3 on Israel

Vote:

AND FINALLY

cc: @nuclearshill @binturong

https://archiveofourown.org/works/48535702/chapters/122428366

Summary:

After upsetting Celebi, capitalist banker, Edmund Blackadder, is transported to St. Fandom Academy in Ilex Forest. Edmund must take over the school so he and his sidekick, Baldrick can return to their rightful dimension. As well as teaching history, Blackadder is eventually assigned to be the homeschool teacher of Class D, which includes notorious students such as Eric Cartman, Ash Ketchum, and Vicky Pollard.

Notes:

This is a rewrite of my 2008 fanfic, St. Manga School. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/3995816/1/St-Manga-School

Chapter 1: Punishment

Chapter Text

Edmund Blackadder, owner of the world infamous Custard Bank was on top of the world. Thanks to another interest raise and mass deletion of jobs, he would be another billion pounds richer. He was going to spent that money all to himself, and he had no intention of sharing it with anybody. His life was perfect.

That was until his assistant, Baldrick had a cunning plan to make his birthday a magnificent one. With the modest salary, Baldrick received, he invested in a lifetime supply of turnips, and a pet he bought off random grunt from the streets.

"What is this meant to be?" Blackadder asked, picking up the green creature from the sack of turnips.

"Happy birthday," Baldrick said with a smile on his face. "From all your friends from Custard Winnings Bank."

"Well where's my cake?"

"I couldn't afford it."

"Baldrick, you're about as useful as a magikarp in battle stuffed with raspberries and cream."

Baldrick nodded. "Sounds delicious."

Blackadder sneered at the creature in his arms. "Just what on earth is this hideous green fairy alien with bit blue and black burglar eyes suppose to be?"

"It's name is Celebi." Baldrick patted Celebi on the head. "And a lovely little thing it is too."

"So you're blind as well as draft?" Blackadder mumbled. "Well thank you for your mind generosity, Baldrick, but there's only one place for this beast!"

"Where's that?" Baldrick asked. Blackadder eyed up the nearest trash in and tossed Celebi in. "Don't be like that, Boss. It did nothing wrong to you."

"It's face offends me," Blackadder howled. "It is the worst birthday present anyone could have. Your cunning plans are about as useful as the diary of the nine-legged Prince of Nigeria."

"I'm sorry, Sir!" Baldrick picked up the trash can so Blackadder could hear the muffle sobs. "When I saw this little thing for sale I thought it was a perfect present for you. You're on your own, and I thought you could do with some company."

Blackadder turned away. "Baldrick, you know me, I prefer my own company."

Baldrick took out an invoice for Blue Ladies For Hire. "Is that why you spend £5000 a week on prostitutes?"

"What are you doing with that?" Blackadder snapped, and snatched the paper off him. "Baldrick, you've given me no choice. I should fire you, but I can't be bothered with the paperwork." Blackadder held his hand out, closed. "Here is my fist, kindly run to it as fast as you can!"

"Alright then," Baldrick said and ran up to Blackadder for a whack in the face. Baldrick collapsed. As the trash can hit the floor, the whole room warped into a scarlet volcano, revealiving a white vortex. Before either men had a chance to speak, they were swept away into the abyss as Celebi waved them off.

"What the bloody heck was that?" Blackadder wiped himself as he got up.

"We've been taken to another dimension!" Baldrick guessed, scratching his pants. "Well the gates over there say we are in…" He tiptoed above Blackadder's shoulder to read the sign. "S.T.D Fanny Alchemy?"

Blackadder rolled his eyes. "It says St. Fandom Academy…why are we here, Baldrick. This is your fault for gifting me the cursed-bogey-coloured-rat with-Down-syndrome."

"As I was trying to say," Baldrick said. "Celebi can time travel, so when you run out of money, you can go back in time and get the money again so you can spend it again."

"Your head is as empty as a unicorn's underpants."

"Well, its your own fault for upsetting Celebi?"

"We need a to find a way back, Baldrick," Blackadder said, straightening up his black jacket. "We need to go back to London and I shall need a cherry."

"GOOD LUCK WITH THAT MATE!" Out from the fog emerged an elderly man who could easily be Santa Claus if not for his anorexic figure. Everything about the man with the white beard and hair to his cloak revealed that he was a wizard.

"Are you Gandalf?" Blackadder asked.

"What?" the wizard laughed. "I'm far too young to be him."

"Dumbledore?" Baldrick asked.

The wizard howled with laughter. "I'm too old to be Dumbledore too."

"Who are you then?"

"You know? I can't remember! Ha!" The Wizard stared at Baldrick as he spoke. "I understand that Celebi has brought you here, Blackadder to teach history."

"I'm not Blackadder."

"Oh…" The wizard glared down at Blackadder. "It's misery guts over here."

"Can Celebi or you take us home, we have no time for foolish games and trickery."

"Sure!" The Wizard declared. "First, you must take over the school and become the headmaster."

"Really?" Blackadder snarled. "I have to give up my life of money and pleasure for these pesky little beasts."

"Yes!" The Wizard declared. "Oh! I remember my name now: it's Merlin!"

Merlin faded.

The gates to St. Fandom Academy opened, and Blackadder was welcomed into his new home.

!bookworms !chuds kino

Hey !bookworms

I figured if I can spend 5-6 hours a week watching reruns of old sitcoms, i might as well spend an hour on a bookclub in rdrama.

I have a few conditions though

Barred:

B.1. No classics (no Steinbeck, Harper, Borges, Hemingway, Conan Doyle etc). Doing a bookclub posts on their works is, frankly, well just circlejerking.

B.2. No modern hipster "I-went-to-Private-College" author (Franzen, DeLillo, Yanigihara, DFW, etc).

B.3. Goes without saying - "I'm too smart ie a neckbeard" type obnoxious people who recommend textbooks

Not Barred:

N.B.1. Really good fiction. Examples:

N.B.1.1 Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver - A recasting of "David Copperfield," narrated by an Appalachian boy whose wise, unwavering voice relates his encounters with poverty, addiction, institutional failures and moral collapse–and his efforts to conquer them.

N.B.1.2 Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance

N.B.2. Really good biographies of interesting people written by really smart authors - Presidents (the lesser known ones especially), Industrialists (Vanderbilt, Joseph Kennedy Sr.), Generals (Omar Bradley, Nimitz, King etc), Scientists (Vannevar Bush).

N.B.3. Science Fiction (must be smartly written, the concept maybe dumb and unscientific). Think more "Story of your life" by Chiang and Jurassic Park by Crichton than whatever the heck Dune (too much on the nose) or Three Body Problem (trying to cover up lazy writing style with science) is.

N.B.4. I really don't want to but... History and General Nonfiction. Keep in mind Rule B.1 and B.3 still applies. No lame books like Sapiens or Guns, Germs and Steel. Neither are books like "Introduction to XYZ. An objective approach". Leave your autism out of this.

cc: @nuclearshill and @binturong (to pin this for 24 hours on /h/lit )

Edit: BARRED ON PUBLIC DEMAND: ANY NOVEL WITH 250+ PAGE.

To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.

!bookworms !classics

I'm still haven't finished Père Goriot and I began to re-read Crime and Punishment as It's been almost a decade since I read it and I was gifted a new and pretty hardcover edition. I forgot how neurodivergent the characters acted, I'm not talking about Raskolnikov but Luzhin for instance behaves and talks so strangely in his first meeting with his future brother in law and co., he first comes out as arrogant, then clueless with a "fellow kids" vibe. Marmeladov's rambling at the tavern was longer than I remembered, and what a pathetic and wretched person he is.

>Yeah, I'm a drunk unemployed loser, my wife got beaten up by shark loaners and I did nothing, my kids starve and my eldest daughter whores herself to provide for us, someone gave me a job out of good faith and old trust and instead of working I went to buy booze and get lost for 5 days. But God will have mercy on me because I'm self aware

I've always been optimistic about him finishing asoiaf, but the recent stuff like the Dunk and egg tv show seems to have motivated him more (ie pushing for money).

The other day he posted a second solitary cryptic quote on his notablog, this time from best president TR: https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2024/06/19/words-of-wisdom-3/

Previously he had this quote: https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2024/03/11/words-of-wisdom-2/ (this one has a blue rose image which is significantly tied to Lyana Stark)

Idk I think it's coming soon

To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.

!bookworms !classics

I haven't done much reading this week but I started Père Goriot, it's only 200 pages long so I'll try to finish it this weekend. So far I like Rastignac and I think Madame Vauquer is kind of a c*nt.

!kino

Still don't know how to make polls lol

It's like a universe of neurodivergents, right? No normal human talks like his characters do.

Who's read these books? I want to talk this shit out because they make me mad. I read Vacuum Diagrams when I was in Jr High, and have been working my way through his shit recently. Though Vacuum Diagrams was depressing, but holy shit, it's all pessimistic.

Why the frick is he obsessed with eusocial humans? If anything, neurodivergents are the oposite of eusocial.

There's a lot of contradictory shit, too. At some point the Silver Ghosts changed from kinda inconsiderate peepees to selfless martyrs. In Vacuum Diagrams there was a machine in Saturn that resonated micro black holes to make a cheap starbreaker, but in Exultant, humans just straight up have starbreakers. And in The Siege of Earth, Saturn conceals the Snowflake that can manipulate Mach's principle and deliver instantaneous gravitational attacks far beyond what was described in Vacuum Diagrams. For that matter, why was mankind in a Xeelee Hypercube? In the Siege of Earth, Luru Parz (btw the worst fricking character) puts Earth in a basket of time or something like that, but not a hypercube. So what timeline did the 8th Room happen in?

Transcendent is kinda interesting as an idea, but also ends up being morally repugnant due to the Undying being fricking ghouls. Baxter seems to have this idea that living longer makes you more of a frickhead and less human, when I would say the oposite happens. The premise that the Transcendence either has to kill all humans or "redeem" them also makes no sense. Seems like a cop out so the mankind can fail. He also went in big with the Clathrate Gun hysteria in the 22st century part which isn't a real thing. He seems to have a habit of extrapolating one questionable study into a whole novel.

All in all, still entertaining. Just wish he could write something positive with actual human characters.