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.

!writecel

I'm pooooooooooooblishing

I decided that I'm just gonna publish the fricking thing I've been working on as a fricking web novel. I realized I might never finish it, the fricking bar is fricking insanely low for free online self pub and having even a fricking handful of readers is fricking better motivation to write.

It also frees me from word count constraints, and in all fairness I don't think it's a fricking work that would ever get the fricking time of day from actual publishers.

Any of you do this, b-word? Thinking of uploading to Royal Road.

!bookworms share your comedy kinos

https://lithub.com/the-meanest-things-vladimir-nabokov-said-about-other-writers/

https://wmjas.wikidot.com/nabokov-s-recommendations

!bookworms !classics come check this out

Plato. Not particularly fond of him.

Lmao

Freud, Sigmund. A figure of fun. Loathe him. Vile deceit. Freudian interpretation of dreams is charlatanic, and satanic, nonsense.

Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind? I may have aired this before but I'd like to repeat that I detest not one but four doctors: Dr. Freud, Dr. Zhivago, Dr. Schweitzer, and Dr. Castro. Of course, the first takes the fig, as the fellows say in the dissecting-room. I've no intention to dream the drab middle-class dreams of an Austrian crank with a shabby umbrella. . . . The Freudian racket looks to me as much of a farce as the jumbo thingum of polished wood with a polished hole in the middle which doesn't represent anything except the gaping face of the Philistine who is told it is a great sculpture produced by the greatest living caveman.

Also @JimieWhales someone agrees with you on Hemingway and Conrad

Hemingway is certainly the better of the two; he has at least a voice of his own and is responsible for that delightful, highly artistic short story, “The Killers.” And the description of the iridescent fish and rhythmic urination in his famous fish story is superb. But I cannot abide Conrad's souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist clichés. In neither of those two writers can I find anything that I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile, and the same can be said of some other beloved authors, the pets of the common room, the consolation and support of graduate students, such as—but some are still alive, and I hate to hurt living old boys while the dead ones are not yet buried.

Or

As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 40s, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.

Then on Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Dislike him. A cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. A prophet, a claptrap journ*list and a slapdash comedian. Some of his scenes are extraordinarily amusing. Nobody takes his reactionary journ*lism seriously.

The Double. His best work, though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's "Nose."

The Brothers Karamazov. Dislike it intensely.

Crime and Punishment. Dislike it intensely. Ghastly rigmarole.

Then Camus, Sastre and Faulkner

Faulkner, William. Dislike him. Writer of corncobby chronicles. To consider them masterpieces is an absurd delusion. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me.

>Camus, Albert. Dislike him. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me. Awful.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Even more awful than Camus. Nausea. Second-rate. A tense-looking but really very loose type of writing.

on the last one, but I like Camus.

What about the authors he likes?

He likes James Joyce, Kafka, Tolstoy, Borges and Bely.

He names “Ulysses”, “The Metamorphosis” and “Petersburg” as the greatest pieces of literature of the 20th century. “Petersburg” looks quite interesting by the way.

Pasternak, Boris. An excellent poet, but a poor novelist.

Doctor Zhivago. Detest it. Melodramatic and vilely written. To consider it a masterpiece is an absurd delusion. Pro-Bolshevist, historically false. A sorry thing, clumsy, trivial, melodramatic, with stock situations and trite coincidences.

!anticommunists thoughts on Dr. Zhivago? Even if only the movie?

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

!bookworms !classics

I finished “The Lady with the Little Dog” by Chekhov yesterday, there's only one more short story on the compilation book I have, “The Bishop”. Next I want to start “Père Goriot” by Balzac as I downloaded the epub on my kindle like 3 years ago but never read it.

!bookworms have you read it? I highly recommend it, it is an hilariously grim glance at 19th century Russian peasant life. It's a novella by Chekhov, just 35 pages long in the translation I read.

It's about a man named Nikolai who worked as a waiter in a hotel in Moscow. He was sent as a kid to get a better life but at the beginning of the story he falls and becomes a cripple. Unable to work, he returns to his village alongside his wife Olga and their daughter Sasha.

He had some happy childhood memories but once there he suffers a culture shock. The “Izba” (Russian peasant log house) where his parents, sisters in law and nephews live is very small and dirty.

Unlike most modern American “liberal urban dwellers visit their conservative country hick relatives” in this story, Nikolai's wife Olga is the pious one. She's very religious and regularly reads the Bible. Her in laws on the other hand are wretched people, they're all illiterate, they don't know any prayers and just go along with what the priest tells them, they curse and blaspheme a lot and display enormous ignorance (at some point their samovar get's confiscated because they didn't payed their taxes, the reason was that grandpa and uncle are both useless drunkards spending it all on vodka so the Starosta tells him to file a complaint in their next meeting, the author ads grandpa couldn't understand shit of those big words but felt satisfied). Granny is an abusive crone beating the crap out of her granddaughters for no reason other than being annoyed at the geese running around (Sasha tells her cousin that hopefully Granny will burn in Heck after Judgment Day). Uncle Kiriak is a violent boozetard who constantly beats his wife. At another point grandpa and his r-slurred buddies accidentally burn up the house of a neighbor. It is also stated that they use the money they collect for the village and spend it all on booze.

!nooticers !neolibs are these the BASED and TRAD Russians I keep hearing about?

Leo Tolstoy, despite being an admirer of Chekhov HATED this novella and wrote a scathing review calling it a “crime against the people” . Chekhov wrote the story after partaking in the Russian 1897 Census, he visited countryside villages, talked and observed people, Tolstoy's review makes sense considering Tolstoy was a landed nobleman LARPing as a peasant.

https://themasonicsociety.com/content/the-journal-of-the-masonic-society/

https://www.rosecroixjournal.org/resources

!bookworms

!bookworms !classics what's some “high-browed” literature you can't stand or just can't “get” despite the critical acclaim?

https://x.com/SimonSchfe45703/status/1799016360238088400

lmao @ humanities

(IDK the context of this and he might be replying to another philosopher and applying their logic to show something is ridiculous but that doesn't help my agenda so that possibility getting ignored)

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

!bookworms !classics

I'm started readings some Chekhov's short-stories. First one was “The Kiss”.

!bookworms !classics

What are your hot takes on some of “The Great Books”, those considered part of the Western Canon. I'm not limiting it to the Enciclopedia Britannica volumes, you can talk about any of the renowned works on 19th and 20th century literature.

Not gonna elaborate.

That's right you filthy scrotes! In modern literature you are NOT allowed to have writings about women which appeals to the Male gays - you are NOT allowed to have ANYTHING which appeals to men, because it is CHAUVINIST and SEXIST and ALIENATES people of fronthole predispositions !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111

You will see this mentality all over on online reddit, it really is repulsive. Once again it is one of those bastardized liberal ideals which is good at heart and concept, but which has been warped into a corrupted woke force by shitliks and wokescolds.

The idea that women can be put off by men who get them wrong or that female characters can be written as nothin more than smut coomer bait is a valid complaint by feminists. Whether it be a hobby being so stratified by gender, or a genre or franchise being so male dominated, especially by neckbeards who've never interacted with womynx their entire lives outside of the fast food teller, and are thus writing women so freakishly badly that as literary devices they are actual abominations to the craft of writing itself,

all of these ideas and complaints I feel are valid. /r/menwritingwomen on the surface would be a cool conceptual sub to learn about how much men get wrong in their descriptions of the fairer s*x - how attitudes and outlooks can differ between the sexes, even those mistakes done completely without malice or chauvinism, and only through ignorance and the fact that sexes seldom can truly conceptualize the differences in lifestyle each other faces.

Isn't that a cool idea for a sub??

But that is NOT what /r/MenWritingWomen is about. The 1st time you'd read or interact with the sub and similar subs on Reddit, you'd come to the conclusion that they have a point! Men having been the dominant demographic in fiction for the past 100 years - and this has led to unintentional but real cultural chauvinism in Male dominated writings - similar to Japs in anime which cannibalizes its own tropes and has a very incestuous relationship with its own literature, and the complaints of even weebs about the Anime industry being redundant and repetitive, is rampant on even weebshit forums or subs, and has been criticized heavily outside the anime-fandoms for these childish and infantile tropes which invest the anime industry,

to the extent that even dramatards here have developed a great deal of disrespect and active hatred for anime, and don't miss a chance to let us all know how much they hate the medium on every Weekly Anime Post here.

In the same vein as the average dramatard would hate one weebshit, so too would the femcels of /r/MenWritingWomen b-word and moan about any literature written by man, but especially when there has been any sexuality or romance added. But Again, on the surface level you'd be forgiven to believe initially they had a point!

Many many male authors themselves had openly stated publicly that they struggle to write realistic women, and those of us who've had actually picked up a book since the prescribed shit we were assigned and forced to read since highschool, may have come to the same conclusion - that writing realistic and authentic people is difficult, especially if those peeps are decisively outside your demographic, and thus the function of /r/MenWritingWomen would be a fascinating outlook on this previously male dominated genre of writing, especially when most writers had been influenced by their past peers, and since fantasy writing had been dominated by men for the past 100 years and more, the scrotes of today obviously didn't exactly have numerous feminine examples from which to forge their writings after!

But again that is NOT what /r/MenWritingWomen is about. Instead it's a quasi femcel sub invested with bitter hags who hate men, and more specifically hate anything related to catering to men.

The sub may have been founded on good ideals, after all I kinda agree with the in-sub meme about the trope of female characters boobily doing action scenes and how attention is unnecessarily placed on to the BOSOM of heroines by male authors. Our boi Robert Jordan had zero shame in his portrayal of babes with LARGE bosoms in Wheel of Time.

But the circlejerk which invariably breaks the original culture of all large reddit subreddits, has meant that the sub would spiral into continuous purity bitching regarding the words written by men, to more and more extreme degrees. To the point where, the sub focused not just on men writing women in an absurdly oversexualized coomer fanfiction, to basically bitching about any words every written by a male author having the AUDACITY to even THINK about sexualizing a female character or the female form.

Now most normie women who have good lives IRL and aren't legbeards who waste their lives away on internet echo chambers will also have their own scale or stadard to which they will tolerate a male author's incompetence regarding the writing of a fictional woman, and whether any romance or s*x between a man and women is endearing or r-slurred.

But the femcels on /r/MenWritingWomen have standards SO perverse, that no book or novel ever written by the male s*x is not misogyny or chauvinism or abrasive to femcels. Ask them long enough and they'll be fricking hard pressed to bring up even ONE example of a book written by a man that is in no way PROBLEMATIC to their senses. In fact if the circlejerk reaches critical levels on the sub that particular day, then the consensus of the femcels are that it is in fact IMPOSSIBLE for a man to write a woman, or sexualize women which is in no degree chauvinistic, EVEN if that book is the rare male-authored Romance novel and the very fricking objective such a book is the inevitable romance leading to sexuality of the characters!!!

And this is my problem with /r/MenWritingWomen and the types of shitlib femcels who share their extreme variant of this Progressive ideology - they take the concept of men failing to portray women faithfully being an issue to women, to taking that ideal to the extreme degree in which ANY writing, even those deliberately catered to the male audience, especially sexuality or romantic intentions appealing to men are taboo for these hags

They're also hypocritical in the sense that they will never EVER avow or acknowledge that women are capable of the same vice of writing male characters flawed as women too struggle to conceptualize demographics outside of their life-experiences. None of the legion of shitty smut written by Foids in the world, even the most lowbrow shit ever enters their criticism echochamber. No proof will ever let them confess any legitimacy that this is a unisex problem.

Now matter that Romance is still the top-selling genre of books for women in the world, and that all of these fricking things are literal fantasies where women envision themselves picked up by Chad, which would realistically be wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy out of their league lol.

Even non-Romance novels are seldom ever acknowledged by these femcels to ever have any flaw by women. And instead it seems like these zoomer freaks aspire to hall all of fiction be sandblasted free of ANY sexuality, especially the sexual portrayal of women in attractive form.

There is a theme and similarity between /r/MenWritingWomen, and the recent Sweet-Baby-Inc type shitlibs who've reached the helm of command of organizations and mandating that all female characters be blobbed featureless fuglified unattractive female characters, especially characters which had been deemed attractive by men.

But the men remain sexy! Just like the impossibly attractive HVM Chad who fricks the fat chick in the shitty sloppy foid romance novels lmoa

Spend long enough with /r/MenWritingWOmen types and you'll even develop the conspiracy theory that the reason why the femcels there hate sexuality portrayed by male authors, is NOT because they dislike unfitting sexuality placed within books by male authors,

but simply because just like Sweet-Baby-Inc DEI types, they want to warp all male sexuality to have no competition against attractive women in fiction!! and want all fantasy sexuality to only feature fatsos and fugly people like themselves!

Of course I'm probably full of shit in this regard - what are you theories and Hot Takes on this, dramatards?

40K LITERATURE DRAMARAMA:

I was combing through old controversial threads in the sub, when I found a common theme to cause disunity in the sub - bitching about a top Black Library author who portrayed women as sexy in his books

https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1d3z0te/things_that_annoy_me_about_gaunts_ghosts/

Dan Abnett is my FAVORITE 40Kslop author and is well regarded by most 40k reading r-slurs @D but there are still slapfights about Dan Avnett and his writing style, and the peeps who hate his books, REALLY hate his books, and this causes some friction especially since Abnett has contributed something like over 100 novels/short-stories/audio-dramas to the Black Library over the past 20 years!

Many wokescolds have bitched about Dan because in his early work all of the female companions and heroines were all super sexy and woke skintight stealth bodysuits

And boyyyyyyyyyyyyyy don't they do the feministas don't like this at all!

"He's got better recently but yes. My brother and I still have a running joke about 'voluptuous' and Kara Swole in the Ravenor series"

"I had a ex-gf that I introduced to WH40k, and we started with Eisenhorn and Ravenor She even commented that it sounded like Dan Abnett needs to get laid or something, or start writing for Playboy or another Gentleman's magazine... At one point she was laughing about the Carnivora acrobatic plot line, when Dan Abnett spent an entire page explaining/detailing Kara's transparent skin tight suit thing lol"

Lol Dan can be thirsty but these fools exaggerate to an obscene degree - I don't know what sexless Sci-Fi slop they usually read where even the comparatively minor sexualization is so instantly abrasive to these sexless zoomer fools, but it's always apparent the personality type of people bitching about sexy women in fiction.

The next butthole badmouths our boi Jordan!

Reminds me of the Wheel of Time. I actually gave up halfway through the first book after the 98th usage of the word "bosom". Men cross their arms, women "cross their arms over their heaving bosoms"

"You really don't want to read the Peter Hamilton books... Every female character is insanely hot and described in great detail and how the clothes they wear shows off their pert and full breasts and accentuates their long legs. Every single man is entranced as they breast boobily down the stairs. They guys? I dunno Brown hair and a suit?"

THE BOOOBILY BREAST BOOBILY MEME MAYAY

Chain further devolves into Wheel of Time bashing

"Wheel of Time lol 😂 the most overrated book of all time my dog could write better prose."

Thank you. I used to play MUDs based on the games with friends, which forced me to keep reading the progressively worse books - And what makes it worse is that it's marketed as a supposedly feminist series due to being matriarchal, when all the ostensibly powerful female characters besides Morraine end up acting like petty children, fawning over male characters, and fantasizing about being spanked. It made me wonder what Jordan's wife was like. She must have spent all of her time smoothing skirts, tugging her braid, and folding her arms underneath her ample bosom."

"How the frick did he get married"

Back to 40K reeeeeing

No sexy people in MY FICTION!

"Yeah, Dan Abnett's a decent author, but writing women is one of his biggest weaknesses, if not the biggest. Gotten better over time, but Legion was definitely where it plummeted, and I still remember that one Gaunt's Ghosts book where one female soldier accused another of trying to get with Gaunt because he was the alpha male or some other dumb shit, and that the second disliked the first because she saw her as a competitor for the "alpha"."

Dan Abnett is a flawed author, and female chars are one of his weaknesses, the but the DEGREE to which these straggots categorize his writings makes me wonder if they explode if they read other actually much more chauvinistic literature out ther?

https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1d3z0te/things_that_annoy_me_about_gaunts_ghosts/l6b95vs/?context=8

https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1d3z0te/things_that_annoy_me_about_gaunts_ghosts/l6atafw/?context=8

"What did you expect from an almost 25 year old book. Male audiences like(d) sexy girls. I don't see a problem even now. Especially because most of the women Tanith are super competent."

What did you expect, we were all cavemen savages 25 years ago, where everything written by sexist problematic boomers was all conservative trash!! MODERN AUDIENCES don't like sexy grils anymore!

"As a straight woman-"

"Opinion disregarded!"

"I'm sorry my take was shallow and boring for you."

https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1d3z0te/things_that_annoy_me_about_gaunts_ghosts/l6bia5f/?context=8

"EDIT: And just to be clear since I've seen this accusation elsewhere; I'm not advocating for a rewriting of the series or saying that people shouldn't read them, or that Abnett should be, like, cancelled or something. I think we can acknowledge that his early writing had these problems, though."

Sure @sshole You just want wrongthink to be sandblasted out of existence

https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1d3z0te/things_that_annoy_me_about_gaunts_ghosts/l6b66le/?context=8

"Don't be reactionary, there are absolutely problems with early handling of women. No one has agitated for "cleansing", they're just asking if the writing gets better because I have to tell you, Abnett's earlier writing is absolute terrible when it comes to female characters. But Abnett improves as a writer and human being, so later on his female characters are just characters that happen to be female rather than a strange alien species. Notably, he got a wife, herself a writer, who doubtless had Opinions about how weird the women were written in comparison to the way women are in real life (ie. normal people too)."

And again here is the issue which I think is murky - many secular puritans verge on this edge where they have a sensible point regarding the failing of male authors regarding the depiction of women authentically, and this concept warped by their new woke secular religiosity puritanism, where wrongthink is to be shamed by the tribe for conformity.

I don't know what to make of this, what are your thoughts on this, dramatards?

Some coomer chads

"I love his work but in this day and age of madness women aren't allowed to be attractive because ugly women are jealous"

Remember that one soy https://old.reddit.com/user/tutorp I followed some of these types and they all have this same one-minded mentality

https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/15m7k1i/girlfriend_is_curious_about_40k_what_book_series/jvkrk0b/?context=8

"How is eisenhorn chauvinistic?"

"Chauvinistic might be a bit of an overstatement, but I've heard people get a little put off by the way Abnett writes his female characters in Eisenhorn and Ravenor, and by how some of the female characters are described, physically. A bit of a "male gaze"/fanservice way - which I do kind of agree is the case. It's not a big part of the books, though The Bequin books does not have that, so it's arguably a POV character thing more than an Abnett thing. Or he has improved his characterization of female characters. :-)"

CONCLUSION WITH RANDOM DAN ABNETT HATE THREAD:

https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1ac8t5n/dan_abnett_is_the_king_of_40k/

"I genuinely don't understand the Abnett worship. Like… at his best he's pretty good, at his worst, which is more frequent, he's the most monstrously self indulgent author I've ever seen. His pacing is awful, he spends half the book introducing the plot and solves the ordeal in 2 pages with a hasty copout."

"well the Reddit cesspool doesn't seem to like it so it must be good"

!bookworms thoughts?

Here is Vladimir Nabokov's on why Dostoyevsky was a writer

https://old.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/17n8lrt/why_did_nabakov_dislike_dostoyevsky_so_much/

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/23/magazine/nabokov-on-dostoyevsky.html

@TR

One of the key facts about Nabokov is that he was a cranky old man his whole life.

Lmao

Hemingway talks about Dostoyevsky's unique style quite a lot in A Moveable Feast.

One famous quote is: “I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and yet make you feel so deeply.”

Undelete link

Im writing a horror novel but have never read one and wanna get into reading horror to help inspire me and develop a stronger writing technique, any recs? I am looking for any form of horror really I just don't vibe with Stephen Kings writing style idk why! I could never get into his books, but please suggest any of your favorite horror novels and what about the writing and how they conveyed their stories stood out to you.

My autism detector is off the charts as OP fights anyone telling her to read a horror book before trying to write one. She later storms off and labels everyone "pretentious" before forgetting the whole thing and moving on to other matters.

Like managing her dread rot

!historychads it was his half-sister-step-cousin-aunt-wife

!bookworms

I finished “Confessions of a Mask” yesterday, BUNCH OF SPOILERS AHEAD.

I found this book to be much better than “The Sailor who fell from Grace with the Sea”, the beginning was kind of weird with Mishima describing his fetishes like masturbating to a St Sebastian painting

This one to be more specific, and I giggled when he had an erection at school after seeing his older classmate show his hairy armpits during a physical education class while describing the pits as “black bushes” with fascination , not to mention his suicide fetishes.

Then by halfway the book became increasingly sad.

This an honest confession written by a man tormented by his homosexuality, he desperately tries to blend in and fails, at some point he holds on the idea of war and dying in battle or during an air raid, he even says he wishes his entire family would die as well trying to act as emotionally robotic as possible. Then we see that's just a coping mechanism as he cries after his sister dies and cries again after realizing his mates mocked him for not having being able to have s*x with a prostitute. You can also tell he wishes he was in love with Sonoko and kind of regrets not having married her, at the same time he knows it wouldn't have worked, or at least he wishes he was “normal” enough to be sexually attracted to her.

All in all this is a well written book and I wonder what sort of reaction it caused on mid 20th century readers.

!bookworms

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.

!bookworms !dinochads

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

!bookworms repent