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:marseyreading: MARCH BOOKCLUB TITLE WINNER!! :marseyreading:

Good afternoon !bookworms !verifiedhot :star:

I hope you are all having a great week so far, I've been working literally nonstop :marseysleep: so I'm really excited to have a new book to read in my downtime! :marseyjump: I'm hesitant to declare The Gambler as the winner bc most of the votes were clearly by the g**mblers :marseyshooting: and not by bookclub members :marseyschizotwitch:, so what I'm going to do is veto The Gambler, move forward w/ the runner-ups, and let y'all choose between them in one final voting thread :marseyclappingglasses:

Sorry to do this :marseypaperbag:, I just somehow highly doubt that our resident (!)slots addicts are actually going to fricking read it or participate in analysis threads :marseyitsrigged:, so I don't want y'all to have to suffer through a book you didn't vote for yourselves. :marseyjustice: You have a period of 12 hours to vote and then I'll post the winner when I get off work tonight! :marseyangel:


final poll :marseyshakespeare:

wildcard: :marseycard:


ily have a great day <3 i pinged verifiedhot bc literacy is sexy!

https://i.rdrama.net/images/17097485801598272.webp https://i.rdrama.net/images/1709748580230907.webp https://i.rdrama.net/images/17097485797641318.webp https://i.rdrama.net/images/17097485805235968.webp

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Culture of Narcissism sounds interesting...

:marseyreading:

Lasch proposes that since World War II, America has produced a personality-type consistent with clinical definitions of "pathological narcissism". This pathology is not akin to everyday narcissism, a hedonistic egoism, but with clinical diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. For Lasch, "pathology represents a heightened version of normality."[3] He locates symptoms of this personality disorder in the radical political movements of the 1960s (such as the Weather Underground), as well as in the spiritual cults and movements of the 1970s, from est to Rolfing.

Robert Christopher Lasch (June 1, 1932 – February 14, 1994) was an American historian, moralist and social critic who was a history professor at the University of Rochester. He sought to use history to demonstrate what he saw as the pervasiveness with which major institutions, public and private, were eroding the competence and independence of families and communities. Lasch strove to create a historically informed social criticism that could teach Americans how to deal with rampant consumerism, proletarianization, and what he famously labeled "the culture of narcissism".

Lasch was always a critic of modern liberalism and a historian of liberalism's discontents, but over time, his political perspective evolved dramatically. In the 1960s, he was a neo-Marxist and acerbic critic of Cold War liberalism. During the 1970s, he combined certain aspects of cultural conservatism with a left-leaning critique of capitalism, and drew on Freud-influenced critical theory to diagnose the ongoing deterioration that he perceived in American culture and politics. His writings are sometimes denounced by feminists[7] and hailed by conservatives[8] for his apparent defense of a traditional conception of family life.

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i chose it bc it fits p well w/ a lot of the shit we talk about on the site and what he has to say is really interesting when you look at online culture today, as the pathological tendencies he describes have compounded on themselves and become considerably more extreme from millennials to gen alpha (who i am sad for beyond words :marseyrain:). I thought a lot about Lasch when reading Didion's Slouching (one of my favorites :marseyhearts:) and I think it's a good book u idiots just have to stick with it and actually read it lol.

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You sold me on it

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right!! even tho it sounds like a lot of technical shit and a hard read it's actually really compelling and most of his points still hold water so i think even !dramatards and !r-slurs could read it and actually take something valuable from it :3

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I had never heard of it before myself, but based of your exchanges here, even if it doesn't win, I'm adding it to my list. Sounds interesting.

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yay! i'm so glad, i hope you enjoy it and take meaning from it. def read F&T (as the guy above said) too if you like it!

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so i think even dramatards and r-slurs could read it and actually take something valuable from it

The takeaways from the book aren't going to stick with most people imo. His diagnosis as to what's happening with society (the general self-centeredness of everything and its consequences) is spot on, but his solution (to oversimplify) is to touch grass and seek Jesus - do you really think that's going to stick with terminally online agnostics?

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It might help them stop being terminally online and agnostic :marseyhope:

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Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling would've been more effective (if people had the ability to read it). I read it around New Years and unironically took a leap of faith and have been going to church ever since (and its been great…who could've guessed).

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so valid, I've been on a slow journey back to religion since last year. I grew up Christian and it really soured my opinion on it until I started getting into philosophy of religion for school, which should prob work in the opposite direction but it didn't so i feel u and congrats! I would have liked F&T to win but it naturally did not bc obviously

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If you don't mind me asking, what exactly soured you from Christianity? I think it is extremely common for everyone growing up in the west to go through that β€œRichard Dawkins Atheist” phase so I think it's normal to end up as that standard irreligious person in your early 20s. To briefly blogpost, I went through that atheist phase, then graduated and β€œfelt” empty. Went through a β€œspiritual” phase where I'd read a bunch of philosophy and β€œwoo woo” spirituality shit, did tons of drugs (oooo ego death) etc etc, typical bs. But it never amounted to anything satisfying, it always felt shallow. Blah blah, got into a LTR, literally ready to make babies and propose, and it fell apart so fricking quickly right before proposal. Guy selling me drugs told me to read the book of John and told me the relationship failed because we didn't have God in it. Started reading the Bible, read some Daoist books (Zhuangzhi), picked up Fear and Trembling and certain things felt self evident for me: I need faith (this is Kierkegaard's point through his philosophy) and all the reading I have done (read tons of philosophy, from the basics like Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, to the more obscure like Land and Evola) didn't give me a solution…I could not rationalize myself to faith. Ultimately, I read β€œThe Orthodox Way” by Kallisto Ware and it solved all my issues with faith. Orthodox Christianity doesn't believe in rationalizing faith…it's all a Mystery and that's it. That particular book (and Orthodoxy in general) felt like a summation of everything I have read and yeah, here I am. I close my blogpost with the story of the prodigal son…tl;dr God loves you and is waiting for you to come back, He won't judge you negatively, he will embrace you with tears:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+15%3A11-32&version=NKJV

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Could I interest you in a bridge?

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zoz

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:marseymad:

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zle

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zozzle

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