Not a book, but I picked up the latest 2600 magazine
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I know I'm late to the party, but I genuinely think the Bachman books are some of King's best even if they deviate from his typical horror. I'd say The Stand and It are some no-brainer answers for being absolutely long joyrides beginning to end, but deep down The Long Walk, Rage and Roadwork are all my favorite work of his possibly. I'm not the biggest fan of a lot of his post-car accident novels, especially stuff like The Outsider and Revival which start out completely promising and ever so slowly deviate in King's largest crux: not finishing a book right.
I might disagree with you there, I thought Revival had a pretty good one all things considered, even if the peek into another dimension was a bit fleeting. I'm still on the fence about The Outsider's ending, though, it was far from a letdown like his past couple have been. They're not bad, but they just kind of end.
Speaking of the Bachman books, those are all pretty underrated, particularly, Rage and The Long Walk. That one feels like a YA novel from hell.
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A book written by arguably the main environmental activist involved with action against the oil companies in the Niger Delta, it's a really depressing book if you take it at face value and knowing only that they got executed by the military dictatorship only 3 years after it was published; it's basically 100 pages of them begging at whoever will listen to do something, since he and his people were being mostly ignored. The last few lines are particularly chilling:
The matter is urgent. I live in the hope that somewhere in this world, good still exists and that it will prevail over evil. If nothing is done now, the Ogoni people will be extinct within ten years.
People of the world, I appeal to you in the name of God to help stop this genocide of the Ogoni people NOW!
THE END
As a bittersweet result, things kinda did happen - his execution (along with eight others) finally got the international attention he was looking for.
It's really interesting having these kind of frozen-in-time reads with the context the future brings.
All of the stuff that happened in the Congo, Nigeria and pretty much the entirety of Africa post-WW2 to the 90s is just absolutely insane and horrifying. The Belgians, The Zanzibar Revolution, the Liberian Civil Wars.
While not a book, I just watched Africa Addio not to long ago, and that is uh, something to say the least.
I had a thought on Blood Meridian earlier. Judge Holden is probably the best villain I have ever read in a book. He disturbs you on a level that you only really feel out of some of the worst individuals in human history. If that speech of his near the ending and the ending itself don't cement themselves in literary history then I don't know what the fuck we're doing anymore with books as an art form. The response from the man and the epilogue make the whole fucking book.
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Anyone interested in military sci fi written by vets, this series is rad as hell
The main series of 9 books has just wrapped up, but they're writing these at a really good clip; there's already two shorter stories and a spinoff series of two novels
And they landed Karen Traviss to write at least one book in the universe, if you've ever read the Republic Commando series or her Halo series you should get real hyped for this one
Their pitch is "Star Wars but not Star Wars," on the surface it has a lot of the same tropes and character archetypes but it's extremely well written and very much has a personality of its own.
I really, really love this series, to the point where I'm donating ~$10 a month to these guys and they used my real name for a character in one of the later books, which is rad as fuck and something I'm always going to brag about.
I'm still on the two Pynchon novels, for how much you have to slow down the prose is so damn good. Thankfully there's a lot of resources online and plenty of hidden gems you discover along the way.
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Started China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. The atmosphere in this is excellent.
I picked up H.P Lovecraft The Complete Fiction, never read any of his stories before but I've seen and played a lot of works inspired by him. I've only read the introductory pages to H.P Lovecraft himself and the first story so far and I'm already pumped to read more.
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also picked up F&L On the Campaign Trail the other day.
When I was in high school I did debate and all the other kids made debate cases based on these French philosophers like Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guatarri, and Derrida. None of it made sense to me and today I'm still convinced that they were making all that shit up. And philosophy is a scam by wordsmiths to sell books to hipsters
that's a spicy take.
There are plenty of Philosophers I can't read but I think that's my lack of ability to understand rather than it being tosh, that and a lot of the English translations of the French philosophers are bad. Derrida is notorious for being hard to read also so the fact that highschoolers were trying to debate with his ideas is pretty outrageous.
Zizek lifts wholesale from Lacan too so I'm surprised you don't think that's gobbledegook.
read stirner
OT: Anglo Saxon England by Frank Stenton. Good overview of sub-roman Germanic Britain.
nice, dude. i know beaudrillard isn't very well-liked but i had a lot of fun with that one.
I read Kant and a bunch of classic/German philosophers, I just thought those French fuckheads were just making it up to sell books. Ultimately, I found it all pointless to read since I was unable to actually USE philosophy for anything
if you don't find philosophy useful for anything why would you go to the hassle of reading kant of all people lol
how did you find the focus to sit through an entire kant book if you did not find any use for philosophy in the first place? he is notorious for being ridiculously confusing in the way he writes even if you are aware of the works he references.
by german philosophers i assume you mean german idealists, in which case i severely doubt you found the likes of fucking hegel somehow more pleasant to read than the french poststructuralists the likes of derrida, who is a breeze to read by comparison. the only confusing french continental philosopher i can really think of would be lacan, which is strange because you claimed you can handle žižek.
Because I was in highschool and all the cool kids were doing it
i feel sorry for your loss. if you wanna be REALLY COOL, read Der Einzige und sein Eigentum or The Ego and its Own in English if you want to satirise Hegel. Read Stirner's Critics for a good laugh too. They're both incredibly well written shitposts that are excellent parodies of Hegel.
My lineage was
Kant -> Hegel (Schopenhauer too but he didn't seem that interesting so I abandoned him) -> Marx (and associated acts such as Ludwig Feuerbach) -> 20th Century Communists like Lenin though I never gave them much credence -> Dabbling in a handful of 20th century philosophers like Lacan (Freud, by extension), and Sartre
Ultimately, after I graduated highschool I realized I was just reading them to pretend to be smart and impressive to other kids in Debate so I quit that and focused on engineering
that's a pretty strong foundation for an education in philosophy and it's okay that it's not your thing. everyone's different, but it sure seems like it's always engineers who are the most pissed off and insecure about it.
I just can't bring myself to read many things anymore that I can't use in some way. It just feels like a waste of time
Reading shouldn't be about what "use" you can get out of it, it should be about learning new things, or enjoying a good story. About making you look at the world in new ways.
great cyberpunk novel, sequel to Cypulchre from the same author. very comfortable read if you're familiar with cyberpunk novels in general- if you're new to them the descriptive parts of the different technology can be a bit confusing at first. leaves alot of room to the imagination while still setting the world's feel in my opinion.
lmao who the fuck quotes Baudrillard and Deleuze in debate in high school
the same type of person who has pretensions of being capable of doing more than briefly and insufficiently skimming kant's work as a high school student, a philosopher whose work is so confusing that to this very day new studies are being done as to figure out what exactly he might have meant.
that is to say, pretentious high school kids with delusions of erudition and deep understanding because they've read a wikipedia summary or two, armed with the knowledge equally clueless kids wont be able to call out their lack of any deep understanding.
I was thinking more on the lines of what kind of case do you have where you base it on philosophers like those
honestly kind of delighted after so many years on the forum to discover this much literacy in philosophy all in one place, let alone postmodern material. for some reason fp is the last place i expected to hear about deleuze and guattari and baudrillard. good for y'all.
This masterpiece:
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Or rather, the Japanese version of it:
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I am terrible at reading though, it took me several days just to get past the first chapter.
Absolutely worth my time so far though.
Started Sapkowski’s Blood of Eleves. It’s definitely a change of pace from the other two books, which isn’t surprising but it’s already pretty engrossing. It’s only a shame that I know how much of it’s going to end from the various references made in the games.
That said, getting to finally delve into the background information and the world outside of the in game index has been quite enjoyable
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