Currently reading The Vision of the Anointed by Thomas Sowell and the book I finished before it was Knellers Happy Campers by Edgar Kenet which is a short story that was adapted into a movie in like 06 called Wristcutters about a guy who kills himself and goes to an afterlife for all the people who committed suicide. I learned it was based on the short story so I found it for cheap and read it
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Dang, y'all are some erudite as fuck readers. I've been reading trash light novels.
Seriously. I just keep chewing through kindle unlimited trash where the protagonist just gets ever bigger weapons to beat up ever bigger threats. Something satisfying about solving a problem with a bigger gun.
The above comment is entirely for humorous purposes. mharmless INC does not promote, advocate, glorify, or endorse violence in any form, including self-defense, warfare, or the putting down of lame animals.
Ha! I mix it up. Nothing wrong with light novels
I’ve read Ender’s Game but haven’t read the rest of them. Body Jeeps the Score Sounds interesting
I'm starting What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver this evening. It's a collection of short stories. I've read Carver before but its been a while.
Last book I read was 1984 I usually give it a re-read every fall. It's a quick read and interesting to compare with the previous year.
I need to start reading more non-fiction, especially Sowell.
It’s good to mix things up. I’m really enjoying this book. Written in 95 and Sowell makes it seem like he wrote it last week in some respects like when he questions the agenda of sex education and asks why they are so eager to go after young ones. I have 1984 but haven’t read it yet. Well, we read it in high school but I’ve been meaning to re-read it
I graduated highschool from the school he went to. He was very accurate about the town, and lied about where he went to school.
Hey, I know this is late but I had meant to ask:
I knew he was from the PNW. I can't figure if he was from Oregon or Washington. That doesn't seem like a big deal to me, considering those rural areas are similar (let me know if I am wrong.)
Is there any reason he would want to lie about his school? I know he was an alcoholic and maybe wanted to cover up his identity at the time.
Either way, I dig his stuff.
Yakima Washington. He went to Davis, but said he went to Eisenhower. Davis is the very ghetto school. Eisenhower was the upper middle class one.
Ironically the best gifted program was at Davis.
Currently on The Jump Ship by Andrew Moriarty (terrible pen name imo). It's what I would call a cheeseburger book. Nothing special but enough to satisfy you until dinner.
Before that was Great North Road by Peter Hamilton, that was a treekiller of a book at shy over 1800 pages.
Need to get back to Gene Wolfes Book of the New Sun. But his writing style is just hard to read imo.
What is Great North about?
I bounced off Book of the New Sun early in the first book, the cannibalism scene. It wasn't terribly pleasant before that either, but I did enjoy the way he described the ancient photo of the moon landing.
I'm reading through the first two Hawk and Fisher omnibuses. Pretty decent fantasy setting focused on a married city guard duo (the eponymous Hawk and Fisher). I'm enjoying them for what they are. It's got all the standard fantasy fare you expect, and the two lead characters are enjoyable.
Which is good, because the last two books I read before that are horrible. The first was House of Leaves, which I first started trying to read about a decade ago, but hated so much that I put it down halfway through. About a year ago I started fresh with it, hoping something about my feelings would have changed, but if anything I just hated it even more. I did force myself to finish it (it took almost the full year), because I have a longstanding personal rule about finishing every physical book I start. As a comparison, the combined Hawk and Fisher omnibuses are about as big as House of Leaves, but I got through 1 and a half of those in less than two months.
The other book was The Atrocity Archives, which I thought had a very interesting premise. Imagine the SCP foundation without the recent idiocy of the past few years, but the view of the government agency in the setting is less, "What the fuck is this?" and more, "You found a dimension-hopping quasit that reversed gravity in your kitchen and turned your dog inside out? Fill out form TFR-72a and wait in line, your number will get called." But the book itself is so entranced with its own made-up pseudoscience jargon it uses to "explain" the roots of the events ("A quasit uses Neo-Darwinian thermodynamics to reverse the root of the gravitational constant, which is how it reversed gravity" and shit like that) and that just makes everything in it a slog. Great premise, I just couldn't stand the execution. I'll force myself to finish it one of these days.
I’ll have to check that out. Especially Hawk and Fisher
Oh man, House of Leaves Every time someone recommended it to me and described it all I could think was the book must be the most pretentious piece of garbage written. Just nothing I have heard made the book sound good. I never have given it a read because, like you, I have to finish every book I start. And I don't want to commit to something I am most certainly going to hate.
Pretentious is the best thing I could say about it if I was being polite.
If I was speaking straight, I would say it reads like the author is getting off on intentionally being "unique" and all you end up reading is what pseudo-artistic rambling spunk ends up on the page after he's done masturbating.
Currently reading the original Robert E. Howard Conan the Barbarian stories...again. Last finished The Case Against Socialism by Rand Paul.
Cool! I actually finished the Howard Conan stories a few months ago. Loved them. Definitely something that is for guys. A legit studio could make lots of money adapting them. I have yet to read any Rand Paul. I’ve read all his dad’s books
A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food. Guy is taking his sixth-generation farm from a "modern" high-tech agriscience-driven farm to the regenerative model. He's quadrupled his farmland, gone from having three employees to a couple hundred, and has boosted his profitability in the process.
I’d love to learn more about farming. That sounds very interesting. I had a great aunt and uncle who had 40 acres of farmland, and growing up we would go visit them from time to time. I really wish I had taken more of an interest back then. They had a large patch for growing fruits and vegetables.
Just finished James Burnham's The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (must read for anyone interested in politics). Now reading Livy's Early History of Rome (must read for anyone interested in Rome).
I’m always up for learning about Rome
Not massively into reading, but currently reading Dune, prior to that it was The Hobbit.
I am more into audiobooks, currently listening to the Star Wars Bane Trilogy (it's pre-Disney content, and it's decent for easy listening). Prior to that, I was listening to some Lovecraft, specifically The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. I want to listen to I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream next, especially since it's available for free on YouTube and read by Ellis himself. I love when I can listen to the author read their own books, because it tends to be better regarding intended tone, even if their performance skill is lesser.
Cool! Dune and the Hobbit were great! I despise Disney Star Wars and have been into the EU since I was 12. I have the first Bane book but haven’t read it yet. Earlier this year I was going through NJO and the last one I read was the Lando Adventures.
If you like classic EU content (Or "Legends" as it's now called), then I would recommend the Bane novels. I'm currently on the second one at the moment, and the first was enjoyable and works as a standalone story with a hook simply to continue the story without being a cliffhanger. Definitely an interesting look into the Dark Side where most stories focus on the Light Side.
Absolutely will get to it. I haven’t read much of the Old Republic era outside of a few comics I have but I’m looking forward to it. Disney was so dumb to wipe that out in favor of high republic
If I'm honest, I could excuse a minor wipe of the lore, but they should have just picked the best stories and kept them. Because the EU wasn't perfect, but there was a lot that should have been kept.
I get it’s their property now so I would’ve been happy with them having a separate continuity for both. Like let third parties continue to write in the EU continuity or do animated adaptations. My biggest annoyance is that they hire activists who hate Star Wars and they seem to think it’s a problem if a lot of men enjoy a hobby.
Was reading Welcome to the NHK again the other day, but had to stop when I realized I have read it so much that I was preemptively recalling lines due to soft memorizing the book. Because something like 200 reads will do that to you.
My last prior was earlier this year (I get too caught up reading Manga to do text readings regularly) was the good ol' classic Lolita. Everytime I read it I catch another little tell about how deceptively framed the entire story is. Its really such a perfect teaching tool for how someone can craft a narrative and manipulate people into thinking something absurd and unbelievable is reality, that when you get the twist revealed (or don't fall for it in the first place) you can go back and find dozens of questions you didn't ask before.
I have Lolita but haven’t read it yet. I saw the movie a while back. What is welcome to MHK about?
The Lolita movies aren't nearly as good because the deceit is a lot harder to hide when you can visually see the events.
Welcome to the NHK is a modern classic Japanese light novel (though it lacks basically all the cliche common to those beyond how it was printed) about the literal garbage human Satou. He lives off his parents in a one room apartment, having dropped out of school and being unable to work to extreme anxiety/agoraphobia. His life is basically completely empty and worthless, to the point where he sometimes will wake up somedays and stare at the ceiling until he goes back to bed hours later. He has no plans or future, and without the intervention of the supporting character would just have meandered until he got evicted and then died as he openly states.
The plot involves the odd girl Misaki trying to take on the task of "curing" his hikkikomori problem, through absurd manners that he barely takes seriously and uses as something to get through his boredom. There is also the subplot of his neighbor trying to create an indie VN through sheer force of rage and hatred of normies, showing a different form of the same broken character who is the "hot" (angry) instead of the "cold" (emotionless).
Its got that classic Japanese apathetic detachment in its writing style and encompasses the lost and broken nature of a lot of young men who basically lose any motivation to escape their spiral, chronicling the self defeating nature they build up that keeps them trapped.
It has a manga and anime adaptation, which are fine but lose a lot of the power of it through both expansion and censorship. The novel shows how easily someone like Satou can fall into a pit of both drugs and lolicon obsession (its Japan), and both are a constant demon hanging over him. The manga cuts out most of the drugs and treats the loli thing as a funny one off thing, just like it does MMOs and MLM scams. Whereas the anime cuts all the drugs and recontextualizes basically everything as a funny romcom with sad moments.
"The Anarchy" by William Dalrymple, which is about the rise of the British East India Company and it's consolidating into the largest power in south Asia.
Not the best Dalrymple so far, Return of a King reads a lot better. Some lefty bullshit, but Lord knows how bad it can get with historical non fiction these days, it's actually not too bad.
Before that I read I was reading "The Basque History of the World" by Mark Kurlansky. Not a great book, it could easily be cut by a third.
The Basques are an extremely ancient and interesting people, but since there's so little recorded history (their language only being written in the 16th century) the book focuses too much on 19th and early 20th century history. And really gets bogged down on Franco, Hitler, the bombing of Guernica and all that "mustache man evil " sort of shit.
Sounds very interesting. I’m not very familiar with Basque history outside of the Guernica painting by Picasso
I'm reading "The Bothers of Gwynedd Quartet". It's a single volume collection of a four part series by Ellis Peter's, the pen name of Edith pargeter. Its fictionalised account of the life of the last true native born Prince of Wales Llywellyn ap Gruffyd and the struggles he had trying to unify Wales against the English and the politicking of his own family. I'd highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in medieval history. It's well researched, and from an English author it's very patriotic towards Wales. Plus men are men, women are women and God is great.
The author has a few classics, "A bloody field by Shrewsbury" is a great battle novel, and she had a long running series of Medieval crime dramas following a Benedictine monk called Cadfael solving murders with 'the Anarchy' as a backdrop.
A few hundred pages into the Brothers Karamazov, and prior to that I read Fry The Brain.
War of the Worlds, finished The Invisible Man before, going for some classics
When I get some free time and at home, I read some stuff I've held off on and re read some of my philosophy books. Currently dipping in an out of reading On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzche and previously read Atlas shrugged, man that was a longer but than most of my philosophy books.
Not reading anything currently, just finished Forgotten Ruin book 1.
Plot: Current world is beset by nanobot plague that someone released, which is slowly rendering all advanced technology unusable. US Government discovers time travel tech, loads C-17s with various high end military units and scientists, and sends them 10000 years into the future. Teams emerge into a world with all the usual magical world stuff, suddenly find themselves under attack, huge firefight ensues, etc.
My verdict: Plodding read, very slow paced. Not my cup of tea, won't be buying any more of the books (it is a series.)
That sounds like an interesting premise. Sucks to hear it’s boring
Looks like more kindle unlimited trash for my pile, thanks!
Reading Akira, working on my thesis, and listening to the Hobbit
Currently "Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism" by Eric Burns. This has been on my pile of shame forever (I got bogged down reading all of Michel de Montaigne's essays a few years back). Eric Burns used to host Fox News Watch which was an ombudsman sort of show that analyzed the news stories Fox News had presented that week and the takes on the news from various viewpoints. The book itself isn't bad if not a little lighter "history" than i was expecting.
Previous (also from the pile of shame): Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. Um... the first 200 pages were great and then it sort of went off the rails... Treating historical scientific figures using contemporary thought processes (which is probably closer than the historical literature represents it) is a clever and fun idea but then Stephenson tries applying that to political and religious leaders and that just doesn't work at all... and then he goes for the trifecta and puts a stronk women character in it.
Currently reading The Upanishads translated by Eknath Easwaran. Book I finished before was Introduction to Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus by Julius Evola and the UR Group.
Is introduction to magic about being a magician or something alchemical?
It's about "magic" in a spiritual sense. Magic in the book seems to be something very similar to the objective a Buddhist seeks in life or anyone into Spiritualism. A magus under their definition is probably something quite similar to a monk. The book was interesting overall and had some very thought provoking stuff in it but it was also mixed with a lot of junk. I probably wouldn't recommend anyone read it unless they're quite interested in the subject of magic. The book did motivate me to want to read more about Eastern Religions because I got the impression there would have been some overlap with some of the spiritualism and magic stuff in the book and Eastern Religions. That's why I decided to start reading The Upanishads and then I'll read the Bhagavad Gita.
Very interesting. I’m very much into the supernatural/paranormal topic. I do believe there is more to reality than what we perceive. I am a Christian but I don’t think we should dismiss things of that nature
"Modern Russian Tanks and AFVs"
It's exactly what it sounds like. I'm looking into getting more specific technical books on certain vehicles, I already have some on American and the rest of Nato's vehicles, but in depth technical books on the Soviet Block are hard to come by in the level of detail I'm searching for. In a few years when I can read Russian fluently I will be able too find them, but right now it is difficult.
Disciplines of a Godly man. Before that was Extreme Ownership.
Never heard of those. Will have to look them up. Especially the one about Godly men
Its been on pause for a while since I need both the right time and energy to read something so dense, but Works of Love by Soren Kierkegaard.
He's one of the only thinkers from the Enlightenment/Counter-Enlightenment era I actually respect. Man's a true genius.
I've also read some of the Rising of the Shield Hero LNs several weeks ago, they were good stuff. Can't wait to watch season 3 when it finishes airing.
I recently finished Atlas Shrugged, and am currently reading Star Wars Dark Forces: Rebel Agent.
It's tough to say I'm actively reading it, since I keep stalling and restarting, but I saw you mention you're into mysticism so I thought it worth mentioning that I'm reading Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt by John Anthony West. West was one of the researchers who helped to demonstrate that there seems to have been water erosion around parts of the Sphynx enclosure. His general thesis is that the core belief systems of ancient Egypt are far more comparable and overlapping with systems like hermeticism, esotericism, pythagoreanism, numerology, etc. than mainstream egyptologists and historians are inclined to admit, and that these elements are encoded into the architecture and writing. His seething sideswipes, aimed at the mainstream, imply that their wilful ignorance helps them avoid awkward questions about the relative sophistication of the tech in early Egyptian dynasties compared to the latter ones.
So in general it falls into the bucket of 'Atlantean woo-woo', but on the other hand West never actually goes that far, rather keeping his focus on what he sees as evidence-based examples of overlooked spiritual and architectural practices. From what I've read and seen of the man he was somewhat of a genius, but he has a rambling style full of his own subjective assertions (and as mentioned, he was seething a bit) so it makes it hard to stay focused on what his point is. Hence the stalls and restarts.
Also reading Jewish History, Jewish Religion The Weight Of Three Thousand Years by Israel Shahak, as linked elsewhere on this board. Insightful.
I haven't actually finished a book for a long time now but I suppose the last one was Against Method by Paul Feyerabend. Absolutely critical reading for those curious about how science got so stupid recently. Essentially, social institutions which present themselves as the most rational and dispassionate paths to knowledge are, due to the very way they work, myopic and insulated against the ability or inclination to discover critical new knowledge. Feyerabend argues this pretty much irrefutably, to my view. So it's about the philosophy and epistemology embedded in 'science' as a concept. I've heard it's best as a companion piece for Kuhn's better-known The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, though I haven't read the latter and feel Against Method stands fine on its own. Good for getting insight into epistemology in general, also it has parallels with Serpent in the Sky, since West's view was that he was dealing with an inflexible orthodoxy that had no ability to process new information rationally.
That sounds very interesting. I’m definitely into the “woo woo” so I’ll have to check that out
The Knife of Dreams. Prior to that, I read Crossroads of Twilight.
I'm enjoying the series. Simultaneously sad that I'm nearing the end and eager to see the conclusion.
What’s it about?
I was wondering if you’d remember the individual titles or not. It’s book 11 of The Wheel of Time, which I got into largely on your reference.
Ohhhh. It’s been a while lol. Glad to see you are almost done. Glad I was able to recommend it.
Just finished reading Silence. It's about Portuguese missionaries traveling to Japan in the 17th century to follow up with the persecuted church there.
Pretty dreary stuff.
Currently reading Dark Age (book 5 of the Red Rising Saga, because I'm in for the long haul it seems).
Previously read Beacon 23 (same writer as the Silo series), so that I can finally be one of "those people" who compare TV/movie adaptions to the book. I'm yet to watch the two episodes that dropped yesterday though.
I didn’t know Silo is based on a book. I will check it out. I’m wary of modern tv shows. Is it good? Is Red Rising Saga a fantasy series?
I'd place the Red Rising more into a science fiction genre, my succinct summary would be "Game of Thrones in space". It wasn't written as a young adult series, but it reads that way.
I devoured the three Silo books. I haven't gotten around to watching the first 2 episodes of Beacon 23 just yet, the trailer didn't curry any favour with me and you're right to be wary. Trailer: https://youtu.be/4vcrdDe-MSk
Thanks for creating the post, some interesting leads here.
Absolutely. Some I’ll have to get back to because I have a big stack of books in my immediate pile to read