Some books seem promising then you start reading and just can't read it because you either don't like the style, it's boring, it's crap.... etc.
Name of book:
How far you got:
Why you stopped reading:
Philip Mainländer's philosophy of redemption. I got into it for the cool hyper pessimism but after like 100 pages of convoluted ontology I dropped it. I knew all the juice stuff beforehand anyway. Now I read the original instead (Schopenhauer)
Logic of Sense by Deleuze. I read it after Difference and Repetition but it was a bit boring imo.
i am a heron. i ahev a long neck and i pick fish out of the water w/ my beak. if you dont repost this comment on 10 other pages i will fly into your kitchen tonight and make a mess of your pots and pans
Biological Exuberence. I started reading it for completely childish reasons(wanted to see how many gay birds there were) but got bored of the concept quite quickly.
Mein Kampf. Bought it when I was going through a childish edgelord phase and took it to high school to everyday to piss everyone off. I never managed to read it all because it’s boring as fuck, especially the biographical parts which are just whiny and annoying. It’s just a dude bitching about his life.
>>82
I’ve never been able to get through any of the books he co wrote with guattari, but his books on Spinoza, Foucault etc are a pretty good read
Ai no Kusabi
In my first attempt the first five page filtered me greatly with its cuckold + rape + bdsm combo.
In my second attempt it was the horrible prose, I could not tell what the hell was going on, who is who and why does what.
I think I read the first 10 pages.
The anime was ok.
>>76
Just be glad you got out before the second two thirds of the book, which consist entirely of the main character spiraling stream-of-consciousness style into catholic guilt.
150 days of sodom by marquis de sade. I couldn’t stop fapping and interrupt my reading.
The Man Who Knew Infinity
Page 80 or so
Found it kind of boring. Maybe I hadn't gotten to the more maths parts of the book, but it was dry and too autobiographical for me. I'll probably try and read it another time, but there are other books I would read before then.
Just started "The Secret History of The IRA" by Ed Moloney. Anyone else researching this topic?
I'd recommend Richard English's book Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA. It's pretty comprehensive, tracing the origins of the IRA in the 20s, covering the various armed campaigns and finally dealing with The Troubles and peace process. He gives a pretty nuanced and detailed look at what drove the IRA to violence in the early 1970s, covers the split between Officials and Provisionals very well and the secret talks with the Harold Wilson government. Kieran Conway, the IRA's director of intelligence, wrote an autobiography, Southside Provisional, which is worth a read. He's featured in the docu series Spotlight on the Troubles: A Secret History which covers the entire conflict with interviews with leading figures on all sides and access to declassified or leaked documents which shine a light on secret negotiations, the role of Gerry Adams in plotting attacks, and collusion between the British army and loyalist paramilitaries etc.
The IRA had shit tons of guns and ammunition given to them by the Libyans but never really did anything with it other than shoot a few cops and detonate car bombs once in a while. As a guerilla organization they were a total failure.
>>3
How? They went from being branded terrorists to parliment politicians with one of the largest and most popular parties. I'd call that a success. IRA have shown us that you can bomb, shoot and kill your way into high office. I'm surprised more people aren't adopting this strategy. It would certainly make the two party system more lively.
No they were very good at what they did. They had weapons, bombs and people supporting them. This scared the shit out of the retards in Westminster. They sent their military into Northern Ireland to try and put it all down, but the IRA and Irish in general resisted.
They didn't have aims to cause immense terror and suffering on the Irish population which is why they never really sought to use those weapons in excess. This is why they mostly did targeted attacks or would detonate bombs in places but give warning to authorities ahead of time so they could evacuate.
They successfully harassed the United Kingdom enough to make them essentially concede and withdrawal. There was no Irish reunification (not yet, at least, but hopefully one day) but they managed to draw down the conflict and get the UK to fuck off. They then evolved and morphed into one of the most successful political parties in the history of Ireland.
The IRA was never that successful outside South Armagh and maybe East Tyrone and Monaghan (at least untill Pat Kelly was killed at Loughgall). They had weapon supplies that most guerrillas could only dream of and lots of talented people but never used them well. There's a former US marine who fought with the IRA who wrote a book about his experiences. He said the IRA leadership just didn't care about skill. They had guys with serious military training but never used their full potential. They never had those guys train or lead other men.
>They then evolved and morphed into one of the most successful political parties in the history of Ireland.
Yet the Provisional IRA is still banned in the Republic and the UK. Politics is what happened. The IRA could have fought an effective military campaign to force the British out of Ireland. But Sinn Feinn realized they could use the army as leverage to further their political careers and that's exactly what they did. That's also why the Libyans and the Palestinains begun pulling their support.
Best. Series. Ever.
Am I wrong?
Yes you are wrong. It was good, but definitely not the best. Still, it's a matter of opinion.
Yes you are wrong. It was good, but definitely not the best. Still, it's a matter of opinion.
I read The Hobbit and then LOTR when I was a teenager in the 80's. Some parts of the trilogy were really slow-going, and I didn't fully grasp everything, but still enjoyed it a lot. The Hobbit was completely enchanting, and I couldn't put that book down. I'd stay up late through the night to read it, over and over again.
But I also greatly enjoyed stories by Robert E. Howard (Kull, Conan), Moorcock (Hawkmoon, Elric), Lovecraft, various other pulp-era stuff that was later compiled into book format, and last but not least, the great Jules Verne.
Dwarves are Jewish
Best series is Perry Rhodan.
The only genre I care about.
Romance is fine too. Porn without romance feels as empty as romance without porn.
>Porn without romance feels as empty as romance without porn.
Found the guy that unironically read pornographic magazines for the articles.
>>2
"Reading" in this context is an euphemism for watching at lewd pictures. The articles in porn mags are usually not pornographic at all.
Seriously, post something
You first
I havent ready any porn books but there's a ton of pornographic writing on fanfiction sites and they're all shit!
https://web.archive.org/web/20201101003536/http://yotogi.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20201101003436/http://easy2life.sakura.ne.jp/yotogi2/
Japanese touhou fanfiction, if you can read that.
https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/88584244/novels
He wrote ８月のヒメゴト 〜僕と桃香の７日間〜 and currently writes 俺の肉奴隷は11歳, both are pretty good.
Stopped second on #16, stopped first on #8
People to maybe check later
https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/1348886
https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/62079282/novels
https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/42140873/novels
https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/6594712
https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/43621518
Here is a good one:
https://www.literotica.com/s/futareich
http://4-ch.net/games/kareha.pl/1206548566/
This is a nice thread. Let's have a book edition.
I just read my first book by Haruki Murakami, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle". Murakami gets a lot of praise in these parts, and after reading this book, I can confirm that it isn't unfounded. The book to me felt a bit weaker towards the end, but I really liked hearing the stories of Nomonhan, Siberia, and such.
Read Raptor Red a little while ago
An alright book, starts off pretty weak but it picks up quickly for the most part. The weird combination of anthropomorphic thoughts/actions alongside these really out of place overly-specific technical descriptions almost killed it for me, though it lessens up as it goes on (or I just got used to it). Word choice was kind of odd throughout the story as well, like the use of "Darwinian" 4 times in the first chapter and the use of the word "shit" like 6 times on one page and then never again. Just obtuse language here and there like the whole sentence "Another vital bit of information was added to the hard disk of her mental computer."
That kind of thing makes it VERY obvious this novel was written by a paleontologist and not a professional writer, which in all fairness has a charm of its own.
Like I said, it does get interesting and becomes a fun read but something about took me out of it every few pages.
Finished The Hobbit. Reread it for the firs time in a long while. Might actually be better than I remembered, it's really charming and such a perfect distilled version of fantasy. Tolkien went a long way to make the story feel like it was actually being related to you in a really cozy way. And not being intimately tied into an overarching epic like LOTR is pretty nice too in that it's a short, pleasant read.
Finally finished Tolstoy's war and peace. it took me nearly 5 years but i'm finally done with it. a lot better than i thought it would be, i kept quitting and putting it off to read other stuff only to come back to it later. its actually pretty good once you get past the ancient writing style and just how slow and dry the start is. i wouldnt recommend it though. save yourself the time and read as summary online.
Just finished Political Theology by Carl Schmitt. It’s a short work, to the point, and can be finished in just two hours. Schmitt dives straight in with his famous definition of the sovereign as “he who decides on the state of exception.” From this he unfolds an infamous critique of liberal democracy manifest in the Weimar Republic. Schmitt argues that politics hinges on a distinction between friend and enemy, a fundamental distinction liberals try to deny or erase while in the process make things much worse. Whereas Schmitt advocates a pragmatic and realist engagement with the enemy, as someone who can be respected and traded with, liberals maniacal obsession with humanity leads to the dehumanization of the ‘other’ and this reduction of the enemy to less than human invites all kinds of brutal atrocities. Schmitt concludes that the ‘depoliticizing’ tendencies make liberal regimes unattractive and incapable. There is a lot of debate over Schmitt’s own politics and he’s relationship with Nazism, although a party member it’s debatable whether he was so out of genuine conviction or simply a pragmatic move to ensure his survival in Hitler’s Reich. Overall, I found Schmitt’s arguments to be thought provoking but not always entirely convincing, why exactly should we accept his claim that the political is founded on an antagonism? Nevertheless, his critique of liberalism helps us understand how that ideology has maintained a stranglehold over humanity despite the numerous atrocities it has inflicted on us.
Industrial Society and Its Future by Ted Kaczynski.
7/10
Ted has a lot of great stuff to say about technological determinism and the creeping effects on human autonomy and freedom. Sadly, too much of his book is spent analyzing leftism, and while he makes a good point it's poorly worded and takes up too much space. It's a shame because you can bring in the Frankfurt School and look at how their criticisms of instrumental reason sit with Ted's anti-technological revolutionism. Nevertheless, it's a good read and worth picking up. Just be careful where you download it. The last thing you want is to end up on a government watchlist.
Messages to the World - Osama Bin Laden translated by Bruce Lawrence
Bin Laden spoke with eloquence and clarity while being the most wanted man in human history. But in the translated interview with Aljazeera reporter Tayseer Allouni, Osama falls apart and comes off as an incoherent chunni whackjob. Other than that, it's pretty simple: America commits crimes around the world and are evil. Nothing new or special. One thing that surprised me was Bin Laden didn't really have much of a political vision of the future he wants to create and he doesn't come up with elborate theories like most paranoid whackjob political types.
4/10
>>117
You have to give Ted credit where it’s due. His ideas about technological determinism are pretty on point even if he is just a serial killer.
I few months ago I finished reading Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent.
Well, it did not change in how I view men and women.
The problem is that most of her struggles in a social setting were due to the fact that she was afraid that people would discover that she is in drag, and if those people discovered it, they would harm her.
The prose was nice, very easy to read.
Has anybody here read it? I discovered it earlier this year and loved it.
I kept hearing good things from 4chan's /x/ board a few years ago, but I never got around to reading it.
Should I give it a shot? Wasn't there some particular edition of the book most people recommend?
I had the "full colour" edition, which I'd recommend, but it doesn't really make any difference overall and it's kinda expensive.
I'm hosting a reading group on Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" (~30pp text) tonight with a friend (6:30 pacific / 9:30 eastern) . Some VIPPER will be joining in. Feel free to join and invite your friends! The first half of the discussion will be recorded and uploaded online later.
https://www.facebook.com/events/4339980456118810
https://blog.philosophy.rodeo/2021/10/22/civil-disobedience-ad/
Imagine not starting with Greek Mythology.
I don't get it. Please rewrite it but have all the characters replaced with pop culture references.
I'm reading Philip Foner's series on the topic at the moment, but does anyone have any memorable works that they want to share?
Got excited when I saw "I'm reading Philip" and then the rest of that sentence didn't finish with K. Dick I just didn't give a shit anymore.
I've been reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Needless to say it is close to unintelligible for me. What secondary lit should I read to properly understand it?
>>1
You can’t go wrong with the Cambridge Companion to Hegel. There is Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History by Buck Morss which is provides an alternative look at Hegel’s intellectual influences. There is a series on YouTube called Half Hour Hegel which goes through the entire Phenomenology including the preface and introduction.
>>2
Thank you! I have heard of Half Hour Hegel but it the book on Haiti, that sounds very interesting.
I've been here, >>1, and I recommend giving up. Whilst it does start to sink in after a lot of study and exposure to dumbed-down explanations I'm not sure it's worth the effort and what little I did gleam from my initial attempts I have long since forgotten. Go read Kierkgaard instead (who likes to poke fun at Hegel)
>>4
You still learn quite a bit by pushing through a dense philosophical book, even if you don’t understand what the author’s trying to get across it makes reading these books in the future a little easier. Sometimes the journey is better than the destination as the old cliche goes. It’s perfectly fine to go through a book and not really remember what the author is doing beyond a vague gist of what they’re trying to say.
>>1
Mind if I ask why your reading Hegel? Have you tried reading Hegel before? your a beginner you shouldn’t really start weigh Hegel and if your new to reading him you shouldn’t start with the Phenomenology but his Lectures on the Philosophy of History which provides you with nice intro to how Hegel sees world history and eases you into his dense writing style.
Anyway, if your looking for secondary sources I’d seriously recommend the Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit by Robert Stern. It’s a really good introduction that’s beginner friendly and written in an easy to follow clear fashion.