What Book Are You Currently Reading? (2.0.)

[PSOL]

Male Fantasies by Theweleit Klaus. Basically a psychoanalysis or the Freikorps. The juxtaposition of the images and quotations to create a narrative of the male fantasy of war, structure, and perverse unity is something that is timeless considering how much this imagery is present in what imagery and rhetoric is present on /pol/, Stormfront, and even those posters on Atlas. A long read, but timeless given what we are now going through.

[PSOL]

Finished Iran:Between two Revolutions by Ervand Abrahamian.

By far one of the best books out there on why Iran is the way it is.

[PSOL]

Finished reading WE, and I hated every minute of it. As I got off for my personal hour for work I spent it reading this novel so as to not read any other capitalist novel whining about the Soviet Union in the guise of a “critique”. Reading through the self-flagellating recordings of a vain, talentless self-insert I wanted to put it down immediately—but alas, my inability to take charge left this drivel on my desk. I suppose letting little things get to you was the link between me and D, and it only made me hate him more. Even through 99 pages of a writer struggling to finish a bourgeois abomination, I kept going on. Even with his brain getting fried, what I took note was that the protagonist became no less vain, no less melodramatic with his anxiety and search for worry, and equally boring. I am never reading another of its translations ever again; never again will I touch Animal Farm, 1984, or Brave New World ever again. My time out of fixed work for future sustenance is vital to me, and I now realize how precious of a thing I should cherish in a world ran by the capitalists planning and looting of my being in and out of a shift.

 I see why the writer died in crushing poverty in Paris, a shame given that he could have utilized the class structure in the Soviet Union to live a much more stable life until the late 1920s, and at most two years after his death for him to get on the purge list.

[PSOL]

Finished Faust by Goethe after a three year hiatus.

[PSOL]

Finished Faust by Goethe after a three year hiatus.

Both vols.? Never got through Part II but Faust is a masterpiece

It truly is, but I got word that Part II is not that good.

[PSOL]

It's excellent but parts of it are hard to translate. The last scene is used extensively in Mahler's Eighth Symphony - the bit with the Anchorites is a personal favourite.

Alright, I’ll pick it up next.

[PSOL]

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

I’m sorry for you having to pull through with that kitsch trash

[PSOL]

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

I’m sorry for you having to pull through with that kitsch trash

Why would you go out of your way to make a rude and dickish comment like this? Just let people enjoy what they're reading without trashing it.

Enjoy it all you want, literature speaks to the reader.

However, from my experience reading Breakfast of Champions and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-five, is it really hard to see how it isn’t some angsty schlock writing with radical chic that leads nowhere but basic statements like “duuuude, war is bad man” or “duuuuuuude, America is really wacked out”. I did not find the jokes funny, in fact it was really hard to find much humor at all in the work, and it is immensely simplistic for something considered commercially popular. He just lists a bunch of concepts without any serious threading to attach these ideas, leading nowhere.

People have made more simpler satire focusing on fewer core ideas that are just as effective and funny, if not more.

Yes, this is the hill I’m willing to die on.

[PSOL]

Yes, this is the hill I’m willing to die on.

Why in this thread in particular, though?

I was traumatized when I was reading it

[PSOL]

Just went through Revolution and Restoration, a book detailing the inner-party conflicts in the CCP and China’s turn towards capitalism. interesting book, but it misses key elements like the university assaults by the Chinese army in 1969 and unfairly paints Chen Boda and Liu Shaoqui in unfair lighting, as well as handglossing over the fact that a huge amount of uni students and universities were in and apart of upperclass society.

[PSOL]

Just went through Revolution and Restoration, a book detailing the inner-party conflicts in the CCP and China’s turn towards capitalism. interesting book, but it misses key elements like the university assaults by the Chinese army in 1969 and unfairly paints Chen Boda and Liu Shaoqui in unfair lighting, as well as handglossing over the fact that a huge amount of uni students and universities were in and apart of upperclass society.

Ignoramus on the subtleties of Chinese history, but this would be fascinating if not for the fact that it is a pdf.

Just convert it to another format. PDF’s aren’t that bad.

[PSOL]

Just went through Revolution and Restoration, a book detailing the inner-party conflicts in the CCP and China’s turn towards capitalism. interesting book, but it misses key elements like the university assaults by the Chinese army in 1969 and unfairly paints Chen Boda and Liu Shaoqui in unfair lighting, as well as handglossing over the fact that a huge amount of uni students and universities were in and apart of upperclass society.

Ignoramus on the subtleties of Chinese history, but this would be fascinating if not for the fact that it is a pdf.

Just convert it to another format. PDF’s aren’t that bad.

I just dislike reading on a screen in general. DK if the ol' printer is going to willingly push out 400 pages.

You can spend hours on atlas reading 50 pages worth of text at a time, I think you can do it man.

[PSOL]

I’ve read “This world we must Leave” by Jacques Camatte and other essays—awful. I think it made me finally become a Stalinist. “Domestication” as a concept is something I’ll use though

I read the entire volumes of Öcalan’s communalist canon—his positive antisemitism and just utter failure at appearing deep was awful. Anarchism really is liberalism.

The only solace I have been having is going through a biography and collection of works by Gore Vidal.

[PSOL]

Finished Infinite Jest and what I can say is that the author could have written a good novel had he not gone insane with the gimmicks; the footnotes and the convoluted plotlines. His prose is actually good and there’s something vital he wants to say on the relationship of the family towards current self-personhood and the stress of academia, but it’s buried under heaps of bull•••• in an attempt at humour and melodrama.

Still, this is leagues better than anything written by Thomas Pynchon whose entire collection is just absolute trash. There’s nothing redeemable in his convoluted nonsense and his magnum opus is just turgid and there’s absolute proof of that given the jokes and sex scenes lose any sort of effort 230 pages in of a ~700 page book. There’s no better place for such awfulness but the trash and any sort of awards given to this waste of paper shows the dire state of American literature under late stage capitalism.

[PSOL]

Going through Agatha Christie's best known sleuth

[PSOL]

Finished a collection by James Cooper and thinking of reading Little House on the Prairie

[PSOL]

I would rather be a member of conservacord and read their s•••posts than ever deal with reading National Socialist literature. This is an even greater waste of my time than perhaps the past four years of my life.