Been reading Malazan book 2, a huge step up from book 1. It's worked its way into my list of good fun sff, but I doubt it will ever hit the big leagues, which consist of:

actually good sff:
>The Time Machine
>Conan
>The Hobbit
>Titus Groan
>The Broken Sword
>The End of Eternity
>The Stars My Destination
>Solaris
>The Dragon Masters
>Dune
>Lord of Light
>A Wizard of Earthsea

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>>25185645
I like the theory that shes some kind of avatar or prophet of Yatwer the fertility god, there are a few things that foreshadow it like Mimara seeing her as this transcendental heavenly being with her judging eye, when its not like Esmenet has lived a particularly holy life. Though she has largely avoided using others as a means to an end, which seems to be the main ethical no-no of Bakkers world, alongside sorcery.
This would be the secret reason Kellhus is so drawn to her and why she can have his kids. He thinks its because shes more intelligent, but even he admits he doesnt really understand it.

If you’ve read dune, you realize how unoriginal and derivative the whole Kellhus storyline is in Bakkers books

>>25188898
what if i've read dune but i don't understand it

>>25188904
What didn't you understand about Dune?

>>25188842
>Money is the zealous one God of Israel, beside which no other God may stand. Money degrades all the gods of mankind and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-constituted value set upon all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world, of both nature and man, of its original value. Money is the essence of man’s life and work, which have become alienated from him: this alien monster rules him and he worships it.

>The God of the Jews has become secularized and is now a worldly God. The bill of exchange is the Jew’s real God. His God is the illusory bill of exchange.

>What is the foundation of the Jew in our world? Practical necessity, private advantage.

>What is the object of the Jew’s worship in this world? Usury. What is his worldly God? Money.

>Very well then: emancipation from usury and money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would constitute the emancipation of our time.

"Christianity sprang from Judaism; it has now dissolved itself back into Judaism."

>>25188533
burn it, and everyone who agrees with it

>>25188863
"Jewry cannot create a new world; it can only draw the world’s new-made creations and relationships into the sphere of its industriousness, because practical need, whose motivation is private interest, acts passively and never initiates growth, only feeds on the growth of society."

"Jewish Jesuitism—that practical Jesuitism which in the Talmud, as Bauer shows, deals with the clever circumvention by the world of private interest of the laws that rule it—is the chief art of that world."

"What is stated as theory in Jewish religion, namely, contempt for theory, art, history and man as an end in himself, is an actual and conscious point of view, held to be virtuous by the man of money. Even the relations between the sexes, between man and woman, become an object of commerce. The woman is auctioned off."

"The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the true nationality of the merchant, of the man of money."

"The law of the Jew, lacking all solid foundation, is only a religious caricature of morality and of law in general, but it provides the formal rites in which the world of property clothes its transactions."

>The view of nature gained under the dominion of money and private property is a genuine contempt, a materialistic degradation of nature, such as exist in Jewish religion, if only in fancy.

>It is in this sense that Thomas Münzer complains that “all creatures have become property, the fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the ground—the creatures, too, must become free.”


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>the JQ will be solved if we give everyone free shit

>>25188899
Wrong thread

>>25188102
Give examples please, Im somewhat into history but I usually defer to YouTube for any of that

>>25188191
Don’t tell that to all the people in the Camus thread treating him like some sort of prophet.

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>>25183386

>>25186994
Butthurt commie cunt detected

>>25188334
history is not an area in which i would feel comfortable giving recommendations
id suggest looking through some university curriculums and working through the mentioned works (which will also mention other works)

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The worst part? He plagiarized passages from another book. Which means the sequels are actually Frank Herbert's real power level.

>>25188749
It's a historical reference

>>25188740
I unironically like David Lynch's adaptation over the modern films and I found the book way too fatalistic even though I agree with the general message. I also hate Zendaya and what Villeneuve did to Chani.

>>25188670
It's a *very* recent development haha. Finished Wayward by Dana Spiotta yesterday. It was an interesting glimpse into how people similar to her and the demographic she writes for thinks, and she's quite competent and even occasionally great as a stylist. There were bits of characterization and plot that were quite compelling, but it was overall drowned out by unnatural plotting and digressions, unnuanced political commentary, like she was trying to reach a word count minimum. Much of it struck me as quite false and artificial.

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>>25188575
i skipped the chapter in trainspotting in which the narrator is a woman who won't stop interrupting herself with "no way!" and the like.

>>25188575
When I was in college I read Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters for this reason. His arguments had what seemed like some obvious flaws to me but it was good to get a better idea of what Christians believe and why. I also started After Virtue but bounced off it.

>>25188575
>Do you attempt to read things you're sure you'll hate, or things you know you'll disagree with, in order to better understand them?
Yes, though I've found that having my beliefs confronted and misunderstandings corrected hasn't really changed the way I think as much as reading something without any preconceptions. I think it's important to live outside of an echo chamber.
Currently I'm reading That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis, a mean and sneering book I don't think I will change my mind on, and The Stripping of the Altars because I've always seen English Catholicism after Henry VIII as a fad imported from the continent and want to see if that belief bears out.

>>25188876
I've found C.S. Lewis' "mere Christianity" a very personal faith that other Christians adopt parts of to suit themselves. I don't consider him a serious thinker even if he was a decent writer.

>open thread
>filled with people who obviously haven't read Philip Roth
This board is so predictable.

>>25187259
>all of them are about jews
Who cares? It's like complaining Scorsese makes movies about Italians. Read American Pastoral, The Human Stain, Sabbath's Theater, you picked a bunch of his late books where he's ruminating on his childhood.

>>25187875
i only started to get into lesser-known postmodernists in the past year or so. i snagged W&M on Amazon for decently cheap and i got three of his other novels but thats it

>>25188141
The Italians have aesthetic and historic value.

>>25188131
a less retarded op wouldve been beneficial here

>>25186488
Everyone who pirates ebooks should use calibre. It auto-converts anything to anything, and can also strip existing DRM off your own stuff (or stuff from Libby)

>>25188604
Shame that no matter how good it gets, pdf conversions will forever be awful

>>25187793
People think bib is frozen in time since the-eye. You can get anything at Anna's archive or irc or any library overdrive anywhere. With a request worth enough people will straight up purchase a book to upload. I got several in Swedish from bib because people there are desperate for upload.

>>25188626
Yeah. It's frustrating how many older books are either PDF-only or the only epub copy has really bad OCR errors.

I've tried to tinker with the advanced conversion options before and have had some success, but the spacing is never right.

>>25188661
Or the ebook is 50 bucks and the pdf is the only pirate available. I'll pay that for a hardcover, or something I can see myself returning to often like reference material. Not something I'm reading once out of curiousity.

Maybe when we get flashable ereaders - 500 flexible eink pages that you turn like normal paper and reflash into another book when done. The young lady's illustrated primer, or more specifically the drunken neanderthal ancestor.

>>25187442
>From a comprehension standpoint, listening can absolutely count as engaging with the work
But you aren't engaging with the work on the same level as if you were reading it.
Of course this entirely depends on how you read. If you speed through a book and don't bother to go over stuff twice then you may as well have listened to it.

>>25187419
>I wouldn't imagine many works being created so as to be intended to be read out, and that is certainly not the case for most of what I have read by Joyce
Joyce, the practically blind wordplayer, who loved to write stuff the reader has to sound out to get?

This discussion about oral tradition is utterly meaningless. Joyce (ironically enough) is the one who made literature a respectable medium. You could listen to Dostoevsky and have the same experience as someone reading it, but Joyce (and the ones that followed him) require far more effort than just listening. >>25187563 is right though, in saying that you should read it aloud, and using an audiobook as a companion piece is a great idea.

>>25187562
>But you aren't engaging with the work on the same level as if you were reading it.
I think it depends on what you are reading, but yeah, if you are reading something more difficult, and or your goal is to study and retain as much as possible, even going back and taking notes, written word is best.
I do think that retaining the information and concentating on either format is somewhat of a developed skill. I listen to biographies at work. Retaining every word of every sentence isnt always necessary, depending on the verbosity of the author.

>>25187269
Don't worry about whether they "count" in someone else's opinion, worry about whether you, personally, are able to absorb the contents of the book as effectively that way.

>>25172552
Which religion is closest to Neoplatonism? I understand the concept of initiation to kill the ego and to provide an actual pathway to spiritual salvation but the religious models in contemporary Abrahamic faiths don't make any sense to me.

>>25188541
Because something can only be analyzed if it is the product of synthesis and vice versa.
>>25188553
Well that’s too bad because Roman Catholicism and… fine, Eastern Orthodoxy are both deeply influenced by Neoplatonism. The whole tradition of contemplative prayer is extremely Platonic. Beyond that you have Sufis with some Platonic influence, also some Shi’ite.

>>25188620
Roman Catholicism doctrine of Hell and Christianity's mandate of original sin alongside the fatalistic view of human redemption prevents me from ever believing in Christianity. I don't like messianism and I find the twelfth Imam stuff really silly so I can't believe in that. Maybe I should explore Sufism more.

>>25188640
What about Hell and original sin put you off? What do you mean by "fatalistic view of human redemption," exactly?

>>25188843
>What about Hell and original sin put you off?
Hell in Catholicism is a physical place where you are eternally at rather than simply a soul too unaware of its original self to reach enlightenment. Theoretically in non-Abrahamic traditions Hell is something you can escape and the moral conundrum of God eternally punishing someone doesn't even exist. Original sin is even worse because it views humanity, and the world as a whole, as a corrupted creation rather than an imperfect creation made intentionally (or at least, is not evil) so that we can understand and appreciate our true form.
>What do you mean by "fatalistic view of human redemption," exactly?
It's fatalistic partially because of what I said about original sin earlier, but also because it literally sees the human soul as so impossibly corrupted that only through rituals where, according to Christian doctrine, you're cannibalizing God, can you be interceded for. There's basically no point in doing anything because Christianity has such a cynical view of the world, and the entire religion is built on not being accountable and banking on a messiah to purge all the conflict in yourself and the rest of the world.

>>25188615
I don't know but you piss me off

>>25188624
We can do an old timey boxing match if you're in the buffalo area. Afterwards we'll go out for root beer floats.

>>25188547
What is this Victoria story anons keep mentioning? Let me in on the joke

>>25188693
It's not a joke, it's a really good excerpt one anon shared some time ago.

>>25188699
so is it done? He probably just dropped it half way like everyone else

>>25187652
>thought this was gonna be about nogs doing stupid shit.
Try The Fate of Africa: A History of the
Continent Since Independence. It's kino, basically Africa Blood and Guts on paper.

>>25186952
The black cover with a huge swastika on it? That's the one I read. They were all over the place in bookstores back then.

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>>25152095
What are the best books to learn about Richard the Lionheart?

Are history book audibooks any good? Like are they as good as books for memory retention?

>>25187652
It is about nogs doing stupid shit? It barely even talks about the Rwandan genocide It barely even mentions it. Did you finish it already?
>Updated edition
You dun goofed, yah dope.

>>25188434
It wasn't

>>25188137
>>25188156
>No literary critics ever say something is slop and that's what breaks my trust in literary critics
https://youtu.be/EVWiwd0P0c0
Read Bloom then, he called Harry Potter slop on national television in 2000 [8:57] and is able to articulate exactly why it's slop - it's an endless series of cliches.

>>25186080
he looks like he smells so bad and doesn't shut up

>>25186080
He never lied. He referred to hackneyed phrases in general littering every page, not one particular hackneyed phrase being repeated over and over.

>>25187948
He's not referred to that phrase being repeated over and over, but that hackneyed phrases, like that one, appear over and over as a crutch for Rowling, making the work tedious.

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pepys

>>25188785
>The author has performed nearly forensic new translations of Pepys’s diary, drilling down especially on the material in foreign languages. This was essentially a secret code: Pepys was a polyglot who could pun in two languages within a single sentence
In other words: the author has already decided Pepys is a monster in the MeToo era, so he makes sure to read every single ambiguous or opaque passage in only one way. Shan't be reading it.

>one chance at life
>cant grope maids

>>25188845
The purpose of this book is not to create a gratuitously distorted or scurrilous account of Pepys’s private life. Instead, the intention is to complete Pepys’s own story, because for one reason or another, all the previous transcribers of his diary in some way sought either to omit or occlude an important component of his testimony. The revelations here of the content and the methods Pepys used to compose the passages concerned should now take their proper place as important components of the diary and evidence for Pepys’s personality. They may serve to stimulate further study of this fascinating aspect of the diary text, especially the light they throw on the way he used the shorthand ... Revised readings, which were not anticipated when the work for this book began, have been introduced where they fulfil one or more of the following criteria: they are more plausible and accurate transcriptions of the shorthand, better match contemporary spellings and usages, and correspond more convincingly to the context by generating translations that make sense as opposed to not doing so.
https://www.pepysdiary.com/indepth/2025/08/04/confessions-samuel-pepys/

Sample of the translation work
>I realized that L&M had mistranscribed some of the polyglot because their versions do not make sense. These are the main areas where they made mistakes unlike the rest of the text where there are very, very few errors. Some of the errors are so obvious it is difficult to understand how they were made.
>Let's take 3 June 1666 as an example. L&M have 'devante and backward'. 'devante' is not a word. It does not exist in Spanish or any other language, whether now or back then. The shorthand reads d(e)l(a)nt(e). 'delante' is in Percivale's 1623 Spanish Dictionary which P owned (it's still at Magdalene') and means 'forward'. Thus 'forward and backward'.
>On 13 October 1663 P uses 'forward and backward' in a way that makes it obvious what he meant on 3 June 1666. I could cite various other examples of erroneous words.