No.

Nah I find doing these challenges suck the soul out of reading for me. I just read every day, that's the only goal. Unrelated, how was The Haunting of Hill House? I need another spooky read after I'm finished with The Monk.

>>25595976
Manga doesn't count as reading, you disingenuous motherfucker.
>man after man
Unfathomably based.

>>25596415
Erm, he said he didn't count the manga.

My goal was 30 and I've read 16 so I'm 7 behind.

What I read:

>1. Economics in One Lesson | Henry Hazlitt
8/10. Good book , especially for making sense of modern politics. Taught me why Trump's tariffs are bound to fail and cause economic woe, why free trade is good, how zero sum thinking misses the point of economics.

>2. Animal Liberation | Peter Singer
3/10. Very forgettable book. He made up anti-animal quotes from the Pope which points to a low level of scholarship. When I looked up this quote it said it's a fake quote that's become a common meme in the animal rights community. I do think meat eating is morally abhorent though I do it myself but this book was mostly just forgettable.

>3. Sentimental Education | Gustave Flaubert
6/10. Decent. Picked this up on the recommendation of BAP on one of his podcast episodes. It was OK for sure, but also somewhat typical (young rich aristocratic male with a large inheritance pines after his married oneitis). Not very relatable as a poor man who's never been in love.

>4. She Comes First: The Thinking Man's Guide To Pleasuring A Woman | Ian Kerner
5/10. Good instruction manual on eating pussy, a bit simpy at times. The lesson on vaginal anatomy is good as you can apply the lessons with your fingers (which imo is much less disgusting than doing it with your mouth). I tried it on a girl and it worked way better than doing it based on my own intuition. The technique for going down on a woman I haven't really mastered yet, firstly because I only do it if I'm really horny otherwise I find it gross, but secondly because I feel like the vagina is really small in comparison to the tongue so when he says lick halfway it's hard to do unless you use the very tip of your tongue with precision maybe? Idk i need to try it more.

>5. Journey To the End of the Night | Louis-Ferdinand Celine
7/10. Good. Funny. Depressing. Weaker in the second half. Sometimes veers into self pity.

>6. Can Life Prevail? | Pentti Linkola
6/10. Old man shouts at the sky vibes. I share his hatred for technology and modern society but ultimately I think there is nothing we can do to stop it. And he doesn't write well enough to take consolation from his book, so what's the point? His screed against the cat was funny, I love cats but it's true they're killing machines.

>7. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction | Immanuel Wallerstein
0/10. Utterly vacuous and forgettable.

>8. Making Movies | Sidney Lumet
7/10. Interesting memoir from an old director. Behind the scenes look at the movie industry, or at least how it was in his time. I picked this up because he directed my favourite film, 12 Angry Men, and The Verdict, another one of my favourites. He believed his finest work was Long Day's Journey Into Night, which I tried watching but could not finish (slow pretentious theatreslop).

(1/2)

>>25596446
>9. The Trouble With Being Born | Emil Cioran
8/10. Lovely little book of pessimistic aphorisms. Therapeutic. Something I suspect I'll keep coming back to. A random quote I highlighted: "In a Gnostic work of the second century we read: 'The prayer of a melancholy man will never have the strength to rise unto God.' Since man prays only in despondency, we may deduce that no prayer has ever reached its destination."

>10. Whores For Gloria | William T. Vollman
7/10. Dreamy, some beautiful moments.

>11. In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays | Bertrand Russell
8/10. It's funny to me that conspiracy theorists implicate Russell in some Illuminati evil plot to control the world, on the grounds that he believed in a world government and the scientific organisation of society. Anyone who reads his political works will find that he only believed those things because of his love for his fellow man. In this book he quite rightly argues that the diminishment of the working day should be our number one priority, to which we devote all of our scientific and organisational skill, and not "economic growth".

>12. Confessions of an English Opium Eater | Thomas De Quincey
9.5/10. What can I say? There are times when De Quincey veers into the territory of being overwrought (hence the 0.5 point deduction) but when it lands his pen speaks with the voice of an angel. The first drug experience/psychonaut literature, and the best. A quote: "But the expansion of the benigner feelings incident to opium is no febrile access [like wine], but a healthy restoration to that state which the mind would naturally recover upon the removal of any deep-seated irritation of pain that had disturbed and quarrelled with the impulses of a heart originally just and good."

>13. Understanding Exposure | Bryan Peterson
8/10. It's a handbook on how to shoot pictures in manual mode on a camera. Good. Am applying its lessons in my own photography journey. Nothing much to say.

>14. The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss | David Bentley Hart
8/10. Destroys atheism/materialism. Good prose. Nothing I didn't already know. A bit too focused on dunking on atheists rather than presenting a positive vision, but they deserve it.

>15 and 16. The Tunnel | Ernesto Sabato
9/10. So good I read it twice. Horrifying memoir of a man dealing with the inability tp form true connections with anybody else except for a fleeting moment. Going crazy from the paranoia and pain. Extremely relatable. This is true of all of us.

(2/2)

>>25596447
>14
>Destroys atheism
What's his argument?

>>25596476
Basically the most important point of the book is just that the new atheists have a conception of God that is a caricature and doesn't correspond to the highest conception of God that has come down to us from the great world religions. They see God as just another arbitrarily powerful being in the world and not the ultimate metaphysical source of being. And there are a bunch of attacks against the mechanistic worldview of the new atheists.

This is a good video that goes into more depth on some of the concepts and reads from the book:
https://youtu.be/ii3LtdOmBHI?si=60YKH8HhgspZDc_U

>>25596418
And I didn't read what he wrote, otherwise it would have to add it to my yearly reading challenge.