I read the Great Gatsby last month and liked it much more than when I read it in high school.
I’m currently about 800 pages into Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. It’s really good and worth pushing through the difficult-to-follow beginning.
This really spoke to me and I’m guessing it will to others here as well:
If anyone remembers LirvA from 2p2, I often think about an exchange he had on there. He (not sure if Lirv used he or not) was a profilic poster who basically lived on the forum for a years and was obsessed with politics, like we all were/are. Anyways, he got really into ACism iirc and made a post saying he was going to start reading more Hayek. Someone (I think possibly suzzer?) replied saying that he’d be better off reading fiction because he would ultimately learn more from it.
I’ve made an effort this year to read much more fiction and feel like I’m better for it. Of course I’m still angry about Trump and all the rest, but fiction gives you a perspective that you just don’t get consuming endless information.
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This was so rough i skipped to the more positive stuff, like ch 5 or 6.
i read it over the weekend, solid book, realized he put it out in 2019 though, so goddamn he was optimistic about the results, predicting a monstrous blue wave even before covid etc.
I looked up his twitter and he tweeted recently that the GOP didn’t fight from inside like he thought they would.
https://twitter.com/StanGreenberg/status/1304803923606351873?s=20
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Another entry in the “Pynchon warned us about this” category:
booooo
Kindle 4 life!
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Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal by Jay Parini
Having read nothing of Gore Vidal and curious about his life as I had heard he was a literary and political titan I picked this up
Well don’t get this particular biography. It’s written a bit matter of factly, which turns out is deeply boring when it’s the life of a writer. Pretty much get up, write for 4 hours, entertain guests, go out and wine and dine, go home, repeat.
Which is a great lifestyle but boring with written like a calender. I had a vague recollection of Gore being a great quipy polemicist and the short antidotes that start the chapters and the quotes as the header of each chapter are great. It then just goes back to Gore went here, he had a party with X, Y, Z, Gore wrote this book.
The only real intriguing parts were about Gores relationship with his sexuality and his relationship with his long term partner. Their last months together had some parts that were genuinely moving.
I finished it out of a sense of duty to know about Gore’s life but wouldn’t recommend it
Because of @microbet ‘s recommendation I got The Dispossessed and read it during a road trip over the last couple of weeks. I loved the book. It was fun reading something fiction that made it so easy to build up the worlds and imagine them in your mind.
Otherwise I’m finishing Mayor 1% about Rahm Emanuel (fuck this guy) and starting Jakarta Method. Also reading a couple of poetry books from local Chicago authors
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Awesome. I like that it’s an imagination of an Anarchist society without being utopian.
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Ate there any business books that couldn’t just be a 5 page summary? I’m doing a reading group for work and skimming is about the only way I can get through them
I just started reading the Trump thread today.
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Just finished The Iliad (Fagles translation). Had tried to start it a couple times before, but got stuck before too long.
I think it helps that I’m older and more patient now. Slow and steady is the way for me with one chapter per day. Also found it helpful to read out loud when I had the room to myself. Crazy to think the OG bards had this memorized and were able to improvise variations. It’s like at least 50 American Pies in length.
There’s also a pretty good bit near the end with some gambling on a horse race.
5 cups of glistening wine
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Heard a really good interview with the author of this a while back and meant to pick up the book when it came out, thanks for the reminder.
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Time chooses 100 “best” fantasy books of all time going back to the 9th Century
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Bye bye, Mr. Achilles guy
Dipped in the Styx, but your heel stayed dry
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Finished Wintersteel, book 8 in the Cradle series. Another great book.
Anybody that likes fantasy should most definitely read this series!
Stranger in a Strange Land
Man this was a slog. How did this win a Hugo award?
This is exactly what I thought when I read it when I was about 14. I’ve always vaguely wondered if I was just too young, but glad to hear not.