You must log in or register to comment.
The Art of the Deal
The Secret. If you wish hard enough for it, an elephant will appear in your living room, eventually.
the secret is probably the origin of all of those quantum prosperity bullshit seminars. fuck that book, i had the displeasure of wasting my time on it.
War and Peace is made up of 42 or something full length novels.
It starts off with two lovers meeting at the man’s house, he joins the army as an officer, they have children, the man rises to become a captain or soemthing, then the Napoleonic War starts, then it follows Napoleans journey from France, through Italy, Austria, eastern Europe and then to his seige of Moscow. The youngest son has now joined the army, and he his keen to join in. The French army are retreating from Moscow, fed up, starving, tired and exhausted, the boy comes up to a band of French stragglers, the French lieutenant, slumped over on his horse, tiredly grabs his sword and slashes blindly behind him, decapitating the boy, his head held on by skin, his horse runs back to the rest of the Russians, where his father is leading.
Then there are 15 more novels after that !
Atlas Shrugged or Dianetics.
–//–
Bun
Air
Bun
I actually really liked Atlas Shrugged, and it makes a ton of sense if you rotate the economics of it by 180 degrees. Reardon wouldn’t be an owner in today’s world. He’d have been bought by someone like Musk long before he was wealthy enough to stop working. Speaking of billionaires, they’re Jim Taggarts if there ever was one. Ayn Rand grew up observing what happens when a handful of people acquire too much power and attributed it to socialism. I believe she was wrong, but she wrote interesting stories about excessive power concentration. Here and now, it’s the capitalist oligarchs that are breaking down the system. Infrastructure is failing like in the book. It just turns out it was the libertarians/anarchocapitalists instead.
yeah, but do we really need a 1000+ page book to learn that absolute power corrupts absolutely?
Maybe not, but it might help reach people that like 1950’s dieselpunk.
Edit: On a side note, it might inspire people to pack billionaires into a modern version of Galt’s Gulch/Mulligan’s Valley, isolated from the rest of the world and arriving with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They can rebuild civilization with only the natural resources on hand. I totally agree with Rand that it might solve a lot of socioeconomic problems, but we’d differ on the “why.”
Catcher in the Rye
I would never use that phrase.
Any Isaac Asimov story.
I actually want to hear more about this. What’re your supporting arguments?
I like a lot of what ive read from him, and he had a lot of views that were ahead of his time (on social issues as well as scientific), but he absolutely could not write women. You could read full length books of his without a single named female character.
Yeah, that’s not great, but honestly, I feel like it’s better than a lot of alternatives. It feels even worse when the women in the book don’t pass the Bechdel test, or worse, end up in r/menwritingwomen posts.
Yeah, I think he actually admitted that he didn’t really know any women when he first started writing until he met and then married his wife, so he avoided writing them. It is weird though cause his writing style (from what ive read) is not very character focused, anyway, so a lot of his male characters could easily just be declared female and no one would spot the difference.
I wonder if he just assumed that his own bias would affect the gender of the characters or if that just wasn’t a consideration. It would have been pretty cool if he had used gender-neutral names to the point where it was never clear, but also didn’t matter anyway.
he had used gender-neutral names to the point where it was never clear, but also didn’t matter anyway.
He almost does that. He uses a lot of made-up scifi names that aren’t obviously gendered, but then point out that the character is male.
He does get a lot better over time, though.
I’ll have to go back and read. The gender dynamics of competitive sci-fi literature would be a wild class.
Edit: I meant “comparative sci-fi literature,” but I’m leaving the mistake because I think it’s funnier, not unlike the grammar mistakes that I try to pass off as erudite subversion of trite conventions, not unlike this meandering, run-on sentence, and I stand by it.
I read two of his popular stories and they both ended with some nonsense about infinite recursion.
Asimov is a Thesaurus writer.
How do you feel about Hemingway and Faulker?
I have not read both of them. Most of my reading these days is Lemmy comments or news
Sorry you’re getting downvoted. I appreciate you taking the time to share your opinion.
