What are you reading right now?

[World Famous Quasi Payer]

1. A shame Shalava didn't die.
2. This just proves how nice the camps were that it lasted 14 years there and lived.
3. It got a white-collar job after getting out, which proves the Soviets were fucking idiots.
4. It having to write fiction to condemn the Soviets proves what a subhuman solzhenitsyn Shalava was.
5. You falling for the same fiction proves the same about you.
6. Shalava dumped its wife (who hadn't divorced or disowned it through the camps) while forcing her to help it with paperwork and shit (after she'd been stained with collaborationism) and "had a brief affair with" (fucked) its benefactor Pasternak's wife to ruin his life, because it was a thankless, subhuman piece of shit.
7. The SMO and its consequences proves every muh gulag whiner is a traitor. Not "has different opinions on Russia's best path to greatness and prosperity" but an actual traitor that colludes with pork and wants Russians to die.

1. Well aren't you a vicious cunt
2. He only lasted that long because he got a job as a male nurse, something that was originally denied to him because of his political prisoner status - until the camp commanders realized only politicals had the will to become trained medical staff.
3. Oh no, a college educated man got white-collar work! The horror!
4. It is historical fiction based off of his time in the camps and other first hand accounts, it not being a direct retailing of his experiences doesn't make it or solzhenitsyn's work false.
5. Oh do provide some evidence that the gulags were just summer camps and uncle stalin was a good boy, who didn't do nothin. I won't hold my breath. I need a good laugh.
6. And this makes the work any less true how? Assuming its true.
7. Being against arresting people for political views or saying they like this or that writer and working them to death doesn't make one a traitor. You are such a nut.

 

[AnOminous]

1. It having to write fiction to condemn the Soviets proves what a subhuman solzhenitsyn Shalava was.

You sound like a tankie.

 

[Flabba Wabba Jabba]

Loved Red Dragon and Hannibal. Didn't touch Silence of the Lambs, since I heard it was identical to the movie of the same name.

I think the book kicks ass. I also checked out the Hannibal TV show. Also good af.

Yeah I have seen the movies and the TV series years ago and loved both, that's what spurred me to go ahead and order the books. I really enjoyed each of the takes on Hannibal, with Brian Cox being the most realistic, Anthony Hopkins being the most sadistic and devious and Mads Mikkelsen's being literally "narcissistic psychopathic Satan". I wanted to read the books to experience all three takes in the literature and see if they hold up to the source material.

 

[GloriousScarf]

I'm trying to branch out in genres. I decided to try a fantasy book, a genre I normally hold in very low esteem. 'Maybe it's not all bad, it can't possibly be all nerd jerk off material', I stupidly thought. Then some fuckwit at work recommended 'A Court of Thorns and Roses' and like an autist, I listened to them. This was bad fan fiction.
Never again will I touch a fantasy book. It's about some dumb bitch who fucks a fairy. Jesus christ, I'm MATI about this book.

This book is 419 pages long and the word "faerie" appears on 305 of them, and that doesn't count all the other mentions of "fae" or other fairy lingo.

If I never see the word fairy again I will die happy.

 

[The Internet Dick]

I've been re-reading J. D. Salinger's short stories, the ones collected in Nine Stories and For Esme, with Love and Squalor. I had forgotten how good Salinger is at the short story. Some of them are simply beautiful, among the best of the form.

Fun fact: J. D. Salinger was notoriously shy about giving interviews and it was only fairly recently (ten years or so ago) that his daughter said he didn't like them because people always wanted to question him about his WWII combat experiences (he was highly decorated) and how much the war had informed his work. Salinger had seen a lot of combat as an infantryman and later as an NCO in an intelligence unit. His infantry regiment took 52% casualties, to give you an idea.

And the truth was (according to his daughter) he hated talking about the war, hated even thinking about it. They didn't know much about PTSD at that time, and she guessed he suffered from it greatly. When she was a little girl, they were attending a family friend's funeral. A car backfired after the service and he instantly reacted, grabbing her and diving behind a tombstone for cover.

 

[cold comfort]

A Court of Thorns and Roses

Well yeah that's a paranormal romance book for teens. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell has fairies of a kind and I absolutely loved it. Or for something fantasy-adjacent I'd recommend Titus Groan / Gormenghast. Or the Book of the New Sun series. Should your trusting nature ever return.

 

[glass_houses]

I'm trying to branch out in genres. I decided to try a fantasy book, a genre I normally hold in very low esteem. 'Maybe it's not all bad, it can't possibly be all nerd jerk off material', I stupidly thought. Then some fuckwit at work recommended 'A Court of Thorns and Roses' and like an autist, I listened to them. This was bad fan fiction.
Never again will I touch a fantasy book. It's about some dumb bitch who fucks a fairy. Jesus christ, I'm MATI about this book.

This book is 419 pages long and the word "faerie" appears on 305 of them, and that doesn't count all the other mentions of "fae" or other fairy lingo.

If I never see the word fairy again I will die happy.

This is fantasy romance. What you just read was a Mills and Boon novel with fairy wings. Reading that dreak and expecting some epic high fantasy saga was retarded on your part. Next you'll be waving some bodice ripper around and shrieking about all historical fiction being crap because of it.

 

[AnOminous]

Then some fuckwit at work recommended 'A Court of Thorns and Roses' and like an autist, I listened to them. This was bad fan fiction.

>read a retarded shitty book from the
>current year that started in 2014
>it sucked
>act amazed
>write off entire genre based on reading absolute shit from the shittiest period in literature
the absolute state of you

Not LOTR. Not Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. Not Lord Dunsany. Not even delightful trash like Robert E. Howard's Conan books or Red Sonya. But some garbage from some Literally Who who is probably a troon or something on top of that.

 

[ScurvyRat]

Not LOTR. Not Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. Not Lord Dunsany. Not even delightful trash like Robert E. Howard's Conan books or Red Sonya. But some garbage from some Literally Who who is probably a troon or something on top of that.

or even modern popular stuff like GoT, Brando Sando, or Rothfuss.
I only know about this shit from a friends wife who loves it. It's essentially softcore porn.

'A Court of Thorns and Roses' This was bad fan fiction.
Never again will I touch a fantasy book. It's about some dumb bitch who fucks a fairy. Jesus christ, I'm MATI about this book.

If you really read thru all of it you have no one to blame but yourself.
Maybe it gets better? I hear there's a couple more of them, why don't you give them a shot? It's just a slow burn, bro. It really gets good around book six.

 

[Doktor Grimm]

I'm trying to get back into real books. Finally finished reading through The Count of Monte Cristo and it was amazing (the ending was the slightest bit disappointing, but I was hooked the whole way there). Now it seems I'm experiencing withdrawals.

Any recommendations for historical fiction with similarish vibes? I'm a sucker for anything set in the 19th century and tend to prefer more literary stuff. I'd perhaps like to branch out from purely reading ""classics"", but I'm paralysed by choice and worried I'll pick up something only for it to end up being total schlock. Advice much appreciated.

 

[Womble of Wimbledon]

Any recommendations for historical fiction with similarish vibes? I'm a sucker for anything set in the 19th century and tend to prefer more literary stuff. I'd perhaps like to branch out from purely reading ""classics"", but I'm paralysed by choice and worried I'll pick up something only for it to end up being total schlock. Advice much appreciated.

Perfume by Patrick Suskind is also set in France, although in the 18th century, and has a lot of literary flair. The ending is definitely not a letdown but I won't give anything away. Not to suggest it will give you Monte Cristo vibes but it's well worth reading.

 

[Doktor Grimm]

Perfume by Patrick Suskind is also set in France, although in the 18th century, and has a lot of literary flair. The ending is definitely not a letdown but I won't give anything away. Not to suggest it will give you Monte Cristo vibes but it's well worth reading.

Looks right up my alley, might have to find myself a copy. Thanks 4 the rec.

 

[cold comfort]

Finally read Trans by Helen Joyce. As a seasoned terf I've heard her talk for hours and hours so there weren't any surprises in there, but it's a really good overview. It'd make for a great introduction for someone interested in the anti-gender ideology argument. The publisher did make her use preferred pronouns for 'transitioned' people, and phrasing like 'trans children' which I thought undermined her argument. But that was the price for getting it out there, and it makes it more palatable for people on the fence. Reading nonsense like “his uterus and ovaries were removed” might wake some people up. There's also one paragraph where, after demonstrating that Caster Semenya is a male who went through male puberty, Joyce writes "She [Semenya] was told to withdraw temporarily from competition and suppress her testosterone, which can be done by taking oestrogen or spironolactone, a hormone blocker. Around the same time, other women with DSDs were undergoing more extreme measures." which triggered me.

 

[glass_houses]

Looks right up my alley, might have to find myself a copy. Thanks 4 the rec.

There was a movie made of that book, and I remember being incredibly pissed off about it. It was generally true to the story line, but not to the character, and the final fifteen minutes made me homicidal. Anyway, I won't ruin it for you.

Perfume is an entertaining book and very well written, with good imagery. Unlike the Count of Monte Cristo, however, I doubt that it will still be well known in two hundred years. If you like historical door stoppers, I highly recommend Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White. It is funny and horrifying, frequently in the same paragraph. And the amount of research Faber put into it is brain breaking.

 

[St.Davis]

I am presently reading The Arabian Nights. As a collection of Arabic folk tales I find it interesting that the number #1 fear of the average Arab seems to be your wife getting fucked by a big black slave. This has come up at least three times in seperate tales as the core issue. There also seems to be a core theme of marrying your first cousin.

I definitely recommend reading it, as it is exceedingly entertaining. The translation I'm reading was done by Husain Haddawy and Muhsin Mahdi, apparently.

 

[FieldPiece]

Stuff I finished recently

-The Sunset Limited - Cormac McCarthy
Finished this yesterday. Probably one of my favorites from McCarthy, which is saying something. I wish The Passenger was half as interesting as this was since both are basically nothing but dialogue.

-Child Of God - Cormac McCarthy
Definitely not my favorite. It has some interesting parts but is pretty one note.

A Confederacy Of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
Probably the funniest book I've ever read outside of Norm MacDonald's "memoir". Reading Ignatius in Chris's voice makes it even more funny.

Stuff I'm currently working through

Empire Of Silence - Christopher Ruocchio
I'm only at about chapter 4 but I'm liking it so far. It is pretty apparent that it's basically Dune written by a Romeaboo though.

 

[glue eater]

Since USSR was mentioned, I think I'll bring this up. For a few years I have been in internet spats with commies and antifas who insist "USSR and Stalin were....le good!" I have read "From Double Eagle to Red Flag", "Gulag archipelago", "Beria's Gardens", you name it. But while they do cover the USSR, they're all anti-communist. So I decided to get out of my literary echo chamber and got the book Khrushchev Lied by Grover Furr who is a hardcore Stalinist. Who knows, maybe I'll start seeing things from Uncle Joe's perspective, maybe I'll even start denying Holodomor.

200 pages in and so far the argument has exclusively been "Well the soviet archives remain closed, so we can't know if the purged people were guilty or not". Which hasn't really convinced me so far. Furr also claims Katyn was perpetrated by Germans. Idk, I think he shouldve cut his losses and called them reactionaries who deserved it. Would have felt more honest.

 

[Freya]

Finally started The Haunting of Hill House. Shirley Jackson really was an amazing writer

 

[glass_houses]

Finally started The Haunting of Hill House. Shirley Jackson really was an amazing writer

Hill House is okay, but We Have Always Lived in the Castle is much, much better, imho. Constance's failed attempt to escape Merricat is heart breaking, and the ending, where she finally submits to the folie à deux with Merricat, the person who murdered her family and destroyed her life, is pure arsenic and roses.

 

[Jewthulhu]

I currently started reading Clausewitz's "On War" alongside a commentary by Bernard Brodie.