What novels have your read that make you reflect on the farms?

Lipitor

Lipitor

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So we don't really talk about why we're here or why we stay... or why it's worth it. I think at a certain point we reflect. I recently read H.G. Wells novel Island of Dr. Moreau, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.... I've seen parallels the authors' never intended. I feel like I was inspired by Palahniuk novels and ultimately found solace in older texts... How do you feel about this brave new world we live in?
 
I would say La casa de los espíritus was an enjoyable book to read. It had a green-haired character, which could be a reference to Tumblr people although the green-haired character wasn't actually annoying in the slightest. It also had a hard working cis-male character who ended up losing the fruits of his labour to a bunch of filthy communists, which one might see as a cautionairy tale, but would also be the wet dream of a lot of Phil-esque anarchists out there.

It was a good book. I like it because it's about family, love, and it shows the dangers of socialism.
 
The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero of The Room.

If it were to somehow reflect on the farms, it'd be comparing Tommy leading his work. While he did get some industry veterans, Tommy was demanding while failing to meet up his own ends. It could be reflective of individual lol-cows or lol-cow communities that have leaders or key figures that always demand while not holding their own part. It could also be a contrast in that Tommy is a man that managed to achieve his dream while you have an individual such as say YandereDev who hasn't even finished his own work while crediting himself over an unfinished game.
 
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This came up in the lolcows in fiction thread earlier, but Confederacy of Dunces is about a lolcow, most of the characters in it are lolcows, and the author himself is arguably a lolcow, or would be if he hadn't written a brilliant novel before offing himself.
 
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AnOminous said:
This came up in the lolcows in fiction thread earlier, but Confederacy of Dunces is about a lolcow, most of the characters in it are lolcows, and the author himself is arguably a lolcow, or would be if he hadn't written a brilliant novel before offing himself.
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I second this.
 
Orlando by Virginia Woolf.

Main character is a man who spends a lot of time thinking about sex and repeatedly trying (and failing) to write a good piece of literature. Many, many years pass without ever finishing it. He becomes a woman at some point. More years pass, she still doesn't finish it.
 
Thirding on A Confederacy of Dunces.
Also, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which is probably self-explanatory. If some of the characters in that novel lived in modern times and were given the Internet, a few would have likely become lolcows. The character 'Chief' would have been the king of clandestine trolls.
 
"Sticking anal beads feathers up your ass does not make you a chicken" from Fight Club comes to mind often
 
It's a short story, but Harrison Bergeron has been brought up a few times here
 
melty said:
It's a short story, but Harrison Bergeron has been brought up a few times here
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Anyone who hasn't read it should.

It's somewhat ironic, because Kurt Vonnegut is a left-wing icon, but it's an aggressively incisive critique of awful morality generally associated with liberal egalitarianism. Its gimmick is enforced equality by hobbling those with greater abilities, so nobody feels left out.

The result is a totalitarian nightmare.

It's what would happen if you actually put SJWs in charge of the world.
 
This year's Hugo winning novella "Cat Pictures Please" by Naomi Kritzer (about a benevolent AI who likes cat pictures, obviously) has a fantastic bit about a lolcow named Bethany. It's short, so you should read the whole thing, but if you're pressed for time...

Bethany was baffling to me. Baffling. She was still taking cat pictures and I still really liked her cats, but I was beginning to think that nothing I did was going to make a long-term difference. If she would just let me run her life for a week—even for a day—I would get her set up with therapy, I’d use her money to actually pay her bills, I could even help her sort out her closet because given some of the pictures of herself she posted online, she had much better taste in cats than in clothing.

Was I doing the wrong thing if I let her come to harm through inaction?

Was I?

She was going to come to harm no matter what I did! My actions, clearly, were irrelevant. I’d tried to steer her to the help she needed, and she’d ignored it; I’d tried getting her financial help, and she’d used the money to further harm herself, although I suppose at least she wasn’t spending it on addictive drugs. (Then again, she’d be buying those offline and probably wouldn’t be Instagramming her meth purchases, so it’s not like I’d necessarily even know.)
 
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The Fall. Especially the last couple of paragraphs. Godbear I love Camus.
 
AnOminous said:
This came up in the lolcows in fiction thread earlier, but Confederacy of Dunces is about a lolcow, most of the characters in it are lolcows, and the author himself is arguably a lolcow, or would be if he hadn't written a brilliant novel before offing himself.
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I first heard Confederacy of Dunces recommended by an Alt-Right dude as being like a wonderful satire of an Alt-Right Internet dweller from a time before either of those things existed. Something I feel and have seen a lot of people compare it to is that when reading Confederacy of Dunces it's one of those experiences where you can feel a bit of yourself in it (and wince), like you may not be a lolcow in real life, but there's something in there that resonates with that potential to be a lolcow if there was no self-awareness or morals, like how other works of literature make you see other unpleasant personality traits as universal. Come to think of it, you know how fiction is full of the sissyish nerd archetype, like Steve Smith from American Dad? Dunces is like a rare depiction of a different kind of nerd archetype.

Don't know if I'm making any sense. Basically, I think it shows a sort of timelessness to this personality archetype that's easy to think of as a modern thing, and it's just a particularly well-done version of it. Beyond that, I didn't find the book hilarious like its cult does, but there are lots of passages in it that are just amazing by themselves (Moorish Crusade for Dignity is especially good).

Don't know much about Toole, but from what little I know it does sound like the whole thing may have been in some way like a satire of himself and his friends (turned into caricatures). Maybe that's what makes reading it feel the way it does, if it came from a place of clever self-criticism.
 
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The Communist Manifesto. Also the Bible if it kinda counts.
 
Russell Greer's Taylor Swift book inspired lots of reflection on this site
 
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