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I read Joe Hill's NOS4R2. It's pretty terrible. Way too long, reads like YA fiction. Steals a LOT of stuff from his dad's books. Even makes an in-SK-Universe reference like his dad does, linking this story to one of his dad's books.

After that I read Adam Neville's The Ritual. A good read, I have ordered a few more of his books.

I dunno if anyone remember's Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half blog which then turned into a book? Well the follow up book which was promised 7 years ago just dropped. A lot of people thought she was dead or had turned into the webcomic world's Harper Lee/Salinger.

This one is called Solutions and Other Problems and it is very funny and very dark. The multiple chapter section on her BF's dog dying of liver disease has way more irl lol funny moments that something like that has any right in having.

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1 minute ago, hello spiral said:

Good book, deserves a reread. Been at least 10yrs since I last did.

Definitely - my version had some annotations etc, I think it was released in 2014 or so? Definitely shouldn’t be limited to those in the industry (as it was originally intended). Very sad about his situation and passing... 

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4 hours ago, hello spiral said:

I dunno if anyone remember's Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half blog which then turned into a book? Well the follow up book which was promised 7 years ago just dropped. A lot of people thought she was dead or had turned into the webcomic world's Harper Lee/Salinger.

This one is called Solutions and Other Problems and it is very funny and very dark. The multiple chapter section on her BF's dog dying of liver disease has way more irl lol funny moments that something like that has any right in having.

Yeah, I member Hyperbole and a Half and loved it, will have to check out the new one, but not without some trepidation, as I'm hardly the same person now who loved that book seven years ago and frankly did kind of forget about her in the meantime. But I know that at the time I found it funny as hell.

2 hours ago, KovalainenFanBoy said:

halfway through kaufman's antkind, feels like the joke's ran its course. diminishing returns. might drop it

I liked the first half better, and the whole thing could have used some trimming down, but I guess it wouldn't really be Kaufman without the megalomaniacal (and in parts self-indulging) monumentality. I found it best to only read a couple of pages per day, and every time I go back to it, there are always some details I don't remember; it's almost like the darn thing keeps changing on me, like when you're familiarising yourself with a new Autechre record. The sheer amount of stuff in there is insane and can be sort of overwhelming. So in a way it's the gift that keeps on giving for me, but I fully understand people dropping it after a couple hundred pages. It's certainly not for everyone.

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The Death & Life of Great American Cities - torn between "Jane Jacobs has some real interesting ideas regarding dynamic structure which could be applied to many different areas of life" and "Jane Jacobs admires the hustle & bustle of urban landscapes in a way that feels dated but I can't quite put my finger on it"

Capital as Power - good shit, very dense. Makes me want to read Veblen next in my economic research

Creative Evolution (in french, just started)

Che Guevara's Guerilla Warfare (this shit is tight) ((on a purely academic level of course))

Sanity, Madness & The Family by R D Laing (they should put a trigger warning on this shit yo)

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  • 2 weeks later...

top books of 2020, in no particular order:

deleuze & guattari - anti-oedipus

oswald spengler - decline of the west (probably the only thing from my "absorb the alt right's reading list so i can better critique them" project that was actually interesting)

karl marx - capital 1/2/3 (a real slog to get through but i'm glad i did)

che guevara - guerilla warfare (do i get the t-shirt now?)

90s nick land/ccru/accelerationist shit (nothing in particular, just the overall vibe)

the world as will & representation (strong disagree with his conclusions but it's beautifully written)

jacques ellul - propaganda (scary shit)

hp lovecraft (again more just the overall vibe)

 

i read close to 100 books this year though so i'm probably fogetting a lot of really big ones

Spoiler

worst book: xenofeminist manifesto. early 2010s was truly a garbage aesthetic now that we have some distance from it

 

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  • 1 month later...
8 minutes ago, Nil said:

Finished The Three-Body problem series days ago (amazing reading !), and just grabbed a digital copy of XX.

I had so much fun reading this. Highly recommended.

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recently:

an audiobook of thorstein veblen's theory of the leisure class

kenneth waltz's theory of international politics

jacques ellul's the technological society

rereading a thousand plateaus (opening to completely random pages each time, as suggested)

randomly flipping thru marx's grundrisse, various works of aristotle, lacan, heidegger in similar fashion

also a bunch of pdfs on evolutionary biology, systems theory, the history of the mp3 file format

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i'd like to read the three body problem at some point. in general i want to expose myself to more chinese media to get a better sense of the country. it feels weird that they make up like 1/5th of the global population & yet the only exposure i get to the culture is through propaganda (both kinds).

also it'd be nice to read some fiction. not counting the hp lovecraft story collection, i think the last fiction book i read was neuromancer back in 2019

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2 minutes ago, Alcofribas said:

@Cryptowen nice to see someone digging Ellul, he’s underrated imo. absolutely love his crotchety vibe. 

i've really enjoyed what i've read of his so far! "crotchety" is definitely a fitting word (there's this prevalent feeling of "oh right this was the shit that had ted kaczynski trippin" throughout), but at the same time it all feels very insightful. i remember when i was reading propaganda last spring there were several points where i had to take breaks, it was making me so uncomfortable.

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5 minutes ago, Cryptowen said:

i've really enjoyed what i've read of his so far! "crotchety" is definitely a fitting word (there's this prevalent feeling of "oh right this was the shit that had ted kaczynski trippin" throughout), but at the same time it all feels very insightful. i remember when i was reading propaganda last spring there were several points where i had to take breaks, it was making me so uncomfortable.

yeah he's incredibly ahead of his time in many ways. he has some tedious works (he loves to complain about marxism) but his books on technology are so good. i hadn't read his stuff in a long time but last year i picked up "the political illusion" which i'd had on my shelf for years and i was like "damn this mf could see into the future."

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*book has pattern, system, or organization in the title*

my brain: bru u should go talk to her

Spoiler

i've started in on Jean Gebser's The Ever-Present Origin. Liking it so far. Reminds me a lot of Spengler, but with a stronger emphasis on the systematizing potentials revealed by aesthetic development, and less emphasis on the inevitable decline of large societies

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Just finished Curzio Malaparte's "Kaputt" , in which the author alternates descriptions of lavish dinners with ambassadors, noblemen and high ranking Nazis with stories about atrocities he witnessed as a war correspondent on the Eastern front.

Not a fun read, but very good.

The sequel (sort of), "The Skin", about the American invasion of Italy in 1943, is also very good and a bit less heavy.

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