What are you reading right now?

[I Know 孤独のせい]

Been reading the Iliad for a couple of days now, halfway done. Some things are a bit strange, but it's good so far, which I wasn't expecting.

 

[Zyklon C]

A Revolution in Arms: A History of the First Repeating Rifles by Joseph Bilby. Chronicles the use of repeating rifles, primarily the Spencer and Henry, during the Civil War. I remember enjoying it when I first read it back in 2005, but this read through less so because the rifles disappear regularly and it becomes a straight CW history.

Bilby did what he could since most people didn't know how to doctrinally use repeaters yet, but I feel he could have posited scenarios in how battles could have changed by different tactics.

 

[Throwing Romans]

Re-reading Kevin MacDonalds Culture of Critique as a final third edition was released last year. If you’re interesting in it’s a good read as he lays out a history of Jews and how they’ve influenced/subverted European nations, and how this strategy has benefited them as a group.

 

[The News Crews]

Dear General Macarthur: Letters from the Japanese during the American Occupation of Japan.

As the title says. It's a collection of letters from the Japanese to General Macarthur on varying subjects, with intermissions from the author to given context to certain events. I thought it was extremely captivating and enjoyed it. Some chapters drag on (such as the gift giving one), but otherwise the book has a steady pace. Gives insight into the Japanese culture of the time, and why the Japanese were so quick to, for lack of a better term, brownnose their new leaders. Some of my favorite letters were:
>A Japanese painter who would sent a picture of Jesus to Macarthur, and said in his letter that Jesus visited Japan and that his cousin was Santa Claus
>A letter written in blood begging for the emperor not to be tried as a war criminal
>A woman who's husband is about to be executed, so she wishes for her husband to know his son's name
>various Japanese generals asking to be allowed to fight in Korea

10/10, highly recommend reading

 

[Fig Kommandant]

Kevin MacDonald

I haven't read Culture of Critique yet, but I can definitely recommend Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition by him. He goes over the context over why Westerners and particularly northern Europeans seem predisposed to individualism by going over genetics, history, religion, climate and bunch of different aspects.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

I got hands on most of the works by Greg Egan and have been reading them. He is a science fiction author that really, really leans into the hardcore nitty gritty of science and tech. So far I have read two of his books and both were pretty good. However do not underestimate the hardness of the sci-fi, when Greg says he like hard science he means it. You won't need to actually do any math or anything but unless you can understand some pretty esotheric concepts and maths you might have some trouble. He has a website where his aesthetics are absurdly kino and some extra commentary and ideas on his books can be found, along with links to all of them.

I have read so far Incandescence and Schild's Ladder. Of these the first one is the more accesible of the two. The second one requires you to be able to make sense of some pretty abstract concepts and while you don't need to actually be able to calculate graph theory or topological geometry if you can't at least relate the concepts it will be kind of incomprehensible and you will miss most of the story.

Incandescence takes place with two different characters at the same time: One is a human, or at least a human descendant, in the far future who is looking for the origin of some DNA fragments which indicate a possible undiscovered life bearing world and possibly even sapient civilization as part of his quest to do something unique. At the same time we follow Roi, a alien woman who lives in a world of translucent rock that is called The Splinter with a rigidly organized society and where little changes, until one day she meets a male by the name of Zak on a quest to discover the true nature of their world. Slowly questions accumulate, and they begin to make progress on their research.

For Schild's Ladder I will just copy-paste Greg's own description:

For twenty thousand years, every observable phenomenon in the universe has been successfully explained by the Sarumpaet Rules: the laws governing the dynamics of the quantum graphs that underlie all the constituents of matter and the geometric structure of spacetime. Now Cass has stumbled on a set of quantum graphs that might comprise the fundamental particles of an entirely different kind of physics, and she has travelled three hundred and seventy light years to Mimosa Station, a remote experimental facility, in the hope of bringing this tantalising alternative to life. The “novo-vacuum” is predicted to begin decaying the instant it’s created, but even a short-lived, microscopic speck could shed light on the origins of the universe, and test the Sarumpaet Rules more rigorously than ever before.

Cass’s experiment turns out to be more successful than anticipated: the novo-vacuum is more stable than the ordinary vacuum around it, and a region in which the new physics holds sway proceeds to expand out from Mimosa at half the speed of light.

Six hundred years later, more than two thousand inhabited systems have been lost to the novo-vacuum. On the Rindler, a ship that has matched velocities with the encroaching border, people have come from throughout inhabited space to study the phenomenon. Most are Preservationists, hunting for a way to turn back the tide, but a few belong to another faction: Yielders, who believe that the challenge of adapting to survive on the far side of the border would reinvigorate a civilisation that has grown stale and insular.

Tchicaya has come to the Rindler to join the Yielders, but when Mariama – a childhood friend whose example inspired him to abandon his own home world and traditions for a life of travel – arrives soon after, he is shocked to discover that she plans to help the Preservationists find a way to destroy the novo-vacuum.

As a theoretical breakthrough leads to a sequence of experiments that begins to reveal the true richness of the world behind the border, tensions between the opposing factions grow. When a splinter group responds to these revelations with violent, unilateral action, Tchicaya and Mariama are forced into an uneasy alliance, and travel together through the border, balancing old and new loyalties against the fate of two incomparably different universes.

 

[Pointer to Address]

SubaHibi and House of Leaves! Bout halfway through House of Leaves- then I'll probably start Ibitsu.

 

[Counter-Semite]

Nicomachean Ethics

 

[Commander X]

Doc Armstrong: Suburb at the Edge of Never by Larry Blamire. A literary sequel to the author's cult films The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra and The Lost Skeleton Returns Again where his hero (played by Blamire in the films) scientist Doc Armstrong delves into the mystery of local disappearances assisted by his wife Betty and his neighbors Kro-Bar and Lattis, two aliens stuck on Earth trying to blend in. His investigation involves overly dramatic derring-do coupled with a hearty application of SCIENCE. He must go up against botany-gone-mad, weird life-forms and clanking mechanical horrors invading from another dimension, landscaping gone amok. and amusing turns of phrase.

Doc was able to go furtive at a moment's notice and often practiced when they threw dinner parties, suddenly ducking low and squat-walking or slithering along the floor until a guest spotted him.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Dear General Macarthur: Letters from the Japanese during the American Occupation of Japan.

As the title says. It's a collection of letters from the Japanese to General Macarthur on varying subjects, with intermissions from the author to given context to certain events. I thought it was extremely captivating and enjoyed it. Some chapters drag on (such as the gift giving one), but otherwise the book has a steady pace. Gives insight into the Japanese culture of the time, and why the Japanese were so quick to, for lack of a better term, brownnose their new leaders. Some of my favorite letters were:
>A Japanese painter who would sent a picture of Jesus to Macarthur, and said in his letter that Jesus visited Japan and that his cousin was Santa Claus
>A letter written in blood begging for the emperor not to be tried as a war criminal
>A woman who's husband is about to be executed, so she wishes for her husband to know his son's name
>various Japanese generals asking to be allowed to fight in Korea

10/10, highly recommend reading

I find MacArthur absolutely fascinating as both a hater (he was one of the most narcissistic showboat fruits to ever blight the US Armed Forces)* and admirer (the Gaijin Shogun, James Madison of Japan's postwar boom, winning the Korean War). I'll have to read this.



*This faggot once stormed into a meeting with FDR to tell him what's what, and by the time he came out he was vomiting from stress. Nobody knows what FDR said to him.

 

[Juan Números]

I've started "Monday Begins on Saturday" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, even if I don't know much about Russian folklore.

 

[Knee Heel No Womb]

I find MacArthur absolutely fascinating as both a hater (he was one of the most narcissistic showboat fruits to ever blight the US Armed Forces)* and admirer (the Gaijin Shogun, James Madison of Japan's postwar boom, winning the Korean War). I'll have to read this.



*This faggot once stormed into a meeting with FDR to tell him what's what, and by the time he came out he was vomiting from stress. Nobody knows what FDR said to him.

I read American Caesar, and a different book about Patton (I think it was Patton by Blumenson, but don't quote me on that). Something that really stuck out to me is that the best US commanders seemed to be intentionally showboating, in order to give an impression of aristocracy on their men. Kind of like the opposite of what other great commanders were doing among the other Allied powers. Petain was sort of famous for dining with his men and the Soviets put a bunch of women in combat roles to communicate egality. The Americans were doing the opposite, maybe because they felt their main problem was the opposite of the other Allies. Very strange.

Also, in American Caesar, the author claims that South Korea represented the better half when the partition occurred, implying that America got the better deal by bringing Seoul into her orbit. That might be the biggest cope I've ever read in print. The beating heart of Korean civilization prior to the partition was indisputably Pyongyang. I don't get why the author would even try to imply otherwise.

 

[General Patton]

The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal And The Making of A Monster by Shelley Puhak.

It's a new release. I've been looking for a proper book about Erzsebet Bathory and I posted one that I got in this thread.

Hopefully it'll be a good read.

 

[Ygolonac]

L'Morte d'Arthur and the Unpanishads

There is a nice little series on youtube that goes over much of the symbology L'Morte d'Arthur it's a bit dated with only a handful inaccurate historical inaccuracies and dubious takes. It's good a good way to get into a medieval mindset for literature.

On the Upanishads, as you read through each it's interesting to see how obvious it is which ones are pre-Buddhist and post Buddhist.

 

[LordOfZhbagva]

Something that really stuck out to me is that the best US commanders seemed to be intentionally showboating, in order to give an impression of aristocracy on their men. Kind of like the opposite of what other great commanders were doing among the other Allied powers. Petain was sort of famous for dining with his men and the Soviets put a bunch of women in combat roles to communicate egality. The Americans were doing the opposite, maybe because they felt their main problem was the opposite of the other Allies. Very strange.

IIRC, Patton had a reputation for being a showman and really went out of his way to ensure he had a good reputation in the press, both of which made him relatively unpopular with a lot of other allied generals and commanders. Didn't help that he was a massive dick.

 

[The Feline Solution 2]

Last Exit to Brooklyn which has been on my list for a long time. It's not as shocking as I expected, more sad than anything else. I just finished the part where the tranny sucks off the love of her life and tastes shit from another tranny's arsehole then tries to convince her/himself that's not what it was. Good read so far but written in a very rambling style.

That's around where i dropped the book. I already hated Selby's syntax idiosyncrasies at that point, the combo with all the gay shit pushed me over the edge. Dropped Requiem for a Dream very early in, too. I don't know much about Selby but it just did not seem to me like he spent time around real junkies, the stuff i read was just goofy and, despite knowing that it's fiction, felt completely inauthentic. One of the few cases where the film is superior to the novel, even though it has its own errors regarding authenticity (heroin junkies won't have a lengthy debate over how they might need to whore themselves out to make money to score, they just do it once the withdrawals are hitting bad, nor do pupils dilate when using opiates/opioids). I remember i picked up The Jungle by Upton Sinclair after i dropped Brooklyn, a book i very much enjoyed reading.

I'm still deep into Warhammer 40k books, haven't read anything else in months. After finishing the Armageddon War Omnibus (which was overall fantastic) i started Death Watch: Xenos Hunters, a short story collection centered around the Death Watch and am enjoying it a lot. Anything that's Inquisition or Inquisition adjacent is my shit regarding 40k.

I decided to stop reading Japanese authors after that book.

Daily reminder that Murakami is shockingly overrated. And that Norwegian Wood is his only worthwhile book.

snip

Pirate them instead. James doesn't deserve your money. Being so deep into 40k books myself i often contemplate getting back into the painting side of the hobby, had a look at what stuff costs these days not too long ago, GW has absolutely lost its mind and will never see a single cent from me ever again.

 

[Otterly]

Is this the Annihilation that was made into a movie? I pretty much liked the movie, since it left me with that uneasiness that is so rare in modern art. Does book reads the same?

It’s a different plot but that crawling sense of horror is the same. I didn’t ‘enjoy’ the books, I found them quite disturbing

 

[Talmudic Ketamine]

It’s a different plot but that crawling sense of horror is the same. I didn’t ‘enjoy’ the books, I found them quite disturbing

Success on the books behalf, then. Unless by disturbing you mean something else or too much disturbing? I tried to get into the first book and couldn't get to it. Would you argue it's worth trying again?

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Thread Tax:
In The Mouth of Madness.

 

[LordOfZhbagva]

Just finished "Winter King" by Bernard Cornwell. Pretty good piece of historical fiction. Fully recommend and the next two books in the trilogy are certainly on the short to read list. Afaik, he covers a pretty undocumented period of history and while I've had basically no exposure to British historiography (or anything west of Hungary/Poland), nothing really sticks out to me as outrageous. It's an interesting interpretation of the Romano-British and their struggles with the Saxons, the writing is good, in some places great, nowhere did it hit me as bad, the story is interesting and the politics and warfare is interesting.
For my next piece of fiction, I'll probably hit some more Elric of Melbourne Melnibone.

 

[800 Chupacabras]

I usually have three books going at once - one e-book, one audiobook, one physical book.

Ebook: Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, Stephen Kinzer

I found this by way of Tom O’Neill’s CHAOS, particularly the connection between Gottlieb and Dr. Jolly West. I’m around 200 pages in, and I appreciate the balance of depth and accessibility in this work. I am reminded of Patrick Radden Keefe’s portrayal of the Sackler family and their drug empire in his writing, such that you can’t write a biography of the man without a history of his institution.

Audiobook: End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, Peter Turchin

Halfway through. It’s certainly a compelling listen, and his justification of cliodynamics for a popular audience is enjoyable. I have no particularly cogent thoughts about it currently.

Book book: God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan, Jonathan D. Spence

Turchin’s book reminded me that I had this on my shelf, and damn do I love Spence’s writing. I read The Question of Hu last year, and he captures the same magic of that book in this larger work. I wish I could have lived in Spence’s mind for a day and understand China like he does. Such a gifted writer and historian, anything he writes is a vivid immersion in an unfamiliar world.

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Daily reminder that Murakami is shockingly overrated. And that Norwegian Wood is his only worthwhile book.

I loved The Wind-up Bird Chronicle in college, but then tried reading 1Q84 and forever dropped his writing

Would you argue it's worth trying again?

It’s quite short and worth the experience. Viscerally unsettling.