Books

About 15 years ago I read though everything Neal Stephenson had written. It started with snow crash, then the cryptonomicon, then less popular works like zodiac and the diamond age. In general I loved them all. I stopped reading his books right before anathem came out...

But on a vacation last year I picked up a copy on my e-reader and started it. I enjoyed the concept, I loved the mat-as-philosophy, despite the difficulty getting into it. Anyway, vacation came to an end, I was about 40% through it, and I just stopped, picked up a couple other books, and moved on. No real reason, but a combination of how slow it moved, the extraneous details that seem like they could have been left out, etc.

Well, vacation this year hit so I picked it back up. After about the 50 percent point the book totally changed, as if I was reading an entirely different story. I'm trying to leave out spoilers, but now I am about 80% through and I'm having trouble with what the characters are doing in the book based on the history provided in the beginning.

Don't get me wrong... I follow the story and the plot tracks well, but there was so much character development in the beginning and suddenly what they are doing doesn't track with any of that development.

The best summery I read by someone on reddit said "what do you think about Anathem? I think it is about 200 pages too long". I'm going to push through and finish it. My e-reader says I have about 7 hours to go and I think I am enjoying it. I just was wondering how others feel about it.

Has anyone read these books, and are they any good?

Link below for clarity on which novels I'm talking about.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Alien_(franchise)_novels

My opinion:

• Interesting concept of a Dark Forest & cosmic sociology axioms.
• Unpleasant characters: Ye Wenjie (narcissistic and psychopathic), Cheng Xin (a kind billionaire lol).
• Disappointing ending—the last few chapters feel weak.

Bonus: Absolutely fascinating interpretation of the first book by @yogthos@lemmy.ml.

My partner and I are doing some traveling and dispersed camping in some fairly remote locations. We listen to audiobooks quit a bit and on one of our legs we listened to The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher and it was so perfectly creepy and we want more of it. The combination of the wooded setting, and psychological type horror that was more creepy than graphic really made the week after listening to it kinda terrifying. We've read Pet Sematary previously and it also really hit the right notes and would have been a great read deep in the trees.

We read Salems Lot and What Moves the Dead and while we enjoyed them, they did not hit the same spot. Vampires aren't creepy in the right way and neither was What Moves the Dead. Horror isn't our normal genre and we don't know where to go from here. We'd really appreciate some some reccomendations

The beginning of this little think piece of mine will cover the ending of the book, as I believe the ending is the glue that binds the rest of the novel together. I’ll then add some general thoughts about plot, pacing, and prose.

The epilogue, consistent with the rest of the book, is metaphor in its most profound form. In my mind, the holes taken from the earth represent the progress of humanity. Humanity as a whole brings hell about the natural land it inhabits and destroys God’s creations indiscriminately, but an infinitesimal number of men lead the charge. Those who are not leading have no choice but to comply. The holes have already been carved, and their contents incinerated; as followers, we have no choice but to watch our step, lest we twist an ankle.

As for the last chapter, I will not pore over the whole thing. Instead, I’ll say that it is clear the judge is supposed to represent God to some degree (literal or otherwise). At the very least, his character is used as an example of how power and knowledge harnessed by capable hands is able to commit atrocities on a biblical scale; and just as the christian god accrues followers, and just as the christian god’s philosophies oft end up causing more harm than good, so too does the judge accrue followers, and so too do his philosophies, grand and astute as they may be, result in harm. Perhaps the judge is an allegory for Manifest Destiny.

I do wonder what significance the imbecile holds. The judge requires a follower of some sort, and so bereft of that, he resorts to the imbecile, perhaps?

As for the rest of the book, I do have a few bones to pick.

I really am not one for this writing style. I see it as a hindrance. It’s bearable, but people liken the prose to Moby Dick (brazenly displayed on the front AND back cover of the book), and frankly, this is an insult to Melville. Yes, the imagery is vivid, the subtext is rich, and the book gets very philosophical at points. But in his prose, McCarthy only holds a candle to Melville when the judge is speaking.

The lack of quotation marks coupled with the run-on sentences were novel and helped set the mood initially, but the more I read, the more these aspects came off as pretentious, needless obstruction.

The book also gets into a rut towards the middle: vivid depictions of nature, a taste of philosophy, an atrocity, a town, an atrocity, rinse and repeat. The book’s complete lack of emotion is harrowing, but also tends to make things blend together, especially in the middle.

All in all, this book definitely has weight, and I have lots to think about.

I’m curious as to what messages you all got from the book as a whole. What meaning did you glean from the tail end of the book? What do you think of the prose?

I can dive into thoughts on characters, specific events, etc. in the comments.

I am trying to get into reading and I started with Brave New World, I have been reading the book for a year and have about 60 pages remaining. Before anyone mentions I am aware it is a small book that can be finished in a week, I am not used to reading. I normally read short stories, comics, and manga. I finshed the machine stops quickly, but I couldn't get into Brave New World, it has a lot of boring parts.

After finishing Brave New World should I read the Tempest, the main character made me interested in the story. I only read one other shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet the sparksnote version, it was great.

From Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy:

They posted guards atop the azotea and unsaddled the horses and drove them out to graze and the judge took one of the packanimals and emptied out the panniers and went off to explore the works.

In the afternoon he sat in the compound breaking ore samples with a hammer, the feldspar rich in red oxide of copper and native nuggets in whose organic lobations he purported to read news of the earth's origins, holding an extemporary lecture in geology to a small gathering who nodded and spat.

A few would quote him scripture to confound his ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings.

The judge smiled.

Books lie, he said.

God dont lie.

No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words.

He held up a chunk of rock.

He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.

The squatters in their rags nodded among themselves and were soon reckoning him correct, this man of learning, in all his speculations, and this the judge encouraged until

they were right proselytes of the new order whereupon he laughed at them for fools.

What does the last line entail? Are they fools for believing the judge in that gods words are the world, or is he laughing that they are so dumb as to believe scripture?

Thanks.

I've taken a break from nonfiction for a while (finished lotr and read a whole bunch of Stephen king). Now I want to go back to reading nonfiction, but I want something that will pull me in another world of facts I didn't know about. Be it political, sociology.... anything really. I don't know if "facts" is the word I'm looking for here (English is my second language). Can I say "discoveries"? Things you've found through the book that shocked you? Hope that makes sense.
Thanks in advance

Edit: Thank you all for the great suggestions. I've saved this post and will go through the list. Much, much appreciated 🫶🏽

Although (or perhaps because) I came to "administration" late in my academic career, I am constantly amazed at how obediently people accept explanations that begin with the words "The computer shows..." or "The computer has determined..." It is Technopoly's equivalent of the sentence "It is God's will," and the effect is roughly the same.-Technopoly: The Submission of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman, pg. 115

Technopoly as a word is entirely Postman's creation, he describes it as a "state of culture" and "state of mind" which consists in the "deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology." As among the symptoms of this state of mind, he includes a conscious focus on more efficient machines without considering the cost of that efficiency, relying on statistics alone as the sole truth and the trivialization of old traditions and symbols of our past.

It is a obvious thing to see that in today's tech-driven world, the more technologies we develop to communicate better, the more isolated and alienated we have become. This is slowly giving rise to a society where we are more comfortable with not thinking critically, of not having the power to make our own decisions and telling our concerns to AI rather than people we are close. This has not happened overnight, and according to Neil Postman, these visible differences in our psyche and daily lives have a long history that starts when we started letting technology take more prestige and power in our culture. This book is his hope that we become more aware of Technopoly's effects in our lives and do something to resist them.

Neil Postman presents a number of evidence and arguments backed by his keen observation and thorough research about the dangers of letting technological innovation and the drive of progress consume our lives. He explains and shows circumstances that we have all seen and felt, especially more rigorous forms of advertising and consumerism than was present in his own times.

What he presents as a solution is less than enough however, his solution I might add is one he gives timidly but with a full sense of hope. It is one where education is the cause of our collective salvation and the only way to overcome this need to progress more efficiently. I however think that it cannot be so simple as that, because as capitalism and our own markets have proven again and again, a message designed to be a cautionary tale can be sold perhaps to even the same people that participate in the cultural submission to technology.

These points withstanding, Technopoly: The Submission of Culture to Technology is a great book to warm yourself to these thoughts that we are ingrained in the grid of consumerism and technology that we don't even realize it.

Some of the bike tours are outdated for certain

There were 2 forks in the road at the end there.

Fork 1) The people running the institute were being totally evil. But it was to save the world. Oh what a moral conundrum!

King's choice : oh wait no, they were actually wrong about that. They were just being dumb. As explained by the genius. So all the bad stuff they did was for nothing good and the institute was just evil.

Fork 2) The psychic kids mindmelded into a magic hivemind deity. Wow. This is certainly something amazing and new in the world .

King's choice. : oh wait no, that whole thing immediately faded away after the climax.

Why? Maybe he was hoping for a tv series, which requires no big changes and moral simplicity

This one is from the First Ballentine Edition of Isaac Asimovs “The Robots of Dawn”.

I’ve got probably a dozen or so I’ve saved over the last few years of reading.

I would love to share more and others I come across if there’s interest.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.blahaj.zone/post/155940

...than having your first 5 star review?😱

Like the two Naomis [Wolf and Klein], conservatives and progressives become warped mirrors of one another. The progressive campaign for bodily autonomy is co-opted to be the foundation of the anti-vax movement. This is the mirror world, where concerns about real children – in border detention, or living in poverty in America – are reflected back as warped fever-swamp hallucinations about kids in imaginary pizza restaurant basements and Hollywood blood sacrifice rituals. The mirror world replaces RBG with Amy Coney-Barrett and calls it a victory for women. The mirror world defends workers by stoking xenophobic fears about immigrants.

But progressives let it happen. … Progressives cede suspicion of large corporations to conservatives, defending giant, exploitative, monopolistic corporations so long as they arouse conservative ire with some performative DEI key-jingling. Progressives defend the CIA and FBI when they're wrongfooting Trump, and voting machine vendors when they're turned into props for the Big Lie.

This thoughtful, vigorous prose and argumentation deserves its own special callout here: Klein has produced a first-rate literary work just as much as this is a superb philosophical and political tome. In this moment where the mirror world is exploding and the real world is contracting, this is an essential read.

ISBN 9780374610326 (don't buy from Amazon or its subsidiaries)

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