Any gift ideas for a dad who reads through Jack Reacher books in a single day?
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One of those Navy ballcaps with a battleship on it?
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Going through this sad list of every book Iāve ever read and somehow Iāve never read a book published in 2011, ever? Anyone got any recs? And donāt say Steve Jobās biography lol
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I think 2011 is cursed, I looked at everything I read that was published that year and I didnāt like any of it
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My Brilliant Friend (italian) has its moments.
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yeah that was right before Ferrante and Knausgaard got translated
also before most of the good millennial novelists were publishing
The Sisters Brothers was ok
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Well. His love might be undying.
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Yeah I liked this one well enough
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I am actually reading just a bunch of Lovecraft in chronological order. Studying the source material as I work on a project. Not a great writer. Frequently not good. But I think that is endearing me to him, and helping to clarify his true legacy separate from the noir tinged pulp detective fiction stuff that gets called Lovecraftian these days. True Lovecraft heads know his work isnāt about alcoholic Continental Ops reading the Necronomicon and shooting at Shoggoths. No, itās actually about being prone to fainting and fixating on the way people smell until you make yourself shit your pants, and sleeping a lot.
āā¦happy is the tomb where no wizards lie, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes.ā
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lol yes you read his shit and itās like wow youāre telling me this guy was extremely neurotic and would have a panic attack if he had to walk past one too many polish guys on the street
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heās a strong concepts/names guy, very easy to lift, as weāve seen ever since
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shadow ticket - at times shockingly cursory or bsidesy but i still wound up moved. i think itās partly that the historical material in this one, european fascism in particular, feels so prefreighted with association that it kind of precludes or at least dampens the traditional imaginative flights. i sometimes feel like in early pynchon the novel-stuff, characters and setting and texture, is just there as something to riff on, some launching point for the next spark of fancy - and what i particularly like abt his mid to late novels is a kind of equipoise as that stuff is there but balanced out, paid for, with a new sense of what he calls somewhere the demands of the day.
in this one it kind of feels like the endpoint of that process, in that itās hard to ditch the feeling that itās this ground detail - placenames, food, bars, flirtations, trivia - that really absorbs and delights him, that the other stuff, sudden spiralling digressions into history or grace, is more like an unwelcome interloper. that he would have been happy writing a thousand pages more on 30s milwaukee internecine ethnic distinctions if it werent for all the other stuff inherent to a story set in 1932. much of it hard to parse inside the novel or out of it as much other than an immense incoming bummer too broad and broadly squalid to get much out of, which is increasingly what all the characters end up being stuck on as well. feels so loaded that it winds up in a post-dāannunzio fiume with no sense of where to go from there.
fav parts, the bike tour, the creepy nazi bowling alley, hicksās goon arc, the last couple chapters. gotta agree the pynchon expanded universe stuff and at times whole chapters felt like nothing but i was agreeably surprised it didnāt feel to me like the cotton-light genre piece iād sorta been anticipating.
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Will always strive to post more in this thread and never actually do it.
Anyway reading this book The Birth of the Museum. It kinda asks the question when did museums come into being and what political/social forces were at play etc. Pretty illuminating tbh. It places them in the context of like late 18th early 19th century europe, and makes the case that they coincided with a transition from like kingdoms to nation states, that the museum was a reorganisation of the kingās private jewels only seen by ruling elites into basically a tool of social conditioning, letting the masses see them but designing an architectural environment that restricts crowd-based behaviour, narrowing groups down into small enough numbers that they self-regulate through manners and airs. Atomisation, individuation etc. He places them as like an alternative to the carnival which was like a site of perversion, letting loose etc, into a place of performance, putting on ur best clothes etc. Basically london was so filthy and pull of peasants besotted at the ale house that these like social intellectuals designed utopian visions to uplift society, educate the masses to a level where they arent as wantonly destructive (creating a middle class basically), which the author basically claims is the birth of the panopticon, and also coincided with the rise of prisons and the decline of public punishment. Idk it is pretty grim! Also this is the same time as anthropology of course, and the museum played a huge role in the construction of the popular acceptance of like white races > āprimitiveā races etc. Itās a good book!
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Still reading The dispossessed but I did get a book store gift card this year and decided that 2026 is going to be the year I finally read Moby Dick so I got a nice big copy of it.
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Imagine a user on forum like this: every time he saw someone in need he send $50ā$150 via PayPal, which leaves constantly short on money himself, and he remember everyoneās names and stories. Black Panther, WUO, Antifaā¦All of these organizations have members who have been helped by him, and stories about him are circulating. When someday the Luigi came to him asking for help, he risked lifelong imprisonment to assist in his escape, he did that not only once in life.
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the revolution is to be human, by walter lowenfels
itās quite decent if youāre into marxists and artists, might seem a bit obscurantist if not. sort of a leaves of grass style thing (i think), a lot of poetical musings on the role of the artist in late capitalism, the role of the human under fascism, etc.
also have been cruising thru the Ormsby translation of don quixote, itās very easy breezy beautiful covergirl reading imo. i got it on libby but itās also on archive org
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yeahhhh moby!!
i read the whole thing on my phone over the course of my commutes during one miserable stretch of my work life so any way you get Dicked is a good way
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i tried reading this last night on IA and it was like ābook is already borrowedā and I was like āMom says itās my turn with the marxist literatureā
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looks available now! i have pretty decent luck with borrowing from archive
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