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Cs lewis was influenced by loathing for the book actually, he thought it was evil

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The end of this book hit me like a ton of bricks. It summarized something I’d been grasping at re: life as a young shrug in just a few simple words. Way more impactful than I was prepared for a space fable filled with the silliest names ever printed to be!

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May be my favorite book. And it’s not just my weakness for allegory; surpassing strange, indulging in body transformation, a religious journey from a non-religious perspective. It’s all.

Tangenting…

David Kanaga (Proteus composer) turned me on to this book, and his work rhymes well with it. Proteus is a superb exercise in abstractions and Oikospiel is necessary.

And of course his plea for multi-sensory feedback:

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This book owns I read most of it sitting on a rock in the forest, very good summer that was

Also I have The Flight to Lucifer sitting on my shelf and have for years. I’m literally afraid to read it. It’s the only novel ever published by literary critic and probable creep Harold Bloom, and it was apparently directly inspired by A Voyage to Arcturus. It was panned on release and basically disowned by Bloom. It’s the ā€œBeyond the Valley of the Dollsā€ of gnostic fiction I guess.

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It is bad!

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please read it and report back, I’ve been curious but I don’t want to subject myself to it!

gimme the shrug truth

For the sake of anyone else who might be curious about it based on this discussion (too late for me as I just finished the book), does anyone know what the best electronic version of A Voyage to Arcturus might be? The first couple I came across were barely readable with all the bad formatting and errors.

I ended up finding a decent copy at Feedbooks.net, since they tend to clean up public domain books nicely, but even that copy had a fair number of imperfections.

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I read inherent vice and, because of the dnd podcast, kept hearing doc sportello in @km’s voice

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Ok looks like we need to modify Ven just slightly

I almost just put this in the Movies thread where the current Annihilation convo is happening, but then I remembered this exists

Just finished Authority last night–I liked it but not nearly as much as Annihilation. I’m excited to finish the trilogy, but man that book drags a lot in the middle. I fully support the general approach to the novel, I think another book set entirely within Area X would have been bad, it’s more the details of how it’s written that I found irritating.

I get that all of the ā€œred herringsā€ are there (presumably?) to reflect the protag’s paranoid state, but it just feels like filler that doesn’t go anywhere, and then the last 50 pages are just overstuffed with plot and character development. The pacing is so weird.

Okay so, as a pleb, what’s a good book to introduce me to US History? I have a really bad grasp on, uh, everything history-related.

Also should I read Pride and Prejudice?

A people’s history of the united states dot pdf

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parallel to that i’ve heard only great things about roxanne dunbar-ortiz’ s an indigenous peoples’ history of the united states

A history teacher in high school had us read xeroxed chapters from Zinn alongside the regular text so I guess they’re right educators really are indoctrinating our youth with radical leftist propaganda!!!

Thank heavens.

That was just one AP US History teacher circa 1998 though I’m sure she’s retired by now.

my high school us history was taught straight from zinn’s book, also an AP teacher

Oxford History of the United States

Although I have only read Battle Cry of Freedom tbh

Yeah, I think you’re best served reading something traditional alongside perspectives that challenge it, like Zinn and the Indigenous Peoples’ History. I found that learning to read history is about reading things that you have no context for but plowing forward anyway; by going over it enough and exploring small branches you begin to put character to names and make meaningful connections that allow you to think about it.

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Absolutely. First you realize how good it is relative to its cultural cachet, then you read Middlemarch and find yourself in awe about how much better is than that

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Also realize going in that Austen is not entirely fond of the people she is writing about.

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