The Book Thread

Dom Harvey

Contributor
Whenever a philosophy has a small number of adherents it's much easier to define it by its extreme fringes, but that doesn't mean much.

The 'Rand = libertarianism' thing is an odd chestnut given that she hated libertarians and most of them hated her
 
From what I know about the main character it seems to be a really idealized version of the classic American industrialist "robber baron" that deals with a variety of people and troubles that are all sort of straw man arguments to prove the central thrust of her philosophy. I relate that easily enough to libertarians, but anyway I know so long as I keep talking I'll keep on showing off my ignorance when it comes to a political group and it's history I am entirely uninterested in and a book that I only know by hearsay and from quotes so I'll just say grillo and dom have won me over and I'll stop slandering it or talking about it altogether.
 

Dom Harvey

Contributor
Like any book it's only good for what you get out of it. If it helps you refine your own worldview, even if it's in opposition to it, then that's a step forward as long as you're not just looking for reasons to confirm what you already thought.

Not to get into political debates here, but for my part I don't profess to know with certainty what would be good for society so I'm not eager to have my theories enforced with the force of the law behind them and I'm wary of those who are, especially when the people carrying out those decisions aren't accountable in any meaningful way.
 
Yeah I'm inclined to agree with you on both counts.
I don't want to consume that book with the opinions of my friends fresh in my ears.
 
I started reading The Fountainhead, and I began to dislike the main character after about 10 pages. It's gonna be a long read.
 

James Stevenson

Steamflogger Boss
Staff member
To start reading Atlas Shrugged I put down Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Into the Wild (Yes, I read all the cliche beatnik hitchhiker hippie books) and The Lies of Locke Lamora. I'm looking forward to getting back to these.
 
Any opinions on House of Leaves? Just got it as a gift and my excited step into Stephen King works has left me pretty unimpressed- not sure I can make myself finish The Stand.
 
I guess I think King is creative enough / willing to write the silliest things seriously, but everything is so long with so little substance it's pretty infuriating. Seriously though I picked up a collection of short stories in a secondhand shop and there was a story about a town in which, annually, on a specific night, killer toads would rain from the sky in such density that they would cause substantial property damage to somehow home in on their victims before melting into nothingness in the morning.

And the regular townsfolk would just sacrifice tourists to the toads every year under some kind of superstition that they wouldn't melt if they didn't eat somebody. Instead of just moving the hell away.

The Stand leads up with something like 400 (of its 800something?) pages in setting development and character introductions and some development, which is a fairly interesting read, then spirals out of control with the characters relapsing as they meet each other and an extremely heavy dose of religion, which is pushing me away.
 
Yeah I like Stephen King well enough. I really enjoy America's great tradition of weird fiction and he writes pretty cute modern fantasy. Like he's not the best writer but he's a storied guy and he writes really accessible genre fiction.

I just finished Clifford Simac's Way Station and I enjoyed it more than a little. It's about a rustic in Idaho from the civil war era who has been contracted in secret to make his house something of a galactic pit stop for traveling aliens. The novel opens up with FBI investigating him for having been alive for 120 years and still in his 30s apparently. Super cute, a little plodding, more than a little campy.

waystation.jpg
 

James Stevenson

Steamflogger Boss
Staff member
I just got home from another hitchhiking trip. I read a few books.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was interesting. The philosophy got kind of higher and higher until it hit a point where I didn't understand it, then it came back down to the ground again, but I wish I'd understood the middle and could link both halves.
"If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" was really cool. A little pretentious perhaps, but if you get a chance to read it, give it a try. I've never read anything like it. I ended up swapping it for some a book with a driver in California, but I haven't started the one he gave me yet.
Now I'm almost finished with Kafka's "The Castle", and boy is it dense... It's saying something about bureaucracy, but I'm not exactly sure what. After I finish it I'll watch the movie "Kafka" again, maybe Brazil as well.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
I think I came halfway through The Castle but that's more because I tend to read books halfway through anyway, save for the stories I really like. It's not a bad book though, but I think The Trial was better (though that may be because I did read that one to its conclusion).
 
Starship Troopers has always been a favourite movie of mine for it's parody and embrace of jingoism but I find I am also really enjoying the novel for entirely different raisins.
 
Got a copy of "S" by J.J. Abrams as a gift- cracked it open yesterday (literally had to break a seal) and a physical note from one character to another fell out. After reading a few pages, the gist appears to be that two characters are passing a book (the physical book, out of its sleeve, is a 'copy' of this book) back and forth, discussing the author's strange history. Obviously haven't gotten far enough to see what's what yet, but this is the craziest book I've ever seen in my life. (Just looking along the top/bottom it's evident that more notes or similar are jammed in the pages)
 

James Stevenson

Steamflogger Boss
Staff member
Got a copy of "S" by J.J. Abrams as a gift- cracked it open yesterday (literally had to break a seal) and a physical note from one character to another fell out. After reading a few pages, the gist appears to be that two characters are passing a book (the physical book, out of its sleeve, is a 'copy' of this book) back and forth, discussing the author's strange history. Obviously haven't gotten far enough to see what's what yet, but this is the craziest book I've ever seen in my life. (Just looking along the top/bottom it's evident that more notes or similar are jammed in the pages)

Reminds me of "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller" by Italo Calvino. That's also a kind of metabook. It was great!

Just started reading Sophie's World. Seems good.
 
Whenever a philosophy has a small number of adherents it's much easier to define it by its extreme fringes, but that doesn't mean much.

The 'Rand = libertarianism' thing is an odd chestnut given that she hated libertarians and most of them hated her
"Libertarian" has been steadily remolded by folks like the Koch brothers, so libertarians now are pretty different from what they were in Rand's day. Libertarianism used to be much more closely related to anarchism, so when it was "everyone is free to do what thou wilt in places they reside / make use of", Rand would have had a problem with the idea of unworthy or simple individuals and communities being able to reject the rule of meritous, strong individuals/groups. Now that libertarianism is more "everyone is free to do what thou wilt with anything they have access to", it's a much bigger hit with Randians and the Tea Party.
 

James Stevenson

Steamflogger Boss
Staff member
I just finished Rand's first novel, We the Living, which at its core held that one's life and desires are to be held as sacred, and no one should be able to take them away from you. We the Living takes place in the early USSR, where she herself lived before "escaping" to America. Her description of communist Russia explains a lot about her description, in Atlas Shrugged, of America collapsing into tyranny and poverty under socialism. I still have yet to meet a libertarian, and I've found Rand's writing to quite interesting. They present very extreme opinions and you've just gotta stay aware of that and use your own brain.

One thing I found interesting was in the introduction, written by philospher and Rand fan Leondard Peikoff. He says "The basic cause of totalitarianism is two ideas: mean's rejection of reason in favor of faith, and of self-interest in favor of self-sacrifice." Now I can't say that is necessarily true, because I don't know. But I find it interesting to keep in mind. This makes some sense with regard to communist Russia, though I'd say fear had a lot to do with it after reading We the Living. Peikoff points to Christian America as an example: "Witness the rise, in the United States today, of the Fundamentalist right aiming to outlaw ideas and values that conflict with the Bible... and, in more immediately practical terms, the eight year rule of a "born-again" President, who shut down biological research he regarded as irreligious while claiming a message from beyond as a guide to foreign policy" (can anyone explain that last bit? I have steared too clear of news and politics in my life)

Anyway it struck me that these conditions are coming together as environmentalist try to push the world to stop wasting (self-sacrifice), based on science that the world mostly has to just take on faith. This is just a thought, don't get me wrong. I am trying to get a career in renewable energy, so I'm not really against this. But it is a thought.
 
The best "metabook" is Nabokov's Pale Fire, which is nothing short of a literary masterpiece. One of the best things I've ever read and I return to it pretty regularly when I'm looking for another book to read on the bus.
 

James Stevenson

Steamflogger Boss
Staff member
The best "metabook" is Nabokov's Pale Fire, which is nothing short of a literary masterpiece. One of the best things I've ever read and I return to it pretty regularly when I'm looking for another book to read on the bus.

Nabokov's on my list, I've heard good things about Lolita.
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
I read The First 15 Lives of Harry August and it was pretty enjoyable. It's a book about some dude who gets reborn at the start of his life after he dies each time, with all his memories intact. Normally I'm all up in a book's business about plot holes and stupid tropes, but this one was solid.
 
One thing I found interesting was in the introduction, written by philospher and Rand fan Leondard Peikoff. He says "The basic cause of totalitarianism is two ideas: mean's rejection of reason in favor of faith, and of self-interest in favor of self-sacrifice."...

...Anyway it struck me that these conditions are coming together as environmentalist try to push the world to stop wasting (self-sacrifice), based on science that the world mostly has to just take on faith. This is just a thought, don't get me wrong. I am trying to get a career in renewable energy, so I'm not really against this. But it is a thought.
That is an interesting thought. You could almost combine those two ideas together as "mob mentality." Faith and rejecting self-interest in favor of self-sacrifice are both counter to individuality, which would certainly be a breeding ground for totalitarianism.

The amount of political bandwagoning I see every day on Facebook is very alarming to me. I don't understand how people can presume to have enough information to have a legitimate opinion on most topics. Watching regular persons bicker about the Affordable Care Act is mind-numbing.

I suppose I'm guilty too to some extent, but I hope at least within reason. I'll take it on faith that man-made climate change exists since virtually every scientific institution agrees on it, even though I've never actually read a peer-reviewed scientific study about it. I wish that sort of primary information was more readily available to the public.
 
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