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I would never use that phrase.
War and Peace is made up of 42 or something full length novels.
It starts off with two lovers meeting at the man’s house, he joins the army as an officer, they have children, the man rises to become a captain or soemthing, then the Napoleonic War starts, then it follows Napoleans journey from France, through Italy, Austria, eastern Europe and then to his seige of Moscow. The youngest son has now joined the army, and he his keen to join in. The French army are retreating from Moscow, fed up, starving, tired and exhausted, the boy comes up to a band of French stragglers, the French lieutenant, slumped over on his horse, tiredly grabs his sword and slashes blindly behind him, decapitating the boy, his head held on by skin, his horse runs back to the rest of the Russians, where his father is leading.
Then there are 15 more novels after that !
The Art of the Deal
Grapes of Wrath is a slight stretch, but it’s shear length relative to it’s message makes it a very empty book.
I made the mistake of reading a few bestsellers in a row a few years ago and I’m now convinced the book industry depends on people buying books on bestseller lists and not reading them.
The subtle art of not giving a fuck
Never split the difference
Rich dad poor dad
7 habits
These books exist just to sell seminars.
See the One Book-theory from the podcast If Books Could Kill
Because all self-help books are basically the same and they all fit that bill
Read rich dad poor dad. Nothing but leveraging yourself into oblivion and doing your best to make the most sketchy writeoffs or deductions you can. Heck, the author is allegedly a billion in debt and has filed for bankruptcy at least once. Not exactly a resounding example of his own financial advice.
Rich dad poor dad
7 habits
My former therapist wanted me to read those. This was in 2023
Maybe I’m not smart enough but House of Leaves was a lot of words. And I don’t even know what they said.
Ready player one.
Do you like lists of pop culture references? Because that’s all it is.
If, instead, you like lists of designer clothes, sound systems and skincare regimes, then I highly recommend American Psycho. Genuinely, I loved it.
Anything Self-Help. They’re usually just a vehicle to sell more shit.
“If you’re looking for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else? Also, if you’re reading it in a book, folks, it ain’t self-help. It’s help.”
St. George Carlin
The JD Vance hillbilly elegy thing. Please don’t hate me, I read this in 2017/18. It was a Christmas present and in my country was hyped at the time as the book you HAVE to read to understand why Americans from the flyover states like Trump and why they would vote for him.
I read the book. Not very interesting. Still didn’t understand why…
the book you HAVE to read to understand why Americans from the flyover states like Trump and why they would vote for him.
It sorta does that, but indirectly, I guess? To me, it was all about what’s not in the book. It was marketed as being written from the perspective of “omniscient narrator explaining why those people are the way they are”, but really it’s more “unreliable narrator explains his worldview”.
I read it probably around the same time as you, and it really just made me angry more than anything because basically the whole thesis is “poor people are poor because they are dumb”.
The fact that Purdue pharma made a pill that they claimed would last for 12 hours, when it was more like half that, so people had to either take them way more frequently (or take way bigger doses at 12 hours), and then proceeded to sell them to towns in Appalachia by the hundreds per capita is never mentioned.
There’s a whole bunch of structural problems that he just breezes by that he probably should recognize (cause I do think he’s probably intelligent), but your average person from the region may not. Basically, it’s just propaganda.
The fact that it was made into a movie as well…
Any Isaac Asimov story.
I actually want to hear more about this. What’re your supporting arguments?
I like a lot of what ive read from him, and he had a lot of views that were ahead of his time (on social issues as well as scientific), but he absolutely could not write women. You could read full length books of his without a single named female character.
Yeah, that’s not great, but honestly, I feel like it’s better than a lot of alternatives. It feels even worse when the women in the book don’t pass the Bechdel test, or worse, end up in r/menwritingwomen posts.
Yeah, I think he actually admitted that he didn’t really know any women when he first started writing until he met and then married his wife, so he avoided writing them. It is weird though cause his writing style (from what ive read) is not very character focused, anyway, so a lot of his male characters could easily just be declared female and no one would spot the difference.
I wonder if he just assumed that his own bias would affect the gender of the characters or if that just wasn’t a consideration. It would have been pretty cool if he had used gender-neutral names to the point where it was never clear, but also didn’t matter anyway.
he had used gender-neutral names to the point where it was never clear, but also didn’t matter anyway.
He almost does that. He uses a lot of made-up scifi names that aren’t obviously gendered, but then point out that the character is male.
He does get a lot better over time, though.
I’ll have to go back and read. The gender dynamics of competitive sci-fi literature would be a wild class.
Edit: I meant “comparative sci-fi literature,” but I’m leaving the mistake because I think it’s funnier, not unlike the grammar mistakes that I try to pass off as erudite subversion of trite conventions, not unlike this meandering, run-on sentence, and I stand by it.
Atlas Shrugged or Dianetics.
–//–
Bun
Air
Bun
I actually really liked Atlas Shrugged, and it makes a ton of sense if you rotate the economics of it by 180 degrees. Reardon wouldn’t be an owner in today’s world. He’d have been bought by someone like Musk long before he was wealthy enough to stop working. Speaking of billionaires, they’re Jim Taggarts if there ever was one. Ayn Rand grew up observing what happens when a handful of people acquire too much power and attributed it to socialism. I believe she was wrong, but she wrote interesting stories about excessive power concentration. Here and now, it’s the capitalist oligarchs that are breaking down the system. Infrastructure is failing like in the book. It just turns out it was the libertarians/anarchocapitalists instead.
yeah, but do we really need a 1000+ page book to learn that absolute power corrupts absolutely?
Maybe not, but it might help reach people that like 1950’s dieselpunk.
Edit: On a side note, it might inspire people to pack billionaires into a modern version of Galt’s Gulch/Mulligan’s Valley, isolated from the rest of the world and arriving with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They can rebuild civilization with only the natural resources on hand. I totally agree with Rand that it might solve a lot of socioeconomic problems, but we’d differ on the “why.”
Catcher in the Rye
My exact thought as well. It was mandatory in HS, and i just never got the hype. Holden Caufield is a whiny phony.
So you don’t remember being a teenager?
Nope. Came out of the womb at 37.
Is your mom okay?
A little bowlegged, but otherwise fit as a fiddle.
I don’t know what I expected. Still hilarious, though.
Huh, she said the same thing…
