Your favourite book of all time...

[Ahmadinebobina]

What is it?

Knulp - Hermann Hesse

[Hachiko]

The Sea Wolf - Jack London

[Rusty Mason]

Lord of the Rings.

[Sean]

Shakespeare's Hamlet.

[Cherry]

Romeo and Juliet, can that count as a book? If not then - Last of the Mohicans - James Fennimore Cooper :love:

I have admit that I like looking at my brother's David Icke books sometimes though. lol

[Steppenwolf]

Thus spoke Zarathustra

[Rusty Mason]

... and Richard Mitchell's Graves of Academe and Gift of Fire.

[Ahmadinebobina]

Honourable mentions go to:

Gertrude - Hermann Hesse
Time's Arrow - Martin Amis
On the Road, Pic, The Subterraneans - Jack Kerouac
The Grapes of Wrath, Travels with Charley - John Steinbeck
Nausea - John Paul Sartre
Knocknagow - Charles J. Kickham
She came to Stay - Simone De Beauvoir
A Moveable Feast, Fiesta.. - Hemingway
Journey to the end of the night - Celine
The Redneck Manifesto - Jim Goad
PG Wodehouse, in general.
After Julius - Elizabeth Jane Howard

We should all post our favourite books and pictures, if so inclined. I am in a book mood.

[Ahmadinebobina]

Oh! Aleister Crowley's Diary of a Drug Fiend.

[Atlas]

Platforme - Michel Houellebecq.

[funderbunked]

If I had to pick just one:

The Ginger Man -- J. P. Donleavy

Novels don't get any better than that.

[Ahmadinebobina]

you do not have to pick just one. :)

[funderbunked]

you do not have to pick just one. :)

The thread-title is: "Your favourite book of all time"

I know the Admins/Mods take their Laws seriously at this site. :rofl: I didn't want to offend.

[Berianidze]

It's a tie between the following (each in their respective category)
Fiction:
The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky
The Patricide - Kazbegi (the inspiration of Stalin's adopting Koba as his pseudonym).

Non-fiction:
What is to be Done? - Lenin
Law's Empire - Dworkin

[Ahmadinebobina]

don't worry, i changed the rules :D

[Anarch]

All 10 Dune books by Frank Herbert.

He was the first person ever to write a pure Sci-fi book. It talks heavily about eugenics, biology, politics, the effect of technolgy on physical and cultural evolution, and many more interesting subjects.
I intend to buy Dune next week.

My absolute favourite book would have to be... Decline of the West, a single volume, unabriged edition I read three years ago.

Outside of the single choice thing, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is certainly up there, and I have a capacity to read, over and over, several times a year, both Atlas Shrugged, American Psycho and Fight Club. Lord of the Rings was quite good. Poul Anderson's After Doomsday was brilliant. Oh, and the 2001-10-61-3001 series by Arthur C. Clarke, as well as the Rama trilogy.

[Burrhus]

Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F.Skinner

Walden Two by B.F.Skinner

President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War 1941:A Study in Appearances and Reality by Charles Beard

A History of the Civil War (3 vols.) by Shelby Foote

Language, Truth and Logic by A.J.Ayer

Any book of poetry by Charles Bukowski

A People That Shall Dwell Alone:Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy by Kevin Macdonald

Separation and Its Discontents:Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism by Kevin Macdonald

The Culture of Critique by Kevin Macdonald

The Misunderstood Gene by Michel Morange

All of the Philip Marlowe novels by Raymond Chandler

[Jake Featherston]

There have been so many, its really hard to say.

Two that have already been mentioned, The Sea Wolf by Jack London, and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, are definitely up there. I really liked 1984 and Animal Farm, both by George Orwell. V.A.L.I.S. by Phillip K. Dick was another memorable one. And I'm not just trying to sound erudite when I say I really liked Plato's The Republic. I'd seriously have to think about it a while to give better answers than that.

[maxsnafu]

Fiction (I think it is technically thought of as fiction): A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce

Non-fiction: Kevin MacDonald's trilogy:
A People That Shall Dwell Alone
Separation and Its Discontents
The Culture of Critique

[Northern_Paladin]

Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers
The Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes

[elbwgreez]

Hunger, Knut Hamsun

[Arrow Cross]

Lord of the Rings.
No racemixing propaganda, thank you.

Your favourite book of all time...
Adolf Hitler - Mein Kampf

[ogenoct]

THE NEVERENDING STORY - Michael Ende

1984 - George Orwell

FAHRENHEIT 451 - Ray Bradbury

STORM OF STEEL - Ernst Juenger

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS - Hunter S. Thompson

C.

[cryptoracist]

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

literally changed my world view... and then I joined the NOI. :negro:

[Hippias]

Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France

[Ravenheart]

Not sure. Perhaps Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger.

[Keystone]

Catch-22

Pickwick Papers

The Foundation trilogy

Too many non-fiction to pick from.

[Atlas]

Thus spoke Zarathustra

Same here.

Honorable mention for LOTR too.

[Ahmadinebobina]

also,
tropic of cancer - henry miller.

miller makes me smile.

[Thomas777]

Political Theory:
-Decline of the West - Spengler
-Imperium - Francis Parker Yockey
-The Republic - Plato

Literature:
-Wuthering Heights - Bronte
-The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea - Mishima
-Blood Meridian - McCarthy

[harjit]

The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

Short story collections of Edgar Allan Poe

Short story collections of Ernest Hemingway

Short story collections of O Henry

Tarzan stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Sea Wolf - Jack London (popular here, I guess many of us are might makes right freaks :))

Zen Seeds - Shundo Aoyama

Siddhartha - Herman Hesse

The Way of the Bull - Leo Buscaglia

The Bhagavad Gita

[ironweed]

Steppenwolf - H. Hesse
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
Julian: A Novel - Gore Vidal
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson

[il ragno]

The Way of the Bull - Leo Buscaglia

Absolutely the wussiest entry on this list! You gotta be kidding with Leo Buscaglia, a/k/a The Sultan of Squish; even a Liberace as-told-to sports more chest hair.

[Jake Featherston]

Julian: A Novel - Gore Vidal

That is an excellent choice. Julian is clearly Gore Vidal's best novel, though The Golden Age is also highly recommended.

[harjit]

Absolutely the wussiest entry on this list! You gotta be kidding with Leo Buscaglia, a/k/a The Sultan of Squish; even a Liberace as-told-to sports more chest hair.
I can relate to the Asia travels. For some reason I often refer to it.

Anyway he was an Italian-American, how wussy can he possibly be? :p

[cerberus]

Catch -22. A Classic.
Most fiction by Wilbur Smith , "The Sun Bird" , in particular.
Wilt , Blott on the Landscape, Ancestoral Vices, The Throwback , Vintage Stuff - by Tom Sharpe.( Rib crackingly funny.).
Puckoon By Spike Milligan.
"One Flew Over The Cuckoo's nest" .
"Shogun" - Excellent.

"Steel Inferno" Michael Reynolds.
"Hill 112 " major J How.
"Hubris" and "Nemesis" By Ian Kershaw.
"The Road to War 2 Richard Overy.
Normandy Then and Now Vol 2 by After The Battle.
Arnhem Then and Now By Karl Maghery.
Berlin Then and Now by Tony Le Tissier.

[Northern_Paladin]

Dante's- Inferno
Kante's- Critique of Pure Reason
Goethe's- Faust

All books we are currently reading in our Religion/Philosophy class.

[Geist]

There are numerous books that have influenced me in one way or the other, and I would at this stage in my life consider myself an avid reader. However, as always, there are some that stand out more than others, but they are not neccessarily the books that I consider informative, beautiful, or whatever criteria one is supposed to judge books on. I am a huge fan of rhetoric, and a forceful style so the list should not seem so surprising in this context.

The Anti-Christ by Nietzsche: This book is not, in fact, a book that gains its merit from reasoned analysis. It is a book of rhetoric that Cicero would be proud of. I stumbled across this book whilst looking for the Gay Science for a philosophy class. I had yet to read any real Philosophy, and had chanced upon the subject due to a conflict of classes. The title gripped me. I have never really felt such an immediate kinship with a book. Why? Who knows how these things work. Later I would find out the Nietzsche had a similar experience when he discovered The World as Will and Idea. Perhaps he had it in mind when he wrote the Anti-Christ.

Strangely I have never read the book since then. I have no intention to do so either.

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot: Another book I was recommended in class. When I first read this as an undergrad I figured it was toss as I rarely read poetry. Over the years as I began to read poetry on a more regular basis I decided to re-visit it. The correct decision was to read it aloud, and only then did the force of the poem really hit me. I am still stunned by it, and never tire of reciting or reading it when I have the time to do so. There are more layers to this poem than I believed a poem could possess.

The Death of the West by P. Buchanan: Single-handedly converted me to a pro-Western perspective of the world.

[Lionheart]

Fiction: Crime and Punishment
Nonfiction: The World as Will and Representation

[Yon]

Ride the Tiger by Julius Evola. A primer for life.

[Heavens to Betsy]

Franny And Zooey by J. D. Salinger.

I'm not sure why really, it's just one I keep going back to.

[Mixed Race]

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.

Amazing film but I think the book is even better.

[Fenrisulfr]

Revolt Against the Modern World- Julius Evola

[gooddeath]

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche

[WFHermans]

Tschai by Jack Vance.

[Sudaev]

Son of the Morining Star by Evan S. Connell.

[Ridder in de Orde van Cicero]

"The Picture of Dorian Gray" --- Oscar Wilde

Very antisemitic book. That's the reason why Oscar Wilde was punished by the Freemasons.

[Geist]

"The Picture of Dorian Gray" --- Oscar Wilde

Very antisemitic book. That's the reason why Oscar Wilde was punished by the Freemasons.

Your going to have to explain this one to me. If anything Wilde was punished by a worried father with good political connections.

[Boleslaw]

Here are some books that have effected my worldview and certainly made a staunch fan of these authors in general in many ways. In no particular order:

Decline of the West - Pat Buchanan: certainly opened my eyes to the crisis facing our civilization.

The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age - John Lukacs: certainly challenges many common notions held about 20th century history, the nature of modern society, and upholds the importance of nationalism.

Transformation of War - Martin Van Creveld: a wonderful book concerning the nature of warfare in the future; which will be based less on inter-state rivalries and more on inter-ethnic/inter-tribal ones(like in the Balkans). Also I love how Creveld refutes the high-tech fetish of most major militiaries, and how such weaponry will be largely ineffective and even irrelevant.

The End of the American Era: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-first Century - Charles Kupchan: again challenges the mainstream view concerning American foreign policy and geo-politics in general. Kupchan demolishes many of the common myths about Globalization and how it will bring about world peace and such. He also notes the continual relevance and importance of nationalism in world politics.

Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History - Anthony D. Smith: a nice book that details much of the various theories and scholarship that has been done in the study of nationalism. Smith also goes to explain how nationalism is far from dying, and that nations themselves are legitimate entities(ie they're not just pure inventions of elites as Modernists like to claim).

The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism - Adrian Hastings: wonderful treatise on the history and development of nationalism, which goes against the mainstream Modernist perspective. Most important element however for me was how Hastings details the indispensable role Christianity had in the rise of nationalism. This came as a shock to me, and certainly has assisted me in refuting the common BS about Christianity being anti-national.

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics - John J. Mearsheimer: another great book that challenges mainstream views on foreign policy and geopolitics.

GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc: The Battle Against Modernity - Jay P. Corrin: possibly the best book out there concerning the Distributist movement. Reading about them certainly influenced my worldview.

The Communitarian Third Way - John Hellman: wonderful account of various Catholic intellectual and nationalist movements in Europe during the interwar years.

Europe and the Faith - Hilaire Belloc: a classic for any Christian dedicated to European civilization.

Man and the State -Jacques Maritain

And Ill add more as they come to me.

[ironweed]

Here are some books that have effected my worldview and certainly made a staunch fan of these authors in general in many ways. In no particular order:

Decline of the West - Pat Buchanan: certainly opened my eyes to the crisis facing our civilization.


Sorry to pick nits, but its Death of the West if you're talking Buchanan, Decline of the West if you're talking Spengler.

As to the rest of it, I have not read any of them...but I've printed your post and will see if I can't get some of them via inter-library loan. They all look interesting.

[Ahmadinebobina]

knulp - hermann hesse

it makes me feel like i could be a good person.

[Ridder in de Orde van Cicero]

Your going to have to explain this one to me. If anything Wilde was punished by a worried father with good political connections.

That court/case agianst Oscar Wilde was starter by the Marqies of Queensberry, a Unionist/Freemason. Same like the case against Roger Casement.

[Geist]

That court/case agianst Oscar Wilde was starter by the Marqies of Queensberry, a Unionist/Freemason. Same like the case against Roger Casement.

Ah the Unionist/Freemason thing...Unionist does the same trick to Irishmen, we don't even need the other bit added on :rofl:

[Boleslaw]

Sorry to pick nits, but its Death of the West if you're talking Buchanan, Decline of the West if you're talking Spengler.

Wow....this is embarrasing. :(

Yes I meant Death of the West. I didnt care for Spengler's book. I also tried reading his polemic Man and Technics, and I couldnt stop laughing from many of the absurd things he stated about the rise of the Spanish Empire and the Jesuit order, among other things. Why this man is taken so seriously by nationalists is beyond me.

[Oblisk]

The Holy Bible, KJV.

[Boleslaw]

I hate the King James Version. I have the New American Bible.

[Felix the Cat]

"Very antisemitic book. That's the reason why Oscar Wilde was punished by the Freemasons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray#Anti-Semitism

Some newer editions of The Picture of Dorian Gray have gone so far as to replace the word "Jew" with that of "man", or "manager".

:rofl:

[Ahmadinebobina]

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller makes me smile,
The Moon and Sixpence by Somerset Maugham,
House of Incest by Anais Nin,
The Dharmabums by Jack Kerouac.

[funderbunked]

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller makes me smile,
The Moon and Sixpence by Somerset Maugham,
House of Incest by Anais Nin,
The Dharmabums by Jack Kerouac.

Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
Plexus by Henry Miller
Big Sur by Jack Kerouac
The Ginger Man by J. P. Donleavy
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S. Thompson

& mine own stuff.

[Delmac]

"Last and First Men" Olaf Stapledon
"Goodbye To All That" Robert Graves
"L'extension de la domaine de la lutte" Michel Hollebecque (sp.?)
"Dubliners" James Joyce
"The Code of The Woosters" PG Wodehouse
"Decline and Fall" Evelyn Waugh
"Homage To Catalonia" George Orwell
"The Rainbow" DH Lawrence
"The Book of the New Sun" Gene Wolfe

[VAMPIR]

''The Karamazov brothers'' and ''The crime and the punishment'' of Dostoievski, ''Ham on Rye'' Bukowski, ''1984'' Orwel.... and lot more...

[John Smith]

"Crime and Punishment" Dostoyevsky
"The Trial" Kafka
"Ghost World" A graphic novel by Dan Clowes
"The Virtue of Selfishness" Ayn Rand
"A Conflict of Visions" By Thomas Sowell
"Decline of American Liberalism" Ekirch

[Hachiko]

& mine own stuff.
Care to elaborate?

I had already mentioned "The Sea Wolf" as my fave, here are some more:
1984 - George Orwell
Hogfather - Terry Pratchett
A Storm of Swords - George R.R. Martin
On The Beach - Nevil Schute, I believe his name is. Read it when I was 14, really powerful ending.

[Ahmadinebobina]

PG!

The Mating Season by PG Wodehouse and whichever one it is that Gussie Finknottle dresses up as Mephistopheles in it... Funniest book of all time.

[yllica]

PG!

The Mating Season by PG Wodehouse and whichever one it is that Gussie Finknottle dresses up as Mephistopheles in it... Funniest book of all time.Right Ho, Jeeves! I'm reading "Very good, Jeeves" (1930) right now.

My choice: Wuthering Heights. Turned this yorkshire lad into a romantic.

[Ahmadinebobina]

Ah, yes, it's absolutely genius!
I just finished The Luck of the Bodkins. :)

[BoloMK30]

"The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and everything else by
Howard Powell Lovecraft.
"Dune" and all eleven sequels.
"Necroscope" by Brian Lumley, and all sequels.
"Farnham's Freehold"
"Starship Troopers"
"Time Enough For Love" , These and everything else by
Robert Anson Heinlein
"Lord Of The Rings", I have this bound in leather and gold.
"The Divine Comedy" Dante
"Red Storm: Rising" and everything else by Tom Clancy

Nonfiction:
"Small Arms of the World" W.H.B. Smith
"The Journals of Lewis and Clark"
"Inside the Third Reich, Memoirs" by Albert Speer
"Gallic Wars" Julius Caesar
"The Radio Amateur's Handbook" ARRL

[Hippias]

Novels:

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Point Counter-Point by Aldous Huxley
Notes From the Underground by Dostoevsky
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
A Room With a View by E.M. Forster
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
For Whom the Bell Tolls Ernest Hemingway
History of the World in 10 and 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes

Non-fiction:

(Political Science/Philosophy)

Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke
The New Machiavellians by James Burnham
Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions by Joseph de Maistre
New Culture New Right by Michael O Meara (especially the parts of the book that deal with Guillaume Faye's ideas).
Liberty or Equality by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddhin
The Morality of Everyday Life by Thomas Fleming
Conservatism by Noel O Sullivan
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity by James Fitzjames Stephen
Theory of Political and Religious Power in Civil Society by Louis de Bonald
The Politics Aristotle

(Philosophy/Metaphysics/Epistemology):

Theaetetus by Plato
Metaphysics by Aristotle
Meditations by Rene Descartes
Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
Nature of Necessity by Alvin Plantinga

(History):

Modern Times by Paul Johnson
A Study of History by Arnold Toynbee
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

(Race Differences/Racialism)

Race by John Baker
Race, Evolution and Behavior by Rushton
The Dispossessed Majority by Wilmot Robertson
Culture of Critique by Kevin MacDonald
Separation and its Discontents by Kevin MacDonald
The Rising Tide of Color by Lothrop Stoddard

[हिन्दुस्तान]

Anne of green gables - L.M. montgomery

[calvin]

Alexander Solzhenitsyn – The Cancer Ward; Robert Anton Wilson –Cosmic Triggers trilogy and Prometheus Rising.

Fave bestseller; Bonfire Of The Vanities – Tom Wolfe

Favourite books of my youth; Stormbringer – Michael Moorcock; Philip Jose Farmer’s, World Of Tiers series.

Most disappointing read; Revolt Against the Modern World – Evola

Most recent reads; The Genius Factory – David Plotz; Mussolini – Nicholas Farrell

Glad to see The Gingerman and P G Wodehouse getting citations, sorry that most of my book choices are low to middle brow.

[Stick to the Facts]

"Dune" and all eleven sequels.

Sorry you lost me on that one.

The first one was great. After that they went steadily downhill. I think I gave up at number 5, although I was always curious if it was possible for any book to be worse than that one. Given the direction they were headed I'd say it was likely.

Although I'm curious to see just how bad a novel can be, I'd not willing to subject myself to that kind of pain again to find out.

One unique thing about those books - my copy of the second one actually had perforated advertising inserts for cigarettes half way through. I've never seen any other book do something like that.

[BoloMK30]

Sorry you lost me on that one.

The first one was great. After that they went steadily downhill. I think I gave up at number 5, although I was always curious if it was possible for any book to be worse than that one. Given the direction they were headed I'd say it was likely.

Although I'm curious to see just how bad a novel can be, I'd not willing to subject myself to that kind of pain again to find out.

One unique thing about those books - my copy of the second one actually had perforated advertising inserts for cigarettes half way through. I've never seen any other book do something like that.

Sorry you had a problem with the series. I admit that the style changed
some when Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson took over the writing after
Frank Herbert died; some of the books were "prequels" about the origins of
Houses Harkonnen, Atreides, and Corrino, the source of the Butlerian
Jihad, the destruction of Old Earth, and the origins of the Bene Gesserit
and Tleilaxu. All of the books together form a story arc about 13,000 years
long. I enjoyed it.

About the cigarette ad; how old was that book, anyway? I haven't seen one
of those ads since the seventies.

If you'd like to read a painful book, try Albert Speer's "Inside the Third
Reich: Memoirs".

[Sudaev]

Bridegroom of Hate responds: My favourite book is Finders Keepers, written in 1976, by David Duke (under his nom de plume Dorothy Vanderbilt) :nuts:

The publication gives advice to women regarding vaginal exercises, fellatio, and anal sex.

[Johnson]

The Stranger - Albert Camus

[Mike Jahn]

Arthur Schopenhauer

The World As Will and Representation Vol II 1844

https://booksxyz.com/covers/large/0486217620.jpg

[Joe McCarthy]

Thoreau's Walden.

[Bronze Age Pervert]

Arthur Schopenhauer

The World As Will and Representation Vol II 1844

https://booksxyz.com/covers/large/0486217620.jpg

I agree. We should start a thread entirely dedicated to us Schopenhauerians, of the right-wing variety.

[Jake Featherston]

Hyperion's REAL favourite book:

http://www.article8.org/docs/news_events/glsen_043005/black_book/black_book_inside.htm

[MrAngry]

I have to ask myself, how many of those books are really favourite books, or, as I suspect, another example of some phorans trying to out intellect each other? :deadhorse:

[Joe McCarthy]

I have to ask myself, how many of those books are really favourite books, or, as I suspect, another example of some phorans trying to out intellect each other? :deadhorse:

I personally find 'Walden' highly inspirational but of course a lot of this is driven by competition. My impression is that many read just to compete on this forum. I suppose any motivation is worthwhile though.

[Mike Jahn]

I personally find 'Walden' highly inspirational but of course a lot of this is driven by competition. My impression is that many read just to compete on this forum. I suppose any motivation is worthwhile though.

People are reading books to compete on this forum? That's the first I've heard of such a thing.

:confused:

[Hartmann von Aue]

http://www.scribd.com/doc/13842449/Freemasonry-Judaism-Secret-Powers-Behind-Revolution

[Joe McCarthy]

People are reading books to compete on this forum? That's the first I've heard of such a thing.

:confused:

You're 89 posts from having SB access. Many of the regs there clearly feel inadequate when one has read a serious book they haven't. I've had instances where I'll discuss a thinker or book that people there clearly know little of and then when I mention it a couple weeks later they know as much or more about it than I do.

So yes, the trend is pretty clear.

[cerberus]

Shogun, Great Expectations two fictional works which are hard to beat.

[Helios Panoptes]

Par Lagerkvist - The Dwarf
Yukio Mishima - The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
Thomas Mann - Death in Venice
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brother Karamazov
Joseph Conrad - Nostromo
Louis-Ferdinand Celine - Journey to the End of Night

[Jake Featherston]

http://i16.ebayimg.com/03/c/00/c1/39/9b_32.JPG

[Mike Jahn]

http://i16.ebayimg.com/03/c/00/c1/39/9b_32.JPG

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

:p :beerchug:

[Helios Panoptes]

http://i16.ebayimg.com/03/c/00/c1/39/9b_32.JPG

Within two weeks, I will know more about that book than you do.

[Susan]

Okay, I'm not someone who is trying to out-intellectualize everyone else here. I probably couldn't do it even if I cared to try. And the funny thing about books is the next book you read may in fact be your most favorite book as there have been so many great books written.

And I will say that there are a lot of good books still waiting to be read by me if I ever get the time to do so. But right now, I would have to choose among the books I have read and really enjoyed for the truth about people and life would have to be an Anne Tyler book--probably either The Accidental Tourist or The Amateur Marriage. Although Breathing Lessons was pretty darn good too.

Anne Tyler has been writing since the sixties and there has been only one of her books that I had no interest in whatsoever and did not read. It may have been her last and I believe it dealt with interracial adoption. Other than that, all of her books involve White people and their lives. Her books do not contain graphic sex or profanity.

All of these books are about people dealing with tragic events in their lives and how they ultimately come to terms with those events and make their way through life, making decisions which affect their lives, or sometimes merely stumbling upon the truth in their lives, which ultimately change their whole world and allow them to redeem themselves in the process.

The Accidental Tourist is more humorous at times than is The Amateur Marriage but both books are extremely poignant and touching. I think I was most profoundly affected by The Amateur Marriage simply because the story begins before the main characters meet and goes somewhat beyond the death of one of them.

The Accidental Tourist was made into a movie and it was probably the best adaptation of a book I have ever seen. It was simply pitch perfect. It was William Hurt's best performance.

[il ragno]

I have to ask myself, how many of those books are really favourite books, or, as I suspect, another example of some phorans trying to out intellect each other? :deadhorse:

Poor, sclerotic Mr Anus. His antifa worldview depends so mightily on the Knuckle Dragging Race-iss prototype, he refuses to countenance the idea that the typical race-iss is better-read than the typical sign-carrying lefty.

Hold your breath and turn blue, Mr Anus, until either reality goes away, or you do.

[Thomas777]

Yukio Mishima - The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
Thomas Mann - Death in Venice
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brother Karamazov
Joseph Conrad - Nostromo
Louis-Ferdinand Celine - Journey to the End of Night

Perfect list. I'd just add Mishima's Runaway Horses and Walker Percy's Lancelot.

[Labyrinth]

http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/ab29458080.jpg (http://www.freeimagehosting.net/)

[Susan]

Little Black Sambo.lol. I had that book as a child. But ours had a different cover. That cover is probably from the thirties or forties I would guess. It was one of my favorite bedtime stories.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Black_Sambo

[Bronze Age Pervert]

http://i16.ebayimg.com/03/c/00/c1/39/9b_32.JPG


Jake Featherston, to the rescue:

http://wcuk.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/225629_fat_guy_in_car.jpg

[Bronze Age Pervert]

Par Lagerkvist - The Dwarf
Yukio Mishima - The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
Thomas Mann - Death in Venice
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brother Karamazov
Joseph Conrad - Nostromo
Louis-Ferdinand Celine - Journey to the End of Night

I approve of your reading list! But Death in Venice has some serious flaws I think. I'll try to find Allan Bloom's few sentences on it from Closing... it's OK, but there are other books that do the same thing better (like Celine).

[Bronze Age Pervert]

Perfect list. I'd just add Mishima's Runaway Horses and Walker Percy's Lancelot.

Do you like just Runaway Horses or the whole tetralogy...I think it's strange to focus just on one incarnation, when it's part of a series...

[Errigal]

Do you like just Runaway Horses or the whole tetralogy...I think it's strange to focus just on one incarnation, when it's part of a series...

All four are well worth reading. The Decay of the Angel is less enjoyable than the earlier books; because of its mood and theme.

[Susan]

Anyone here like Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being? I need to read his other books as I've only read that one after seeing the movie.

[Thomas777]

Originally Posted by hyperion
Do you like just Runaway Horses or the whole tetralogy...I think it's strange to focus just on one incarnation, when it's part of a series...


Horses stands on its own. That is also why Schrader included it in his Mishima film.

Mishima generally wrote better short stories than he did novels I think. Runaway Horses however is compelling for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that it improves upon the philisophical themes addressed in Patriotism, albeit in a somewhat less abrupt, sensual, and violent way.

Edit:

Runaway Horses/''a question of purity'':

pCwwFV-1uy4

[O'Zebedee]

Anyone here like Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being? I need to read his other books as I've only read that one after seeing the movie.

Book of Laughter and Forgetting is brilliant, imo.

[Mary Magdalene]

The Mabinogion

http://www.mabinogion.info/

[Susan]

Thanks Z. I'll see if I can find it somewhere at a Goodwill store first. haha I'm cheap about books as they are so expensive new. I've gotten almost every one of mine on sale in clearance bins or at used book sales (one of my most favorite things to do) or Goodwill stores.

I just read that Kundera was not happy about the movie version of "Unbearable" so he forbid any more movie versions to be made of his books. I don't know why he didn't like it though.

[Susan]

Those books sound interesting Mary. I'll look into them sometime.

[Errigal]

Horses stands on its own. That is also why Schrader included it in his Mishima film.

Mishima generally wrote better short stories than he did novels I think. Runaway Horses however is compelling for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that it improves upon the philisophical themes addressed in Patriotism, albeit in a somewhat less abrupt, sensual, and violent way.
...

I liked Spring Snow the most.

[Thomas777]

I liked Spring Snow the most.

Mishima's entire catalog is good. Spring Snow seemed to deal more with the ''tragic lives'' motif that he talked about in Confessions of a Mask extensively and less with politics and violence. He was better when he embraced the latter IMO.

[Errigal]

Mishima's entire catalog is good. Spring Snow seemed to deal more with the ''tragic lives'' motif that he talked about in Confessions of a Mask extensively and less with politics and violence. He was better when he embraced the latter IMO.

Temple of Dawn seems to have been about Buddhism mostly. I enjoyed it too.

[odin]

http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/ab29458080.jpg (http://www.freeimagehosting.net/)

As I recall, that restaurant made some tasty pancakes.

[il ragno]

Among my favorites:

Shakespeare's JULIUS CAESAR and THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH. One could say they were written for performance and are incomplete on the page, and possibly that's so; but who else ever made antiquated poetry so vitally relevant to every age? And particularly these two tragedies, so dead-on in dissecting the human and inhuman nature of men's fears and ambitions? Re-reading either is like contemplating, at 40, the father you fought bitterly with at 20, and marvelling at how much smarter he's gotten in the two decades since. (It doesn't hurt that both have language that has been cannibalized for centuries to such an extent that they have become almost foundation stones of Western literature.)


The early work (40s/50s) of Ray Bradbury, roughly from the stories collected in the long-unavailable DARK CARNIVAL, more-or-less until A MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY. Like Heinlein, he was applauded and absorbed by the mainstream almost from the beginning of his career: his brilliance was that immediately apparent. Bradbury took pulp genres – sf and horror - and invested poetry, soul and an aching beauty into them that no one before or since has even come close to; his first 15 years or so was and is so extraordinary that his later slide doesn’t even matter.


The novels of Jim Thompson – Thompson came after the 30s vogue of ‘hard-boiled’ fiction as typified by Hammett, Cain, Chandler and the pulp magazine BLACK MASK, bumming a ride into town on the freight train of the 1950s suspense novel that 'hard-boiled' had mutated into. Grittier, bleaker and more psychotic than his predecessors, and set almost uniformly in the Texas-Nebraska panhandle he’d grown up in, Thompson’s books are almost uncomfortably realistic snapshots of the dreary small cities and backwaters of the American heartland – the remains of boom towns after the boom subsides – and his specialty was the folksy first-person narrator who slowly reveals himself, halfway through, to be a deeply disturbed individual who may have been lying to you all along. His ‘heroes’ aren’t Chandler’s rumpled urban knights-errant, but shabby bill collectors, mentally-ill lawmen, unscrupulous salesmen, corrupt hotel dicks, and shyster lawyers. A young Stanley Kubrick was so impressed by Thompson (whose entire career was spent churning out 25-cent paperback originals with lurid covers and titles like A SWELL-LOOKING BABE, THE KILLER INSIDE ME and THE KILL-OFF) he hired him to write the screenplays for PATHS OF GLORY and THE KILLING. Maybe his best novel was THE GETAWAY, a book so insidiously perverse not even Sam Peckinpah came close to capturing its unique miasma of moral rot and walls-closing-in doom.


Almost anything by Mark Twain, but especially THE MAN WHO CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG


Almost anything by PG Wodehouse and SJ Perelman: I highly recommend each writer’s MOST OF omnibus edition (as well as their individual titles, of course)


THE COMPLETE STORIES OF PHILIP K DICK – so much has already been said about Dick, I’ll let him speak for himself:

I only know one thing about my (stories). In them, again and again, this minor man asserts himself in all his hasty, sweaty strength. In the ruins of Earth's cities he is busily constructing a little factory that turns out cigars or imitation artifacts that say, "welcome to Miami, the pleasure center of the world." In A Lincoln, Simulacrum, he operates a little business that produces corny electronic organs -- and, later on, human-like robots which ultimately become more of an irritation than a threat. Everything is on a small scale. Collapse is enormous; the positive little figure outlined against the great universal rubble is gnat-sized in scope, finite in what he can do...and yet in some sense great. I really do not know why. I simply believe in him and I love him. He will prevail. There is nothing else that matters that we should be concerned about. Because he is there, like a tiny father-figure, everything is all right.
Some reviewers have found "bitterness" in my writing. I am surprised, because my mood is one of trust. Perhaps they are bothered by the fact that I trust what is so very small. They want something vaster. I have news for them: there is nothing vaster.


Dickens, A CHRISTMAS CAROL – justly one of the best-known and most meaningful books ever written; a moving reminder of what it means to be human. As relevant now as when it was written, it’s emblematic both of the Dickens canon and the tradition of the British ghost story it springs forth from


Ring Lardner - ROUND UP, his hand-picked collection of his best work, which fell out of print decades ago, its contents subdivided and rerouted into a handful of other, lesser, collections. Lardner was a major influence on both Hemingway and Fitzgerald, although miles away from either in both style and subject matter. (Hemingway’s THE KILLERS, for instance, is almost a Lardner pastiche.) Largely a forgotten man now, if you know of him at all it’s for his baseball stories such as YOU KNOW ME AL and ALIBI IKE, although his specialty was simply in capturing the speech and customs of ordinary, mostly-Midwestern Americans of the early 20th century. It’s difficult to convey what made him so good because the America he lived in and wrote of is now so far away and out of reach it might as well be a foreign country or mythical kingdom….it’s easy to envision a generation plugged into the Eternal Now regarding Lardner’s work the way he once described a spoiled, pretty girl’s nonchalance towards one of his protagonists: "She looked at me like I was a side dish she hadn't ordered".


I have a strong bias for short-to-medium length fiction for the simplest of reasons: the novel has, for some time now (with the collapse of the commercial short-fiction market), become the coin of the realm - the fulcrum of modern publishing, the only viable avenue to make a living writing fiction as well as the obvious shortest distance between original manuscript and the all-important tv/movie sale without which most writers would need to keep their livery-driver licenses current at all times.

Unfortunately, as a result, too many of the modern novels I've read feel bloated, padded, piled heavy with climaxes and secondary plotlines. Whereas the short story/novelette is more often the story told at the precise length required to make the greatest and most lasting impact. The relative brevity of the format allows for suggestion and elliptical nuance, inviting the reader to fill in the areas hinted at; whereas too many novels, reaching for word-volume and page-counts, cross every t, dot every i, and explicitly underline every point.

[Thomas777]

Temple of Dawn seems to have been about Buddhism mostly. I enjoyed it too.

Mishima's treatment of Buddhism is peculiar because it seems colored by a 'Western' (and specifically German) philisophical lens. The character of Honda isn't a typical Mishima protagonist, torn between the chrysanthemum and the sword, he's a man who has abandoned passion (in large part involuntarily on account of the untimely death of his friend Kiyoaki) and who resents action, violence, and all of the things that irrationality and desire yield.

Honda would seem to be a nominal Buddhist whose passive nihilism is tethered to his religious instruction he recieved as a young man. What makes him remarkable is the contrast between himself and the 'spirit of the age' which is incredibly violent, 'Shintoist', and actively nihilistic.

If we accept that Mishima was in fact a genuine Germanophile and more of a 'political writer' than a 'Japanese novelist', it seems to make sense within the narrative of the tetralogy that Honda is a prototype of nihilist pessimism (in the vein of Schopenhauer) and those who come after him (the warrior youth of the Imperial Way Faction) are 'active' nihilists in the Nietzschean sense.

He's telling us something about the origins of the German and Japanese revolt against the world order of 1941, but he's synthesizing both tendencies to such a high degree that he ends up writing a German philisophical novel but with samurai swords and pagodas for decorum.

[Allegheny]

If I had to name one, it would be Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth, the finest account of pioneer life in America, and a testament to the courage of the Nordic spirit (seriously, read the book). Along with accounts of republican Roman, this book is one of the few pieces of literature capable of moving me. It is almost uncomfortable, on a very real, very visceral level, to read about how much stronger we once were.

[Susan]

Ragno's last post jostled my memory about one of my favorite authors and books: Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine about the summer in a small town in America as seen through the eyes of a twelve year boy. It is simply a magical wonderful book that I never tire of rereading.

[Bronze Age Pervert]

I liked Spring Snow the most.


I agree with you, but as regards other stuff that was said, I don't like talking about Mishima and other things I really like online because it cheapens it I think, but as for this tetralogy, it's natural to prefer one part of it over another. But I think it's a distortion of Mishima's intention to consider any of the entries in isolation, because they tell the story of Japan in the modern world as a whole.

I think Mishima was aware that the political dimension doesn't capture the whole of life, and that there can be no political solution to the "modern problem" because there can be no political solution to man's spiritual problem in general. Anyone who doesn't see this in Mishima's work doesn't understand Runaway Horses or anything else he wrote; Mishima is not just some reactionary ideologue.

I think his stories of modern life in books like After the Banquet and Forbidden Colors aren't just "tales of decay" that you can contrast with the "purity" of Runaway Horses. Like his friend Shintaro Ishihara, I think Mishima understood the specific power of modern life in a way that is quite beyond the ability of activists to grasp.

[Jett]

Brave New World

[Jake Featherston]

Almost anything by Mark Twain, but especially THE MAN WHO CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG

Yeah, that's a good one. I bought a Penguin Book edition of it for 49 cents (new, not used), basically just because it was so cheap, else I never would have read it (I assume the reason it was so cheap was because it wasn't a work that was ordinarily long enough to be published on its own).

[Mary Magdalene]

Mark Twain wrote an excellent book about Joan of Arc..

PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC.. Which was written under the pseudonym of of Sieur Louis de Conte.

[Susan]

I'm just curious if anyone here has read any or much of Joyce Carol Oates. I had never read anything she had written up until a few years ago, and I just bought a few of her books at used book sales to give her a try as she is such a prolific writer. Anyway.....I've read several of her books and each one provokes in me a different feeling about her as a writer. Her novels are all very different in subject and tone.

The one which is probably the most well known is We Were the Mulvaneys which is about an upper middle class rural White family whose entire world is shattered when the daughter is raped on a date (by a White boy). Anyway, the novel was interesting but it bothered me because of the way the characters reacted to the family tragedy. The parents' marriage eventually fell apart. The big old comfortable country home was lost.

The father ultimately ended up becoming an alcoholic who finally died from his illness, alone and destroyed. The mother survived to start a new life as a businesswoman with a female business partner. The children, including the daughter, survived but in very different forms than what they would have been had the tragedy not occurred.

Anyway, it bothered me that the family fell apart so easily and the one member who completely fell apart and died ultimately was the father. Maybe I'm making too much of this aspect of the novel. I would not describe Oates as a feminist author. Every novel does not have to represent perfection in human characteristics. If so, there wouldn't be much literature, I suspect.

One of two other books I've read by her is Break Heart Blues which is a sprawling, rambling novel about the effects one handsome charismatic young man has on a group of young girls. This novel starts in the teenage years of a group of young women and carries them through middle age. There are multiple large events that occur in the town and the novel just has the feel that Oates has taken on too much and can't fully attend to it all.

I wanted it to be more in depth than it was, but she simply seems to leave too many ends left dangling and ultimately leaves one with an empty feeling at the end. It's still very intriguing, the scenes are very detailed, the characters very vivid but the final result is ultimately somewhat unsatisfying. The journey was worth it, but the end should have been better.

The third novel I've read by her was a very disturbing novel, You Must Remember This, about a young teenage girl who begins a sexual relationship by accident (or not?) with an older uncle. The sexual descriptions of what he does to her are very graphic and I found very disturbing to say the least. I guess there is some kind of justice in the end for what he has done to her as he seems to self destruct later. No one ever found out and the young girl survives the abuse to grow older and thrive.

Anyway, just curious if anyone has read anything by Oates. She's an interesting writer but she seems to lack a specific style of writing. But then, maybe her style is that she doesn't seem to have one. I guess that's possible.

There are a few male Phora readers who I suspect might have read something by her. I'll just see if I am right about my hunches. I could be completely wrong though as most of the males seem to eschew female anything.

[il ragno]

I'm just curious if anyone here has read any or much of Joyce Carol Oates.

You could hardly avoid her; she's incredibly prolific and has published in almost every category.

For my taste, she's a little too much a typical academic....dry, bloodless, a style-that-is-not-a-style. You have to keep double-checking the gushing blurbs on the jacket overleaf to remind yourself what it is you're not seeing. She's had some undeniable high points, however.

You ought to read her boxing essays, though. They're like an ongoing love song to Mike Tyson. Even after his never-ending meltdown, she's stiill in there blaming "society" (guess who) for his problems.

[Mike Jahn]

I'm just curious if anyone here has read any or much of Joyce Carol Oates. I had never read anything she had written up until a few years ago, and I just bought a few of her books at used book sales to give her a try as she is such a prolific writer. Anyway.....I've read several of her books and each one provokes in me a different feeling about her as a writer. Her novels are all very different in subject and tone.

The one which is probably the most well known is We Were the Mulvaneys which is about an upper middle class rural White family whose entire world is shattered when the daughter is raped on a date (by a White boy). Anyway, the novel was interesting but it bothered me because of the way the characters reacted to the family tragedy. The parents' marriage eventually fell apart. The big old comfortable country home was lost.

The father ultimately ended up becoming an alcoholic who finally died from his illness, alone and destroyed. The mother survived to start a new life as a businesswoman with a female business partner. The children, including the daughter, survived but in very different forms than what they would have been had the tragedy not occurred.

Anyway, it bothered me that the family fell apart so easily and the one member who completely fell apart and died ultimately was the father. Maybe I'm making too much of this aspect of the novel. I would not describe Oates as a feminist author. Every novel does not have to represent perfection in human characteristics. If so, there wouldn't be much literature, I suspect.

One of two other books I've read by her is Break Heart Blues which is a sprawling, rambling novel about the effects one handsome charismatic young man has on a group of young girls. This novel starts in the teenage years of a group of young women and carries them through middle age. There are multiple large events that occur in the town and the novel just has the feel that Oates has taken on too much and can't fully attend to it all.

I wanted it to be more in depth than it was, but she simply seems to leave too many ends left dangling and ultimately leaves one with an empty feeling at the end. It's still very intriguing, the scenes are very detailed, the characters very vivid but the final result is ultimately somewhat unsatisfying. The journey was worth it, but the end should have been better.

The third novel I've read by her was a very disturbing novel, You Must Remember This, about a young teenage girl who begins a sexual relationship by accident (or not?) with an older uncle. The sexual descriptions of what he does to her are very graphic and I found very disturbing to say the least. I guess there is some kind of justice in the end for what he has done to her as he seems to self destruct later. No one ever found out and the young girl survives the abuse to grow older and thrive.

Anyway, just curious if anyone has read anything by Oates. She's an interesting writer but she seems to lack a specific style of writing. But then, maybe her style is that she doesn't seem to have one. I guess that's possible.

There are a few male Phora readers who I suspect might have read something by her. I'll just see if I am right about my hunches. I could be completely wrong though as most of the males seem to eschew female anything.

Susan, why are you so focused on themes of sexual assault?

[Susan]

I'm not Mike. I had no idea what the books were really about before I began reading them. I bought about four or five of her books and I guess it was just a fluke that two of them had a similar theme. And you'll see from above, that "broke heart blues" is not about sexual abuse or assault.

Actually, I just read on wikipedia about her that her main themes seem to be rural poverty, sexual abuse, class tensions, desire for power, and female childhood and adolescence. But, prior to reading her books, I had never read one word about her writing. I just knew that she wrote a lot.

Mike, please tell me you aren't getting started back up over here on the "Susan is a feminist" are you? Dear Lord in Heaven, please say you aren't. I thought we had left VNN behind.

ragno: yes, she is prolific. And yes, one of the things that really stands out in her book "broke heart blues" is this rambling, leaving loose ends feeling. The story is a big sprawling story that spans several decades and has many characters, too many actually, and it seemed as if she just tired of trying to write about SO MUCH in one story and just let some important storylines kinda fall by the wayside.

She just lets the main character, the young man, disappear at one point in the story, and picks up with him near the end, but lets him go again without satisfactorily wrapping up what happened to him. He's the one character I really wanted to find out more about. It was still an interesting book though.

[OVERWATCH]

If you only read one first-person account of Vietnam, this is the one:

Nam (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nam-Vietnam-Words-Fought-Abacus/dp/0349102392)

A large collection of anecdotes by many different veterans.

[Errigal]

I agree with you, but as regards other stuff that was said, I don't like talking about Mishima and other things I really like online because it cheapens it I think, but as for this tetralogy, it's natural to prefer one part of it over another. But I think it's a distortion of Mishima's intention to consider any of the entries in isolation, because they tell the story of Japan in the modern world as a whole.

I think Mishima was aware that the political dimension doesn't capture the whole of life, and that there can be no political solution to the "modern problem" because there can be no political solution to man's spiritual problem in general. Anyone who doesn't see this in Mishima's work doesn't understand Runaway Horses or anything else he wrote; Mishima is not just some reactionary ideologue.

I think his stories of modern life in books like After the Banquet and Forbidden Colors aren't just "tales of decay" that you can contrast with the "purity" of Runaway Horses. Like his friend Shintaro Ishihara, I think Mishima understood the specific power of modern life in a way that is quite beyond the ability of activists to grasp.


I would agree that it's all of them or none of them when it comes to reading The Sea of Fertility tetralogy. I would recommend them to anyone but I can't help feeling Mishima was writing with a Japanese reader foremost in mind.

[Thomas777]

I would agree that it's all of them or none of them when it comes to reading The Sea of Fertility tetralogy. I would recommend them to anyone but I can't help feeling Mishima was writing with a Japanese reader foremost in mind.

Yes and no. Mishima was an ultra-nationalist, so his cultural orientation was unmistakeably and uncompromisingly Japanese, but his political mythos was almost totally Western in origin. One of his later essays states; ''We never really understood the moral basis of the battle when we fought against the West''. We could take that claim to mean that the men who defeated the Imperial Way Faction were simply capitalistic cynics who were as vulgar and impure in purpose as the White men against whom they waged war, but the truth of what Mishima intended to convey seems to actually be that the defeat of 1945 led to a spiritually decrepit world order, the guiding ideas of which were/are obscenely liberal/humanitarian, quantitative, materialistic and devoid of higher forms. In other words, the 'wrong' Western tendencies prevailed rather than the heroic ones.

Mishima was fickle in picking and choosing the Oriental philisophical traditions that he praised and invoked. IIRC, he was enamored with Yang-Ming (neo-Confucian) thought and philosophy on account of its unity of 'thought and action', but (as one of his biographers pointed out) he was treating his own traditions semi-ahistorically and conflating Confucian radicals of previous eras with 'active nihilists' of the Western tradition:

''Revolution is action. Because action often leads one close to death, once a person has left the contemplative life and entered the world of action, it is human nature that he must be enthralled by both the nihilism he feels in the face of death and a fateful mysticism. In my opinion, the way to the Meiji Restoration was prepared by National Learning as mysticism and Ying-Mang thought as active nihilism.''

In other words, Mishima's values and aesthetics owed more to de Sade, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Raymond Radiguet, Jean Genet - and of course, Adolf Hitler, that to anything 'authentically' Japanese.

[Lud]

The early work (40s/50s) of Ray Bradbury, roughly from the stories collected in the long-unavailable DARK CARNIVAL, more-or-less until A MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY. Like Heinlein, he was applauded and absorbed by the mainstream almost from the beginning of his career: his brilliance was that immediately apparent. Bradbury took pulp genres – sf and horror - and invested poetry, soul and an aching beauty into them that no one before or since has even come close to; his first 15 years or so was and is so extraordinary that his later slide doesn’t even matter.



Il Ragno: Are you a pulp fan?

Can you direct me to any worthy novelized forms outside of Bester and/or Hubbard?

[Mike Jahn]

I'm not Mike. I had no idea what the books were really about before I began reading them. I bought about four or five of her books and I guess it was just a fluke that two of them had a similar theme. And you'll see from above, that "broke heart blues" is not about sexual abuse or assault.

Actually, I just read on wikipedia about her that her main themes seem to be rural poverty, sexual abuse, class tensions, desire for power, and female childhood and adolescence. But, prior to reading her books, I had never read one word about her writing. I just knew that she wrote a lot.

Mike, please tell me you aren't getting started back up over here on the "Susan is a feminist" are you? Dear Lord in Heaven, please say you aren't. I thought we had left VNN behind.

I wasn't accusing you of being a Feminist but I wondered whether you had any personal experiences with sexual assault? Either yourself or someone you know?

[il ragno]

Il Ragno: Are you a pulp fan?

Can you direct me to any worthy novelized forms outside of Bester and/or Hubbard?

Well....yes and no. Great writers have come out of pulps, but the pulps themselves were largely comprised of penny-a-word junk. The common method for breaking out of pulps and toward mainstream publishing was to cannibalize elements of one's short fiction in a longer, repurposed format - Raymond Chandler relied almost exclusively on this method, combining two or three pulp stories at a time. The Chandler collection KILLER IN THE RAIN compiles only those stories he later reworked into novels like THE BIG SLEEP and FAREWEKLL MY LOVELY, while his other collections like THE SIMPLE ART OF MURDER feature his standalone pulp stories.

In science-fiction, cannibalizing and expanding short work was the norm - everybody including Bradbury did it - particularly as the pulps gave way to the 'digest' magazines like GALAXY and F&SF, and the emphasis shifted to creating continuing series (like Farmer's RIVERWORLD books) or recurring characters (such as Keith Laumer's Retief, or Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry) as the most commercially-astute method of building an audience. (This was still an era when the likelihood of Hollywood optioning an sf novel - particularly one that was idea-driven and well-written - was remote.)

Chances are if you pick up an sf novel by anyone published in the 50s or early 60s, it's going to have been derived and developed from one or more short stories. Not knowing your specific tastes, however - Bester and Hubbard are pretty dissimilar - I'm kind of stumped. Let me get back to you on this.

[Sulla the Dictator]

I was thinking about this and had a hard time determining favorites in non-fiction and literature, though I lean towards a Tale of Two Cities for lit. My favorite Sci-Fi books would be Hyperion, Jack Faust, and the three Foundation books. My favorite detective books are a little known series called SPQR.

[Dan Dare]

Strictly in the sci-fi genre, I'd say the book which made the greatest impression at the time of reading would have been "A Canticle for Liebowitz". The Foundation trilogy would have been a close second.

[il ragno]

My favorite detective books are a little known series called SPQR.

??? Tell me more, please.

[harjit]

Anyway, just curious if anyone has read anything by Oates. She's an interesting writer but she seems to lack a specific style of writing. But then, maybe her style is that she doesn't seem to have one. I guess that's possible.

There are a few male Phora readers who I suspect might have read something by her. I'll just see if I am right about my hunches. I could be completely wrong though as most of the males seem to eschew female anything.
Haven't read her novels but I do like what little I've read by her.

I read an anthology of American ghost stories (http://www.amazon.com/American-Gothic-Tales-Various/dp/0452274893/) that she edited, wrote a very good introduction to, and also contributed one of the better stories in. This has made me curious about her other stuff.

[Sulla the Dictator]

??? Tell me more, please.

They're a book series set in the Roman Republic. There are a couple of these historical detective fiction series floating around, but usually they have characters who carry the prejudices of modern people towards ancient behavior (Main characters sneering at slave mines, and what not). The great thing about SPQR is that the detective is a minor Roman official puttering around at just about the end of the Roman Republic. He makes no value judgements about Roman society (Modern value judgements, atleast), and isn't "our man in the past". One of the cool things about the way he solves mysteries is he does it with details about historical weapons, or politics, or geography, and logic. No cheating with "I have a theory about these marks on the edge of our fingers..." type of stuff. Amazon has the first couple of pages of the first book on reader:

http://www.amazon.com/Kings-Gambit-SPQR-I/dp/0312277059/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_c#reader

If you like detective fiction, you'll really enjoy these.

[Susan]

Mike, to answer your question in a word: No. I just thought you were saying that I was interested in sexual abuse because it might have an anti male theme. And that I was interested in that because I am a feminist. Someone over on VNN just accused me of being a feminist and dismissed me as a pro White person. Haha There's no winning.

harjit: I've only read the three novels I described earlier by Oates. I have one or two other books by her, but one is an interracial romance so I'm not sure if I'll even read that. I just may give that to the Goodwill. Try We Were the Mulvaneys as that is her most mainstream novel.

Sulla's post about detective novels also jostled my thoughts about MY favorite mystery/detective series. I don't know if anyone here has read any of Sue Grafton's Alphabet inspired series about a female private investigator, Kinsey Milhone, set in a mythical coastal town in California. They are superb in my estimation.

Grafton started with the letter A and has worked her way through the alphabet and is through S I believe now. Anyway, I have all of them. I think the letter T is about to be released sometime this year. You know: A is for Alibi, etc. Sulla's comments about not using the usual methods of solving mysteries, etc., reminded me that Grafton's series is set back in the early 80's before cell phones and computers, so there is nothing of that element in her stories. Milhone has to rely on her own native intelligence and ability rather than on modern technology. Also, it's just nice that modern technology doesn't get in the way of a good story.

Milhone is an interesting character too. She carries a gun, of course, and has had to shoot people at various times in the stories. She eschews materialism, drives an old VW bug, likes small living spaces, and rents a very tiny garage type apartment behind the home of a retired wealthy bachelor who plays a prominent role in most stories. In the last several books, Milhone even started up an on again off again relationship with a local cop she occasionally works with. Because she comes into contact with various male characters in her work, I think the stories would appeal to both males and females.

Grafton is probably the best writer out there today in this genre, at least that's what the blurbs say about her. Haha I know one thing, and that is no one writes dialogue like she does. I tried reading another female detective/mystery writer and her dialogue was so bad, I just quit. Grafton thoroughly researches each book and her details are incredible, as is the way she has maintained the consistency throughout the books. Because each book takes up more or less immediately after the previous book ends, the time is still back in the early 80's. They're just good fun reading by someone who can really write well.

[<access denied>]

One of the greatest books of all time, rivalling Mein Kampf, is the novel Sin Against the Blood (Die Sünde wider das Blut), 1918. I have not yet read it, but I can testify to its propaganda value by the following synopsis in The Racial State by Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann (which I read some years ago):

The writer Artur Dinter plumbed further depths in racial conspiracy theory. In a novel, published in 1918, entitled Sin Against the Blood, he told the story of a 'racially pure', blonde, blue-eyed German woman who was seduced by a Jew. Although she later managed to get away from him, and subsequently married an 'Aryan', she and her husband nonetheless produced 'typically Jewish-looking' children. Her 'hereditary properties' had been permanently corrupted by a casual encounter with a Jew. (pp. 37)

The book (a bestseller when it was published) should be translated to a dozen European languages to stop it from languishing in obscurity.

[MrAngry]

Poor, sclerotic Mr Anus. His antifa worldview depends so mightily on the Knuckle Dragging Race-iss prototype, he refuses to countenance the idea that the typical race-iss is better-read than the typical sign-carrying lefty.

Hold your breath and turn blue, Mr Anus, until either reality goes away, or you do.


Yuk yuk yuk, you're so clever.. :rofl: My world is fine and dandy, yours has an army Black Bogeymen just waiting to getcha and a whole bunch of Jews waiting to suck your blooood mwa hah harrrr!