Hey, can we have a rolling What Are You Reading thread?

[FoolofaTook]

Spot on, brother-man. Hell, the term "conspiracy theorist" was created by the CIA to discredit people from questioning the JFK assassination. To this day it's still a term widely used by the establishment to discredit anyone challenging a narrative. To anyone red-pilled, it's a weak deflection, but it works with a lot of normies.

I was reading John Bolton's ( former national security advisor for those who don't know) white-house memoir and he essentially says that it was a bio-weapon from China used to push their control measures on the West. It makes sense. There was also a lot of propaganda coming out from China when the virus first broke. Staged footage of people dropping like flies in streets and shit that we now know just doesn't happen. The discoverer of HIV also came out and said that covid-19 is clearly a chimera virus with viruses spliced together as you can actually see the insertions in the virus.

Another angle people don't talk about is how those Hong Kong protests were in full steam and gaining massive momentum and embarrassing China world wide... The release of the virus sure knocked that shit out of that movement in a hurry.

[buzzard]

Yeah, whatever. I'm not believing shit you say until Dr. Francis Boyle backs it up.

[FoolofaTook]

[slunken]

I got reinvolved into Charlie Manson deep dive territory so I finally ordered "Electric Kool Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe and "Hell's Angels" by Hunter S Thompson.

Not particularly looking forward to them but at least I can cross them off my list. The Tom Wolfe in particular I'm expecting to be a hate-read.

Also recently picked up a book of 6-7th century Chinese poetry by this hermit who lived on a mountain that may or may not be a mythological creation. Also includes the 4 poems written by a buddy of his that apparently kept a pet tiger and slept behind a monastery library. When people tried to find him all they would see is tiger prints. How sick is that? The true identities of these dudes are still unknown.

[slunken]

Yo Took, you fuck with the Nag Hammadi library at all? I had to take a break from reading 80s cyberpunk trash and that really broke my head open. It's a good "yea i'm going crazy" read.

[FoolofaTook]

I know you're trolling me.

Hell's Angels by Hunter is good, btw.

[slunken]

no i really wondered if you've read the hidden books of the bible

[FoolofaTook]

feel free to eat my asshole


no really

[FoolofaTook]

i will pay

[slunken]

you sound upset

[Disco King]

Originally Posted by slunken

I got reinvolved into Charlie Manson deep dive territory so I finally ordered "Electric Kool Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe and "Hell's Angels" by Hunter S Thompson.

Not particularly looking forward to them but at least I can cross them off my list. The Tom Wolfe in particular I'm expecting to be a hate-read.

Also recently picked up a book of 6-7th century Chinese poetry by this hermit who lived on a mountain that may or may not be a mythological creation. Also includes the 4 poems written by a buddy of his that apparently kept a pet tiger and slept behind a monastery library. When people tried to find him all they would see is tiger prints. How sick is that? The true identities of these dudes are still unknown.

Acid Test is good, tho

[Disco King]

Currently reading some Quine. I told myself no Kripke until I finish my Quine. How the causal theory of reference/semantic externalism deals with modal statements probably seems more significant after you've refreshed the theory of definite descriptions in your mind.

I'm skipping all the chapters that are just pure bland philosophy of language with no interesting ontological bits, though

[FoolofaTook]

[cork_soaker]

pale fire first timer here

[Alice]

How is it? I’ve been working in a book store and it’s hell for my reading list. This is one I’ve meaning to look into since being reminded of it there

[Alice]

I just finished Pride and Prejudice for the first time and it was a delight. Started Descartes’ Discourse on Method and I think I’m going to enjoy reading more of him. I’d like to read some Geulincx after that but who knows

[Alice]

I probably mentioned starting Proust a while back. I took a break after finishing the first section and I’ve just started it again. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m now more accustomed to the way he writes and how best to read him but wow am I enamored of this thing. I liked it well enough before but now I’m fairly certain it’ll end up one of my favorite things I’ve ever read. I only hope someday my French will be good enough to read it in the original

[Alice]

I don’t use the word exquisite very often but he certainly warrants it

[Alice]

I mean just take a look at this sentence:

"He brushed past us, and did not interrupt what he was saying to her, but gave us, out of the corner of his blue eye, a little sign which began and ended, so to speak, inside his eyelids and which, as it did not involve the least movement of his facial muscles, managed to pass quite unperceived by the lady; but, striving to compensate by the intensity of his feelings for the somewhat restricted field in which they had to find expression, he made that blue chink which was set apart for us sparkle with all the zest of an affability that went far beyond mere playfulness, almost touched the border-line of roguery; he subtilised the refinements of good-fellowship into a wink of connivance, a hint, a hidden meaning, a secret understanding, all the mysteries of complicity, and finally elevated his assurances of friendship to the level of protestations of affection, even of a declaration of love, lighting up for us alone, with a secret and languid flame invisible to the chantelaine, an enamoured pupil in a countenance of ice."

[Alice]

Or these ones:

"I would stop by the table, where the kitchen-maid had shelled them, to inspect the platoon of peas, drawn up in ranks and numbered, like little green marbles, ready for a game; but what most enraptured me were the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and pink which shaded off from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible gradations to their white feet—still trained a little by the soil of their garden-bed—with an iridescence that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form and who, through the disguise of their firm, comestible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I'd partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare's Dream) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume."

[Alice]

A strikingly beautiful description of asparagus that ends with a reference to the effect it has on the scent of one's urine. Willickers

[FoolofaTook]

[FoolofaTook]

[MyOneAndOnly]

Gideon the Ninth

Scifi space necromancer vampire lesbian drama

[buzzard]

It may look like a thin block of gourmet chocolate featuring caramelized buttermilk and organic roasted pecan meringue, but it's actually a book and proving quite readable after about sixty pages or so.

Here's a sample:

‘Have you ever seen a whale, Daniel?’
I told her that I had not in real life, only on the television.
‘On the television have you seen a whale breach?’ she asked. ‘That’s when it jumps clean out of the water only to smack down onto the surface of the sea. Have you seen that? The almighty splash it makes?’
I told her that I had.
‘We don’t fully understand why whales do that but there have been many suggestions. Some people say that it’s to see the world and especially the sea from a different perspective, to catch a glimpse of what it is they spend their lives swimming around in. It’s like us humans sending rockets up to the moon only to spend the next fifty years gazing at the pictures of our own earth. The whales want an experience like that. A different view. Some people have suggested that it’s not a visual experience they’re after but a sensual one. When they breach the water they feel the full size and heaviness of their own bodies in the air. They feel gravity and dry cold and when they smack the hard brine with their full airborne weight they quake to their blubber. People say that they’re trying to brush off dead skin, barnacles, lichen, and that breaching is like a horse scratching its rump against rough tree bark. But it meets at the same point, doesn’t it? The need for a physical sensation that they can’t get any other way. That sensation becomes a fixation and each time after they feel it the pressure slowly builds until they can feel it again. I think it’s something like that for the whales. They swim around for days, weeks even, feeding and sleeping and breathing and they start to think about that last time they jumped clean out of the water and how it felt when their head, then their body and fins, and then their tail, all emerged from the sea, and how it felt to momentarily hover in a substance that fills their lungs but dries their eyes, and then they remember especially about how it felt to return to the water after their moment in the air. That thump. That splash. The whale continues to think about the breach, more and more, until the urge to repeat becomes irresistible and it erupts out of the ocean only to fall again into it. And so it’s sated for a while.
Your Daddy’s like that, I think. Like one of the great whales. And when he fights it’s like one of their breaches. But bloodier, much bloodier. And it isn’t a lone act. It’s not just an animal and the elements. There’s another animal too. Another human. But it’s the same. It quenches him.’

[wHATcOLOR]

Originally Posted by Alice

I mean just take a look at this sentence:

"He brushed past us, and did not interrupt what he was saying to her, but gave us, out of the corner of his blue eye, a little sign which began and ended, so to speak, inside his eyelids and which, as it did not involve the least movement of his facial muscles, managed to pass quite unperceived by the lady; but, striving to compensate by the intensity of his feelings for the somewhat restricted field in which they had to find expression, he made that blue chink which was set apart for us sparkle with all the zest of an affability that went far beyond mere playfulness, almost touched the border-line of roguery; he subtilised the refinements of good-fellowship into a wink of connivance, a hint, a hidden meaning, a secret understanding, all the mysteries of complicity, and finally elevated his assurances of friendship to the level of protestations of affection, even of a declaration of love, lighting up for us alone, with a secret and languid flame invisible to the chantelaine, an enamoured pupil in a countenance of ice."

im not trying to be contrarian but i genuinely hated reading this "sentence"

[MyOneAndOnly]

If your sentence requires a paragraph break it's maybe too long

[MyOneAndOnly]

Originally Posted by Alice

I just finished Pride and Prejudice for the first time and it was a delight. Started Descartes’ Discourse on Method and I think I’m going to enjoy reading more of him. I’d like to read some Geulincx after that but who knows

so you think you're all that because you read Descartes

[Cool As Ice Cream]

Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years

[Cool As Ice Cream]

heh, i never noticed before that it's "prostrate" instead of "prostate".