Books

cross-posted from: https://piefed.blahaj.zone/post/155940

...than having your first 5 star review?😱

Like the two Naomis [Wolf and Klein], conservatives and progressives become warped mirrors of one another. The progressive campaign for bodily autonomy is co-opted to be the foundation of the anti-vax movement. This is the mirror world, where concerns about real children – in border detention, or living in poverty in America – are reflected back as warped fever-swamp hallucinations about kids in imaginary pizza restaurant basements and Hollywood blood sacrifice rituals. The mirror world replaces RBG with Amy Coney-Barrett and calls it a victory for women. The mirror world defends workers by stoking xenophobic fears about immigrants.

But progressives let it happen. … Progressives cede suspicion of large corporations to conservatives, defending giant, exploitative, monopolistic corporations so long as they arouse conservative ire with some performative DEI key-jingling. Progressives defend the CIA and FBI when they're wrongfooting Trump, and voting machine vendors when they're turned into props for the Big Lie.

This thoughtful, vigorous prose and argumentation deserves its own special callout here: Klein has produced a first-rate literary work just as much as this is a superb philosophical and political tome. In this moment where the mirror world is exploding and the real world is contracting, this is an essential read.

ISBN 9780374610326 (don't buy from Amazon or its subsidiaries)

I created Daybook to recommend one interesting book every day

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Each rec links straight into BookWyrm, so if you're new, it's a dead-simple way to start tracking, reviewing books on the fediverse!

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Crossposted from https://lemmy.world/post/30928435

In middle school I read The Three Musketeers and enjoyed it overall. Later in high school a movie adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo was released and I enjoyed it enough to read the book. I feel like I lucked out in picking up the Robin Buss translation. It was a recent translation based on the most complete original texts he could find. He explained how the first anonymous English translations would sometimes edit the story to fit English sensibilities of the era or simply not be very good at translation. The book is full of endnotes explaining things, like references that would’ve been obvious to contemporary readers but are largely lost to anglophones over a century later, or things that simply don’t translate well, like an important scene where a character uses the formal vous tense instead of the informal/familiar tu tense but this distinction doesn’t exist in modern English. It made me want to re-read The Three Musketeers in a translation by Buss, but the only other Dumas work he translated before his death at the age of 67 in 2006 was The Black Tulip.

Have you read Buss’s translation of The Count of Monte Cristo? Have you found a similar translation you liked for The Three Musketeers? Searching online the most helpful listings I’ve found are a couple old Reddit threads where it seems like the two recommendations are those by Richard Pevear or Lawrence Ellsworth.

A total banger. The first two chapters are a bit basic but then she starts spitting hard facts.

Democracy is dying because we are clinging to a dangerous and outdated myth: talking about politics can change people's minds. It doesn't.

This provocative debut from a bold new voice combines a fascinating range of research to show us the psychological and sociological factors that really shape our politics.

Drawing from ancient philosophy to modern neuroscience and social science, Dr Sarah Stein Lubrano reveals the surprising truth about how people think and behave politically. From friendship to community organizing and social infrastructure, she explores the actions that actually do change minds.

In a world where politics keeps getting more irrational, dishonest, violent and chaotic, it's getting much harder to reach people with words alone. So people who really care about democracy must ask: how can we stop arguing and do the deep work to build stronger foundations for political life, and a better world for us all?

“The Bellmaker” by Brian Jacques is part of his Redwall series, which kinda raised me. It’s amazing how much of this I remember.

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A life time ago I lost a friend to Objectivist philosophy. Not wanting to lose said friend, I read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged to try and figure out why he was acting like an asshole all of a sudden.

I took a couple points of psychic damage in the process, but at least I can stand my own when offering counter arguments against their edgy philosophies.

What are some other works that it would be handy to be knowledgeable of the next time a philosophical edge lord tries to quote me into a corner?

I'm looking to be more well informed in conversation.

The book switches between being a personal tale of growing through being neurodivergent in a world built around being "normal", how "normal" was created, and how normal doesn't even exist. It's a really good read

As a huge BTTF fan, I'm really excited to read this! I just added it to The StoryGraph, and you can shelve it for your TBR here: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/c02ec440-d907-4c9d-b13c-6bc967207a0e

Hello!

May I please have some book recommendations on the Russian Monarchy from the causation and the formation of the Russia Monarchy to the rise of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Thank you in advance!

Hello!

May I please have some book recommendations on Communist China? I am interested in learning about the origins of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). I would like to understand the events leading up to the formation of the PRC, the rise of the CCP, and the development of Communist China. I am particularly interested in learning about key figures such as Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and Xi Jinping, as well as other prominent leaders.

Hello!

May I please have recommendations for neuroscience books? I am interested in the biological process of the nervous system.

Thank you in advance!

This is a classic now, so I expected it to be the prototype of all time-traveling stories that are so much more common to us now. What I didn't expect was how serious Wells was about writing the book. The year 80K AD is a unique living breathing world which is built on the gradual conditioning of the two divisions of society: lower class and upper class. This makes the novel much more grounded and a commentary to the present times as all classic science-fiction does and indeed what is basically H.G. Wells' flavour.

Another surprising thing was the fact that this is also a very imaginative and creative novel. It seems like H.G. Wells is giving voice to the way time-lapse videos work when his protagonist gets on the machine for the first time and he experiences this:

The laboratory got hazy and went dark. Mrs. Watchett came in and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. Tomorrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still.

I mean, this is before television, cameras, montages and yet HG Wells' proves himself as the classic visionary writer. The novel is always beautiful and imaginative with it's setting and the visual language gives the more serious commentary an adventurous thrill and excitement that makes you intrigued in the story.

To me the novel has less merit as a commentary though because it is much more speculative even in it's own narrative, the chains that keep the two classes in constant struggles are visible clearly at first to the time traveler but he soon realizes that even that simple explanation though it may explain how the beings of 80K AD got it, what is happening to them now is different. The novel also talks about evolution and time and all of that has a more compelling story-telling intrigue than anything that is real.

I have watched the movie "Things to Come" which was based on one of his stories and it felt like the writing and message was very heavy-handed and dry in it and that gave me the impression of Wells' as a very "old" writer so it was a pleasant surprise to find thrills, danger, beauty and genuine questions of humanity's future and about the Earth.

8/10 Wonderful read, surprisingly good

I am looking for recommendations for some good historical fiction books. I am mostly interested in books about mediaeval times or even earlier, as I find it fascinating to understand the struggles of the people back then, but I am also open to any suggestions if worthy.

The authors who manage to clear the low bar of incorporating characters/communities from diverse cultures into their fiction without cultural appropriation/stereotyping/racism... who are they and how do they do it?

I know many writers sidestep the difficulty altogether, either by creating a fictional universe with cultural proxies (fantasy stories/video games with Chinese, Japanese, and Russian analogues, I'm looking at you) or by writing in the distant future where the cultures have blended into new ones with flavors of the past (sci-fi does this a lot).

I've seen so very few authors do it well, but I do believe it's both possible and worth doing.

Cross-posted in [email protected]

So, I am trying to find quality elastic ribbon bookmarks that won't damage my books. I want this kind of bookmark because I use these types of elastics for my tablet cases and there is one on a notebook I have and it's really satisfying to close out my experience by reapplying the elastic band. Does anyone have any suggestions for a quality set of these bookmarks? Thanks in advance!