Books
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@mclaincausey said in Books:
@Giles I am so glad you and P enjoyed / will definitely enjoy it. Hannibal was a badass. What wild times those were!
Yeah thanks. I've been thinking about it a lot. I actually said out loud last night, that I think what we were like back then, was probably a truer reflection on what humans are like. This "civilised", polite, woke facade we have is just that, a facade. And it does not take a lot to dislodge it.
The human race did not get to the top of the food chain/dominant race by being nice......
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@Giles could be. Another book I mentioned here (the Dawn of everything) challenges that though and highlights a lot of archaeological evidence that humans have formed all sorts of ways to live before we invented the state 12,000 or so years ago, some authoritarian and brutal and others more egalitarian.
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I finally got to read this wonderful book and I cannot thank @Giles enough for bringing it into my life. I had no knowledge of Antarctic exploration and the history surrounding it, so this world was truly alien to me and I was immediately captivated. I’ll say this…the metaphor of the Endurance stuck in the ice and sinking hit me personally in ways I’ll have to write about in another thread on another day…but it was very powerful. And then there was this passage which echos many artists and creators I admire…
I want to record Orde-Lees recording of his sunset, because it is like a hand-print on a cave wall. We give beauty to the world by seeing it and loving it and saying
'this is beautiful. The world doesn't need us in order to exist, but it needs us in order to be beautiful, just as we need it in order to be purveyors of beauty. Through loving the world, we love ourselves into finer being. Neither of us, neither us nor the world, must be lost.This book has instantly become one of my favorites and I will read it often, continuing to play the infinite game. What an inspiration.
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Thank you. Funnily enough, we had friends around for dinner. Richard loves books, so I told him about Finding Endurance, and how much it had affected me and how much I loved it. I used the example of the finite and infinite game, as one of fundamental things I had learned from the book.
He took my copy home with him.
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Anyone else subjected themselves to this? It is, for the most part, competently written. The unpleasantness is so unrelenting that one becomes pretty much inured to it by the last third or so. I don't regret reading it, per se, but it is a miserable bloody thing that I am glad to be done with. I don't know why it exists and couldn't really recommend it.
Now I'm reading some Jeeves and Wooster. Way better
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@steelworker adding it to the list
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After that you may find his memoir of ww2 interesting .
Thats the writer on both jackets
Luck for us he wasn’t one of the slaughtered -
Slightly unusual suggestion I suppose based on the calibre of the books usually posted here but, my partner and I have been reading the “Dungeon Crawler Carl” series this year and (aside from the fact that it keeps us spending time together despite her living 600 miles away) I think it may well be one of the most enjoyable works of literary fiction in existence.
If you’re ever looking for a bit of escapism that won’t talk down to you and doesn’t take itself too seriously then I cannot recommend this more enthusiastically
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I wanted to get into that one but LitRPG is not for me. Much respect for the writer and all his success. My recent obsession is Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series. On the latest, 4th, installment and love them and the narrator’s lovely English accent and character impersonations on Audible. Great sci fi for the nerds.
