Post: #651

Fiction: A Song of Ice And Fire - A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin.

This one doesn't need an explanation. I've never heard of the books before the series came out, but it's not that surprising given there's a lot of bloody good European fantasy writers who get more attention on the old continent. Mr Martin is a genius and I'm devouring the books, the successors are waiting already.

Non-fiction: The Charisma Myth - Master the Art of Personal Magnetism by Olivia Fox Cabane.

Self-help books are great. I've just started and so far it is interesting and provides examples of charismatic people relating to the chapter's subjects. According to Fox Cabane charisma is something everybody can learn, not something some people possess and others don't. I have a hard time constantly following the advice but I will do my best, let's see what the results will be!

Post: #652

@Quaestum. I had an argument with a friend the other day about whether or not A song of ice and fire is a work of genius. I said it was and he said it wasnt.

Post: #653

Currently reading "48 Laws of Power" by Robert Greene.

Post: #654

(04-08-2016 07:43 AM)Pride male Wrote:  @Quaestum. I had an argument with a friend the other day about whether or not A song of ice and fire is a work of genius. I said it was and he said it wasnt.

The first three books are masterworks of plotting. Every page after that point is a masterwork of shit.

Finished The Pillars of the Earth, onward to The Count of Monte Cristo.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #655

(04-07-2016 02:03 AM)Sooth Wrote:  

(04-06-2016 11:40 PM)germanico Wrote:  Antifragile by Nassim Taleb.

Why is this guy not more widely recognized, I dont know.

He even lifts.

Also see his book "The Black Swan" if you haven't already.

I love this guy, hes definitely a thinker. Very intelligent and also has a large ball sack. He calls people out in his field all the time.

http://www.rooshv.com/review-of-antifrag...ssim-taleb

/thread-20111.html

Post: #656

Is Song of Ice and Fire a work of genius?

Post: #657

(04-10-2016 07:43 AM)Pride male Wrote:  Is Song of Ice and Fire a work of genius?

No.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #658

"The Rational Male" by Rollo Tomassi

It's a cathartic read, due to the multitude of truths within these pages. Combining this with "(Day) Bang" would be highly potent.

Post: #659

I'm actually reading "The way of the superior man" by David Deida. This book is old, but it has a lot of wisdom regarding our true masculine nature.

Post: #660

I'm on travel this week so I've brought the complete works of Frederic Bastiat. I originally bought it for The Law, but The State is also an excellent essay.

Post: #661

I'm going to read Panzer Leader. I've had it in my collection of books for years but I've been busy lately reading school assigned readings. I have skimmed through a few times but I haven't actually sat down and read it every day until finishing it.

I also have Stuka Pilot by Rudel which I plan on reading again.

Panzer Leader is written by General Heinz Guderian and is all about his ideas that were brought into action with the blitzkrieg.

Post: #662

I've been in a literary rut lately since finishing Quintus' "Pathways". So I've gone back to an old favorite of mine, "Fantasyland" by Sam Walker.

TL;DR Walker is a sportswriter who's never played fantasy baseball before, and decides the best way to get introduced to the game is to dive headfirst into an "experts" league. Its a fun read for anyone who's ever played fantasy sports because you will inevitably come to a point where you will say "yep, I've done that".

Post: #663

It's a Did Not Finish for The Count of Monte Cristo. I lasted maybe 8 pages or so. Just could not deal with Dumas's writing, it's dated and all passive voice and the subject matter is just plain uninteresting. Maybe it's just the time period - about the only thing I've been able to get through from this rough time period is Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities and a bit earlier, Defoe's Moll Flanders.

I bought The Other Boleyn Girl by Phillippa Gregory some years ago and decided I'd get round to reading it. Got through it fairly quickly by comparison, will put a longer review in the completed books thread.

At the moment I'm fucking around with a compilation of some of Hemingway's short stories. I'm ambivalent about Hemingway, on one hand his writing is a hell of a lot more complex than it first appears, but most of his short stories just annoy the living fuck out of me. I don't read stories to try and figure out what the fuck the author is talking about, I read for an emotional experience and a catharsis. I would not have a clue what A Clean, Well-Lighted Place is about unless I'd heard elsewhere that Hemingway is basically writing about an old man on his way to kill himself. The Killers just mystifies me. About the only short story of his that struck me hard was Hills Like White Elephants, and so far it's about the best one of the lot. His novels are a bit more understandable: I enjoyed For Whom The Bell Tolls and most of The Old Man And The Sea, and this book contains The Sun Also Rises, so we shall see.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #664

(04-10-2016 08:24 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

(04-10-2016 07:43 AM)Pride male Wrote:  Is Song of Ice and Fire a work of genius?

No.

Why not? And what do you consider literary genius?

Post: #665

(04-14-2016 03:54 AM)Pride male Wrote:  

(04-10-2016 08:24 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

(04-10-2016 07:43 AM)Pride male Wrote:  Is Song of Ice and Fire a work of genius?

No.

Why not? And what do you consider literary genius?

In short, it's selectivity that determines Song of Ice and Fire as a work of non-genius. As to what I consider literary genius, that is way too wide a concept to cover, but taken as one story ASOIAF is not selective. Or rather, Martin is not selective. Martin admits he's completely lost control of his plot and it's apparent with every passing book that his editors either can't edit or can't be bothered lancing out his excesses.

For example, the way he does journeys. In the first few books, journeys are handled in a very different way to the standard fantasy novel. Absent one or two significant occasions which heavily advance a character or advance the plot (the two being hard to separate) you don't see characters on the road much at all. Compare that to a Tolkien or (shudder) Eddings travelogue fantasy, where we're subjected to just about every bloody meal a group of characters partake in on the way to Magic Elf Land. Martin - at least in the early books - excises these journeys because back then they were utterly irrelevant.

But he's started slipping. Brienne of Tarth goes looking for Sansa, and we're subjected to a long romp across the southeastern end of Westeros as she goes from hovel to hovel without success. And for extra measure, Martin hits the same note again and again and again on these encounters: it's always the dreadful, horrible lord-y people who are responsible for all the ills of the world, the little people are all nice and just try to get along with their lives.

The sheer length of the story may well be an argument against its genius, too. Aristotle's Poetics - an extraordinary ancient document which sets in place some of the fictional structures we still have today - cautions a playwright/author against running out a story so long that the audience can't remember the beginning of the story.

This was solid pragmatic advice in more ways than one. For a start, the longer you ran the story, the more creativity you had to come up with to keep the story from getting boring. The more chance there is you'll start repeating yourself. Exhibit A: Daenerys running away from Meereen and facing being turned into a Dothraki fuck toy once more. We saw this bit already.

In Martin's case, stringing out the story has destroyed most of the tension he had carefully developed from Ned Stark's beheading and the Red Wedding. It was a deliciously frightening reading experience early on because you really had no idea who the real protagonists of the story were - in short, the "Anyone Can Die" factor.

Martin has spent and then overspent all of that capital. The story has run out so long that (a) there's practically nobody sympathetic or empathetic to root for anymore and (b) he's winnowed his starting characters out so completely that it is apparent to anyone with half a brain which ones have been issued with Plot Armour, which ones we will see last until the climax: Dany, Tyrion, and Jon.

Martin is also not much chop at illustrating the growth of characters into competent leaders. Absent Tyrion to a small extent, none of these three are competent at leading or at navigating power. At all. Jon gets his arse stabbed to death (and anyone who thinks he's not coming back as a Lady Stoneheart-style hardcore dude, please: Plot Armor.), Dany fails hard at managing cities, and Tyrion is an exile. Even leaving aside the idea that you have to make things harder and harder for characters, just knocking the character out of their proverbial tree is not enough. You have to illustrate them getting markedly better at tree-climbing or at least better at not hurting themselves as much when they get knocked down. You have to do this because the challenges for the characters are meant to get ever-greater, and the whole point of a story is to demonstrate the character growing to meet these challenges until the final challenge of them all: the climax.

When you don't do that, you risk having to resort to the one great sin that Greek tragic theatre in Aristotle's time permitted but which no modern drama does: deus ex machina, the arrival of an outside force to solve the characters' problems for them. And as we get further into the story it's becoming more and more apparent to me that Martin's going to start resorting to deus ex machina to resolve a good part of his characters' problems. That's leaving aside the fact the next book -- if the series is to finish in two -- is going to be a brutal, pointless mass slaughter of a big number of the characters we've been following for the past ten years or so.

The way Martin is letting this series go, and indeed it's a direct consequence of his lack of selectivity, there is no feasible way his climax is going to be able to deliver a satisfying conclusion to the series. To get this series finished well Martin is going to have to pull out either the best two books he's ever written in his life, or he's by default going to write the two worst. The guy is a fat, ageing procrastinator and I find it very, very difficult to believe this is going to end well.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #666

(04-10-2016 07:43 AM)Pride male Wrote:  Is Song of Ice and Fire a work of genius?

No, but it's the work of an obvious Cultural Marxist.

I read about a third of the first one. Heroes weren't heroic, Villains weren't colourful, neither group was likable.

Recognised post-modern nihilism for what it was.

Looked up a picture of the author, who looked exactly what I expected, except more so.

Skipped to the end to see them all die horribly in the middle a zombie vs dragon war.

Discovered you don't get to that particular firework factory for another six books.

Lifestooshort.gif

Didn't finish it.

Be very careful of whom you let take up residence inside your head.

Post: #667

Forgot to note what I'm reading: I set Hemingway to one side, his short stories have gotten me to the point where the old bastard was just being obscure for the hell of it. I tried reading The Sun Also Rises, but even knowing ahead of time that the main character's penis has been shot off in the war it's still a big dose of #FirstWorldProblems as he mopes around Paris, swanning it up with hot women who want him and drinking his arse off while trying to remain completely obscure about the injury.

So on to another darling of literature, though at least to start with it's engaging, or I'm engaging with it: Lydia Davis's translation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. So far, so good.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #668

Im reading" My Secret Garden" Google it...
I'm listening to, " The Science of Interstellar"

Post: #669

Just started reading two books: The prince by Niccolo Machiavelli and The Iliad by Homer. Two classic pieces that Ive been trying to read for the past few years. But what has stopped me is my lack of focus while reading. I can read about a paragraph or so, but then my mind wanders onto other topics while my eyes are still skimming the page. If the paragraphs/sentences are short and easy to read, I can focus a little bit more, same if the book is really interesting. Does anyone else ever have this? I've been diagnosed with ADD, but fuck medications, they give me terrible anxiety. Its a real struggle to read, but I do my best to push forward, even if I'm reading at a rate of one page every 5 minutes.

Post: #670

(04-30-2016 07:33 PM)Cortés Wrote:  Just started reading two books: The prince by Niccolo Machiavelli and The Iliad by Homer. Two classic pieces that Ive been trying to read for the past few years. But what has stopped me is my lack of focus while reading. I can read about a paragraph or so, but then my mind wanders onto other topics while my eyes are still skimming the page. If the paragraphs/sentences are short and easy to read, I can focus a little bit more, same if the book is really interesting. Does anyone else ever have this? I've been diagnosed with ADD, but fuck medications, they give me terrible anxiety. Its a real struggle to read, but I do my best to push forward, even if I'm reading at a rate of one page every 5 minutes.

Generally on the topic of reading rate, the only advice I could give is: persist. Like most other things, the more you do of something, the better you generally get at it. This goes for reading as well as writing.

And try to read less on the Internet. Social media is a big contributor to the shortening attention span of humanity at large. Twitter only allows 140 characters because their target audience has an IQ roughly 40-50 points south of that number.

With The Prince, don't be surprised if some of the concepts seem to be a bit "Yeah, so what", or "I've heard this elsewhere." There are a lot of books which were groundbreaking at the time which have been so absorbed into our collective consciousness that the original concepts are no longer as engaging as they once were. The Prince is basically the first major work of cynical realpolitik in the West. It's more attended to for its insights than the specifics of its language. Frankly you could pick up a Cliff's Notes summary of it or a Wiki-style article setting out its principles and lose nothing out of it.

With The Iliad -- or indeed any really ancient text like that -- try looking for a different translation. It wasn't until I glanced through two competing translations of Homer's Odyssey that I realised how much variance in style and syntax different translators can draw out of the same source. One of the translations I saw was in high romantic style, while the other was much more of a bawdy tale. Some of the older translations of Homer and his fellow Greeks literally go back centuries; even modern, non-ADD readers can have difficulty following the translations.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #671

Two books right now:

Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? by Thomas Sowell. Very interesting so far.

Nat King Cole by David Epstein. Biography of the famous singer. A must read for me, as Cole is without a doubt one of my biggest musical influences.

Post: #672

After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Viet Nam
Richard Spector

Post: #673

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
Anders Ericsson

Phenomenal book about latest scientific findings on how to learn efficiently and to excel at any given task. I just started reading but his concept of "deliberate practice" sounds really promising in terms of learning/becoming better at something.
He recently appeared on "Freakonomics Radio" where he talked about it.
If you have the time, listen to it: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/peak/

The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
Giorgio Vasari

Renaissance-author Vasari compiled the biographies of dozens of renaissance artists into one book. Very entertaining, provides a lot of inside on the life of that time and furthermore it is very inspiring reading about all these masters of their respective craft and how dedicated they were and that all the passion and labour they put into the works eventually earned them respect, fame and fortune.
If you are (like i am) interested and possibly familiar with the artworks of the renaissance knowing the biographic details of the artists will further your understanding of their work and makes it even more enjoyable to engage with the art.

Post: #674

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand - essential primer for objectivism, forging your own path, internal validation and outcome independence.

Post: #675

Guns Up!: A Firsthand Account of the Vietnam War by Johnnie M. Clark

The author was a M60 machine gunner during the Vietnam war and he tells his story in this book. I recently spent a month in Vietnam and after a visit to the war museum there I got interested to read more about it.