Bookses.

Right now I'm reading Atlas Shrugged, and I think it's one of the most well written novels in the past forever.

I'm also reading Catcher in the Rye, and Holden Caulfield is a lot like Matthew Freeman. (Me)

actually wait...now that i think about it....i MADE that thread.

i could never follow catch-22, but i still could tell it was a fantastic book. I should really give that another try...

lol.. frequency.

I'm trying to read PD James' Skull Beneath the Skin and it's absolute freaking agony. How could you fuck up a standard crime novel so much? What the fuck made you think it was a good idea to put pseudo-educated references to victorian history and Webster's plays into this you fucking BITCH. The plot is stupid predictable, the characters are all the same fucking person with different names and the writing reminds me of Tolkein, which may be a compliment to some despite the fact that I hate Tolkein but GOD DAMMIT Tolkein didn't write crime novels for a freaking reason. Fuck I hate school prescribed texts.

Yeah.. it's rubbing off on me.

I need to get a cream for it or something.

tmills said:
findingthebomb said:
I'm also reading Catcher in the Rye, and Holden Caulfield is a lot like Matthew Freeman. (Me)
Everyone below the age of 18 thinks that they are Holden. That's what makes the Catcher in the Rye such a remarkable book is that everyone can identify with him. It's also what makes it so annoying.

That's kind of what I thought.

I think Catcher in the Rye is a great novel. However, Catch-22 is my NUMBER ONE. After an initial read, it seems hilarious, but if you analyze it further you realize how haunting it is.

findingthebomb said:
Right now I'm reading Atlas Shrugged, and I think it's one of the most well written novels in the past forever.

This proves your age just as much as Catcher In The Rye. Ayn Rand is a hack who loves to hear herself talk. Furthermore, objectivism isn't practical.

Anyway, I'm reading history books right now. I'm about halfway through Winston Churchill's The Gathering Storm series.

reading for whom the bell tolls and the book of daniel right now

JESUS people, everyone knows that bad grammar can be used as a slight humor tool.

Rand's stated purpose in her writing is "the projection of an ideal man." Distinctively modern experiences that most of us take for granted--feeling the rush of wind at the top of a skyscraper, seeing the landscape flow past from a speeding train--Rand's best and brightest appreciate as the most exquisite refinements for sensual aristocrats. And the most sensual are those who esteem the power of abstract thought to create a uniquely human world appropriate to the age of capitalist democracy.

What is one to make of it all? In Rand, soundness and charlatanry commingle. In the end, charlatanry prevails.

Freedom, individuality, achievement, reason: Rand takes these and other fine ideas and pursues them to the limits of sanity. Rightly understanding Soviet Communism (and German National Socialism, which she considered its mad collectivist kin) as epitomizing the worst in ethical and political thought, she plunges to the conclusion that in its polar opposite will be found nothing less than perfection. Having learned the lessons of socialist dystopia on her own body, she embraces a utopian fantasy of her own: only mingy compromise with collectivism stands in the way of the society without flaw, in which heroic individuals, loosed from Judeo-Christian tyranny with its insufferable God and foul altruism, will create the capitalist paradise.

In her passion to reshape the world in accordance with her idea, Rand begins to sound like the tyrants she hates. Her capitalist revolutionaries speak of their opponents as "subhuman creatures," "looting lice." Galt's radio address to the nation--he has commandeered the airwaves by some electronic magic--is positively Castro-like in its mad zealotry, running to over 50 pages and unfolding every half-truth and alluring lunacy Rand ever entertained.

Everything in Rand's thought depends on her faith in reason, her conviction that any question has a clear and definitive answer. This unlimited faith in reason damages her as a novelist--there are no mysteries in her world, including no mysteries of human character--and also severely limited her as a moralist and undid her as a woman.

In Rand's psychology, reason unfailingly determines emotion, never the other way around. But in her own erotic life Rand was at the mercy of a turbulent unreason that pulled her under even as she burbled on about her unimpeachable rationality. As she could only love an extraordinary man, she endowed the man she married, Frank O'Connor, with all the qualities of a hero, even of a god. In fact, in almost everyone's eyes but hers, O'Connor, a failure as a movie actor, was a raging mediocrity.

At the age of forty-nine, Rand fell for yet another god, Nathaniel Branden, the husband of her biographer and himself a disciple younger than she by 25 years. She expounded the perfect reasonableness of their adultery to each of the injured spouses, whom she expected reasonably to accept their twice-weekly scheduled trysts in the bedroom she shared with her husband. After years of this, the Brandens' marriage collapsed and Rand's husband swirled down the alcoholic drain.

When Rand was sixty-one and Branden thirty-six, the sexual fire went out for him and he found a younger lover. Rand nearly went insane in her jealousy. Maintaining that she was entirely reasonable and fight, and Branden purely evil, she destroyed his professional reputation and banished him from the Randian kingdom where he had been until then the crown prince. Heroic reason, heroic freedom, heroic love ended, as they began, in folly.

Imagining herself one up on Heraclitus, Rand the thinker holds that a man's mind is his character is his fate. She appears never to have given a thought to how one actually comes by one's particular mind and character. She has no sense of human beings as creatures, each endowed with his own particular gifts, whether by chance or design, lacking other qualities he may wish he had, and subject to all the pains of individual and human nature. It is arguable that only from this awareness of incompleteness and contingency does there stem compassion for others, a quality rooted in rational human nature that has achieved its fullest expression in democratic society. But compassion disgusts Rand; John Galt scorns it as love of the unworthy, a triumph of sloppy feeling over lucid reason.

This is no doubt why, for all her continued popularity, Rand is anything but a commanding figure these days. Very few conservatives want any part of her, for she is the conservative bogeyman that liberals invoke to terrify their children: money-worshipping, absorbed in the pursuit of her own happiness, indifferent to the pain of others. Though she will no doubt continue to sell--there are certain effects she brings off as well as anyone, and they have their undeniable appeal--it is hardly a matter for regret that her centenary has gone largely unmarked.

wreckedangle said:
that was a siq copy+paste

I really hope it was because that would be a lot of effort for something that nobody is going to read.

Yeah, it was totally copy and paste. I wasn't about to write that shit out when it's easily available all over the place.

This is a great thread.