What are you currently reading or have recently finished and what did you think? I just started pic related, specifically the double, and suffice it to say it is quite strange but hilarious so far, feels different than any other dostoevsky i've read

I just finished reading The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. I know there are tons of other books related to this series, but I'm having a hard time figuring out which ones are actually worth reading as narratives, and which are mostly made for their value of their analysis. I understand how some people might care about analyzing the development of the texts, but I really just want to read stories. But it's hard to figure out which publications are actually made for the sake of telling stories. For example, The History of Middle Earth seems mostly to exist for its analytical value, but its first two volumes are called The Book of Lost Tales, and seem to feature some narratives not told elsewhere, among others that are just earlier versions of narratives in The Silmarillion. Is The Book of Lost Tales (or any other book of The History of Middle Earth) actually worth reading for its narrative value, or only for seeing the literary development of The Silmarillion? Related to the same question, there is Unfinished Tales. As these are unfinished, I'm less interested in them, but would anyone say they are actually worth reading for their narrative value, either on their own or as they add to the greater narrative of the world? Or are they more just interesting for seeing the ideas Tolkien toyed with in the development of his work? What about the "Great Tales?" The Children of Hurin, Beren and Luthien, and The Fall of Gondolin. They were published as standalone books in the last 15 years, and they seemed like interesting stories in The Silmarillion, so I'd be interested in reading more fleshed out versions. Is that what these publications are? From what I've gleaned from the internet, Children of Hurin and Fall of Gondolin sound like they're novels, but Beren and Luthien is apparently a publication of two versions of the same story, to show the development of it. I'd be less interested in that than I would in just a full book of a much more fleshed out story, especially since that chapter of The Silmarillion interested me much more than the other two Great Tales. Of course, I'd also be interested in your thoughts and questions about the main three books. Now that I've finally read them, I finally understand them. I tried to read The Silmarillion when I was like 12, after Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring movie came out, and I read The Hobbit, so I figured reading the thing that takes place first would be fine, I wouldn't need to know the end of Lord of the Rings since it takes place later. I was sorely mistaken. I finished it, but retained almost nothing. Now, 20 years later, I finally understand it. Except for one thing. Who is Tom Bombadil? I'm pretty sure he's the embodiment of the forest. I mean his wife is very blatantly the spirit of the river, and that would match the forest well enough. But I'd be interested in hearing/arguing about other ideas.

How often do you guys head out to library book fairs, estate sales and the like looking for stuff to read? When was the last time you picked something up? Anything good, bad, a pleasant surprise? Do you ever bother going to bookstores anymore, or is just a waste of time and money to do anything but browse? For a good couple years in a row I kept stopping in at my library's yearly book fair and managed to grab some copies of older Michael Chrichton books (Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Sphere) along with some books on design and a few "(Year)'s Best Sci Fi/Fantasy." Haven't gone too often since 2020 though for the obvious reasons but also because I don't have as much free time to read now. Around that time I was also looking for some Sector General books because I wanted to get into the series and found an eBay listing for almost the entire collection secondhand for like 20 bucks but didn't get it. I'm still kicking myself over not grabbing that.

Preferably the Mishima kind, but anything is welcome.

Has anyone read it? if so what is it like? Ive always had somewhat of an interest in the setting so im thinking of checking it out

does anyone has this on e-book? i got it at 0.99 and the dollar for page ratio its insane. i have only read "To build a fire" tho so idk about the quality of the rest of the book but it has some typos. loved the story thought

4chan /lit/ was too soft https://mithrawebb.substack.com/p/wreck-et-mend-a-walking-aphrodisiac 8chan /lit/ should be doubly extreme

I have not read this book yet, but after reading this excerpt that defines /pol/ and political misanthropy in general, I just might. >This is an epistolary novel, written in the form of a series of letters. The letters are from Screwtape, a senior devil to Wormwood, who’s trying to tempt his human soul.

The first in the venerable Amber chronicles, and more importantly the first in the five book Corwin Cycle. We meet an Amnesiac. Bed ridden in some manner of hospital, and where this any other book it probably wouldn't go much further. But here our protagonist proves paranoia isn't necessarily wrong. Just insane. So he rips off his casts and sets a trap for the hospital staff. Soon we have moved from assault to blackmail at gunpoint. Then pockets flush, stolen .38 in hand, and no fucking idea who he is or how he got to upstate New York. Anons I love this series. Absolute favorite. It's fucking good. Highly recommend.

Screw this pretentious crap. Give me some unapologetically unintellectual hard sci fi with explosions and pussy. Like Frankowski if he had been free to write how he really felt.

Been reading this lately. I like it What are your thoughts on it? https://mises.org/library/book/how-think-about-economy-primer

I started reading this several months ago but stopped because of the slow pace of the first 30 days. Sade was clearly bored of the weak first fetishes and dropped the 2nd and 3rd months and went straight to the last month, the most extreme. This helped me finish the book in a few days. It's definitely not for normal people, I don't really like gore but I'm open to reading about it. Near the end you feel a bit desensitized because of the overused torture methods and a bit of detachment tl the characters due to the book being incomplete. For someone who read visual novels like Starless and Euphoria when young I feel at home in a sense. It was nice finally being able to meet the father of Sadism. I would rate it a 7/10 book

Feel free to share your book shelves and or stacks!

The idea of the nature of all aspects, laws, entities, and phenomena of reality (aka. absolutely everything and everyone in existence) re-writing itself to match with the majority agreement of all the minds of the universe as to what it should be (consciously or unconsciously). This premise is similar to "mage: the ascension" except that it really explores what this premise of the aggregate psychic influence of mental activity over reality itself would mean, it would not just mean changing of phenomena in the present, but in the past or future as well (like if enough minds believe the holohoax happened, then the evidence in the present would change to indicate a past where it did happen, and a time-traveler to this past would end up in an alternative universe where it had occurred as claimed, unless most minds in the present also believed most minds in this past believed that the holohaox wasn't happening, which would cause the time-traveler to show up in a past where it didn't happen, but from a present where the past was changed from the present to make the present as if it had occurred back then, because the past consensus would warp reality to make it so that the holohoax wasn't happening the moment the time-traveler arrived), it would be able to affect itself, like altering what realities people's mental power goes towards, or straight up creating or deleting people with minds that could contribute to determining what the aggregate consensus on reality is, and the strange idea of making an exception for one species, normal humans, as the sole contributors to the "vote" on what their reality is going to be like is rather arbitrary, what if all minds, including those of animals and even aliens, were to have a "vote"? last deviation is the idea of belief being the sole form of mental activity that contributes to the nature of reality, it might be the strongest kind of mental activity, but the mind has all sorts of mental phenomena going on, for example, imagination and fantasy or thought and emotion, if belief has an influence, surely these should as well? The setting is one where the existence of magic means that all minds can warp reality, any kind of mental activity exerts some level of influence upon the nature of existence. The degree of psychic ability that any mental activity has to alter the world depends on various factors, like how complex the mind is, how close the mind is to what it's affecting, the nature of the mental activity itself, the level of consciousness of the mental activity, the strength of that mental activity, and the duration the mental activity occurs over. The strongest kind of influence would be the most complex kind of mind believing with the greatest level of certainty and with the greatest force of will, at the most forefront of it's own consciousness, for the longest period of time, about some phenomena occupying the exact same space as itself, something usually describing the a priori knowledge of a mind about it's own existence. Since the mental activity of every mind exerts some degree of influence over the way things are, multiple minds can be in disagreement with one another, and even one mind can pull existence in multiple conflicting directions at once just by disagreeing with itself, reality can be pulled in multiple directions by the contradictions between the different potential realities that the actual reality is being pulled towards, in this case, the potential reality with the greatest amount of psychic power behind it is the one which becomes the actual reality. In the rare cases of ties, the nature of some phenomena may be equally disputed as being multiple possibilities that are equally backed by psychic power, and in addition to being supported by perfectly equal amounts of psychic energy, these possibilities are backed by more psychic energy than any other, in such cases, the ties are settled by going through the closest minds to the phenomena and whichever possibility being tied for gets the first bit of psychic power that breaks the tie in favor of one of the tied possibilities determines the nature of the contested phenomena, locality matters (also, most of these exceedingly rare events are resolved immediately without ever being noticed). Any aspect of reality can be affected by the influence of mental activity, including the minds of others and the mental activity produced by them, in such cases, the affected minds would influence reality in accordance with their new states, thus the consensus could theoretically affect itself. Since the consensus could create the existence of new minds, or remove existing minds from existence (such as the consensus causing the creation or erasure of people), and the presence or absence of those minds would include the presence or absence of their mental activity, those new minds that are created by the consensus would create a new contributution to it, and those existing minds which are deleted by the consensus would take their contribution with them, in both cases, this would only affect their contributions towards the consensus in the present and going forward, should there be changes made to their past existence by the consensus, their contributions to it in the altered past would only be observable to one who enters this past from the present after the consensus of the past had been retroactively altered, not just by the creation or erasure of minds that existed in the past, but also by the alteration of what way the minds that existed in the past had contributed to the consensus of their time (see below). The consensus can not only affect the present and future state of reality, but also it's past and future states, should the consensus influence the past to have been a certain way, all of reality would warp itself to be consistent with having come from that version of the past, should the consensus influence the future to be a certain way, the future would warp itself to fulfill this prediction. This makes time-travel more like stepping into another world entirely, as going back to a past that the consensus of the present had altered is not going back to the "true" past that existed pre-alteration. Furthermore, if the consensus on the present had altered the consensus of the past, that past consensus would not have any influence on the time-travelers reality before they went back in time, since their minds wouldn't be present to exert any influence on reality, but after doing so, the time-traveler is now in a world where the consensus is different, and therefore reality will warp itself to match with that new consensus, since the time-traveler's influence is going to be easily overpowered by the influence of the minds of everyone else in that version of the past, and if this consensus of the past was created by a consensus of the present, it's possibly a consensus that never created a reality before, thus the time-traveler is trapped in a brand new version of reality without precedent (whether they are aware of this or not). This is because only minds that are active in the present can contribute to determining the nature of reality at any point in time, a mind that has ceased to generate any activity or which has yet to begin doing so does not have it's contributions factored in to the state of reality at the time. A time-traveler going to the future would have the same experience, as the existing consensus of the future, which may or may not have been influenced by the consensus of the present, would overpower the time-traveler and leave them trapped in a reality that is produced by that future consensus, just as with the case of travel to the past, time-travel in this setting is potentially like stepping into an alternate reality, however, normally the time-traveler wouldn't notice since the differences between produced realities would not likely be readily noticeable. Still, history is no longer an exact science in such a setting.

Are you writing? Do you want to? Dreams of writing for anything in particular? Share, chat, and critique. Let's suffer together.

I just finished Slaughterhouse-Five, this was my introduction to Vonnegut and it couldn't have left a better impression on me if it tried. I went into this completely blind and with little to no expectations but left pleasantly surprised. I would love to know what the fact that ending was supposed to convey exactly beyond "war bad". What should I read next?