Mr.E Posted November 28, 2016 Share Posted November 28, 2016 Just started on Trainspotting sequel Porno , which has a very large picture of a blowup sex doll on the cover (one of the older releases I think), so it's been fun explaining to people at my work what this is. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Gus Mears Posted December 8, 2016 Paid Members Share Posted December 8, 2016 Finishing up a biography of Lord Randolph Churchill (Winston's Dad). What a total shit that man was. In the year of Trump, I can safely say this turd was doing a similar amount of outright lying back in the 1880's. It led to high office for him too. I'm glad he died of sodding syphilis. Â Finishing up on Neitzsche's Anti-Christ, his last great work before going insane, ironically of syphilis. His work has always been philosophy in almost poetic form and it's a dream to read him trashing religion in such beautiful language. Â Finally, starting a book on the Franco-German War which led to final German reunification. No one dies.of syphilis, but I've always found Bismarck one of the most incredible people in history, so good overview of, arguably, his greatest triumph. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SuperBacon Posted December 8, 2016 Share Posted December 8, 2016 Bloody hell Gus, that lot sounds demanding and rewarding. Â Ok, I've just finished Bill Bryson's Notes From A Small Island, and now want to read everything he's ever done, as I just think his style is very endearing. Yeah, it's not particularly taxing but there you go. We all need a bit of light relief every now and then. Â So for non fiction at the moment, I've just started Football, Bloody Hell-Biography of Alex Ferguson by Patrick Barclay which I've just worked out is the fifth book I've read on him. Â Also, in and out of World On Fire about the American Civil War, which is interesting but taxing. Â For fiction, I'm re-reading The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach which is fucking great. A real Great American Novel of the last 10 years. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Gus Mears Posted December 8, 2016 Paid Members Share Posted December 8, 2016 Yeah, I'm a politics/history/philosophy/classics dork. I totally appreciate if people think the stuff I read is dryer than sawdust, but I love it.  Another decent bet regarding the American Civil War Bacon is Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which is ostensibly about Lincoln and members of his Cabinet, but covers the Civil War very well too. Widely regarded as one of the finest historical books of the past decade and I can't recommend it highly enough., Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Chest Rockwell Posted December 8, 2016 Moderators Share Posted December 8, 2016 I don't read much non fiction, and have little interest in historical stuff but I do enjoy some philosophy and sociology/anthropology stuff. What's a good starting point with Nietzsche, Gus? I've never read any of his work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Gus Mears Posted December 8, 2016 Paid Members Share Posted December 8, 2016 (edited) I would say Twilight of the Idols, Chest. Despite it being his penultimate 'sane' work, gives the best whistle stop tour of his thinking and it's also only about 140 pages. One of the great things with Nietzsche is his brevity. He generally packs a huge amount into things via aphorism which makes him both accessible and incredibly rich, as he compresses original concepts into small chunks.  Human, All Too Human is also a good starting point because it kicks off the aphoristic style of writing, which was really his forte. Beyond Good and Evil also one to go for near the beginning as it is his most effective argument against objective morality on which his other famous idea (the will to power) is based.  Don't touch Thus Spoke Zarathustra with a barge-pole. It's rubbish, both because he goes past lurid language to plain unnecessary. Plus, after decrying a 'perfect' being in terms of morality in other work, he spends the book talking about his view of a perfect being (just having replaced the standard concept of religious perfection with his own, amoral, concept). Edited December 8, 2016 by Gus Mears Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Chest Rockwell Posted December 8, 2016 Moderators Share Posted December 8, 2016 Cool, thanks Gus! I'm sure they'll all be on libgen, so I'll get them downloaded to my kindle. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Gus Mears Posted December 8, 2016 Paid Members Share Posted December 8, 2016 (edited) No problem, hope it's reasonably enjoyable. Definitely go for Twilight of The Idols if you can, just Wikipedia'd it and apparently he wrote it as an introduction to his work anyway during the time period where he started to become famous. Never realised until just now. Edited December 8, 2016 by Gus Mears Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr.E Posted December 8, 2016 Share Posted December 8, 2016 what was Nietzsche's deal then? I'm aware he was a philosopher of some description, but don't really know that much about him.  Also have you read any of Socrates' books or anything of that era? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Gus Mears Posted December 8, 2016 Paid Members Share Posted December 8, 2016 (edited) Nietzsche believed that there is no objective right or wrong and that man has been increasingly debased from it's natural instinct by, above all else, Abrahamic religions. He feels they are negating the brilliance of our existence by making people live entirely beholden to the nonexistent promise of eternal life.  He holds a special hatred for Christianity and particularly Christian ethics,  which he considers to have been utterly destructive and based entirely on hypocrisy and fear. Only by affirming the terms of our existence and almost revelling in them, can we create value in life that isn't value based on fear. We must place ourselves beyond false good and evil and aim for as much as possible in this life, even at the expense of damaging the weak, rather than wallow in mediocrity. He feels that the death of God is coming at some point and that to avoid outright nihilism, this basis of being so, so alive is needed in place.  He basically takes the negativity of Schopenhauer (another favourite of mine). That the world is totally amoral and people desperately seek value through religion and lying to themselves as, essentially a form of cognitive dissonance (before that was really a thing). However, whereas Schopenhauer's response was to actively hide from the world, Nietzsche felt we must positively overflow with life, affirm and push and 'say yes' (as he put it) to existence in all of its inadequacies. He managed to make a quite positive, though brutal, end goal from a very, very negative basis of life.  I hope that makes some sense and apologies if I sound up my own rear. I'm also missing a bunch, but that's most of his most important thought in about three sentences.  I've read some of the classical philosophers, Socrates (via Plato) being one. It's dull and frankly, I've never liked the ancient Greeks as compared to the Enlightenment/post-Enlightenment work of Hume, Kant, Rousseau, Hegel etc. But you have to read some of it to get a basis. Aristotle is the best of the famous Greeks to actually read and I have still to see a more applicable concept of ethics than 'The Golden Mean' (his idea that most ethical issues have a right solution at somewhere in the middle). Republic is hilarious in that you get idiots banging on about how it's the basis of modern democratic thought, when actually Plato thought democracy was barely removed from tyranny in terms of being utterly useless. His perfect state is quite close to Spartan, where things are categorised and decided from on high. Sort of enlightened dictatorship. Edited December 8, 2016 by Gus Mears Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr.E Posted December 8, 2016 Share Posted December 8, 2016 Ah awesome, I'll add some of Nietzsches stuff onto my list then as that sounds very cool indeed. Cheers Gus! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Chest Rockwell Posted December 8, 2016 Moderators Share Posted December 8, 2016 Yeah, I'd not bother with the Greeks. But if your want a 'classic' though, I do think Descartes' Meditations is a good read. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Gus Mears Posted December 8, 2016 Paid Members Share Posted December 8, 2016 Actually, yeah, that's a great shout Chest. While I would never recommend totally skipping ancient Greece (just because it's referred to so much and forms so much of a base), Descartes' is a great shout for a starting point post-Enlightenment. He is in the view of many, myself included, the first 'modern' philosopher. Completely started from scratch after a millennia of Scholasticism and poor quality theories to prove god like the ontological argument and the like. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr.E Posted December 8, 2016 Share Posted December 8, 2016 (edited) very cool, I've added that onto my list as well. Â Bit off topic, sort of, but has anybody read The Art of War? it's something that has taken my fancy to read, and I'm not sure why. Edited January 5, 2017 by Mr.E Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Gus Mears Posted December 8, 2016 Paid Members Share Posted December 8, 2016 (edited) Yeah, it's fine and many of the tenets of it still hold true today. But there isn't much point unless you fancy reading international relations theory or further military theory. If you are going to do the former, read History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides as a starting point (it's a really entertaining classic as far as it goes) and if the latter, then I'd go for Clausewitz's On War . It's widely regarded as the greatest work of military theory (outside of Sun Tzu) that there is.  If you want to go for a book from the same period that's better (in my view), read Confucius, who is responsible for one of my favourite ever maxims.  "Learning without thought is labour lost, but though without learning  is perilous"  Never truer than today. Edited December 8, 2016 by Gus Mears Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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