The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Cool post, thanks for writing it. Should I read Shogun? It's been recommended to me a thousand times for obvious reasons, but I'm a jerk about historical accuracy and I'm worried it's going to be full of anachronistic nonsense or magical oriental Mr. Miyagi characters. Maybe I'm approaching the book too seriously and should suspend disbelief?
FWIW, I'm reading King Warrior Magician Lover by Moore & Gillette, and it gets recommended fairly often in some manosphere corners. I'm only about halfway through and I'm not sure I'm totally sold on (what appears to me to be) all the Jungian psychobabble, but it's kind of interesting and different, and I could see how the framework might be useful for men. That might be one to check out.
Tim Ferriss gets recommended a lot. I read the Four Hour Work Week back in college, but it didn't leave a huge impression on me. All I remember is that he became a "kickboxing world champion" in some weight class by somehow exploiting a loophole in the rules and... that proved some point about hustling, or something. But a lot of people seem to like his stuff.
Yes. I re-read sections of it along with a friend while re-watching the show. It holds up better than I remember, I might re-read it in full. There are parts that might not hold up perfectly, and you can do nit-picky historical accuracy stuff (technically Geishas didn't exist at that exact time, stuff like that), but if you view it primarily from the perspective of Blackthorne (largely as a stand-in for Clavell himself, who was a prisoner of the Japanese in Singapore during WWII) I think it holds up really well. It's very GRRM when it comes to throneroom politics, very Ian Fleming when it comes to swashbuckling omni-competent British hero everyone wants to fuck.
Reading it again in parts, I realized how much the book is a metaphor for the aftermath of WWII. It starts with the Japanese doing unforgivable things to Blackthorne and his men, and asks how can he forgive them? This mirrors the journey of Japan in the second half of the twentieth century: how can Clavell forgive the Japanese for what they did to him, how can the Japanese forgive the Americans for the bombings? Clavell suggests it is possible for people so totally opposed to find human connection, understanding, and love; even if the book is far from utopian in its vision.
Okay, that sounds pretty cool. I like the idea of taking as the narrative of a British man rather than that of an omniscient narrator. I'll pull it off my shelf and give it a read.
More options
Context Copy link
My problem with the praise of the (remade) miniseries is how the ostensible protagonist of Shogun (Blackthorne) is relegated to an ineffectual buffoon, without any real redeeming qualities apart from the fact that Toranaga and Mariko seemingly take to him. I enjoyed the book immensely both times I read it. I am somewhat surprised by your praise of Ta Nehini Coates, who I think is a muddled-thinking fraud.. That said, I haven't read this book you're recommending.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Read his Jardine Matheson books instead, they have much less weebery.
Do they get better after TaiPan? I read it a while back and just felt like it went nowhere, where Shogun was perfectly well contained as a story.
What I disliked about Shogun was the whole fake protagonist thing, like in Unsong. Both HK novels suffer a lot from "things resolve themselves", but at least the hero of the story is the hero of the story.
Did you have the impression Blackthorne wasn't the hero of Shogun? (I mean the book.) He definitely was in the Chamberlain series, definitely wasn't in the new series, but I remember in the book, despite the omniscient perspective getting into every character's head, Blackthorne did seem to be the main character we are meant to empathize with.
By the end of the book it's clear that Toranaga is the real protagonist. As soon as he appears in the story he immediately steals at least half the limelight, and ultimately Clavell spells it out that Blackthorne's story is the story of a tame bird of prey: he's not locked in a cage but he doesn't realize he's wearing a hood and sees only what his master wants him to see and his agency is an illusion.
That's Toranaga's inner voice, yes? Historically, Will Adams was eventually given leave to return to Japan, though he stayed. I'd suggest part of this is Clavell's unlimited omniscient writing style, combined with the passage of time in the novel. A similar trope was used in the original miniseries where you had Orson Welles reading out Toshiro Mifune's Toranaga thoughts at the end.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link