-Pensées, by Blaise Pascal gets poo-pooed because the stock objection to the Wager is easy to understand, but it's a good trip through the mind of someone honestly grappling with religious questions.
-Notes From the Underground should be required reading for every teenaged boy who suspects he is smarter than other people (this means you, probably, if you're here)
-Alexandria, by Paul Kingsnorth is the best post-apocalyptic story I've ever read, and I've read all the canonical ones.
-Religion and the Decline of Magic is an excellent history of ideas about magic. Academic enough to be serious, but popular enough to be readable.
A friend I knew in school declared that notes from the underground was required reading for any educated person. I’ve read it and while I appreciated it, I didn’t quite have that reaction.
Can you justify the recommendation some? I’ve been thinking of giving it a reread
Maybe it's more useful for adults who thought they were smarter than everyone else, but it offers what was, to me, an unsettling look at the sort of self-destructive martyr-in-the-name-of-authenticity complex that a lot of intelligent young men fall into. The main character delights in dropping truth-bombs on other people's willfully ignorant illusions, and revels in the hostility this provokes in the sheeple, but is blind to the fact that this is all just a means of shoring up his own identity as the only person who REALLY gets it. He has glimpses of his many defects, but in the face of these he doubles down on the identity he has created for himself, which is pretty much divorced from any action he has taken. If TLP was a novel, it'd be NFTU.
I endorse that message, something that I identified with to a skin-crawling extent, and would add: it's fascinating listening to NFTU read from my magic box I carry everywhere through my wireless earbuds, and hearing the narrator decry how the people of his age were so artificial because they were just copying what they read in books in the same way that his modern equivalents love to accuse people of being sheeple just listening to twitter/tiktok/youtube whatever.
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Notes -
-Pensées, by Blaise Pascal gets poo-pooed because the stock objection to the Wager is easy to understand, but it's a good trip through the mind of someone honestly grappling with religious questions.
-Notes From the Underground should be required reading for every teenaged boy who suspects he is smarter than other people (this means you, probably, if you're here)
-Alexandria, by Paul Kingsnorth is the best post-apocalyptic story I've ever read, and I've read all the canonical ones.
-Religion and the Decline of Magic is an excellent history of ideas about magic. Academic enough to be serious, but popular enough to be readable.
A friend I knew in school declared that notes from the underground was required reading for any educated person. I’ve read it and while I appreciated it, I didn’t quite have that reaction.
Can you justify the recommendation some? I’ve been thinking of giving it a reread
Maybe it's more useful for adults who thought they were smarter than everyone else, but it offers what was, to me, an unsettling look at the sort of self-destructive martyr-in-the-name-of-authenticity complex that a lot of intelligent young men fall into. The main character delights in dropping truth-bombs on other people's willfully ignorant illusions, and revels in the hostility this provokes in the sheeple, but is blind to the fact that this is all just a means of shoring up his own identity as the only person who REALLY gets it. He has glimpses of his many defects, but in the face of these he doubles down on the identity he has created for himself, which is pretty much divorced from any action he has taken. If TLP was a novel, it'd be NFTU.
I endorse that message, something that I identified with to a skin-crawling extent, and would add: it's fascinating listening to NFTU read from my magic box I carry everywhere through my wireless earbuds, and hearing the narrator decry how the people of his age were so artificial because they were just copying what they read in books in the same way that his modern equivalents love to accuse people of being sheeple just listening to twitter/tiktok/youtube whatever.
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