The Books/Reading Thread

The Eye of the World is definitely a good book; I just don't think the series maintains that quality.

I've heard mixed things about The Martian, which is too bad because it sound interesting. Never a huge Stephen King fan, but those Dark Tower books sound pretty cool.

In other news, I just read Ulysses. I feel like I've been beaten over the head with... well, with this fucking 750 page book.
 
I finished reading the Ace Atkins novel The Ranger tonight. The first book in his Quinn Colson series. It was a pretty solid read overall.
 
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In other news, I just read Ulysses. I feel like I've been beaten over the head with... well, with this fucking 750 page book.

750 page mind fuck is more like it. I gave it a whirl last year and couldn't make it through it. Maybe next winter, if I work my way through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man before hand.
 
I found the section in that second book on feminism pretty hilarious.

The women’s movement was taken over by radical leftists and became an adjunct of the Democratic party. I prefer to call the most obnoxious feminists what they really are: feminazis. Tom Hazlett, a good friend who is an esteemed and highly regarded professor of economics at the University of California at Davis, coined the term to describe any female who is intolerant of any point of view that challenges militant feminism. I often use it to describe women who are obsessed with perpetuating a modern-day holocaust: abortion. There are 1.5 million abortions a year, and some feminists almost seem to celebrate that figure. There are not many of them, but they deserve to be called feminazis. A feminazi is a woman to whom the most important thing in life is seeing to it that as many abortions as possible are performed. Their unspoken reasoning is quite simple. Abortion is the single greatest avenue for militant women to exercise their quest for power and advance their belief that men aren’t necessary. They don’t need men in order to be happy. They certainly don’t want males to be able to exercise any control over them. Abortion is the ultimate symbol of women’s emancipation from the power and influence of men. With men being precluded from the ultimate decision-making process regarding the future of life in the womb, they are reduced to their proper, inferior role. Nothing matters but me, says the feminazi. My concerns prevail over all else. The fetus doesn’t matter, it’s an un viable tissue mass.
Feminazis have adopted abortion as a kind of sacrament for their politics of alienation and bitterness.
 
I started reading that a while back. I find it hard not to think it's part of some chaps and leather building site boys rough and tumble gay fantasy. Anyway, I'll have to read further before passing proper judgment. I think the idea that a man's worth be best estimated by his social circle of other men is a bit random. We live in a world based in technology, so the tool makers are the real genuine most important people, people who try and go against this are pseudo macho posers.
 
It was much shorter than I expected, and the first half could probably have been condensed even further. The main point was about meaning in life and the lack of it in bubblewrapped, feminized, technoglobacratic modernity (or maybe more accurately, post-modernity), and how or why this is a much bigger problem for men than women, and subsequently the author's vague offering of a solution. Nothing new there, but not a bad read either.