This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that reading the sequences makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.
Rules:
Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. If you've engaged with some common themes on LessWrong, this book will be incredibly rewarding. It does take a short while to get going.
WARNING: the below is arational.
The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell
I don't know how to talk of this book. Let's start with a new angle, popular on LW now: the author is your traditional virtuous bleeding-heart liberal, and for his unacknowledged humanist quasi-theocracy he has written THE account of woe, perdition and apocalypse - it has been called the Nazi Life and Fate, yet I'd say it resembles the Book of Job as told by Satan.
Yes, it's a gratuitous and grotesque fictional account of the Holocaust, but it's also a work of literary research, trying to puzzle out the implications of this convoulted nightmare - like Dostoevsky foresaw much of the things to come in his works. And if it doesn't give you nightmares of your own, you haven't been reading it right. I'm long done with it (a couple of years or so), yet occasionally it still haunts me.
The question is, what, exactly does the industrialization of murder say of us as a species? Viktor Frankl famously abjured the notion of "collective guilt" after his liberation. Yet, with all the mounting evidence, might we all indeed have contacted the taint in some way? Or were we damned to begin with? Do you care to find out?
3David_Gerard
The complete works of J. G. Ballard, looks like. I proposed a daily JGB quotes Twitter on the jgb list (a remarkably high-quality list, mostly because David Pringle is present) and it rapidly became apparent that collecting even a year's worth would be work. Read all of The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash over the weekend, extracting about 400 one-liners from them. The trouble is that Ballard wrote in precise and elaborate sentences, and there were so many perfect fragments that came in at 160-170 characters. Most annoying. But AE and Crash are basically made of one-liners. Now I just need to read the rest so it isn't all cars, sex and Kennedys. And by the way, AE and Crash are fucked-up shit as well as literary genius.
This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that reading the sequences makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.
Rules: