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From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

> Have you ever considered writing a book about race?

>>I have thought about it, but—this is an embarrassing confession—I don’t have very many black friends. I have never been in love with a black woman. I feel like if I had, I might dare.

...

Also, I was recently apprised of this gem of a book review, which Franzen begins by saying:

> Although it's technically impressive and theoretically laudable when a male novelist succeeds in inhabiting a female persona, something about the actual practice makes me uneasy. Is the heroine doing double duty as the novelist's fantasy sex object? Is the writer trying to colonize fictional territory that rightfully belongs to women? Or does the young literato, lacking the perks of power and feeling generally smallened by the culture, perhaps believe himself to be, at some deep level, not male at all? I confess to being unappetized by all three possibilities; and so, fairly or not, I found myself wishing that Whitehead had written about a man.

which, I suppose, explains Purity.

You don't have to write well to be published. You have to write what editors think can sell and poorly written 'well plotted' mysteries sell like hotcakes. After you put out a few books that sell well, publishers get indulgent, which probably explains the poetry.

The Amazon excerpt from the book they mention in the article is as dreadful as I'd expect from someone with Dr. Seuss and Mother Goose as her touchstones.

This place is basically a chip on Reddit's and MFA-ianity's shoulder. Early Coleridge-Wordsworth are basically a chip on Neo-Classicalism's shoulder. Goethe is basically an eternal chip on German's shoulder. Kate Tempest is basically our Jungian-double. Except apparently one that can afford to go to clubs and buy drinks there.

Also, her latest publication was what sounds exactly like a hilarious rip-off of the <em>Autobiography of Red.</em>

From wikipedia:

>Literary critic George Steiner described A History of Western Philosophy as "vulgar", noting that Russell omits any mention of Martin Heidegger.

Or in other words,

"Man writes book about Heidegger, becomes upset with second man who didn't."

Obligatory link to the exiled: "Still, Wallace had the nerve to complain about “puff words” in a popular YouTube video. Seems he has issues with a few small-timers who write utilise instead of use and prior to instead of before – they’re using “more syllables” and “it’s just puffed-up.” He then tells us that: “given the Latin roots, it should really be ‘posterior to’… so if you’re saying ‘prior to’ and ‘subsequent to,’ you are, in fact, in a very high-level way, messing up grammatically.” This is wrong. (Prior means the same thing in Latin as it does in English.) Course, you can forgive a writer for not knowing a dead language, but you can’t forgive them for bluffing about “Latin roots” and “high-level” grammatical errors. You can tell from the video that Wallace’s real gripe isn’t with “puff words,” or empty syllables, or even grammar mistakes. What he hates are plebeian writing errors – the innocent kind you’d hear from Joe Six-packs who haven’t studied creative writing or gotten properly sterilized by Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. But he has no problem with “formicating,” or “Kekulean,” or “Hobbesian” (used simply to mean “savage”), or “martial” in the same sentence as “militaristic.” They may be puff words, but at least they’re not lowly, Middle American puff words."

I just looked at the wikipedia summary of the book. Chile? Seriously? Shoehorn away Miss Naomi.

>In the London Review of Books, Stephen Holmes criticizes The Shock Doctrine as naïve, and opines that it conflates "'free market orthodoxy' with predatory corporate behaviour."

Dead right.

I actually have the precise volume that the leftist is talking about. The Art of War is a great book for everyone who sees murdering subordinates to give a lesson as great, the number five as beholding numerologic significance and doesn't 'get' logistics yet.

1. Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

2. The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, by Bill Watterson

3. Candide, by Voltaire

4. The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

5. The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch

6. The World is Flat, by Thomas L. Friedman

7. The Sandman series, by Neil Gaiman

8. The Breif Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz

9. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides

10. The Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett

11. A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn

12. Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman

13. Hallucinations, by Oliver Sacks

14. Discipline and Punish, by Michel Foucault

15. Stiff, by Mary Roach

16. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

17. The Stranger, by Albert Camus

18. Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, by David Sedaris

19. Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn

20. Sex at Dawn, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá

21. Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson

22. Beloved, by Toni Morrison

23. The Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling

24. Random Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

25. The House of Mirth, by Edith Warton

26. The Book Thief by, Markus Zusak

fuck I need a drink.

> I have no idea who considers On Writing to be some kind of paragon of style instruction. . .

So I guess you've never gone to one of the book suggestion subs (Suggestmeabook, booksuggestions) and asked for guides to help improve your writing? Try it. I guarantee On Writing will be one of the first suggestions. Same for Goodreads. LiterallyAnscombe didn't call him "our lord and saviour Stephen King" on here for nothing. For a large contingent of the reading public, every piece of advice he gives is automatically gospel to be quoted in tweets and writing blogs until the heat death of the universe: "The road to hell is paved with adverbs." “Kill your darlings." "If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."

That thread is so annoying, especially the praise for On Writing as one of the greatest books about the writing process. I mean I guess if you want to exist under the impression that such books can only be nonfiction then whatever, but don't try to tell me On Writing is better than the The Letter of Lord Chandos.

Is this another one of those 4chan documents where they write a collective book?

> I'm not sure how to get anything out of what I'm reading besides whatever immediate emotional effect they have on me (hence why I'm a genre reading pleb).

I tackled Joyce the last couple months and the two things that got me through:

1 - You're not going to get everything on your first try. I had a prof who would give us reading assignments, but he told us not to worry about understanding it all; he just wanted us to upload the raw data, and then we'd sort it out during class. Some of these books can occupy you for a lifetime, but even if you're not getting your PhD in Joyce-studies, it's not unreasonable to expect having to read things a couple times. The first time through tough works, expect confusion, but once you have the big picture in your head, going back and trying to understand details will be easier.

2 - There's no shame in using secondary sources. I majored in philosophy, and I love Heidegger, but I never would've been able to make much sense of him were it not for Blackwell's Companion to Heidegger as well as a few other important texts that helped render his thought comprehensible. I'm currently reading Joseph Campbell's book on Joyce as a way of processing what I just read, and I'll be reading more secondary sources on him in the future. There's nothing wrong with turning to experts for help; it's what they're there for. It's easy to get the impression that no one else does it (because people just mention the authors they read, not the effort needed to understand them), but trust me when I say a good and thorough understanding brought about with assistance is far better than smugly feeling like you did everything yourself while actually having a lot of problematic baggage.

Just my two cents.