Books you won't read, and antirecommendations

10 posts

auteur_theory

I actually like reading things that I normally would not and/or do not like. Some are just absolutely ridiculous, and some have the benefit of actually shooting current themes in the foot by accident. For an example of the latter, Halsted Plays Himself by William E. Jones. It's a biography of the gay S&M pornographer Fred Halsted written by a shitlib that unintentionally undermines the whole "THEY'RE JUST LIKE US, BIGOT!" bullshit about gays.

auteur_theory

Another example:

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany

In between unnecessarily graphic descriptions of public gay sex, it shows the utter disregard these degenerates had for anything. Most of this book details the author's gay sex life at the absolute height of AIDS - gratuitous amounts of unprotected sex with complete strangers, pretty much every day.

Broseph
The first book of his I read was The Black Swan and it's still one of my favorites as it goes on about topics I have great interest in.

I then tried to read other works and got immediately bored. I still read what he posts on his blog and twitter.
Welund
I flipped thru Norm's book at Barnes and Noble (a store with no history books that blasts music so you can't think) and put it down as quickly.

Scifi (Asimov, Dick) is the one genre I enjoyed of the immediate postwar period as a child. The imagination for this is totally expired since we haven't created technology since then. We now just make movies simulating technological advancement.

I stopped reading Harry Potter - the first two of which were boring, got to four - when I discovered Tolkien.
Thoughts

If I refuse to read a book, it is always because of the author or the imagery, but not the substance.

I don't read books that are attempts by used car salesmen to sell hot air. They think it's *hilarious* that they can sell a book that says exactly fucking nothing by making layers of insinuations and overly-general 'advice', much like how third-rate salesmen attempt to 'reframe' the issue so that their product looks bigger in comparison to others. ("The *real* technique has *nothing* to do with what you think! Buy my book, buy my book!") That would include Scott Adams, and (sometimes) N.N. Taleb, although Antifragile was good and I always scan his bibliographies in case he ever read something I didn't (rarely ever happens).

I often intentionally read books that are earnestly stupid, for the entertainment value, say on semi-sciences (like cognitive "science"), or pseudo-sciences (astrology), or politics. The following is a prototypical example:

https://www.amazon.com/Fascism-Very-Short-Introduction-Introductions/dp/0199685363/

Link to ebook here .

See the section on "biological and cultural [sic] racism".

I draw the line at anything pornographic or which would make an image 'stick' in my head, however.

Revelations of the Past Few Minutes

I'm tempted to say any and all books. Seriously though, universal literacy was a terrible idea. Literacy should only be reserved for a priestly class.

perkunos
You should read Esther Vilar.

I actually knew Delany a little bit. That was enough. I liked his book Nova when I was a youngun, but then someone told me his real masterpiece was ... I think it was Dhalgren, but all I remember about it is the main character in it, a young kid is repeatedly sodomized.

Taleb is a mixed bag. Mostly he's gaseous. Fat tails and Mandelbrot's stuff are extremely well known in finance and statistics, and there are techniques for dealing with it. He made it sound as if he was the only one who knew this thing, which is highly disingenuous. I have read half of Antifragile. It's pretty good. Lifting weights and reading Takimag has been good for him. Even though he's half full of shit he has my full support for understanding what's wrong with modernity.
Content Creator

Anything Julius Evola is just :cunt: and even though there are a few paragraphs which are gold for the most part it isn't what people think it is maybe that is why they're disillusioned. If you want 290 pages of magic, Hyperborean, Hindu mythology and weird crypto-Spenglerian narratives then you might like it. Most people think Ride the Tiger is a self help book for racists with an explicit "step one you..." etc format. MANY SUCH CASES . It is esoteric literature for a reason and three years on /pol/ will not prepare you for it. If you can hack through the dense prose his notion of traditionalism is far more useful than people who post blonde girls and Yugoslav war footage on Twitter. It is coherent (barely) and well thought out. The devolution of society through time makes sense. An unstitching from the divine etc. But I would not recommend Evola to anyone because it is the kind of thing you'll seek out of your own accord and either get a lot or nothing at all out of. Though if someone seemed unsure I'd save them $35 and tell them to just read the wiki cause the guy died a weird wheelchair incel magician anyway

Content Creator

I personally didn't enjoy The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. The Friar William just has far too many modern liberal interpretations of things for a 13th century man which are in the narrative supposedly evidence of his "wisdom". There was also a part where he talks about the future and its some lame "one day there will be metal birds that will carry people and metal fish that go the bottom of the sea". Give me a break. Full disclosure I dropped it around 120 pages in and though I'm impressed by the research Eco must have undertaken to write it I felt the novel suffered from the author imposing his present day on the past.

Kebab Removal Service
Random Logic, could you please be so kind and give an example of a cringe-inducing idea NNT proposed?

Regarding your argument about his combination of already known ideas:
Well, that's pretty weak, could you name any book with such a range of topics which introduced only new ideas to the audience? I'm almost sure you can't.
From my own experience, most of the best books only achieve one goal, but this in a perfect way:
Rearranging & combining existing ideas with each other, which usually results in new solutions / new ideas.

I dig Perkunos opinion on Taleb.

Most of the stuff which Taleb mentioned was known to professionals, as Perkunos mentioned, BUT I think most of his critics misunderstand this:
His popular books weren't aimed at a professional audience. He wrote his technical and very well regarded book „Dynamic Hedging“ for professionals.

„Fooled by Randomness“, „The Black Swan“ & „Antifragile“ aim for a bigger, slightly-better-educated-than-your-average-joe audience, which probably didn't know most of the stuff he wrote about in his books ( I am a perfect example: I read him at the age of 21 and was blown away by the amount of knowledge I don't have) .

There he made a big splash and redpilled a lot of people, who otherwise wouldn't have heard of concepts as Black Swan Events AND probably wouldn't have been exposed to proper real-life-thinking. You won't find it in any other pop-science book & fuggedaboutit in modern school & university education.

Having read & (partly) understand his books is a great indicator for being a non-pozzed individual.

His bigger-than-life persona as well as his sometimes annoying tendency to credit himself for all the ideas mentioned in his books is an unavoidable part of the deal.
I can't imagine a humble, non-aggressive & polite person of thought, who bullycides raging faggots as Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, David Graeber, etc., the so-called-intellectuals of our time.

I take Nassim Taleb pop-science red-pilling every time over some NRx wall of text, written by a pencil necked faggot, and/or autistic screeching about German idealism on a 2 (!!!) hour podcast by some unloved neckbeard-soy-boys.