/int/ - certified time wasters

EC's lucky number seven.

I haven't written a review in a long time. So let's start with this one. Crime School by Chris Mathers.
Mathers is an undercover ex cop from Canada and while he sketches organized crime and some of its consequences quites well many are very dramatic and hyperbolic so that some people can laugh and the even the last idiot gets it that it is is a bad thing for society but more so individuals like you and me, hard working people with dreams and such, Mathers is a lover of the state that he will damn in the same breath because it is bureaucratic - a citoyen move. His hard-boiled attitude gets really annoying once you are halfway through. I imagine some Ernsts would suck up his words in delight like a some porn stars suck dicks for the camera, though.

It's from 2004 and therefore a bit dated I assume.
How well you should value his opinions becomes clear when he talks about Osama Bin Laden and his theory why Osama must be dead already. The argument is done in the same lax "down to earth" big knowing attitude that is featured prominently in the rest of the book and in retrospect casts sceptical light on his way of talking and arguing in general.

I prefer the Johnny Drug Dealer examples from another book, less hard-boiled but equally informative

>>19443
Downloaded picrel today btw.

Read "Howl" by Ginsberg recently. Cool and relatable - I recall the times when I was a non-conformist leftie teenager surrounded by huge materialist normies. Also reminds me my own experiments with its repetitiveness though I went somewhat further :)

>>19414
>like a some porn stars suck dicks for the camera
Wouldn't that be a lack of enthusiasm, as the actions are ultimately driven for ulterior motive? Never had the makings of a writer.

>>19414
I am not a person like you at all, thank you very much.

>>19446
t. expert cocksucker

>>19447
like he said you would suck it up, cuck.

Martin Stanley – How to be a Civil Servant

Read this in yet another ill-conceived attempt at satisfying my fetish for learning about and partaking in bureaucracy.
I think I actually liked it, though I’m unsure how much or what I got out of it. (But I was comforted reading it.)
It goes into some details about working with ministers, other civil servants and handling situations and so on, but a substantial portion of the book is taken up by managerial self-help advice about talking with stakeholders and empowering coworkers (which the author uses for “Delegating a task with autonomy to make decisions”).

Obviously this is an idealised picture the author is painting. It’s how things “should be”. This leads to a somewhat comical running gag where he’d describe what a civil servant should do, and then goes on to say that “Sadly, too often, civil servants…” and then he basically describes a Yes Minister scene.
Though props to the author that he only made a single Yes Minister reference throughout the entire thing, which I think is good because it’s kind of like writing a book on the Mafia without referencing the Godfather. Easier than it seems, healthier than it looks.

James A. Benn – Tea in China

Some people were hyping it in twitter. Why not I guess, why not read a book on tea?
It’s okay. It’s another one of those “200 page academic books that feel too long despite being really short”.
Full of quotes from primary sources and just like with the Tokugawa book, the author spends way too much time repeating themselves after each source. Essentially it’s too padded. It should be like like a two part study in a journal or something, not a book.

Regardless, there’s a lot of good stuff in it and a lot of work went into it so it’s not a lazy book, it’s just that the format it has is not very suitable to the content.
Worth a flip-through for the chapters that seem interesting to you. But otherwise I wasn’t really going crazy for it. It wasn’t “inspiring”. It’s “one of the books of all time”.

>>19446
Aha! You are a good student of literature, Ernesto! What you point out, albeit involuntarily, is what makes literature literature among other things - polysemy!
I was thinking of the "hyperbolically enthusiastically slurping a cock and making sounds like it's some grandiose five star food dish that is enjoyed" kind of blowjob porn.

Finished Flannery O'Connor's short story collection A Good Man Is Hard To Find. The stories are all set in early post-war American South and are pretty dark, usually dealing with the sins common people commit, the banality of evil or sth. Nice prose but pretty depressing despite some humorous parts. Best not to read it all at once.

About 2/3 through the first volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. The first part of it was mostly highly detailed recollections about the narrator's childhood. I enjoyed the prose but it was getting kinda boring so I'm glad I'm now getting to the juicy part of Swann's love story.

Also started Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow on my e-reader. Not too far in, it can be a bit challenging not to get bogged down by trying to really decipher every sentence, but very fun so far.

Lu Yu – The Classic of Tea
It’s very short, around 7000 characters in Chinese. Obviously the author didn’t intend for this to be read from start to finish, rather, he made a volume that is to be consulted. He basically tells the reader how to copy it into three silk rolls so that they can have it next to the teaset and consult it if needed.

It has some quotations from now lost works near the end which are interesting somewhat.
The studies accompanying my edition weren’t much to write home about because of the other book I read on the topic but it’s nice that they were there. Same for the illustrations of the teatools.

Baal and Anat: Epics from Ugarit
I got this a few years ago because I was frightfully into checking out the references made in Stargate. Never got around to reading it. Picked it off the shelf because it’s short and looked like a nice palette cleanser.

I think it’s more of a curiosity honestly. The stuff in it is not nearly as intact as the epic of Gilgamesh is, so often you just have entire plotlines missing. Essentially the entire thing is assembled kind of arbitrarily.

The afterword says that some scholars thought of Ugaritic epics as the “missing link” between Homer and the Bible and it’s kinda right in the sense that you have Semitic gods fighting in a verse.
Though the human element is entirely missing. Every character is a god or a demigod. The forces of the divine are fighting amongst themselves, and the only time mortals are mentioned is when Ba’al wages war on them at one point for some reason. (That part is missing so we don’t know.)

The book is kind of old now, so I gotta wonder what kind of advances have they made in the field of studying the language and also if they found more tablets or not.

I've been reading these two works of the Renaissance and I've been surprised how greatly these thinkers were still influenced by Christianity.
I had never thought much about Renaissance before and what it really meant, how it distinguished itself from Medieval times. But through reading these two books I got a better understanding and also developed a lot of respect for the universal knowledge of Renaissance men like Pico (who was 24 at the time he wrote that speech!) and Petrarch.

Been reading Transmetropolitan recently, currently at 7-th chapter of 60. Nice worldbuilding, it's interesting to look carefully at drawings of characters and background. But sometimes the plot feels like Redditor's
power fantasy and that one Dobson's comics constantly comes to mind.

I think I'll put it away for a while. It's fine but I'm curious what other comics are like

All tommorrows, by Nemo Ramjet

The book describes future history of mankind, its natural and artificial evolution, adaptions (biological and cultural) of different kinds of post-humans to different environments.
The book is short and rich with illustrations, would recommend to all sci-fi fans.

The europoors among you might have heard of Encrochat, snippets from reports became memes on TikTok.

Dark Wire is a book about the rise of encrypted phone companies and their organized crime userbase and how the FBI pulled a sting operation by setting up ANOM as one of these firms and collecting and analyzing all the messages from criminals using their phones/service. A never happend before kind of intelligence gathering.
An interesting read, mainly for the insights on how organized crime or drug trafficking in particular works, or has worked at the end of the last decade and into the 2020s.

One of these good to read (investigative) journalist books.

>>20054
Dixon’s “Man after Man” is also a very fun speculative evolution book if you liked All tomorrows.
The illustrations are reminiscent of old children’s educational books which adds to the appeal imho.

I remember reading it on my phone in the hospital in some Russian pirate website.

>>20083
Thanks, downloaded!

A New History of Shinto
This one was pretty good. It's short and to the point. Handles a variety of topics examined through the study of actual cases of worship and history.
It was very interesting to read how much of a disconnect there is between how people practice it and how the official representatives of the religion(?) envision Shinto functioning.
(As in, for most people Shinto is about going to the shrine to wish for a better new year, to have your child pass rites or to ask the kami for good luck or health, while for the official representatives it's about worshipping the emperor and fermenting ultranationalism.)

Shinto: The Kami Way
It's short. Too short. I read it after the previous one and it literally gave me no new information on the topic. It's a pamphlet if anything.

Arsene Lupin – Gentleman Burglar
Kinda feels funny to say I'm reading this for research. Anyway, it's one of those things I wanted to read since high school but I never got that final push to actually go out and get a copy or borrow it or something.
Honestly I expected it to feel dated and tiresome but actually it's kind of fun.
Lupin is smug, full of himself, a master of disguise. It's not all that clever but it's really, really fun to read.

I'm in the middle of a Celinian obsession. After finally finishin "voyage au bout de la nuit". I got into it again after reading that the insults of captain Haddock were very probably taken from the Celine's antisemitic pamphlets. In a way it's hard for me to believe Céline, his dark humor on his percieved darkness of the condition of man, his hallucinations, it feels me with joy and existential revolt. And this only with voyage, I cannot wait to read the rest of his work.

I'm currently in the middle of "Mort à Crédit". The french wikipedia article of the novel redirect to the emetophilia wikipedia article, it's funny. For the time being, his novel's avatar vomited twice on his mother and once on his father.

In the french academic literary canon, he's supposed to be one of the two greatest author of the 20th with Proust, weird century.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ITjOa-LD74

>>20168
> In the french academic literary canon, he's supposed to be one of the two greatest author of the 20th with Proust, weird century.
What place do Camus and Sartre have in this pantheon?

>>20197
I may not be a reliable source.
Camus is considered middle school or highschool French class literature. Treating the stranger is almost inevitable at that age, I did an entire 20 page essay on his protagonist when I was 16. Same for Sisyphus, high-school philosophy. I think his international recognition comes first of all because he is so easy to translate.

Sartre, I think people see him more as a public figure and a play writer than an author or a philosopher, even more than Camus. According to Beauvoir he was extremely inspired by Celine and his writing style radically changed once he read « voyage au bout de la nuit ». He’s like a may 68 figure, even if he has not really participated to anything. He’s also read in high school.

>>20198
No adult (mind) would ever concern themselves with Camus. It's just a different kind of edgy for edgy teenagers than, say, a superficial view on Nietzsche.

>>20198
> I did an entire 20 page essay on his protagonist when I was 16.
That's a lot. Did you study in some lyceum focused on humanities? I don't think that I have ever wrote essay longer than 5 pages.

BTW I decided to study French as 3-rd language few months ago. There is no practical purpose, it's just a hobby. But as a pleasant bonus there are French movies, songs, books, etc without translation. French culture is very rich, after all. That won't be soon obviously, it will probably take 2-3 years at current rate (10-15 minutes of practice per day) to reach a decent level. For now I'm reading translations.

For instance, I've read a fragment about Gavroche by Hugo. Well, it reminds me of Soviet writers. 100% socrealism. Given the timing, it's they who imitated his style.

Balzac - just a few short stories, another kind of propaganda about old regime. It's just some dirt about how priests and nobles were corrupt and lustful and courtesans bossed them around.

"The second sex" - almost a half of the book is done, will write more then it's finished, but for now it strongly reminds me of "Das capital": a huge influential Talmud with historical and other broad overview though prism of narrow ideology (dialectics/existentialism)

Also I've read "The Little Prince". Not sure if this book is actually for kids, more like for adults. But it's ideal for non-native speakers because of its simple language. I hope to reread it in original in few months. Liked it a lot.

>>20200
> you study in some lyceum focused on humanities?
No, I was focusing on mathematics and physics. Swiss public education system is complicated, every canton used to be completely responsible of its educative system up until very recently where some accords among French speaking cantons have been made to uniformise education.To summarize, at ~16yo in Gymnasiums, people are supposed to write and defend an ~20 pages essay about the topic they choose as long as a teacher in the school is ok with helping them on the topic, teachers can also propose specific topics. I chose a humanity related topic just to test something else.

> decided to study French as 3-rd language
Godspeed

>le petit prince
My mother read it to me when I was a kid. I still remember some scenes vividly. I think it’s one of the best selling books in history. It’s still very trendy in Paris…

What do you think of EC book club, somewhere in January-February? We choose a book, then by the end of every week we read some part of it and then discuss together.
What books would you like to read and discuss? Fiction or non-fiction, both are possible.

>>21302
If we manage to pick something reasonably short like under 300 pages or so I'd be down to give it a try.
I've been meaning to start Là-Bas by Huysmans so that would be a suggestion off the top of my head, should be reasonably edgy and EC tier. Though it might be a bit on the longer side (bit over 300 pages), so I'm also open for suggestions.

>>21302
Obviously Das Kapital by Friedrich Marx and Karl Engels.

>>21306
You mean A Tőke by Marx Károly and Engels Frigyes.

>>21304
> If we manage to pick something reasonably short like
I agree, something short would be good for the first time.

> I've been meaning to start Là-Bas by Huysmans
Cool, seems to be a good choice. BTW in one of Houellebecq's books main character dedicates his life to studying Huysmans.

>>21306
Oh, I'm finishing de Beauvoir's "Le capital" right now and I'm not ready to start another such book. On the other hand, I wanted to read Chomsky's "How the World Works", it seems to be easier reading.

>>21310
What is your favorite Hungarian literature?

I also had thoughts about something ancient. Like "Epic of Gilgamesh" (and sci-pop book about Sumerian mythology). Or some Greek playwrights, such as "Oedipus Rex".

>>21324
> Or some Greek playwrights, such as "Oedipus Rex".
Oh fuck right off, I had to read "Antigone" in school.
Ancients and even the 18th/19th century classics are extremely overrated. There, I said it.

>>21325
They have classic structures and so on but yeah, I could not be bothered either, it's "too far away" since it is classic structures it is not, really but probably the language

>>21325
>Oh fuck right off, I had to read "Antigone" in school.
Do you think one would be able to follow what's happening on stage in a play without having read it beforehands? I'm considering to buy a ticket since I have to kill some time on my holidays before work starts again.

>>21324
>BTW in one of Houellebecq's books main character dedicates his life to studying Huysmans.
Yeah, that's where I heard about him first. I already read and enjoyed À rebours.

>I also had thoughts about something ancient. Like "Epic of Gilgamesh" (and sci-pop book about Sumerian mythology). Or some Greek playwrights, such as "Oedipus Rex".
The two particular examples I read already and wouldn't be super interested, but sth else by the Greeks would be cool imo. Mb a comedy by Aristophanes like Lysistrata rather than a tragedy could convince the haters.

>>21325
>I had to read "Antigone" in school.
I don't remember reading anything of antiquity in school. But before 1917 it was a common thing to study ancient Greek language in gymnasiums.
How widespread is classical education in European counties these days?
https://x.com/malmesburyman/status/1482950095578537984

>>21324
I'd probably go with something by Márai. "Land.. Land!" is really good. Been meaning to read "Peace in Ithaca" for a while now.
I also like Krasznahorkai but I have not read any of his "major" books. The one with the really long title I'm too lazy to look up right now is my favourite from him. I think I have a really basic taste in Hungarian literature.
My favourite authors are just Arany–Babits–Márai. Poeta doctus authors who wrote for the well-mannered, moderately liberal middle-classes, who, aside from Arany suffered from decades of neglect both under nationalism and communism.

Péter Hajnóczy is also good, he was a massive alcoholic but nothing by him is translated I think. But "Death Rode out from Persia" is an amazing short little book.

>>21325
>>21329
Antigone is kinda mid, along with Oedipus Rex, but "The Wound of Philoctetes" is really fucking good imho.

2bh there's a lot of stuff I'd like to re-read. Crime and Punishment, No Longer Human...

Speaking of Huysmans, I could never get myself to finish A Rebours for some reason. I tried like three times, and each time I ended up failing to finish it.

>>21329
>How widespread is classical education in European counties these days?
Not very.
Afaik here Greek education peaked in the mid 1800s and then it slowly collapsed during the early 1900s when they first replaced it with reading the authors in translation and then removing it from the curriculum altogether except for select institutions where it was necessary, like priest training seminar schools.

Latin education is semi-common, but then again I have a massive selection bias due to the people I have interacted with over my life.
But the was majority of people do not study Greek or Latin. I myself only studied a year of Latin in college because it was obligatory when I joined up, Greek I took a year of out of curiosity but I have forgotten nearly all of it.

Finished this yesterday and liked it very much. The author has a vivid and clear style of explaining things, which makes this book very enjoyable to read. I also liked that he uses lots of primary sources and quotes of Ancient historians and poets like Thucydides, Herodotus and Homer.
It's probably not up to date scientifically considering its age, but it's still a good read and one gets a good grasp of Greek life and mentality around 500 BC.

>>21379
I think with books like these them being "out of date" isn't necessarily a problem.
Their purpose is not to provide you with cutting edge scholarship but to give you a baseline.

For Chinese stuff, Henri Maspero's book on Ancient China is close to a hundred years old if I remember, and he never had access to the amazing archeological finds of the 70s and 80s which gave us new texts and historical records.

But he uses the "traditional" sources masterfully, giving the reader a crash-course on hos the erudite classes of the civilisation experienced their own historical narrative, and that's invaluable.

The "latest" in a field is not going to mean much to people outside a field. It's much better to get a digestible, coherent narrative the "general population" has.
(One day someone will write a new monograph using the new facts and "update" the narrative.)

>>21447
Haven't heard of Maspero.
I heard Jacques Gernet's Le monde chinois, originally published in 1972, was a classic introduction. Another book is Chinas Weg in die Moderne (I don't know the original title) by Jonathan D. Spence. Let's compare the German translation of Gernet with that of Spence: both are thick books of similar height and width, both contain mostly text, and both look like introductions to Chinese history to me; I'm not going to check their prefaces now to confirm whether that is their intended purpose – at any rate, there seems to be much overlap in their scope. But beyond that, the differences pile up: Spence's is much thicker than Gernet's. Gernet's Suhrkamp Taschenbuch edition is printed in noticeably lower quality than Chinas Weg in die Moderne that makes the former less pleasant to read. Beyond such superficial differences, I cannot give a fair assessment of Gernet because I found what little I've read to be dull compared to Spence, which was so much more interesting to read as to make up for its more intimidating size, so I didn't bother to finish reading Gernet.
So, had my first introduction to Chinese history been just the Suhrkamp Taschenbuch translation of Gernet, I don't know if I would have found enough motivation to read enough of it to accept the "baseline" or "narrative" it offers. I found Spence to be much easier "digestible", to use your words.

One thing that may be underrepresented in such introductions are the various "things you can't say", what many people (for example, foreign observers) think but what is rarely deemed fit to print, about a given subject, for example, "Elbonians are dirty", or picrelated. People's (mis-)perceptions of and (non-)interactions with (aspects of) a culture influence each other, yet you'd need months of first-hand experience to learn about them. There are good reasons not to teach about them (so as not to perpetuate prejudice), but for those who do want to learn about them, if you're lucky, introductory texts will quote from a rant to illustrate such things; a shortcut is interaction with people who will speak frankly, and satire, firstly because satire can say things textbooks can't, and secondly because it can employ hyperbole to better get its point across. Satire can give you a good idea of what at least some people find annoying about any given subject that you would otherwise need a lot more personal interaction or experience to arrive at, at least that was my thought when I read some that seemed to sum up months of reading other texts and first-hand experience. Satire can be a shortcut for beginners, or it can invite you to check how well it holds up against your own impressions, no matter the order in which the two came to you.

>>21464
And of course, satire is not only often more succint, but usually also way more fun to read.

This book made me fall in love with Simone Weil ngl

>>21497
>Falling in love with a female author
HAH, GAYYYYYYYYYYYY

Finished Countdown to Zero Day by Zetter. It's about how the US and Israel trying to stop the Iranian nuclear program for atomic weapons with malware. Well written forensic nonfiction but at times it feels a bit bloated. Important for me the role of infrastructure in cyber war. It's 400 pages.

>>21497
I heard Weil is cool. Eilenberger wrote a few books on pre WW2 philosophers I think. Sounds interesting but my pile is too big.

>>21500
>Eilenberger wrote a few books on pre WW2 philosophers I think.
Yes, I also read Zeit der Zauberer a few years ago and it was very good as well. I think Eilenberger has a talent for weaving abstract philosophical concepts with biographical sketches in an entertaining way.

The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir
I did it. It was not worth it.

In 1949 author voiced views which by now have become default feminist opinion, as well as default normie and default establishment opinion in western countries. So it's a book of great historical interest, if you have this interest. Otherwise it's mostly boring, because after her ideas has been put into practice, they are proven to be either obviously right, either obviously wrong.

That's the main content of the book. Besides that there is an annoying narrow philosophical framework ("immanence", "transcendence", "transcendence through immanence", "immanence in transcendence"), there are quotes from lovely poems about women, and there are funny quotes by different misogynistic thinkers. I've bookmarked them, I'll collect and post this "based compilation" a bit later.

>>21547
>18+
Since when is there an age recommandation on philosophy books? Does Russia do that on a massive scale?

Diese gut

>>21691
Does it have a monkey boy and a girl and magic clouds?

>>21558
There is a law that all books should have an eld score, same as movies and games.

>>21694
Reminds me of buying American Psycho all legal when I was 15 or so.
Wondering how I managed to actually finish it, because its main stylistic device is that it's boring as fuck.

>>21693
No, this English cover I randomly chose really gives the wrong impression hehe

This is the last book I finished, it's a collection of essays and talks by classical philologist Wolfgang Schadewaldt about Ancient Greece and Homer. It's pretty good, if you are interested in the topic, he has a clear style and is passionate about the topic.

Read some more Hesse, can't get enough of him

>>21776
Where should I start if I want to get into Hesse?

>>21777
Unterm Rad or Narziß und Goldmund, I'd say. Although I've only read all his major novels and a couple of novellas, so maybe there are more suitable works that I'm missing.

>>21778
Thanks, that will do.

>>21779
Just don't start with Siddartha unless you are into far east religions. Personally I liked Roßhalde.

t. other Ernst

>>21781
Yes, I thought about that. Some of his novels show the mystic and religious influence very obviously, like Siddhartha and Demian. Personally I like those books the best, but I agree it's not the best entry if you're a casual reader.

Goodnight punpun
Don't know what to think of it. I believe I disapprove.
I'm disturbed by the yellow man's obsession with adolescent oriented media about transcendental loneliness, impossible reconciliation of the self with the other. Aruki Murakami, Evangelion, city pop music... This manga fits into that... Makes me all think a bit of Houellebecq's work, to the point where this is very unlikely to be a coincidence.
t. orientally illiterate

>>21970
>Goodnight punpun
That shit fucked me up for good when I read it as a teen. I remember it being really tragic so I wouldn't want to re-read it but it definitely left an impression, also with the way it combines different art styles. I don't really see any particular connection to Houellebecq tho tbh.
As for manga, I've finished Blame! recently, the story is kind of whatever, but the art and worldbuilding are absolute peak dystopian sci-fi. Nobody does this morose architecture and post-human creatures like Tsutomu Nihei.
Started rereading Dorohedoro only to realize I've only read the first few volumes previously. It's strengths are in the mix of a nasty punk aesthetic with some light humor, the central mystery the plot revolves around keeps getting ever more confusing though. Have some nice panels to look at!

>>21973
Good escapism value, probably. The four samples you attached don't remind me of my daily life, like, at all.

Look back, one-shot by Fujimoto
Second half was too deep for me, otherwise liked it.