(Part 2) Best political fiction books according to redditors
We found 657 Reddit comments discussing the best political fiction books. We ranked the 255 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
It was a difficult and interesting time. First of all, when people complain about food shortages it is because they are too young to remember the 80s, rationing coupons and Gorbachev's ban of alcohol (near total ban, prohibition, they tore up historic wineyards etc).
Suddenly the shelves were full of stuff, but it was often weird stuff. For instance, in Yekaterinsburg (Soviet Sverdlovsk) where I was growing up, we had endemic shortages of eggs and meat. Well, chicken eggs and beef/pork/chicken meat, so the stores sold quail (?) eggs and whale meat. We got chicken from America and concluded it tasted like chicken. These were nicknamed "Bush legs" because Bush arranged the trade deal or whatever. We also got a banana and cut it up into a bunch of slices and shared them among us as an exotic delicacy. In a few years bananas were as common as they are in the West. Lest you imagine us as vitamin starved: we grew apples and strawberries and tons of other stuff at the dacha, picked mushrooms and got imported persimmons, apricots, oranges and pomegranates from southern Soviet republics. Bananas were new though. As were Snickers, Twix etc. bars: not as good as Russian candy, but neat.
Kiosks appeared everywhere. These were a proud take on free enterprise: rickety shacks with small access windows (robbers had a proud take on free enterprise too). These kiosks sold candy bars, magazines, porn all the stuff you'd expect in the West, but for Russians (especially Russian children like me) this was exciting, exciting stuff.
I still remember the evening walk with my dad and the dog to the kiosk at the big bus station. We would buy me gum with a fold-in wrapper with a picture on it (I collected these: usually pictures of motorcycles and cars, sometimes scary, out-of-context stills from the Godfather or porn), and some fireworks and set them off in the empty lots between apartment buildings on the way back. The lady that worked the kiosk always disapproved, telling us that people normally buy fireworks for holidays. This is pretty indicative of the old-guard mentality in the post Soviet era: the notion of working for profit didn't quite sink in, and for all I know she was working for some local mafioso.
Which bring us to the proper name for the era: Bespredel or "no limits". Crime exploded. The mafiosi that sank to the top and became respectable classy Oligarchs were at this era riding around town in their Mercedes Benz, purple Armani suits, and so much jewelery that the term "raspal'tsovka" (now means "showing off in an unreasonable way") appeared to describe the peculiar contortion of the fingers the gangsters experienced from wearing so many heavy rings. In an odd way, Russian gangsters actually lived out the image of wealth depicted in 90s Hip hop: perhaps it has something to do with fantasies born from dire poverty. Yeketerinsburg has a gangster cemetary, complete with statues of the dead depicted in suits and holding the keys to their (heavenly?) Mercedes.
I say "heavenly" only because it was just around this time that the Russian Orthodox church started selling indulgences by letting gangsters donate to/construct churches and thus legitimizing and laundering their wealth for them(for the uneducated, an indulgence is a fee set to absolve a sin: murder a person=10,000$ or a new gold vestment/scepter for the Patriarch to be sin-free. For all I know, the fuckers introduced bulk rates, looking at the Patriarch vsya Rusi's fat mug and 30,000$ watch (and vow of poverty, mind you), I wouldn't be surprised).
In any case, the crime exploded, and not in the casual efforts to beat up my father and grandfather for being Jewish put forth by our more degraded drunk neighbors (who sometimes lived in the staircase and sometimes died there too). These were part and parcel of Soviet life.
Crime exploded in a macro way, such as that the Local crime syndicate, started a D.A.R.E.-type program in town to push out the Roma syndicate, which then ran all the drugs, and then shut down the program as soon as they came to an agreement. Then the Moscow gangs moved in leading to a shoot-out between the local police and the Swat team (which owed allegiance to Moscow) this was on the news~ I looked for the link but my searches bring nothing: too many shootouts, too many involving cops or spetnaz in my dear town, if anyone remembers better I'd appreciate the link. Everyone knew all this because all the papers talked about it.
Media: the tale of the Russian media after the Perestroika is exemplified by the magazine SpeedInfo. Now rather minor, SpeedInfo was hugely popular, almost as hugely as the pyramid scheme MMM. SpidInfo or "Aidsinfo", as it was originally called, was supposed to be a journal for Russians starved for relevant information about safe sex (for reference the main Soviet manual for young couple, which sadly is not at hand but which I've read from cover to cover a few years ago had, on the cover, a woman's hand handing an apple to a man (this is in an atheist country), had a chapter on "frigidity", a chapter on homosexual men (lesbians don't exist), and was generally a piece of work)). Very quickly Aidsinfo became a kind of penthouse forum, publishing increasingly unlikely sexual anecdotes and erotic drawings, but never actually porn. Later it was renamed Speedinfo, to push off the highly unsexy issue of AIDS off. As far as I can tell, this is a telling example of what happened to much of the energy and enthusiasm of Perestroika media: that and part of it went online, where Russians have their own power foci (e.g. we bought out Livejournal and took over it).
My personal recollection of the time is fixated on the movie Jurassic Park. I was at the age obsessed with dinosaurs and this movie was the embodiment of pure desire. It was rumored about. The local theater advertised showing it, and when I excitedly went with my grandmother it was actually "Godzilla vs Mothra" or whatever, which is a fine movie, but I was damn sure at whatever age this was, that dinosaurs did not get that big or breathe fire, so the young paleontologist in me felt let down and thought Jurrasic park would be more accurate. I was also let down when the local news paper published a comic book version of Jurassic Park. There the artists also clearly hadn't seen the movie, so the premise was that the dinosaurs broke out due to endemic power shortages and the mafia. In hindsight, it might have been political commentary.
Literature: stays fucking awesome. Sorokin & Pelevin are must reads you will never read anything more fucked up and brilliant at once (this is more about Sorokin, as true of his work today as it was in the 80s when he was starting out: start with Day of the Opritchnik and work backwards), Pelevin is hit or miss, but the early years after the Perestroika are his best work, and when he hits, it is like a clever revelation from good bong hit. The movie version of Generation P is pretty good, and that is maybe his best novel and most accessible to a Western audience, it has a good translation under the title Homo Zapiens (Chapaev and Emptiness, his other great is all inside jokes for Russians). Take that as you will. For a sweet detective novel series you can't go wrong with Boris Akunin's Fandorin epic (available in Andrew Bromfield's awful translation!)
Religion: in the absence of the pseudo-religion that Communism was for the remaining idealists everyone goes nuts on the New Age and the Orthodox Church, stays nuts, invents current fascistic theocratic bullshit with a Dictator-King and stays with it until this very day.
Government: Desperate idealism followed by... see: Religion
You're joking, but the book actually does exist, and no, I don't know how it ends.
> It's 1980 and the Cold War continues to rage. Seemingly out of nowhere, wealthy businessman Logan Powell has become President-elect and is only weeks away from assuming the most powerful position in the world on the twentieth day of January. Across the Atlantic, veteran British intelligence agent James MacKay uncovers shocking evidence that suggests something might be terribly wrong with the election. With the help of a reluctant CIA, MacKay sets out on a dangerous and daring mission to discover if the unthinkable has occurred: is President-elect Powell actually a puppet of the Soviet Union?
That book was written in 1980. The author died in 2005.
> Well, we could write a novel already.
Someone already did. Back in the 80's
Great post OP! I haven't seen the video in question (sorry) but as an anarchist I do feel confident in giving some of my views. First off, there are no right answers to these questions. Even within the same school of anarco-socialism, you'll likely get different answers to these questions from different people (ask 10 anarcho-socialists and you'll get 11 different answers) and in my view, that's a strength, not a weakness. However because I haven't seen the video, I don't know how much of what I'm about to say is addressed by it. I'm sorry!
I personally don't believe that lazy workers are as much a problem as you believe they will be and I base this on my personal experience. I have visited anarco-communes and also "temporary utopias" like climate camps and anti-globalization convergences. And, no, they were by no means perfect. In anarchist households dishes often don't get done to the extent that it's kind of a running joke. But there are lots of reasons for that. Houses aren't designed with communal living in mind. Under capitalism most of us suffer from depression and anxiety and it's hard to be motivated with that kind of thing when you're worried about your next deadline at your unfulfilling job or paying the bills by the end of the month. A more collectivist society could do things like ensuring no one ever has to do menial jobs alone (even by the simple provision of bigger sinks and bigger kitchens--ever notice how classically houses in western society were designed for use by a single-occupancy gendered labour force; my kitchen is barely twice the size of my wardrobe, but the living room, where the man of the house was expected to spend his off-labour time, is huge). And ultimately I would expect that anarchist societies would not only have a good working understanding of the sexism of gendered labour (most menial jobs are traditionally performed by women) but also be more lenient around all labour. Like maybe you can skip the washing up for that day if it's your period or if you're nursing, both of which are labour neglected by capitalism, just to choose a stereotypical and thought-provoking example. Going back to my own experiences, there were plenty of problems with places like the convergences and anarchist camps, but they never actually suffered from not having clean toilets because people understood that cleaning them was as important an activity as any other type of labour which needed to be undertaken. Ultimately, I agree with the point raised by the WNDWU (youtube link--above): "So you're asking me, who will do the dishes when the revolution comes? Well I do my own dishes now and I'll do my own dishes then. Funny that it's always the ones who don't, who ask that fucking question."
There are a lot of different thoughts about how economics can work in anarchist societies at large-scale. Most likely there would be several different economic models, possibly even within the municipal area, but certainly within different ones. In the future, Kim Stanley Robinson describes a system where small consumptive goods are created in situ, then optionally exchanged as gifts with traders. Underlying this, potassium is used as an exchange of hard currency and reserve, regulating the flow of resources throughout for the production of goods the solar system. Meanwhile, Ursula Le Guin envisaged a society organised by collectives (syndicals) where work was undertaken out of a sense of duty. Less speculatively, David Graeber has done a lot of good work documenting the use of gift economies throughout human history and it's hard to believe there's nothing there, given the overwelming preponderance and importance of gift economies to advanced human societies so far.
But I myself am not an advocate of gift economies. Michael Albert and co. have done a lot of writing on how non-gift participatory or democratic economies could be run and I highly recommend checking out his work. Albert's work is pretty much the closest to what I would like to see myself, I think and he also talks a lot about the psychological benefits of job rotation, e.g. a system where doctors also clean toilets. There is also a form of anarchism known as mutualism in which productive work is carried out by coops instead of companies or conglomerates owned by shareholders or an owner or owners. A coop can be structured along purely democratic grounds, where every decision requires a consensus meeting from relevant workers, through the whole gamut to a system with middle managers and bosses basically being like a company except that the workers form and control the board instead of vice versa. After producing goods, they are exchanged through a free-market mechanism as under capitalism. I myself am not a mutualist but really even mutualism would be a huge step forward compared to what we have under the current system, where productive labour is essentially organized by unaccountable and undemocratic corporate oligarchies.
The invention thing is quite interesting, I think. Just as in an anarchist society you might get several economic systems, so today we actually have several economic models under capitalism as well. One which I am quite familiar with as a software engineer is the open-source model of software development. Last year I invented a new and pioneering method for installing Wordpress websites using a fairly obscure collection of deployment software. The mechanism I invented is so niche that even I struggle to develop the enthusiasm to explain its benefits even to people within the same field but I was excited enough to develop it that I spent three months of my free-time doing that, and now that it is done I am still pleased with the effort even though no one uses it. So basically I invented something and released it for free which was the very definition of a project for which I receive no thanks: no economic compensation, no fame within my professional circles, etc. And yet I was still happy to create and distribute it for free, even allowing others to modify it if they found it useful. So I think that when you are very invested in a particular problem field it's actually very easy to develop the enthusiasm to figure out an invention for a better way of doing something, even if you know you'll receive nothing for it but the personal satisfaction of having simplified a particular problem. And of course in an anarchist society you could expect that most techniques and methods are open-source, and able to be modified and improved upon for free by any interested party. Receiving fame among one's professional peer group, being invited to prestigious conferences within your field to talk about your invention, maybe even being interviewed by the news media--these are all extremely good motivations for creating something, arguably a lot stronger than money actually. (Considering most invention these days is IP-protected and ultimately owned by corporations, I'm kind of surprised the myth of the solo inventor made rich by his own success succeeds actually.) And this happens a lot in software. The most common operating system software globally across all devices? By far, Linux. Windows only leads in the desktop, and that only because of entrenched capitalist user lock-in paradigms.
I'm a language professor, my wife's focus is on bilingualism and we are raising two bilingual children (now 6 and 8) who are high functioning in both languages (90+ percentile in native verbal assessments in English and above average in Japanese). We are also surrounded by dual language families who are taking a variety of approaches.
The simple answer is that out of around 20 families all with fathers (the reality in Japan is that the English speaking parent is almost always the father) who are highly engaged with parenting, the families whose children have become bilingual are those whose mothers (native Japanese speakers) also speak to them in English. So, generally, One Parent One Language does not work here. The exception is with kids who are also going to English language schools.
Here's what we did. Our home language is English. That includes 90% media, which we intentionally included in their day (one hour). Since both of us work, we put them in Japanese daycare at two years old. Also, we have a network of friends with kids the same age who speak only Japanese and we got together occasionally. This was their early exposure to Japanese.
As they got closer to kindergarten age (Japanese kindergarten starts at year 3 and ends at year 5), we increased my wife's use of Japanese to about 20%. They entered kindergarten with weak Japanese and came out at age 5 pretty much the same as monolingual Japanese kids. Also, a policy that we adopted is that after coming home from kindergarten, the conversation about what they did that day was entirely in Japanese. Through kindergarten we kept the target of 20% Japanese with my wife, and increased and decreased that depending according to the individual kid's needs.
Once entering Japanese elementary school, our first kid was fully bilingual in both languages, so we kept up the 20% Japanese at home, but the second child appeared a bit weaker in expressing herself in English, so we dropped the 20% (aside from talking about school immediately after school) and speak only English with her at home. So how much Japanese my wife uses is our tool to tweak things if we think it's needed.
We read to our kids every day and make books available to them all the time. We do not watch broadcast television at all, so the only video that they have experienced is nearly all English. We do allow them one Japanese TV show they can watch regularly, so they share some culture with the kids at school, but after Pretty Cure and Yokai Watch, they pretty much lost interest in Japanese shows. They have decades worth of great shows in English that are more attractive than the popular show of the season in Japanese. It may be a Japanese thing, but Manga is the thing that they all read and talk about at school, so at home video is all in English.
We also taught them to read in English from a young age and they continue using Raz-Kids.com, reading about one book from there a day, which will take them to grade 5. They also usually spend at least an additional hour or more a day reading books we have around the house in either English or Japanese. We have a pretty extensive children's book and video collection.
I don't recommend Krashen. It is rather outdated and has not been shown to translate into the real world. Individual elements of his model are good, but production and interaction is far more important than he claims. If you are looking for a theoretical model I'd recommend looking at Vygotsky's Social Development Theory. Here is a simple introduction. It is not about bilingualism, but the ideas of scaffolding and and the zone of proximal development have guided most all of my interactions while teaching my kids.
A book my wife recommends to her friends is Raising a Bilingual Child, Barbara Zurer Pearson. It is written for non-linguists.
Taft really is an underrated President. He broke up more trusts than TR and was probably the more progressive President. TR stabbed the poor guy in the back when he ran against him in 1912, which Taft never recovered from.
There's a short and funny read called Taft 2012 I recommend for anyone interested.
I actually read about this some time back in two GREAT and well-researched novels called Power of the Dog and The Cartel. Actually I learned more about the drug war in those 2 novels than I've learned anywhere else.
I studied this in college as it was related to my major. From what I know, bilingual children tend to be more creative, have more mental flexibility, develop metalinguistic awareness, and have bigger vocabularies.
Speaking to your child 100% in your respective second langauges is pretty much the best way for them to learn those second langauges.
Note that it's not super common for a child to have equal command of all their languages. Your children might prefer French over German or vice versa.
I'm not sure how advanced you and your husband are in your L2s, but one thing to watch out for is transferring your language mistakes to your children. They would learn to correct those mistakes eventually, but it's something to be aware of. There's also a lot of nuance they might not understand if you don't understand them--taking them to those countries for any period of time so they're fully immersed in the langauge, while they're young, will do them a world of good.
In terms of speaking, children tend to learn the langauge they experience in school as they grow up. There's a certain age when friends become more important than parents, and children usually don't want to seem too different from their peers. As they grow, you would want to encourage your kids to speak your respective languages with you, or else your children will understand French and German but won't really be able to speak it.
As far as reading goes, it might be beneficial to stick with one langauge at first. When your child is a fluent reader in one langauge, they will (subconsciously) transfer reading skills to the other langauge. It's easier for them to read in a second langauge if they're a fluent reader in their first. At any rate, read to them often and encourage them to be good readers. This helps develop language skills anyway. Invest in books that are written in multiple languages if you can!
Study up on some linguistics if you haven't already as well as language development for children. It will really help you understand what langauge is, how it works, and how children acquire langauge.
Reading:
Raising a Bilingual Child by Barbara Pearson
Bilingual By Choice: Raising Kids in Two (or More!) Languages by Virginie Raguenaud
A Parent's and Teacher's Guide to Bilingualism by Colin Baker
7 Steps to Raising a Bilingual Child by Naomi Steiner
You know what? I'm sure everyone's going to share any of the actual books on awakening or enlightenment or whatever (although I don't see The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts listed yet, and that was instrumental for getting the ball rolling for me before I even knew there was a ball to roll - I still pick it up every now and again and read passages).
But anyway, in my early 20's, I was REALLY into Tom Robbins, and I realize now that those books connected me with a truth I didn't yet know how to find. He's a freakin' genius. His words still, to this day, make me giddy.
So if you're ever interested in wild, hilarious, raucous fiction that gropes the awakened viewpoint like a drunk in a whorehouse, I recommend these books:
Skinny Legs and All
Jitterbug Perfume
Still Life With Woodpecker
He has more, and they're all equally is good in many ways - those three just happen to be my favorite.
Part 2
------------------------
According to wikipedia, this was a quote from a character in her book, not her own words.
>French's 1977 novel, The Women's Room, follows the lives of Mira and her friends in 1950s and 1960s America, including Val, a militant radical feminist. The novel portrays the details of the lives of women at this time and also the feminist movement of this era in the United States. At one point in the book the character Val says "all men are rapists".[3] This quote has often been incorrectly attributed to Marilyn French herself. French's first book was a thesis on James Joyce.
I don't know the passage itself, but the book is available on amazon.
-----------------------
“Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.” — Germaine Greer.
This quote is from her book, "The Female Eunuch". Here's a longer version of the quote:
> Security can be a killer, and corrode your mind and soul. But I wish I had it.
>Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release. The problem of recidivism ought to have shown young men like John Greenaway just what sort of a notion security is, but there is no indication that he would understand it. Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life. Human beings are better equipped to cope with disaster and hardship than they are with unvarying security, but as long as security is the highest value in a community they can have little opportunity to decide this for themselves. It is agreed that Englishmen coped magnificently with a war, and were more cheerful, enterprising and friendly under the daily threat of bombardment than they are now under benevolent peacetime, when we are so far from worrying about how many people starve in Africa that we can tolerate British policy in Nigeria. John Greenaway did not realize that his bastions of security would provide new opportunities for threat. The Elizabethans called the phenomenon mutability, and mourned the passing of all that was fair and durable with a kind of melancholy elation, seeing in the Heraclitean dance of the elements 271
>a divine purpose and a progress to a Platonic immutability in an unearthly region of ideas.2 Greenaway cannot have access to this kind of philosophic detachment; neither can he adopt the fatalism of the peasant who is always mocked by the unreliability of the seasons. He believes that there is such a thing as security: that an employer might pay him less but guarantee him secure tenure, that he might be allowed to live and die in the same house if he pays for it, that he can bind himself to a wife and family as assurance against abandonment and loneliness.
Here is the full book available to read online and that link goes to this specific quote's page.
---------------------------
"95 percent of women's experiences are about being a victim." - Jodie fosters.
This quote is from a NY Times article and here's some more context:
>Consequently, she can't work a lot. She says: "I have to replenish myself. It's not that I go to the guru and chant. It's this muscling up. Physically and mentally."
>Perhaps part of the reason Foster tries to make only one movie a year is that she's only interested in "heavy dramas." " I love life-threatening situation movies," she says. "They're not about, 'Will I lose my virginity?' And in terms of women in history, 95 percent of women's experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive. So, if I played Wonder Woman all the time I would be betraying where I come from. Women didn't go to Vietnam and blow things up. They're not Rambo. That's why 'Silence' is such a big departure, because it stands for all the same things, but you have a real female heroine. It's not about steroids and brawn, it's about using your mind and using your insufficiencies to combat the villain."
I think it's also important to remember that Jodie Foster had a stalker who tried to kill a president to get her attention.
---------------------
"All men are good for is fucking, and running over with a truck". Statement made by A University of Maine Feminist Administrator
Okay, so this was quoted by a man named Richard Dinsmore, who had a lawsuit against the University of Maine. I found an article that mentioned his lawsuit to be reinstated to his job here and this is what it said
>An example of an accused harasser who won back his job is Richard Dinsmore, a professor of European history at the University of Maine at Fort Kent. Many accused harassers take to the courts to try to avenge themselves, but he is one of a handful who have succeeded.
>In early 1992, one of the women students in Dinsmore's History of Ideas class complained to school administrators that he had sexually harassed her by touching her shoulder during a viewing of a film, by helping her put on her coat and by acting overly friendly while taking her out for coffee.
>An investigation was conducted by Myrna Cassel, the campus's vice president for academic affairs and student services. In addition to supporting the student's claims, she also said Dinsmore was "guilty of using inappropriate academic content" by requiring students to read a book by psychologist John Bradshaw called "Homecoming," which Cassel said could be "dangerous to students who might not be sufficiently mature." She recommended that Dinsmore, who had been suspended, should be terminated.
>He was fired from his tenured position in May 1992.
>Dinsmore sued, charging that his rights to free speech and due process had been violated and that he had been defamed. He won nearly $1 million in damages and attorneys fees in a jury verdict last year. His case was later resolved in a mediated settlement for $500,000 and he was reinstated to his previous job. He returned to work at the college campus this fall.
>Dinsmore said in an interview that the charges were "preposterous," and that he had become a victim of "man-hating feminists." He said he did not blame the young woman who had made the complaint because he believed she was a pawn in an ongoing dispute he had with administrators.
>Dinsmore's attorney David G. Webbert said Dinsmore had become a controversial figure on the campus by espousing unpopular views on gender issues. "In a university setting, sexual harassment is a weapon people can use to get people fired," Webbert said.
>Vendean Vafiades, counsel for the University of Maine System, confirmed that the university had settled the case and reinstated Dinsmore. But she said the university's views about Dinsmore's conduct had not changed, despite the jury's verdict.
>"Professor Dinsmore's conduct caused us great concern," Vafiades said. "We feel we have an institutional obligation to protect our students."
>Group dynamics appear to play an important role in these cases, experts said, as people join in denouncing those they mistrust. Particularly vulnerable are African-American men, especially if the alleged victim is white, or highly-paid older white men in a era of salary cutbacks, experts said.
>In a relatively small number of cases, alleged victims have invented harassment stories, experts said. These rare instances of false accusations stem from psychological problems, a desire to earn money in a lawsuit, or an attempt to protect their jobs if they are performing badly and fear they may be fired, according to attorneys who specialize in handling sexual harassment cases.
>One case cited by sexual harassment prevention trainer Monica Ballard involves a woman teacher was coming to work late and leaving early; she was confronted about it by the male principal, who told her he had been tracking her schedule of missed work. The next day, the woman falsely charged he had sexually harassed her, and the school district fired him immediately to avoid negative publicity.
So, uh, he's not exactly a trustworthy source, and if he's the only source of this quote then...I think that speaks for itself.
--------------------
And that's what my internet sleuthing has found!
I am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes.
Tolstoy's great-grandniece has a good post apocalyptic book called The Slynx.
Day of the Oprichnik and The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin are both good. The Queue is written in all dialogue though, which can be off-putting to some.
Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin is pretty damn funny.
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is considered a precursor to 1984 and is worth a read.
Yuri Olesha's Envy is another funny one. Short, too.
Petersburg by Andrei Bely is generally considered the Russian Ulysses.
The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov is a biting look at Stalin's collectivization.
The Golovlyov Family by Shchedrin is about a family so awful they wouldn't be out of place in a Faulkner book.
Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is my favorite of his story collections. Pretty trippy stuff.
Ahh, there's where we disagree then.
Have you read The Dispossessed? Amazing fiction book about an anarchist society.
I was sympathetic with anarchism for a long time, but my sympathies were broken when I read about the starvation in Somalia. There was no national government to organise buying food from other countries or redistribution and rationing as other countries do.
Absolute freedom means freedom to starve, and sometimes it's good to have a 'paternal' state. It's now my opinion that a social democratic state government is superior to anarchism. Of course, that form of government has a whole load of failings as well, but starvation due to a lack of coordination tends not to be one of them.
I'm a big fan of Tom Robbins' earlier books – Skinny Legs and All and Jitterbug Perfume are my favourites.
If you want to cry your eyes out (or maybe that's just me – it was at a weird time and I ended up sobbing on a park bench in San Francisco), there's Not Wanted on the Voyage by Timothy Findley.
Edited to add Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible and Pigs in Heaven.
If you have a few minutes, I'd encourage you to have a look at the opening of I am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes. You can read it in Amazon's "Look Inside" preview. This is an international spy thriller, so it's not in our field, but it's one of the best genre fiction books I've read recently. I think this novel should be studied for its excellent pacing; even the slow parts are interesting.
Hayes utilizes a gruesome murder in the opening of his story. However, he actually opens on his main character. In fact, we become introduced to his main character through his behavior and thoughts while the murder scene is being revealed. By the end of the opening, we've got a pretty good idea what sort of person the main character is; at least, we know them well enough that we've begun to empathize with them. We are hooked, engaged emotionally, and want to keep reading.
My very long winded point in all this is that I think you want to view your opening from this perspective: You've got maybe 200 words in which to hook your reader, somehow, anyhow. If you can't manage this, you risk your potential reader putting your book back on the shelf. So you don't have too much time to waste on secondary considerations such as beautiful scenery. You need to hook your reader, and one of the best ways to do this is to get them to empathize with your main character, to create an emotional bond. You want to somehow figure out a way to make an emotional connection with your reader in the first 200 words.
If you can do this with a terrorist attack or a pack of rabid wolverines, go for it.
If you can write any sort of good beginning, you need to do it. What I mean by good is, you would hand it to someone to read, and they would say, "Wow, this is good." If you can manage to write anything that does that...you win. We aren't for the most part geniuses of litritchaw, we're genre fiction writers. If you can write a whole book and find a publisher that says, "Wow, this is good," I don't think we can really quibble over how many imaginary buckets of blood you had to splash around to do it.
This one too! I read some of it, and hooooly shit. It starts with an Episcopalian pastor shitting herself as she's burned at the stake by the "good guys", for being a pagan.
Also the subject of this book:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mirage-Novel-Matt-Ruff/dp/0061976229
I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes is a thriller that involves hunting down someone who commits a perfect murder. Is that what you are looking for?
The hand-wave explanation is that with enough people and resources in the future, people (even non-human persons) are likely to do just about anything that's possible. We may not be able to understand their motivations from our current perspective.
A more concrete suggestion - why do we have archaeologists and historians today?
An alternative suggestion - the simulation could be closer to a universe simulator (so they could see into the past of cosmology or see how universes played out with different constants) and any consciousness that arises may be completely accidental.
I don't want to spoil anything for you... and my interpretation of the book isn't the mainstream, but you may find The Peripheral by William Gibson interesting.
I think the question is not how many languages you can speak to the child, but how many languages child will be able to speak when it's say 18 years old.
All depends on the goal. I suspect you actually want your child to speak few languages decently and not just be exposed to many languages to flex mind and that's it.
Also, I assume active command of language, not just passive one (reading, listening). Research says child needs to spent min 10% of its time to be exposed to a language to obtain passive knowledge. Min 20% for active command of a language. Research source is in the book mentioned below.
I'm glad you mentioned OPOL, as from what I noticed not many people talk about it here - I also might be wrong as I'm new to this subreddit tbh 😜. Coming to the pointb, I fell you try to apply OPOL only to you, whereas what's important is family context ie how many languages you speak, your partner and child's grandparents. What's more, it's crucial to know your native language and country where you live atm. Perhaps ML@H (minority language at home) might be a better option for you. There is not enough data to judge at this point. However, what you can do is to read below book. It contains pretty much an outcome of 20+ years of research of a PhD lady, who focused exclusively on children language acquisition.
I read it 2 times before my first child was born. I did family capability analysis and have chosen languages most useful in my geocultural context, which was separate challenge. Then I planned a hybrid strategy to teach chosen languages. It's not trivial, but with a bit of inclination everything is feasible. Also it's not too difficult once your go through that process.
Book I was referring to:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1400023343/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_1400023343
I came across Blood Oath by Christopher Farnsworth a few years back. If you like action packed, violent, kick-butt vampire books, I highly recommend it. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the book. While it wont be winning literary awards necessarily, it is a fun read.
Also, I'm a guy -- and I say that because to some degree it matters. My wife, who also likes vampire stories, would never read this...she would much prefer something like Twilight (romance, etc), which this is not!
If it sounds like something you'd enjoy, give it a try. I've recommended it to several people, and have had nothing but good feedback.
EDIT: I should have read the post with your example of what you are looking...not just the title (on mobile, sorry) -- but I will leave this here anyhow, in case it is of use to you or anyone else. ;)
William Gibson's newer stuff, namely Zero History, Pattern Recognition, and Spook Country. I think Gibson tends to stumble on little-known and very under-appreciated trivia when he's writing, and he'll pack his stories absolutely full of little references and clues that almost compel you to go learn things.
https://www.amazon.ca/Uprising-Novel-Douglas-L-Bland/dp/1926577000
I'm not gonna claim it's good, but it exists.
I am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes
The Gray Man by Mark Greaney
Yup
https://www.amazon.com/Too-Like-Lightning-Terra-Ignota-ebook/dp/B015MP6WPY
whole series or just this one?
Or:
http://www.amazon.com/Zero-History-William-Gibson/dp/0399156828/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278821363&sr=1-2
The Power of the Do and The Cartel by Don Winslow
There is actually a hilarious book about Taft. Basically, he somehow gets to the future and kicks everyone's ass in gear and finally gets to be a Supreme Court Justice. It's pretty funny: It's called Taft 2012
You really need to read The Dispossessed.
There's a novel called The Unincorporated Man which has a part that sounds remarkably like what you're describing.
Have you seen Meet John Doe by Frank Capra?
It is available free at the Internet Archive.
also Interface by Neal Stephenson and Fredrick George under the name Stephen Bury.
http://www.amazon.com/Interface-Stephen-Bury/dp/0553572407
I recently finished I am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes. It was an enticing read and once I got to the back half I didn't want to put the book down.
The Women's Room by Marylin French
The Chomsky Reader by Noam Chomsky
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir
The Classical Style by Charles Rosen
Floating Worlds by Cecelia Holland
The Troika Incident by James Cooke Brown
> and woke up in an alternate universe.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mirage-Novel-Matt-Ruff/dp/0061976229/
> If you knew me, you would know that I lived in many more countries and varied conditions than you did
Let me just state the same: If you knew me, you would know that I lived in many more countries and varied conditions than you did
> Anyway, there are much worse places than where you live, even in France.
One thing I know for sure is that you've never been to Russia. Otherwise you wouldn't be spouting such nonsense.
> whether you stay in Russia or decide to move to place you deem better. May be you are right, may be it does exist.
Oh, I'm not moving anywhere, I'm gonna stay here and try to change things. One good thing about Russia is that intersectionality and political correctness (in it's Western, "your-breathing-is-offensive-misogynic-and-oppressing" sense) are completely alien concepts here. And unlike their Western counterparts who glorify Marx and Lenin, the majority of our hipsters adore Ayn Rand and libertarianism.
> Here's some first class reading for you. It provides excellent background on the west.
I will read it. And since we're doing book suggestions here are mine:
https://www.amazon.com/Winter-Coming-Vladimir-Enemies-Stopped/dp/1610397193/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
https://www.amazon.com/Man-Without-Face-Unlikely-Vladimir/dp/1594486514/ref=la_B001H6MBXK_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1525652656&sr=1-2
https://www.amazon.com/Day-Oprichnik-Novel-Vladimir-Sorokin/dp/0374533105/ref=la_B001JOLA4G_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1525652758&sr=1-1
The first two are political/historical nonfiction books, written by people who had first-hand experience with Putin's regime.
The third one is a novel, but many of the things and ideas depicted there has come/are coming to life in Russia right now, unfortunately. Orwell's 1984 and Burgess' 1985 (read it too, by the way, great book) are good descriptions of what's going on in the West and where it is headed with its leftist ideology. And this Vladimir Sorokin's book does the same for Russia.
So do me a favor and read these three books (and do check out "1985", I'll say it again - great book). And I'll read your book as soon as I finish "Journey to the End of the Night".
No, I said Rense was an anti-Semite. If I was talking about Duke I would have said racist.
Your contention is this was a controlled demolition but you are unable to articulate a motive and can only link to a 5 hour documentary. I assume it's based on Griffin's book of the same name? If so I can hardly expect a balanced account.
I didn't blow off free fall speeds as a minor point either. I was referring there to your comment earlier that the fact the buildings were in regular use was a minor point and you also dismissed the potential effect of the uncontrolled fires on the demolition as bullshit.
We're not talking about planting a bomb (in which case I'd be more likely to agree with you) we're talking about a controlled demolition which is an entirely different proposition.
I'm not asking you to explain exactly how it was done, I pointed out a few factors (several times now) which are incompatible with your claims of a controlled demolition.
-WTC 7 (and WTC1 and 2 for that matter) were in normal use, they couldn't have been stripped and rigged for a controlled demolition.
-They were on fire before they fell.
-There are no audible or visible explosions associated with controlled demolitions
If you're so sure about your position it should be really easy for you to provide explanations as to why these are not incompatible with controlled demolition but instead you sent me a link to a story on a website. If that's your level of debate then check this out:
http://www.amazon.com/Debt-Honor-Jack-Ryan-Clancy/dp/0425147584/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1410891307&sr=1-1&keywords=tom+clancy+debt+of+honor
Short version: foreign terrorist launches suicide attack on Washington using commercial jet. Checkmate?
I would be genuinely interested if someone could articulate a motive and provide some explanations to the points I've raised. I guess we're not going to get that though are we?
I've never read it, but I've heard high praise for The Mirage.
Basically, America is a third-world chaotic shithole populated by Christian extremists, and the Middle East is a sophisticated first-world Islamic civilization. An Arab Homeland Security agent finds a copy of a never-before-seen newspaper called The New York Times from September 12, 2001. Unraveling antics ensue.
I hate to promote the work of a douchebag, but a guy I know wrote a book called "Blood Oath".
"The President's Vampire," is apparently a sequel.
"Blood Oath" is sitting on my nightstand, still unread because the writer is a douche.
So Far My list is as follows:
3DimensionalGirl wrote:
Part 2
According to wikipedia, this was a quote from a character in her book, not her own words.
> French's 1977 novel, The Women's Room, follows the lives of Mira and her friends in 1950s and 1960s America, including Val, a militant radical feminist. The novel portrays the details of the lives of women at this time and also the feminist movement of this era in the United States. At one point in the book the character Val says "all men are rapists".[3] This quote has often been incorrectly attributed to Marilyn French herself. French's first book was a thesis on James Joyce.
I don't know the passage itself, but the book is available on amazon.
“Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.” — Germaine Greer.
This quote is from her book, "The Female Eunuch". Here's a longer version of the quote:
> Security can be a killer, and corrode your mind and soul. But I wish I had it.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release. The problem of recidivism ought to have shown young men like John Greenaway just what sort of a notion security is, but there is no indication that he would understand it. Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life. Human beings are better equipped to cope with disaster and hardship than they are with unvarying security, but as long as security is the highest value in a community they can have little opportunity to decide this for themselves. It is agreed that Englishmen coped magnificently with a war, and were more cheerful, enterprising and friendly under the daily threat of bombardment than they are now under benevolent peacetime, when we are so far from worrying about how many people starve in Africa that we can tolerate British policy in Nigeria. John Greenaway did not realize that his bastions of security would provide new opportunities for threat. The Elizabethans called the phenomenon mutability, and mourned the passing of all that was fair and durable with a kind of melancholy elation, seeing in the Heraclitean dance of the elements 271
a divine purpose and a progress to a Platonic immutability in an unearthly region of ideas.2 Greenaway cannot have access to this kind of philosophic detachment; neither can he adopt the fatalism of the peasant who is always mocked by the unreliability of the seasons. He believes that there is such a thing as security: that an employer might pay him less but guarantee him secure tenure, that he might be allowed to live and die in the same house if he pays for it, that he can bind himself to a wife and family as assurance against abandonment and loneliness.
Here is the full book available to read online and that link goes to this specific quote's page.
"95 percent of women's experiences are about being a victim." - Jodie fosters.
This quote is from a NY Times article and here's some more context:
> Consequently, she can't work a lot. She says: "I have to replenish myself. It's not that I go to the guru and chant. It's this muscling up. Physically and mentally."
Perhaps part of the reason Foster tries to make only one movie a year is that she's only interested in "heavy dramas." " I love life-threatening situation movies," she says. "They're not about, 'Will I lose my virginity?' And in terms of women in history, 95 percent of women's experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive. So, if I played Wonder Woman all the time I would be betraying where I come from. Women didn't go to Vietnam and blow things up. They're not Rambo. That's why 'Silence' is such a big departure, because it stands for all the same things, but you have a real female heroine. It's not about steroids and brawn, it's about using your mind and using your insufficiencies to combat the villain."
I think it's also important to remember that Jodie Foster had a stalker who tried to kill a president to get her attention.
"All men are good for is fucking, and running over with a truck". Statement made by A University of Maine Feminist Administrator
Okay, so this was quoted by a man named Richard Dinsmore, who had a lawsuit against the University of Maine. I found an article that mentioned his lawsuit to be reinstated to his job here and this is what it said
> An example of an accused harasser who won back his job is Richard Dinsmore, a professor of European history at the University of Maine at Fort Kent. Many accused harassers take to the courts to try to avenge themselves, but he is one of a handful who have succeeded.
In early 1992, one of the women students in Dinsmore's History of Ideas class complained to school administrators that he had sexually harassed her by touching her shoulder during a viewing of a film, by helping her put on her coat and by acting overly friendly while taking her out for coffee.
An investigation was conducted by Myrna Cassel, the campus's vice president for academic affairs and student services. In addition to supporting the student's claims, she also said Dinsmore was "guilty of using inappropriate academic content" by requiring students to read a book by psychologist John Bradshaw called "Homecoming," which Cassel said could be "dangerous to students who might not be sufficiently mature." She recommended that Dinsmore, who had been suspended, should be terminated.
He was fired from his tenured position in May 1992.
Dinsmore sued, charging that his rights to free speech and due process had been violated and that he had been defamed. He won nearly $1 million in damages and attorneys fees in a jury verdict last year. His case was later resolved in a mediated settlement for $500,000 and he was reinstated to his previous job. He returned to work at the college campus this fall.
Dinsmore said in an interview that the charges were "preposterous," and that he had become a victim of "man-hating feminists." He said he did not blame the young woman who had made the complaint because he believed she was a pawn in an ongoing dispute he had with administrators.
Dinsmore's attorney David G. Webbert said Dinsmore had become a controversial figure on the campus by espousing unpopular views on gender issues. "In a university setting, sexual harassment is a weapon people can use to get people fired," Webbert said.
Vendean Vafiades, counsel for the University of Maine System, confirmed that the university had settled the case and reinstated Dinsmore. But she said the university's views about Dinsmore's conduct had not changed, despite the jury's verdict.
"Professor Dinsmore's conduct caused us great concern," Vafiades said. "We feel we have an institutional obligation to protect our students."
Group dynamics appear to play an important role in these cases, experts said, as people join in denouncing those they mistrust. Particularly vulnerable are African-American men, especially if the alleged victim is white, or highly-paid older white men in a era of salary cutbacks, experts said.
In a relatively small number of cases, alleged victims have invented harassment stories, experts said. These rare instances of false accusations stem from psychological problems, a desire to earn money in a lawsuit, or an attempt to protect their jobs if they are performing badly and fear they may be fired, according to attorneys who specialize in handling sexual harassment cases.
One case cited by sexual harassment prevention trainer Monica Ballard involves a woman teacher was coming to work late and leaving early; she was confronted about it by the male principal, who told her he had been tracking her schedule of missed work. The next day, the woman falsely charged he had sexually harassed her, and the school district fired him immediately to avoid negative publicity.
So, uh, he's not exactly a trustworthy source, and if he's the only source of this quote then...I think that speaks for itself.
And that's what my internet sleuthing has found!
Presumably, there's a second crewmember in the cockpit. If you decide to kill everyone, you'll have to start with them. Like the end of Debt of Honor.
Rather than going with the obvious fatal jugular clipping technique, it might be more effective to club them to death with your iPad.
Are you familiar with The Unincorporated Man?
Victoria was better written, and less heavyhandedly didactic. (I'd put it at medium handed compared to the Art of Manliness link)
Yep, Spook Country and Zero History. He's also on Twitter. Enjoy!
Interestingly, I just read a (fantastic) sci-fi book with smellavision.
3 dollars for each found
1989: Fall of the Soviet Empire
ISBN-13: 978-0307387929 https://www.amazon.com/Revolution-1989-Fall-Soviet-Empire/dp/0307387925/
~~The Twentieth Day of January
ISBN-13: 978-0486819221 https://www.amazon.com/Twentieth-Day-January-Ted-Allbeury/dp/0486819221/~~
The Global Cold War ISBN-13:978-0521703147The Cuban Missile in American Memory by Sheldon Stern, ISBN-13:978-0804783774Tass is authorized to announce by Julian Semenov, ISBN-13: 978-0714541204
I'll figure it out. Oh! Here it is. The unincorporated Man
http://www.amazon.com/Unincorporated-Man-Sci-Essential-Books/dp/0765318997
http://www.amazon.com/Interface-Stephen-Bury/dp/0553572407
Exactly, Rove is a ruthless and fucking brilliant political strategist. It's like he is out of a novel.
These books look cool! Thanks for sharing.
>I actually read about this some time back in two GREAT and well-researched novels called Power of the Dog and The Cartel.
>Actually I learned more about the drug war in those 2 novels than I've learned anywhere else.
You're pretty close
I actually read this, was decent.
https://www.amazon.com/Taft-2012-Novel-Jason-Heller/dp/1594745501
Educate yourself.
I know this post is 2 days old, which puts it in some sort of reddit graveyard, but I'll add my thoughts.
First, Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan is the definitive "modern" cyberpunk novel so check that out for sure.
Also, for more of a "5 minutes into the future" cyberpunk, check out the Nexus trilogy by Ramez Naam. The third book in the trilogy won the Philip K. Dick Award if that means anything to you.
Another series I liked, which has a great dark humor to it, is the Avery Cates series by Jeff Somers. Seriously, just read the 'About the Author' section at the bottom of that page to get an idea of the humor.
Have you read William Gibson's The Peripheral? It's a neat update on Gibson's cyberpunk vision now that the world has changed.
Someone else recommended Cory Doctorow. I actually think Little Brother is his best work, though it's young adult so prepare yourself for that.
Finally, I feel weird recommending this, but if you were a child of the 80s, have you read Ready Player One? It's pretty polarizing in this sub since you either love it or you hate it, but it is a popular modern cyberpunk novel.
Try the President's vampire
Book 1 - blood oath
You might also want to try the laural K hamilton books, its a mix of human/vampire/supernatural + lots, and lots of sex.
My favorite light reading book is Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins. My name is Kat (for real) and I would like it because it makes me think and laugh all at the same time.
Oh, you sweet sweet summer child, you've yet to see true batshit.
(You can find the first 2/3rds to 3/4s-ish of it online for free)
http://www.amazon.ca/Uprising-Novel-Douglas-L-Bland/dp/1926577000
I hope you see the irony in all this.....