/lounge/ Book Club

Social media, Netflix, TV, movies... that's for human garbage.

Read books to improve your life. Not garbage grocery store romance novels or best-selling pleb shit, but important books. No scifi or fantasy escapist trash either. Read books that make you think.

What kind of books have you read lately? What kinds of books do you like?

Here are some books I like:
1984
Brave New World
Fahrenheit 451
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Society of the Spectacle
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Can Life Prevail?
Propaganda
Walden
Th Ego and Its Own
Authority and the Individual
The Machine Stops
Technological Slavery
Crime and Punishment
The Collapse of Western Civilization

Books I plan on reading:
Animal Farm
The Will to Power
The Degenerate Society: Postmodernism And How You Can Oppose It
The Panopticon Writings
Beyond Good and Evil
The Decline of the West
Why Nations Fail
Revolt Against the Modern World
Democracy: The God That Failed
Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist

I read a lot of programming books too, though you'll notice that I didn't list any here. Even though it's the industry I'm in, I can't help but feel like tech is soulless bugman shit that is accelerating the rise of degeneracy in the west.

Ideologically-driven books are the most captivating. They're the kinds of books that make you want to read them cover to cover.

But enough about my taste in books. So what do you like? And what would you recommend reading?

>>1
A lot of these books are simply bad, and the list itself is nonsensical, unless you've done significant prior reading on these topics which you haven't mentioned. You can't expect to understand The Society of the Spectacle (or anything from Zizek), a post-Marxist work, without having read Marx. And as Lenin famously claims, you can't understand Capital without having read Hegel's Science of Logic, and you probably haven't understood Hegel unless you've read Kant, Spinoza and Aristotle.

You've decided to reject respected figures in the history of sociology and media (Adorno and Marcuse for one) in favour of right-wing rubbish. You claim to "like" Stirner but the books you plan on reading show you can't have liked him all that much. You didn't even read Marx's critique of Stirner. You've named only the most selective Nietzche. You've made no mention of Freud, or J.S. Mill (or critiques of him). The only work on that list that's even vaguely critical of liberalism is Stirner's.

To top it all off: you're reading a book about "how to destroy postmodernism" but I can't see a single primary source by a "postmodern" thinker on your list. Maybe because to understand postmodernism you'd need to understand modernism, but that's too much effort? I don't know.

If I were to give you one piece of advice (take it or leave it), read Marx (the Manifesto doesn't count; all three volumes of Capital is a must-read), and dismiss any pre-conceived notions you may have had about him and his work. After that, you'll have some basis to open a much bigger variety of critical literature. Verso Books has "Radical Thinkers" series. Read critiques of Marx and responses to the critiques. Don't only focus on Marx and ideology, but focus on his political economy too, and read up about the LTV and TRPF. My apologies if you've already read him, but there's never too much Marx and post-Marx to read. Avoid work that isn't critical ("unfortunately" this immediately kicks out most right-wing and libertarian codswallop).

>>131
Sorry, but this is bullshit. Anyone with a cursory understanding of the philosophy of science knows that Popper's criterion of falsifiability is rejected (if you bothered to check SEP you'd know this my dude), at least in the form he proposed it. Open Society has been beaten to death a hundred times over, not least by the Frankfurt School. You have no evidence for your third point.