/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?

Disillusionment with modernity.

I agree, we live in flawed world. We can read books about escapist fantasies and how bad the world will become in the future, but it won't fix anything.

Suppose you can apply some of the books to your life, but other people would still be a source of external pressure(unless you're trying to be a NEET hermit) that would not understand your philosophy and will force you to adapt to them.

You'll need your own arguments to convince others beside relying on a book. Being book-smart dogmatic believer won't win you friends or change society.

You're overestimating the impact of books as people don't rely on this medium in modern time: today the format which spreads ideology better isn't a book.
The society you live in doesn't revolve about books anymore.

To spread ideas people need a modern "decentralized narrative": memes, short articles, infographics, forum posts, websites. The age of books as dominant cultural relics is over: the digital infosphere has outcompeted the medium itself with shorter, more efficient distribution aligned with the reader needs.

A monolithic relic that puts a single-perspective "central narrative" will be judged as biased and one-sided. The opponents and critics don't have a voice in the book: the book is reflection of author and publisher's filters. Interactive mediums(such as this thread) have infinitely more potential to refine and dissect an idea than a static book.

Why don't you bring forth an idea that interested you most in a recent reading and start a thread about it?