speed racer

‘Work…’ ‘What sort of work?’ ‘Thinking,’ he replied, seriously, after a brief silence.

@JoshPhillipsPhD Agreed

Tolstoy is intimating because his great books are 800-1,500 pages long But they are not difficult to read Just think of it like reading a book series all crammed into one print

I had to unfollow a certain philosopher on here because it became clear he has zero sense of literary discernment

@Haki987 @RepliKant2049 @TheRooster What’d your favorite book?

@RepliKant2049 @TheRooster Books are one dimensional, words, that’s it. Games incorporate music, visuals, and interactivity simultaneously. I like books, but there’s a reason it’s fallen massively behind movies/shows/games, and why games are the fastest growing entertainment segment

Games > Books Some games have scripts so massive, they make books look like a light read. For comparison, the entire LOTR trilogy has ~481,000 words: 2.2M — KC: Deliverance II 2.0M — Baldur's Gate 3 1.2M — Disco Elysium 1.1M — Animal Crossing 1.0M — Baldur's Gate 2 1.0M — Cyberpunk 2077 950K — Planescape: Torment 740K — Dragon Age: Origins 650K — Fallout: New Vegas 450K — The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Narrative designers write modern epics and voice actors record absolute libraries.

@wyatt_browdy Do you like the Stephen Kotkin series on Stalin, if you’re familiar?

Major in history, learn a dead language, do cool work. Nothing to cry about

@ParsifalBooks Reading that same edition of Robert Louis Stevenson short stories right now. His prose is surprisingly phenomenal.

Staff picks!

@LeProjetSerret @diogo76 It was one of my favorite reading experiences. Absolutely gripping. Makes me want to learn French lol.

@spaceracex5 @diogo76 Ha. That's the closest thing I've read to my daily experience of life.

Livros mais deprimentes que já li

@philiptraylen Lol

@spaceracex5 kafka

Nabokov’s attempts to make you “feel something” are so naked, maudlin, and inept that I feel like jumping out of a window just to clean myself. At times he displays certain stylistic gifts but these are, without exception, grotesquely sub-Joycean. 3/10. Probably the greatest American novelist of the post-war period.

@AuthorGFAllen Didn’t you ask this 5 days ago?

Do you usually read multiple books at the same time?

@its_hipolita Well Melville was gay

The whole "dead white men classics" shit from booktok people is absurd because I read Moby Dick and one of the first things Ishmael does is get into a tensely homoerotic two-men-one-bed situation with Queequeg and even goes "it's like I'm his wife... jk haha... unless?"

@Mikedomd @JoshPhillipsPhD I finished the Maude translation for War and Peace a few weeks ago and had zero problems. Granted, I had nothing to compare it to since it was my first read.

@JoshPhillipsPhD No recommendation, but a question. Does the choice of translator for Russian lit make a substantial difference in the reading of the book? I plan on starting Anna Karenina soon.

This app is great. Just connect and interact with great people :) I find such cool content and book recommendations from y’all Keep them coming 😎📚

@souljagoyteller Do you not read many novels?

I adore the Great Gatsby, probably my favorite novel, but I’m pretty sure that it’s a quintessential high school novel

Antisemite who refuses to read The Great Gatsby because he thinks the most morally dubious figure in the novel is Jewish

@EggerDC That’s not all he said?

I love Cormac McCarthy but I also feel like everybody clowning on this post just has a different axe to grind with Rufo, because "just not in the mood to get pounded by unrelenting nihilism for 350 pages" is a perfectly respectable reason to go read something else

@Vaishnavi__0 @wyatt_browdy I will say I considered that the weakest element. The hyper-positivist solution to modern materialism fell flat, in my opinion. But I’m still not sure if that was the point.

@spaceracex5 @wyatt_browdy That was my foray into Houellebecq's oeuvre, too. I didn't really enjoy it, especially the sci-fi underplot, which came off as rather cursory.

the only ethical choice in 2026 is to read literature about the decay of western society. we need bernhard, mann, houellebecq, zweig out in full force

@werther_n Lol

Let me give a slightly more substantial critique, since Mr Prudentialist has now blocked me, and I read the whole essay anyway. Here's a sample sentence: "This FYP Brain has led us fundamentally to fail the psychological marshmallow test, the desire for the instant gratification of getting clicks or making short-form points that can come back to bite you based on changing circumstances." Any editor would have taken this sentence apart, it is terrible. "This FYP Brain as led us to... fail...": the acting subject of the sentence is wrong, how has the brain led us to fail, wouldn't it be more correct to say that the FYP Brain fails the marshmallow test? Since when do our brains "lead" us to fail tests? Next, why "fundamentally" fail? What is the difference between fundamentally failing a test and just... failing it? You're incorrectly using fundamentally to emphasize, to indicate complete/utter failure. Then the use of "psychological" before "marshmallow test": how can the marshmallow test, referring to the famous psychological experiment about delayed gratification, be anything but psychological? Is there a "physical" marshmallow test? Further the whole sentence structure is wrong, three fragmentary clauses jammed into one sentence without relation to each other. What this sentence, along with the paragraph it is part of, is trying to say is this: Twitter changing to a FYP model makes it a bad place to seriously discuss politics. Political discussion on the FYP rewards reactive, rapid and dramatic political posts that reify the existing beliefs of the reader over carefully and slowly thought out political positions. As information changes, the short-sightedness of these takes will come back to bite the author. This is something I largely agree with, but not a novel insight; the internet has been criticized for its tendency to obliterate delayed gratification since its inception. We've been talking about this for twenty years. But Mr Prudentialist has a trick for making this sound like a new and interesting take: the forced reference to the marshmallow test. This is part of why the sentence reads so weirdly - he has shoehorn in the marshmallow test reference. The marshmallow test is a pop psych pseudo-intellectual reference. He could have just talked about delayed gratification itself, but he needs the reference; the reference is a little reward for the reader: "oh, the marshmallow test, I know what that is". You read the reference and like all references it short circuits your brain, you literally *stop* thinking right there, because you, the informed reader, already know what the marshmallow test is. You are relieved from thinking. That is the point. The essay makes you feel like you are thinking, like you are reading something serious, when what you are consuming is the equivalent of candy. You are being lied to, by yourself. The whole essay is littered with these buzzwords and each time you read one you get a little shot of electricity through your pleasure center, "I understood the reference, I know what that is!" rather than having to actually think about the topic at hand. Here's a few examples from the essay: "vibes-based", "psychosecurity", "memetic agents", "Reddit-tier tripe", "zioshill", "trooned-out panican", "iPad baby", "meme-space", the list goes on. None of these words mean anything, they intentionally obscure the topic, they direct you away from thinking and towards identity, towards "feeling part of the group", because you get the reference. Mr Prudentialist is speaking robot, for you page, inhuman speak, to give himself and his readers the exact same short form dopamine rewards the essay supposedly rails against. He could just speak honestly and say what he means, but he can't, he is possessed by the very thing he claims to hate. Like the video essays that he misses, this is not serious, well thought out analysis, but edutainement, intended to be skimmed over, to make you feel like you are thinking seriously, intended to make you feel good. It is, to use a popular buzzword, slop. Of course there's a link to his podcast six paragraphs in, so the whole thing is an advertisement and I've effectively wasted my time critiquing ad copy. So perhaps Mr Prudentialist wins in the end. I've wasted my time.

My latest essay, link below.

@Excel3664 My first Whitman! Probably won’t get to it for a while, but nevertheless excited. I went there with a friend of mine who majored in classics so he starts handing me all the “must-reads” and I couldn’t help myself.

@spaceracex5 Good picks. I’d like to get to some Walt Whitman at some point.

Yesterday’s haul from my local bookstore

@JoshPhillipsPhD Thanks!

FYI Fagles box set is currently on sale on Amazon for $25! The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid!