#I really do need to read more classics

[drfrankendyke]

My summer reading list, in order.

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

Can we get some book recommendations by any chance? 🎤

OF COURSE!!!!! i made a little book rec post a while back, but i …. can’t find it :’) so. i’m just gonna mention a few of those same books again <333

if i had to narrow my list down, i’d say my favorite books atm are beartown, eureka street and kafka on the shore ….. i say that very hesitantly though because 1) my memory is very bad and it’s been a while since i read them 2) i have many books on my tbr that i think will shoot up the rankings…………..

but yeah!!!! beartown is … probably my favorite book of all time and i will recommend it to the ends of the earth. it’s very heavy though!!!! content wise. and it’s long. but like, really easy to read because you just get sucked up into it. it’s about a small town that stays alive through its hockey team!!! but it’s not really about hockey . more about culture in general. family, friends, sports — etcetc!! i would absolutely look up the cws for this one though because it did give me a crisis 😭 it’s a really devastating book. but it means the world to me. backman’s writing is sooo pretty and i applaud him for carrying swedish literature on his back because god knows most of it sucks 🙏🙏

eureka street is, at its core, a love story <3 with a lot of humour sprinkled in. but it takes place right at the end of the irish troubles, with bombings and death all around, and it paints … a very vivid picture of those troubles. right in the middle of the book it switches genre for a chapter and is like……. devastatingly detailed & grim. only to switch back immediately after. it gave me chills bc the book just. does suchhh a good job of showing how desensitized you get to war and conflict after a while . but again, it really is mostly a story about love!!! and wilson’s writing is soooooo gorgeous i was fuming with anger while reading because i was so jealous 💀

kafka on the shore is another looong one and it’s also super weird, murakami is a freak, i don’t like him, unfortunately his writing is also gorgeous . i could give you tws for this one but we’d be here for a while. cat beheadings, sexual assault (almost)(in a dream), fantasy incest? (maybe?)(maybe not?)(it’s up for interpretation), etc. it’s so weird. but that’s exactly why it makes for such a wonderful coming of age story……. murakami likes to play around with the line between fantasy and reality and i think he does it sooooo so well . if you enjoy magic realism you’ll probably enjoy this book. the vibes are also very tasty in general……. the writing 😔…………… (<- is jealous)

…… also . this is a poetry collection not a novel but i need to recommend war of the foxes at any given opportunity………. richard siken you are the love of my life…. his crush collection is suuuuuper good too but i think i prefer wotf just a teeny tiny bit

[oldtvandcomics]

So, October. I really enjoyed reading Arsène Lupin for Pulptober last year, so I am going to repeat that. Also, Les Trois Mousquetaires. One of the books I am kind of feeling low-key guilty for not having yet read, so I'm going to use this opportunity to rectify that.

Also interesting because of the mediums, Lupin is on paper while the Mousquetaires is digital, so I'm going to attempt the atrocity of reading both at the same time, under different circumstances. See how that goes.

[keeps-ache]

i need to walk into a field and just sit for for a while.. maybe forever hbfsh...

[01tsubomi]

i'm taking the jlpt this sunday and had a stress dream last night abt it bc it sort of snuck up on me and now it's kind of a question of how much my actual japanese abilities will carry me (versus if i should've been cramming on flashcards this past month) but the listening portion is far simpler conversation than my coworkers and i have so. i think that maybe instead of "damn i should've been studying japanese" my perspective should just be "i speak japanese"

[13eyond13]

.

[an-absolute-trainwreck]

My classes right now are great but they do require like a lot of reading Serious High Brow books, or at least Critically Acclaimed books with Deep Meaning

And. Being real the YA fantasy books and horror manga on my tbr shelf are really calling to me…

[britneyshakespeare]

i didn't like the roaring girl by middleton and dekker as much as i was expecting to. i have the feeling it's just one of those you-have-to-watch-it plays but as someone who has read a lot of elizabethan-to-restoration era comedy this year, there are other have-to-watch-it plays that still fare as better entertainment in a reading. basically the selling point to me moll cutpurse as the main character herself, and on that front she didn't disappoint, but every other character in the play had minimal interest to me, or if they did, they only had a little bit of time on the stage. having already known that the plot is that she saves other women from dishonor and remains a single woman by choice, yes, that's still cool—the gender fluidity inspired by the real moll cutpurse is cool. i enjoyed reading about that. but the whole action and plot around it. lackluster.

[queenerdloser]

im literally begging every teen who complains about classical lit they were taught in high school to like wait a few years and go back and re-read that shit when you’re in your 20s and 30s. like. i absolutely think you can get and love the classics as a teen, but i do feel like there are so many books that just hit different as an adult. your worldview is so different, your connection to real life is more vivid, and the stuff that maybe flew over your head or seemed boring or unimportant in books actually hit. i also just think it’s really important to read classics outside of the classroom setting in general like - yeah, read it for fun! i don’t care if it takes three years to finish or if you only listen to the audiobook or you just end up not finishing it, but i feel like part of what helps make a connection to these books is discovering it yourself, with nobody holding your hand or pushing you along. (this is not anti-english class!!! english class is SO necessary and wonderful and teaches you so many good essential skills.) 

idk like the anti-intellectualism surrounding reading cults (here’s to looking at you booktok) is honestly mind-numbingly frustrating and the refusal to see any inherent worth in the classics because the last time you read them was when you were bored and frustrated in your 10th grade english class is..... stupid. read them again as an adult! read them again for fun! there’s so much shit i hated as a teen i love now and yes that also applies to books by stuffy white men! 

[unproduciblesmackdown]

speaking of your coming of age movie that never happens & your narrative non-narratives, shoutout to the arcs that’d be supposedly “worse” lmfao like posts about people-pleasers being like “i’m in my villain era” when it’s just consciously prioritizing themselves at all / noting when boundaries for their own wellbeing are being trampled, and the like. wherein i’m like, well i like talking to people i suppose, i can do the hours of monologue at a wall for one mode, got chatterbox mode, funny guy theatrical mode, etc, but in actuality also, i do not like talking to people lmao. the “yeah, that’s me” movie ending with another voiceover while upbeat music plays & you’re cheerfully walking along in 0.75x speed through some picturesque arena filled with socializing people like =) putting on headphones, turning up the volume, ignoring everyone, dodging people according to the berth one wants to maintain,

[pantoranqira]

Simonjess is LITERALLY soulmateism

[holytrickster]

idk i think it's so funny I went down a survival horror game rabbit hole when a) I'm too freaking anxious for horror games I will make myself cry, b) it was all PS2 stuff which is extra funny bc I've never even played on someone else's playstation let alone had one, i was always a wii kid lol. but now my brain is like ah yes. time to consume everything I can about games I can't even play and that are stupid expensive/hard to get now

[a-passing-storm]

mmmmmmmm

[scientia-rex]

When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”

He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)

I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.

What is your objective?

Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.

I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.

I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.

Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.

Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.

How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?

Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.

Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?

[pixel-axel]

i need every author (and reader) to know that writing “a lot” does not mean you’re writing well. i could turn this into an inspirational talk about how a high word count isn’t necessary for good writing but at this point i’m so pissed that i just. i need yall to know. that describing every little bit of everything and going on and on and on and ON is so not necessary and it will only annoy readers. i also need all teachers to know this as well; just because these old books are so long and have such descriptive language IT DOESN’T MEAN THEYRE GOOD!! i understand these books have important themes you need to teach but oh my fucking god just let us read the hate u give or stamped or another book of the sort instead of black boy, because this book is so difficult to read and i (as well as my friends) am probably one of the only students to even read the book!! someone needs to introduce this man to the return key or the concept of an editor because bro will not stop YAPPING

[letstrywritingmaybe]

I just finished reading Lolita mostly because I see the term more often than I care for in fics, so I needed to know the source of it, and it’s definitely not for me. I get the importance of it and why it’s controversial, but again this is one of those classics that I’m like eh. Like tbh the fanfic with the same title was way more enjoyable than this literary classic. But that’s because I don’t vibe with the character, and while I can understand him in a way, I don’t really care to. I don’t think the book is horrible, but it’s passable.

But now that I see where the term comes from, I can confirm what I already knew. I don’t care for the ShinAi dynamic as much as the rest of the fandom. Then again I never did like any types of “forbidden love” (though in the novel it was definitely not love, but that’s an argument idc to go into. Though I suppose if you believed it was love then maybe it was real in a way, but it’s real an illness. Which again people have compared love to)

Unrelated update: I strictly read CoAi fics yes, but I do dabble in other Shiho ships as long as the canon ship is not also tagged cause fuck that noise. Plus I need to see a jealous Shinichi over my queen. Unfortunately we don’t have enough fics of other Shiho ships. Which needs to be remedied for sure. Since I’ve been writing a tiny bit of these ships, I decided to poke around the tags and see what was out there. I’m glad I did cause I just read the cutest Shigo fic and I’m so here for it. Honestly if this was the endgame I wouldn’t be mad, I know so many people hate on it. But as a fangirl, I really love the idea that my queen is good enough to get with her celebrity crush. Also as a massive sports fan, which none of you are, you really just don’t get it. Which is insane to me cause it’s the same as being a fan of anything else! You get excited and emotional and want to be better for the thing/person you love and you can be irrational and jealous. Hello yall over here with your ship wars, be for real, you’re not better than any of us for being open with our fangirling. So yeah when I see people criticize Shigo it just makes me want to ship it more. People claim it’s ooc, but it’s really fucking not. She’s still a teenager, she’s allowed to have these kinds of emotions. Heck even if she were to be into boy bands instead I would support it. We have layers, we’re more than just one thing. Don’t just shove her into the emotionless scientist corner cause she’s a cool girl. She can be both, and she is. Let her live. Literally just let her live, it’s all I ask from canon