Quads of culture.
I've mostly been reading critical books lately, but I can't admit which ones on Kissu otherwise I would be killed.
The last novel I read was The Handmaid's Tale. I had some issues with it but overall it had a fantastic atmosphere and was completely worth reading.

>>7778
Isn't that the women breeder fantasy thing with rich men breeding women or some shit?
And somehow it's championed as a feminist novel?

>>7777
Those quads...
Wasted on a r**n...

>>7779
Well you see Anonymous, one of the amazing things about fiction is that you can depict things without necessarily endorsing them. In fact you can depict them for the purpose of "critiquing" them.
The breeding was my issue with it though. I was more interested in the social stuff and the setting than all of the sex.

>>7780
You mean elevated on a roon.

>>7777
>>7782
cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuute roon!!!

ever since I finished my English degree (ESL) I have zero desire to read anything slightly demanding
all I read these days are 40k pulp and other sci-fi/fantasy trash

>>7786
So what sci/fantasy trash ghetto have you been reading then nonny?

>>7787
Mostly Warhammer crime stuff after I got caught up with Horus Heresy.
Also The Forever War but that is dangerously close to being literature

>>7788
I regret to inform you that The Forever War is in fact literature.

I recently finished Anna Karenina and thought it was excellent. I'm reading American Pastoral now and also liking it a lot though I'm not too far yet.

>>7777
ocean by david attenborough

what do you think im reading some fiction crap? silly anon, that's what games, manga and anime are for!

Spy the Lie pseudohandbook from the CIA that covers most of their methods.
I'll expose all of your lies, Kissu. All of them...

I wish I could read.
I keep starting weird philosophy and psychology and sociology books (look mom, no background!) before getting distracted by the next shiny thing.

I just finished something called "War in Heaven". It's a book some guy claimed he channeled. It's about powerful disembodied spirits that used to me men LARPing as Gods in an attempt to avoid reincarnating and avoiding losing their memories of past lives. They require constant sacrifices of fresh souls to consume to avoid fading away or something.

>>7822
A lot of theorist types frankly do a terrible job of writing in a way that is at all accessible to a beginner. I'm sure a philosophy/psychology/sociology otaku could recommend you some good starting points that would make the rest more approachable. I would, but sadly none of those are really my area of interest.

>>7881
Philosophy/psychology/sociology otaku here. You don't just "get into any field" - it's even simpler than that. You have to read, skim, look around exactly until you find something that feels "relatable" in principles in such a way that you feel curious over it. You're not obligated to be PhD-tier in classics or modern mainstream basics to appreciate and ponder on what really clicks for you. This goes for an any field at all.
I guarantee that even Freud's old obsessive pessimism - if you prefer to read it even without subscribing to any of the notions - may generate more food for thought than DBT or Hegel even if you "get them" equally at 100%. It doesn't matter if something is known to supposedly be "more right" if you just couldn't care less and thus have no holistic mental engagement with it. People who only always grind through the "most right" with the recursive investment of belief that it is "most right" just end up being pedantic, closed-off, almost bitter, and, if argumentative, then only for negative sophistry and stress relief - not who you, yourself, would want to interact with.

>>7883
This is true! I mostly just meant that a lot of modern works tend to build upon concepts that were established in earlier works without really explaining them since the assumption is that since they're such fundamental concepts, anyone reading will already be familiar. If you aren't familiar with the concepts in that case then I think it can be hard to get anything out of the reading.
This is my experience at least. I spend a lot of time digging back through citation chains because I feel like I often can't fully understand something unless I also understand what it's responding to.

>>7881
>>7822

I recommend you "Psychoanalitic Diagnosis 2nd edition" by nancy mcwilliams which, although is aimed at therapists, does a great job at explaining all the main personality disorders and defense mechanisms in a way that is understandable even to a layman. Even after reading about 100 sociology, psychology and related books I was impressed by how clear and to the point, yet undoubtedly valuable the insights in this book are.
After that you can look at recommended readings in that book and go from there. Obviously some disorders will interest you more then others.

Does anyone here read webnovels? Like the chinese translated webnovels?

>>7971
If Chinese webnovels are anything like Japanese light novels, you only really need to know about 10K words to read 90% of it. Learn Mandarin?

>>7973
Okay that's cool have you read any

Right now I am also reading a bunch of GURPS sourcebooks for my solo tabletop rpg game I'm going to do ;w;

reminder that it's prime day so big sales on books

I ended up buying The Legend of the Ten Elemental Masters and its coming on Sunday

Book finally came

>>8233
This isn't a novel by the way it's a fucking video game script.

>>7880
I finished reading this about a week ago. It wasn't that great but was amusing enough to hold my interest. Could be used as the basis of a script for a good movie or novel. Reminded me a lot of the "I am Ra" thing I found on the web a long time ago.

>>7883
>Hegel
I really dislike Hegel. I hate how a lot of this stuff has been weaponized and used against honest/naive people. I feel like most psychology texts wouldn't exist at off if advertising wasn't an accepted practice and became so widely used to sell people things they don't need starting around the late 1800s-early 1900s. It's also pretty depressing how their solution to most problems is putting people on drugs.

I was surprised how few people I've talked to have not read Hegel and don't know who he was. Which is understandable I guess since most of the stuff the advertising industry uses wouldn't work if people were wise to their game.

>>8269
It's kinda tarded as well, but in a good way.

I'm reading this and I can't help but notice how performative it is. Someone who'd actually bother to think more than cross-linking human anatomy textbooks and butchering handbooks would've go in depth on what PPE to use, what to clean yourself and the premises with, when to use layers of trash bags to dispose of the waste easily, et cetera. There's no solemnity or deadpan delivery with occasional self-awareness jokes and puns, just strategical structure and tactical placement of elements all for impressionism.
https://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/e-sermons/butcher.html
It's like the fastfood-eating shock appeal author didn't ever do as much as gut a fish.

Okay so I read ten elemental masters, its okay, I would recommend it if you like outsider art.

I am in the process of reading Amazon slop
It's Amazon slop what do you expect?

One okayish writer sold me on reading Tillich's Courage to Be.*
What can I say - I'd rather read the illusion I was being sold, not the real thing.

First Tillich cannot grasp that the stoics imply that their stoicism has limits in rationale's dependence on biology, and projects his lack of attempt to understand as their flaw. There are other kinds of pseudointellectual pedantic posturing thorough the book, but these aren't as grave in comparison.
Then - the only good deed he's responsible for, at least within the book and the relevant lectures - he calls out the feeling of ontological estrangement that everyone have to some degrees. *That was the hook. That's a rarity I had been looking for, for long...
...but he wastes the potential, first, by outlining that any non-being, and anxiety, are biological, yet in doublethink gymnastics, he tries to sell them also as ontological, anyway, making use of the categories rather pointless as the ontological effectively ends up being limited only to the biological, at least in how he wastes the dual category potential, anyway. A lot of mechanics around the ontological feeling are presumed around his personal mental limits and protections, only showing that he did not use any courage to at least do as much as a few thought experiments. There are also self-assured assertions that anxiety has no biological function (Tillich has to do fuckall with biology, even as a hobbyist or enthusiast reader - and it shows).
Then the rest of the book goes as prattling his soft bones around the inane spiritual bypassing of "I'm courageous because asserting that God loves me is enough for MY anxiety and MY self-becoming! Take that, losers!" That's it. That is what sets his anxiety-courage axis. Not even an attempt to actually build something constructive on top of the state where the standard of "courage" had been achieved.
Even the vapidness of reasoning and tenets aside, how much of a hollow wretched wreck do you have to be to see it as a solution to attempt treating God as a slave for own needs? How in the damnation do you live through a war as an active participant yet come out as a huge faggot? I thought working through quite thorough suffering would be enough for the person to work through own hubris, and I was utterly wrong. I couldn't have been more wrong. I'm at a complete loss, but that's only because I never stopped to really think about it. You can rely on neither miracles nor certainty to even approach addressing that "working through" before it's too late.
This is the garbage you get for bringing "-logy" to "theo-" without having the courage to do it properly. In his definition of "demonic", he's as demonic as they get. Funny how there are zero suggestions on confronting the demonic.
Fuck you Tillich, you disgusting sissy. Be courageous in Ganges river hell. Maybe you'll learn not writing trash next time.

On the upside, now I know that I should avoid Tillich fans if I don't want to waste my time. He's quite famous, so this means I get to see many worthless people mark themselves for my peace of mind.
The rest of the half of book is just a dry historical overview that's surface level for wherever I had read what Tillich tries to give his narrative-loaded commentary on.

Most books are bad, bad books get me worked up, I hate books.

Death Object by some Japanese author I've never heard of: https://dn721909.ca.archive.org/0/items/8d-0de-2/8d0de2.pdf

>>9520
I feel like I'm lacking the context needed to understand exactly what's wrong. What's the ontological feeling you refer to? In what sense is non-being biological?
>(Tillich has to do fuckall with biology, even as a hobbyist or enthusiast reader - and it shows).
That much is to be expected for a book from 1952, biology has changed quite a bit since then. Those were the times of B.F. Skinner, the cognitive revolution would begin more or less with Chomsky's critique in 1959.
>how much of a hollow wretched wreck do you have to be to see it as a solution to attempt treating God as a slave for own needs?
I don't think this is particularly odd for a Christian, especially those who argue that God is goodness itself. Lots of Christian philosophy boils down to "akshually this problem is easily solved by accepting Jesus, trust me dude."

>>9521
Didn't mean to link directly to pdf file. Here.

https://archive.org/details/8d-0de-2

I want to find an original copy of this in Japanese so I can read it that way instead of the English translation. I can't tell if the author translated it himself because no TL is credited and it pre-dates lazy AI translations. You can tell the author is for sure Japanese by the way he writes;

>We must formulate the Fake Atomic Instantaneous Liquidation (FAIL) hypothesis very carefully. Taking the time upfront to sculpt the FAIL correctly
can save infinite irrelevant counter-argumentative keystrokes when the FAIL takes the field against its many doubters, mockers, scoffers, debunkers and defenders of orthodoxy. A carefully bounded FAIL is also a lot easier to talk about.

>>9521
Satan 2 is real and he's out to get you.

>>9523
>What's the ontological feeling you refer to?
The kind of pre-conceptual alienation and estrangement from living that persists even during and despite the active participation in life, even at the extremes such as creativity, flow states, eureka moments, self-assertions of individuation, and the like.
That's the lived experiencing I refer to. That's as best as I can describe it in a concise way.

I'm so done with "thinkers" trying to wave it away as some post-conceptual reasoning issue that disappears in just a few steps of their genius trick they stretch out over hundreds of pages to hide how shamefully inept it is, with the solution just being about bashing straw man presumptions against "rational" presumptions, just losing oneself in Plato's cave for the hell of it, and expecting ovations.
>In what sense is non-being biological?
The way Tillich describes it, non-being is what you get when your CNS is stressed into/by a evolutionary defense response of fawn/freeze/flight/fight, in whatever combination or form. True ontology would be "active non-being may persist even during and despite the healthy and whole courage."
>That much is to be expected for a book from 1952, biology has changed quite a bit since then. Those were the times of B.F. Skinner, the cognitive revolution would begin more or less with Chomsky's critique in 1959.
Bergson, Jung, even Freud, as examples I know well, did better without waiting for that. I wouldn't think they're a good standard for the times, yet here we are.

I disdain heresies, including heresies of pride, no matter the prevalence.

>>9526
Ah, well, my opinion there is that one's consciousness is necessarily incomplete. As the product of cells signalling to each other with finite resources, they are as subject to limitations as any other system of signs, and the end result that you experience not only prunes away information deemed not relevant enough, it also has many forms of extrapolation that lead to illusions. Not only is total awareness impossible, it's undesirable. Evolution has selected against it.
>Bergson, Jung, even Freud
The interesting thing is that Jung is following Freud, and Freud gets tons of his stuff from Nietzsche, who was extremely focused on the biological.

>>9524
lol leave it to a Japanese author to compare nuclear fission to Pachinko.


>In Pachinko, the ball [neutron] enters the playing field [fissile mass], which is populated by a large number of brass pins [nuclei], several small cups into
which the player hopes the ball will fall [fissionable nuclei] (each catcher is barely the width of the ball), and a hole at the bottom into which the ball will fall if it doesn’t enter a catcher.

>The ball bounces from pin to pin, both slowing the
fall and making it travel laterally across the field. A ball which enters a catcher will trigger a payout [delayed neutrons], in which a number of balls are
dropped into a tray at the front of the machine. The object of the game is to capture as many balls as possible. These balls can then be exchanged for prizes
[death and destruction on a truly epic scale]

Sorry if formatting is screwed. Copy/pasting from pdf sucks. The epub they offer isn't formatted correctly sadly.

I am attempting to read Confessions by St. Augustine.

>>9524
I finished this book today. Much better than I expected. Reading about the atomic bombings from the perspective of a Japanese author was interesting and it was much more balanced than I expected. He brought up a lot of good points and I now have a few more places to visit on my next trip to Japan. Interested in reading it in the original language for my second read whenever I can find a copy of it.

I first got on the "nuclear bombs aren't real" train after watching a few guys bully someone that simply questioned the obviously faked footage of some of the test shots. Now I'm pretty much convinced they aren't real or aren't as deadly as portrayed. I know for a fact that all of the footage that's been released is bullshit since I can easily spot how a lot of it was faked. For a long time I didn't know how they managed to fake a bombing on the little model houses they used in the famous test clips. But I finally figured out they were done under water. Which accounted for a few things I couldn't explain before.

This is probably the best book I've read on the subject of nuclear weapons thus far. I am sad that the author refused to release some information in this book but at least he left clues on how to replicates those parts himself. I understand why someone living in a US occupied nation would be spooked about releasing that stuff. Since it would have gotten him thrown in prison for probably the rest of his life without a day in court. Maybe as he gets closer to death he'll get more ballsy and release the section he left out for fear of getting arrested.

At any rate, interesting book.

>>9570
>attempting to read
Heh. I can relate. For me I just have to get past the first few hundred paragraphs and become engrossed. Until then, though...

>>9527
It's undesirable because in an everchanging environment having a perfect recollection of all previous events as they've been experienced by you is not useful if only certain information from those events have relevance to your reproductive success, especially if having a perfect recollection would require resources that could be better spent elsewhere, or even better just not spent at all. It's purely contextual.

>>9575
I think he means different things like "perfect (Jungian) wholeness isn't possible," infinite rate of qualia moments isn't possible, perception covering all of the ongoing sensory and unconscious details isn't possible, et cetera. I do agree that you wouldn't ever need them.

But I think we technically could naturally evolve in your interpreted direction as species - perfect photographic memory people exist for a reason that doesn't seem to be a maladaption - given that the information needed to participate in society well is becoming more and more complicated.
I could use some perfect memory to recall all the stuff I learn and forget: I forget too easily for how much I have to learn and relearn.

>>9572
>Now I'm pretty much convinced they aren't real or aren't as deadly as portrayed
Can't blame you as I disagree with you; it's society's fault that accessible and legal empirical ways to verify that "nukes, as they're advertised, are quite possible to manufacture" require doing personal research in methodology and its implementation, if at least to verify by inference and extrapolation.

>>9576
My opinion rests on the fact that no one has built one for the lulz. I really like fire, bombs, fireworks and everything else that goes boom. I'm sure if it was possible I could assemble one. Sadly, it isn't.

Now fission is real sure. I just don't think you can make something go BOOM by shooting two pieces of metal together quickly or with shape charges. I know for a fact all the test footage I've seen is bullshit. I'll spare you the long rant as to why. It's pretty obvious to anyone even remotely familiar with basic hollywood effects.

I’m reading Notes from the Underground right now and find the character of the wicked man quite relatable and sensible in his tirade against the state of the world. At the same time I can find myself disagreeing at some points with his character about some of the behaviors he finds pleasure in, such as pain for the sake of burdening others with his moans and somewhat his own willful arrogance. I can still see and understand his point of view, however.

I think some of what makes this understanding come so easily comes down to the way the book is written. It’s very much a tirade from the “author” character told to another, in this case being the reader. He lays his whole philosophy down and has nothing to hold back in his speech. I find it somewhat ironic then, in a sense how he expresses his distaste for wickedness of humankind and yet in every step justifies its presence. Such as while going on about a formulated solution to human will and wanting, how one will still wreck it and has to wreck it because it is the quality of being human that compels one to prove he is himself. The arrogance and wry tone he uses to profess his troubles create quite the charming character to listen to, not to be romantically wooed by, but to be amused enough to keep listening.

Picked up Ernst Becker's Denial of Death.
One preface and first half of first chapter in and I feel "yup, this is gonna be good."
I'm ready to be disappointed now. Not recommending yet.

https://archive.org/details/the-invisible-rainbow

I finally got around to reading "The Invisible Rainbow". I bought a copy of it back when it first came out but I kept putting off reading it.

I'm about halfway through it right now and I've been verifying the authors claims and quotes for 1600-1800s scientists and doctors as I've gone along. So far, he's not misquoted or twisted anyone's words that I could find. The book is well written and put forth some good theories. I'm pretty impressed by the author's attempt to remain as unbiased as possible.

I've read a lot of crappy reviews of this book (on both sides of the debate) and a bunch of people have attempted to paint it in a bad light over the last few years since it was first released. I kind of understand why now after seeing the contents.

If you're interested in medicine and the technical details of how electricity and radio works it's worth picking up and giving it a read. I won't summarize the author's theories here to avoid spoilers. I'll just leave it at he's got plenty of evidence to back up his theory(s) and I think the subject deserves far more attention than it's given by the mainstream.

>>9799
>I won't spoil
Decided I'm going to give some detail because I looked at amazon's entry for this book and noticed whoever wrote it is attempting to paint it as a book written by a kook. The entries for it wasn't like that when I bought it a few years ago.

The book is basically about early experiments with electricity in the 1700s (Leyden jars) and how it became a huge meme with people at the time. They were lining up begging to get shocked by the early leyden jars and batteries. Tons of journal entries and letters from really well known people are quoted in the book about this early public excitement for electricity. They thought they'd discovered the elusive "life force" they'd been searching for since men first started doing science.

After that it goes into early attempts by doctors to use this new thing for healing people. Lots of them were shocking people and trying to either draw electricity into or out of their bodies. Bunch of them experimented on themself and their wives/close friends to the point where they caused nose bleeds and other bad effects. Many of the people that were initially excited about it denounced it only a few short years later because they'd done harm to themself using mild shocks. Leyden jars could barely hold a charge and it was more akin to getting shocked with a mild static electricity shock than what we have today.

Anyway, after he covers the early discovery of electricity and the public's excitement about it he goes into the flu. Which was a very rare disease before the late 1800s that only appeared only to quickly vanish again during peak solar cycles. It's only documented to appear every 100-150 years or so during those days in medicine/history. But soon after we started using telegrams and hooked up cities with DC (and later AC) electricity to power things like lights the flu started to pop up more often and eventually every year. Pandemics of it followed the power and telegram companies as they wired more and more cities and eventually entire land masses. Then once we got into the wireless telegram/radio era the flu started to become a yearly thing and millions of people were getting killed off by it every year. It also changed in its nature some. It used to not affect the lungs of people as badly as it does now.

I'm up to WW1 era in the book when widespread use of radio took off very very quickly with so many messages being sent all over the place during the war years. Along with public broadcasts for mass media.

The author has gone back and mapped out a timeline where we see pandemics of flu (and later other new diseases), mass die offs of people and other ill non-fatal health effects happening the same year a new form of electricity transmission and radio was put into use.

The author's theory boils down to the fact that our bodies didn't evolve to live in the radio spectrum soup we live in now during the modern age. That our bodies still haven't had time to adapt to our use of radio. He thinks that we see outbreaks of flu-like type illnesses when new technology is employed to use new parts of the radio spectrum that weren't in wide use before. Hence the recent pandemic we saw that happened during the roll out of what we now call 5G. While we were using that part of the spectrum for some things the use wasn't that wide spread and we weren't pouring in so much energy in that part of the spectrum until mid-2019-late 2020.

It's a pretty convincing argument. I was aware of some of this before and I knew even "safe" radiation/radio could cause ill health effects. But seeing it all mapped out with a timeline and mountains of pre-modern research, letters, notes and quotes is really convincing. Every time I've taken a break from the book to verify something he's referenced it has been word-for-word what the author claimed the person was saying. I also learned about a lot of really smart scientists from the past that I haven't heard of before. Many of which wrote many papers and books which I plan on picking up soon. Most of them that I did know about before reading this book are well respected people even in the mainstream.

There were also some experiments mentioned in this book that I want to try for myself. Like improving crop yields and plant growth via using very small amounts of electricity (less than a 10th of an amp). Some studies were about to double output of crops like potatoes with very minimal amounts of input. I'm going to test this myself next year when I plant my gardens for the next growing season.

>>9801
The author is basically saying that we've shit up the natural state of things concerning the radio spectrum. Since the earth and what's coming in from the sun (and space) was with us for millions of years and we evolved to live with that (along with everything else on the planet). Which is why we don't have organs like eyes and ears that can see/hear/feel it. Radio is on the same spectrum as visible light after all. So it's no wonder that it would have effects on our bodies and brain.

This book also led me down another path. Where people are using radio waves to mimic the effects of some chemical drugs. Promising research that could allow us to treat things without the side effects of the chemicals and substances we have to use now. Hardly anyone talks about it despite it being a well funded area of research and proven to work for many decades now.

The author also thinks that our wide use of radio spectrum is probably the cause for the rising rates of cancer since the 1800s. For example, tobacco smokers didn't get lung cancer from smoking like they do now. There are other factors too I'm sure like the food we're eating these days. But radio must be a big part of it too.

Very interesting book and the author has tons of references. This book is probably going to cause me to end up buying at least 20-30 more (assuming I can find them since many are probably not in print at the moment). A bunch of them are in different languages as well like French and Latin. So it gives me an excuse to read in a non-English/Japanese language. Which is always a good thing.

>>9801
Oh and it wasn't just flu/flu-like disease. In an early chapter about telegram operators the author writes about how they were coming down with some strange disease that only affected them and other people that worked around the lines. It was a "neurosis" (pre-Freudian definition of the word). Basically, they were coming down with anxiety, panic attacks, losing their will to live (many anhero'd) and they could find the strength to get out of bed in the morning. Was happening to a lot of doctors as well along with many other city dwellers that had allowed the private telegram companies use the roofs of their homes to run the wiring when London was initially wired up. It was thousands of people. Almost all the guys that were tapping away sending the messages back and forth would come down with it after a few months on the job and they were having a hard time replacing them and line workers once word spread around about it.

This same new disease was also happening to frequent travelers by rail. Since all the early routes for telegram lines ran next to the railroad tracks.

There was also a really interesting bit about a scientist that was able to snoop on telegram messages by placing a metal stake in the ground miles away from the lines running by the rail roads. He even snooped on messages from 100+ miles away from the lines. Since back then all of the telegram companies were using the Earth as grounding instead of their own lines to save money when the first networks were eventually built out.

The author speculates that this is also what's causing the die offs of many animals like insects and birds.

Pretty interesting book

>>9802
But what's the mechanism proposed for this? The photons of radio waves are weaker than those the Sun has bombarded us with every day for the last six hundred million years, so it wouldn't really make sense for it to be causing cancer since the 1800s rather than the much more likely culprit of carcinogenic chemicals. Especially because the photons that truly hurt you are even stronger than visible light, like gamma rays.

>>9801
>is really convincing
Did the author address the increase in international commerce and travel, thus the world becoming an unified petri dish, being the elephant in the room for the "historical correlation" take?

>>9805
Moreover, you also have to account for medicinal statistics/recording progressing as the world had been becoming more information-heavy.

Silence these fools, Pissmin. They speak too much.
Delete their posts.

Ban them.

>>9809
no thank you

>>9805
Yes. Most of the stuff he's citing pre-dates air travel and travel by ships. Then he's got several cases of a flu outbreak happening to people on a ship that wasn't in port for the previous 6 months. When they got to where they were going they learned there was a flu outbreak on that isolated island about the same time they had it on the ship. It's worth reading.

>>9804
>But what's the mechanism proposed for this? The photons of radio waves are weaker than those the Sun has bombarded us with every day for the last six hundred million years
A lot of them simply pass right through you. Actually, most do. Read the book if you're interested. The guy is basically giving a lot of proof that all these parts of the spectrum deemed to be safe really aren't.
>chemicals
It doesn't have to be one thing it can be a combination of things.

>>9806
Data is data. He's got plenty of it from practicing doctors of that era and the studies that were undertaken to back up what he's saying. It isn't hard to come by.

>>9801
>They were lining up begging to get shocked
Just like in my kissu banners!

>>9619
Finished it.
Pretty good! It's effectively an over-recap of later works of Otto Rank with lots of retrospective and author's originality to it.
Otto Rank is only popular for his "gestation and birth trauma", but that was only his early work which he left behind for better research and theories
My gripes lie in that it needlessly tries to base itself on presumptions which it tries to soften only a little:
¥ all mental divergences like neuroticisms are always symbolic (quite Freudian for how the reductionistic and pedantic Freudianism is critiqued)
¥ artists and non-philistines are nearly immune to depression just because they have a better grasp of, and partake in, differentiated self-expression that goes above the lower ends within human nature (laughable)
¥ not being fearful, weak, and stupid is enough on its own to not get stuck in any mental deviations, including minor fetish perversions, some anxiety, or nervousness
It does defuse the tensions by effectively discarding it all in favor of "that's how life goes" as the repeated theme, message, and the finale.
Ernest Becker called out lots of phenomena, behaviors, systems, mistakes I like to call out! Very good. Also Freud got a re-overview - in that he had the guts to get into the biological and creepy buy he didn't have enough guts to get to a point he kept avoiding - that's better than what I had seen from Jung, Deleuze & Guattari, and the like. Tillich got called out too! Splendid.
Got me to see human behavior from an entirely different and simple way, It's anthropological and biological, and more overreaching than Jung, who positioned that goal of life is mystical individuation (reliant on many mechanisms where you pump yourself full of narratives like it's crack), buy didn't address people what is it of lives of people who're "not meant to individuate" for whatever presumed or perceived reason as seen by the analyst. This is also highly compatible and complimentary with Robert Moore's later works, seminars, lectures on grandiosity and evil.

The elephant in the room is that neither address rather active people who're not quite healthy or self-fulfilling, but there's ambivalence and apathy to them instead of depression or neuroticism or narcissism. That's just one of the elephants.
I still recommend it, the language doesn't need any expertise.

Next is Becker's Escape From Evil.

>>9884
Escape from Evil wasn't very interesting. Not bad, just Denial of Death reiterated as "science is red herring, Marxism eats itself, religion is a lie, society has collapsed, somebody do something!"
I am largely disappointed. It's not a bad book, it's a a disappointing book. There's only a paragraph worth of good sentences that made me think. If I were writing this book, I'd, too, prefer to die before finishing it.

Now I'm going back to the worst of reading experience: digging through mediocre writers I am tired of, as there's no better alternative, so I can pick up any references to help me find works of good potential of being relevant to me.

>>10260
Actually, I'm being a bit unfair. I realized that I didn't find anything new because I had read The Golden Bough and The Ancient City beforehand. EoE was still a disappointment nevertheless.

Picked up Extreme Ownership. Unimpressed by introduction. Quick skimmed. It's just gayer 48 LoP, with that self-aggrandizing bureaucratic flair for pedantic smoothbrains you see in largest militaries' documentations. Really gayer. Dropped.

Picked up The Courage to be Disliked. Well this freakin sucks. I didn't think it's fiction. Also it's a rehash on Adler by the Japanese, which isn't bad on paper, but it's YUCKY fiction in that gay Greek dialogue format by Socrates. If that's the case, I'd rather read Adler directly. DROPPED.

Started 12 Commandments by Freinacht. Dropped. The author is like an LLM.

Got a kindle, it's pretty neat.

>>10625
>>10644
Gay luigi?

I hope kissu ain't slacking on their /lit/reading and all that.

The books I'm reading lately are all stuff I wouldn't even mention to my closest friends. At least they're not droppable.

>>12890
Okay well I'm reading amazon self-published slop where its like men's fantasy bullshit so like, you can't go any worse?