[Bizet]

(07-30-2018 10:08 AM)Beyond Borders Wrote:  

The Road is damn good - one of my favorite books. All the Pretty Horses also really stuck with me.

But his magnum opus is Blood Meridian, and that's saying a lot coming from a master craftsman like McCarthy. Must read.

Awesome. I'll check all these books out. Thanks!

[Paracelsus]

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, John Carreyrou

This one was on audiobook. Bearing in mind that Carreyrou is a journalist who originally broke the Theranos story in the Wall Street Journal, I went into this text with strong suspicions on Carreyrou's motives and kept that mindset up throughout.

Having now been through that, I'd have to say that Carreyrou put his skin in the game by writing this book to begin with. Carreyrou has the expected and boring leftie bias to be expected: he reads the New Yorker, he goes after Trump-aligned and Reagan-era old men a a lot more than Clinton or Obama's elder statesmen in this book. But that aside, the book seems to have been written with pretty extensive sourcing. It strikes me as built to withstand a pretty determined legal case for defamation or libel from Elizabeth Holmes or from the guy who has to rank as maybe the most successful Indian Race Troll in Western history, Sunny Balwani, forty years of age and banging the early-20s Elizabeth Holmes who was running this shitshow on a nightly basis for years.

The book is about as strong a summary prosecution case you could make against Holmes and Sunny Balwani, but in particular Holmes. It's solid, it's well-researched, and it goes into detail about how and where the frauds were perpetrated, off the back of several different whistleblowers or former employees. I came away with the impression that Holmes' chief talent was in inducing erections from Baby Boomer men (and younger) who really ought to have known better, and it was enough to carry her for a good 10 years or so.

I'll make a more detailed post about what I came away from this book with over in the Holmes thread, but in terms of this book - I'd rate it roughly 95% solid, 5% liberal bias for content, even allowing for Carreyrou's status as a journalist. It's a pretty one-sided book, but that's largely because Holmes refused to address the accusations in the book and because, I'm fairly convinced, she was a liar and a narcissist. It's a good read/listen, 8 out of 10; not exactly a masterpiece of prose, but it's also better than the standard long newspaper article most journalists-turned-authors seem incapable of rising above.

[Paracelsus]

Anabasis, Xenophon



It appears to be cool at the present to translate the title of the book as The Persian Expedition. The correct translation is The Journey Upcountry. I was reading this one at the same time as listening to Bad Blood in audiobook.

Either way, this is the account of the march of a mercenary army called the Ten Thousand, in 401 BC - thus, the period right at the end of the era covered by Thuycydides' histories. Three years earlier, Sparta had achieved final victory in the Pelopponesian War, sacking Athens and subjecting it to tyranny, arguably the strongest point that Sparta ever reached in terms of dominion over the Greek peninsula.

The Ten Thousand were a large band of Greek/Spartan/Arcadian/other Greek exiles hired by a pretender to the throne of the Persian Empire - Cyrus, not to be confused with Cyrus the Great of decades earlier - to overthrow the king. The original leaders of the expedition more or less tricked the mercenary army into this scheme; they'd originally thought they were off to fight some minor satraps in what is now southern Turkey. And in an abortive action at Cunaxa, not far from the centre of the Persian Empire, Cyrus was killed, leaving the mercenary army without a leader and without a paymaster right in the guts of the Empire, in enemy territory. Originally they'd made a deal with the Empire to head home quietly. However, shortyl after, the Persians' Greek allies betrayed the Ten Thousand: their commanders of the Ten Thousand were slaughtered at a meeting, leaving the mercenaries with basically no command structure.

It's at this point that Xenophon, a late-20s aristocrat among the Ten Thousand, rises to the fore and takes command. He assembles a command structure, takes control of the army, and then leads them on an 18-month journey north all the way across Turkey through what is now Kurdistan and through bitter winter conditions to the Black Sea, and then west along the Turkish coast, and back to the Dardanelles, or the Hellespont as was then known. And even then they couldn't get back to Greece until political conditions had changed, for another couple of years. They dealt with enemy actions more or less most of the way.

The account makes for easier reading than, say, Thucydides. It's more Julius Caesar than Cicero, which might be why it used to be pretty popular among schoolboys asked to learn Greek. It hits full speed right on the betrayal of the Ten Thousand, and most of the interest to me comes in the motivational speeches that Xenophon conducts with the men and with his fellow commanders. Admittedly this account is meant to be a bit of an apologia for Xenophon since other Greek accounts apparently say he wasn't that important in the expedition, but it still holds its interest.

This is one of the first ancient classics where I followed Nassim Taleb's exhortation to the letter and ignored the preening introduction that invariably is put in front of most texts like this by some academic, although I did go back and read the intro in this case because the introduction in this case was written back in 1940 - well before our current narcissist infection in the West. It made it a bit more difficult to absorb because you then come at the text cold with no context, but the literary spell is that much stronger, and the text still touches you without all the cheap tawk in the Preface.

Is it great? Well, not awe-inspiring; Xenophon is writing more for history than for entertainment in this one, and it's as straightforward and matter-of-fact as Caesar's The Gallic Wars, but it is still a fast, short read and you do get something out of it. I won't rate it out of 10, classics don't deserve that shit, but it was a decent read.

[chicane]

I just finished "Expatriation Apocalypse". It's a short book that is probably most appropriate to a younger man who wants to leave the US. It goes over a lot of the things that are going wrong in the US and how to escape. Not a lot of depth, but an easy read and fairly inexpensive. Buy it as a gift to the 18-25 year old guys you know.

[I DIDN'T KILL MY WIFE]

The Checklist Manifesto - Atul Gawande

One of those classics that feels self-explanatory from the title alone, where everyone nods their head in agreement but doesn't actually read and use it.

It's an explanation from a surgeon how he tried to reduce the chance of mistakes, infections and death during surgeries. He got the inspiration for checklists from aviation pilots' disciplines use of those, went ahead to interview general contractors in construction in how they manage workflows and make sure things aren't missed and also consulted and tested surgery checklists in cooperation with WHO.

Checklists help, duh, nothing new there. However, we as experts tend to feel insulted when tasked with following checklists. After all, how can our professional craft be described by something as mundane as a mere checklist?

He tried to examine, which checklists help where, when and how to structure them for that purpose. Essentially there are 3 types of tasks in the world: the simple, the complex and the complicated.
Simple tasks are essentially repeatable routines, ideal for ticking off checklists. Complex tasks require a certain degree of experimentation, adaptation and decision making in the moment. His example was for sending a rocket into the space: the task is new, there will be a lot of cooperation required to make sure everyone provides their expertise, but once the task has been accomplished, it could essentially be repeated again. One rocket shouldn't be different from any other one, provided all factors stay the same. Complicated tasks are essentially a constant re-adjusting, like raising a child: if you've raised one succesfully, it doesn't mean the next one will be the same formula.

Best practice for creating checklists: decide on a DO-CONFIRM or READ-DO checklist. Each of these will have pause points: moments when, before the next phase begins, you/the team needs to check that the former steps were followed. The DO-CONFIRM checklist assumes expertise of the user and at the pause point requires a check that nothing was missed. The READ-DO checklist is like a recipe, where essentially each step is a pause point, and is ideal for providing guidance on situations where the user didn't have experience with yet. Checklists should be short (max 9 items), worded unambigously, quickly performed in max 1 minute. And most important of all, where I've also made that mistake: checklists are not guides, nor explanations or documentation manuals to teach you how to do something. They are tools to unmistakably honestly check if the most critical steps in a process have been missed.

I've found some new ideas for myself and might incorporate some of those for my job life.

[Bizet]

The Dead Zone - Stephen King.

Probably the last Stephen King novel I'm going to read in a very long time. Don't get me wrong, I think King is fantastic at creating a sense of atmosphere in his writing (the final page of this book is beautifully written); however, I've never been a fan of his dialogue and I think all his characters are one dimensional.

Take, for example, the protagonist of this novel: Johnny Smith. If you asked me to describe his personality, or anything else about him apart from what he does for a living, I'd struggle to give you an answer. Oh, except for the fact that he's a grown man who still calls his dad 'daddy', that was just weird.

By the end of this book I found myself rooting for the bad guy and hoping main character gets killed.

[BadgerHut]

(08-08-2018 02:56 AM)Bizet Wrote:  

The Dead Zone - Stephen King.

Probably the last Stephen King novel I'm going to read in a very long time. Don't get me wrong, I think King is fantastic at creating a sense of atmosphere in his writing (the final page of this book is beautifully written); however, I've never been a fan of his dialogue and I think all his characters are one dimensional.

Take, for example, the protagonist of this novel: Johnny Smith. If you asked me to describe his personality, or anything else about him apart from what he does for a living, I'd struggle to give you an answer. Oh, except for the fact that he's a grown man who still calls his dad 'daddy', that was just weird.

By the end of this book I found myself rooting for the bad guy and hoping main character gets killed.

I really enjoyed The Dead Zone, read it twice if I recall correctly. But I get what you're saying for sure, had I read the book in a different time I might have had the same reactions. I do find King's characters to be pretty simple and fable-istic, you can see their denouement coming a mile away.

It's like the characters are more a setup for him to write inner dialogue and work the plot than characters in their own right.

[Vasily Zaytsev]

I recently finished reading Heman Melville's, Moby Dick. It's a book I'd been planning on reading for quite some time, but, could never seem to get around to it. I think it's a book many guys in the Manosphere have read or would enjoy because of its themes of adventure, travel, struggle, and revenge. However, don't ever read it if you are not very interested in knowing more about 19th Century American Whaling. Melville is often criticized for being waay too wordy and verbose at times.

[Pride male]

Just finished Harvest of Thorns by Shimmer Chinodya. I recommend it.

[Vienna]

Just finished 2 books. I'll start with Jesse Itzler's autobiographical Living with a SEAL: 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet.



Now, do yourself a favor and ignore the author's soyboy expression on the cover. This is a book almost tailor-made for the constituency of this forum.

It tells the story of a very successful Yankee entrepreneur, who begins to find his training regimen to be too predictable. During a 100 mile relay race, he sees a man completing the race all by himself, while the author has a team of 5 persons doing 20 minute laps. He contacts the man, who turns out to be a former Navy SEAL operative, and asks him to live with and train him for 31 days.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I finished it in an afternoon since it was a real page turner. The SEAL, whose real name is David Goggins, brings the bootcamp mentality to Itzler's posh Central Park West apartment. The real enjoyment of this books comes from seeing two different cultures clash; Goggins' stoic approach to fitness (and life) where pain is something to enjoy, and Itzler's world of meetings, private jet flights, family life and comfortable morning runs.

In the end, the books offers not only practical tips for increasing your fitness levels, it also gets you started on a blueprint on how to achieve grit. It doesn't contain everything but enough to be a call to action. Goggins lives by some of the creeds of this forum.

I believe the book to be based on a true story, hence 80% true and 20% tweaked for narrative purposes. Still, it's highly recommended.

Minor spoilers ahead: I googled David Goggins and the man is a true hero. Long story short, after a group of Navy SEALs died fighting insurgents in Afghanistan, he signed up for some extreme endurance competitions in order to raise money for the dead SEALs families. In his first competition running 100 miles in 24 hours, he weighed 270 pounds and broke all metatarsals in both feet and still finished. Weeks later, still recovering, he did an even more gruesome competition.

I'm about to listen to his conversation on the Joe Rogan podcast, number 1080 for those who are interested.

The second book Robopocalypse was also a page turner. It's written by a robotics specialist and deals with how a superintelligent AI might take over our modern world. It's a military sci-fi but would probably be enjoyed by forum members looking for 2 days worth of adventure.

It's written in present tense which was a bit jarring at first, but you get used to it after a few chapters.

The only real nit-pick I have with the book is that the first few chapters, which dealt with how an AI might seize control felt very rushed. It went from the birth of the AI to suddenly gaining control of military robots and equipment, without the reader really getting a peek behind the curtain.

Other than that, I recommend this book. It's like reading a bombastic movie co-directed by Roland Emmerich and JJ Abrams.

[Bizet]

Habits of a Happy Brain - Loretta Graziano Breuning, PHD.

I read this book over the weekend​. I really enjoyed it, but I think it's one of those books you can skim through for its key concepts and skip large chunks of (like most self-improvement books).

What I learnt from this book is that there are four main chemicals that make us feel happy: dopamine, endorphin, oxytocin and serotonin. Our brains release these chemicals as a reward for doing something good and essential for the survival of our genes.

We get rewarded with dopamine as a result of setting goals and achieving them, as well as new experiences (think of the buzz you get right before the the first day of a new job, or when you first land in a new country).

Endorphin is released to help us deal with pain (the high you get after a workout).

Oxytocin comes from being around loved ones (family, good friends, a partner).

Serotonin comes from having the respect of your peers, being high value, etc. Think of it as the alpha-male chemical.

The author explains in detail why our body rewards us for doing these things (it's a result of evolution: without seeking these things we wouldn't survive and reproduce).

Basically, my main takeaway from this book was: if you want to be happy, set goals, don't stagnate, workout, spend more time with people you enjoy spending time with, and be somebody who is worthy of respect.

[Paracelsus]

The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece, Paul Cartledge



This one was an audiobook that I picked up on something of a lark, to be honest. Honestly, the main thing going for the recording is the performance by Paul Lee - he reads in an upper-class English accent, very precise, very correct, and his pronunciation of the names is dead on from what I understand. But he also makes it an entertaining read, one where he varies his voice up and down the lines, as if you're listening to an 8 hour speech by an English lecturer on the subject.

Essentially this is an introduction to the history of Sparta. It covers the main "interesting" section of Sparta's history, from its early wars with the Persians culminating in Leonidas' defence at Thermopylae, to its confrontation with Athens in the Pelopponesian War, to its downfall and passage into mediocrity a century or two later.

It isn't a thick academic text, and by virtue of the reading and the switches in focus Cartledge at least keeps it interesting, although it's also infested with the usual bleatings about patriarchy blah blah blah. It provides a pretty good introduction to how the Spartans actually lived, and as a result was a bit of an eye-opener, perhaps most significantly around the fact that sexually, the Spartans were pretty degenerate from our perspective: there was institutionalised pederasty in the education of boys (the famed and brutal agoge which just about killed or actually did kill a number of its students), male homosexual relationships were fine and kosher, and the women could quite literally bang men other than their husbands if they wanted to do so - they were not compliant women or homemakers, that was the role that Athenian wives and mothers took.

The three things that seemed to hold this hot mess together were the sheer (and for a while unbeatable) military discipline of the Spartan citizen army (the spartiates), the heavy paranoia and "xenophobia" against outsiders -- i.e. that which made the women resolute believers in their men and in their families, and the fact their labor costs were practically zero because they had a slave underclass, the helots. When they got serious money in their hands, they fell.

I found this an interesting confluence since in many ways the US is not in the position of the Roman Empire, and isn't Athenian either, but is tending more and more to look like Sparta for real: it has an unbeatable military guarding what is turning into a cultural shitshow mainly because its labor costs are low. I am actually wondering whether with the creation of AI and robots whether we are doing the same thing again - obviously not with sentient intelligences but with dropping labor costs substantially.

But anyway, the book itself is a good general introduction and gives you a context for going on to assault Herodotus, Thucydides or Xenophon. I imagine I'll be able to go back and read Thucydides with fresh eyes in particular. I'd probably recommend the audiobook over the book.

[Bizet]

Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie.

I read this entire +250 page book in one sitting (on my flight on the way to Bali). I have never read any Agatha Christie before, nor had I seen the recent movie adaptation of this book. I think that's a good thing, because the ending of this book really surprised me. I did not see that coming at all! The novel itself was really well written; I liked all the characters, and I thought the pace move along perfectly. As I said, this was my first time reading Christie, and it won't be my last.

[Teedub]

Game by Roosh Obama.

[C-Note]

The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel by Cathy Scott-Clark. A fairly detailed and good account of the 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai. The book mainly focuses on the Taj Mahal portion of the attack and the experiences of some of the key members of the hotel staff. The English in the book is a little weird, so I suspect Scott-Clark has lived in India for a long time and has picked-up Indian style English. The author did a good job of researching and getting the Lakshar/Pakistani side of the story.

There is another book on the attack published a year later (2014) called Black Tornado which is more of an impersonal chronology, which I may try next. Since a lot of us here are world travelers, knowing how to react in a situation like this would be to our benefit.

[BlastbeatCasanova]

I just finished The Unchained Man by Blackdragon. I thought it was really solid, I'll definitely give it a reread sometime in the future [no, I didn't get paid to plug him here ]

[ilostabet]

The man who watched the trains go by (by George Simenon)

I picked this up from a second hand book street fair because it was just 1€. I knew that Simenon was the creator of Maigret, and although I am not a big fan of detective fiction, I decided that it was cheap enough, it was one of his most famous non-Maigret books (as stated in the short description at the back) and might as well give it a try. I was expecting a book to simply pass the time, but I was in for a trip – to this moment I am still shaken by the book. This doesn’t happen to me very often.

Although the book is a cat-mouse chase of sorts, I wouldn’t classify it as detective fiction. First of all, it is in the perspective of the criminal, not the detective. It also is a lot deeper than a simple chase, focusing on the internal struggles (or lack thereof) and motivations (or lack thereof) of the protagonist. He is one of the best anti-heros in fiction in my opinion, and puts Camus’ The Stranger to shame, despite the obvious similarities. I had to google it and in fact Simenon’s book was published 4 years earlier than Camus’. It displays a much deeper existential dread and emptiness in my opinion - and it is much easier to relate to than Camus' main character.

To the outside world, the protagonist is a model citizen: father, husband, steady job, upper-middle class life. He is not especially skilled or intelligent, or special in any way, but rather an average Joe with average concerns. He seems bored, above all, but content enough. Until it all comes crumbling down. He finds out his boss is about to go bankrupt, and that he will lose his job. Upon hearing this, he leaves it all behind - without thinking too much about it. He jumps on a train and starts his slow descent into madness, perversion and the crime underbelly of central Europe (first Amsterdam, then Paris).

Perhaps the best thing about him is he seems to have no particular pleasure in doing what he does. He just seems to be doing random stuff at first, and then his purpose lies completely outside the criminality itself – as if it’s just a vehicle for something else. He’s at the same time detached about what he’s doing and why, but he constantly checks the news about himself and is annoyed about their portrayal of him. He regards himself as a normal guy, but wants at the same time to be presented as something special by the journalists. His involvement in the criminal world goes hand in hand with his growing paranoia and obsession with the police investigation of his case – to the point where it seems at times he is doing it more for the notoriety and to leave a mark on society (even if a dark one) than to derive pleasure from his criminality.

After I finished the book I had a sense of dread - the book moved me greatly on a physical level. Still now my stomach gets weird thinking about it and writing this. It doesn't happen very often for me. The meaninglessness of the modern functionary whose job is a fiction without any real world value to the worker, the ease with which a regular citizen descends into madness due to the detachment generated by the emptiness of his role in society, the dark underbelly of crime and ugliness that lives side by side (though hidden) with the normal families, the aim to do something stupid and violent just for the sake of being noticed and getting out of the artificial mould that industrial society has created. And all this darkness and purposelessness only needed a simple catalyst like unemployment.

The book is 80 years old. Reading it though, it was hard not to think about how this atomization and meaninglessness of the urban life has only gotten worse. How many of us would like to think this could never happen to us, that we would not lose our minds so quickly and so definitively, that we can keep it together. And yet the book highlights how it is all hanging by a single thread.

Great book. Could not recommend it more highly. One of the best novels I have ever read.

5/5

[RoastBeefCurtains4Me]

(08-08-2018 11:11 PM)BadgerHut Wrote:  

(08-08-2018 02:56 AM)Bizet Wrote:  

The Dead Zone - Stephen King.

Probably the last Stephen King novel I'm going to read in a very long time. Don't get me wrong, I think King is fantastic at creating a sense of atmosphere in his writing (the final page of this book is beautifully written); however, I've never been a fan of his dialogue and I think all his characters are one dimensional.

Take, for example, the protagonist of this novel: Johnny Smith. If you asked me to describe his personality, or anything else about him apart from what he does for a living, I'd struggle to give you an answer. Oh, except for the fact that he's a grown man who still calls his dad 'daddy', that was just weird.

By the end of this book I found myself rooting for the bad guy and hoping main character gets killed.

I really enjoyed The Dead Zone, read it twice if I recall correctly. But I get what you're saying for sure, had I read the book in a different time I might have had the same reactions. I do find King's characters to be pretty simple and fable-istic, you can see their denouement coming a mile away.

It's like the characters are more a setup for him to write inner dialogue and work the plot than characters in their own right.

I enjoyed the Dead Zone TV series with Micheal Anthony Hall. I never realized it was a Stephen King novel. More likely the show promos mentioned it a lot, and I forgot that part but remember the show.

I recently read the whole Dark Tower series, and all the books that are related to it in the Stephen King universe. That's a lot of Stephen King.

It's funny. I think he's only a medium good writer, and so do a lot of other people, but they've read several of his books. He's obviously doing something right. He spins a good yarn, even if it doesn't seem like super high quality writing.

[Paracelsus]

The Bed of Procrustes, Nassim Taleb.



If you're a Taleb fan, this is a handy way to reabsorb the central attitude, thinking, and insights of the Incerto in the space of a couple of hours of reading. If you're not a Taleb fan, this is a long series of aphorisms that warrant very careful and deep thought. Taleb himself in the preface advocates absorbing maybe four of the sayings at one sitting, which probably isn't a bad idea in retrospect - it is very easy to just have a taste of the idea in each of the aphorisms and move on, this shit works a lot better if you actually try and put the idea in your own words.

In essence, the book is a very short read and amounts to a series of sayings that Taleb has put together which he says express the central ideas of his books. The standard disdain for academicians is in here, but there is still a lot to be said for the book. In particular, one aphorism has stuck with me on this:

Sport feminises men, and masculinises women.

This is consistent with Taleb's approach to freerunning and walking off simple roads, i.e. that human beings crave randomness, and modernity's principal mistake has been to become Procrustes: imposing stupid, universal rules on reality so we don't have to contend with the really random nature of existence.

This is the same insight anyone who's ever come through a somewhat unlikely natural disaster or personal, life-endangering risk understands unconsciously. It's what prompts people to invariably mouth after these events that they'll "never take life for granted again" and such.

Taleb also says professional sports prostitute randomness; reality is abstracted down to a series of rules for what can and can't be done - in a game there is always a winner and a loser, but in life you often don't know who has won and who has lost at all.

It's also visible at the macro level too. The best-paid sportsmen are basically reality TV actors at this point. Take a look at even a supposedly "gentleman" sportsman like Lionel Messi who at 30 inexplicably decided to tatt up his fucking arm like a Yakuza. Why did he do it? Because he, like David Beckham and all the rest, is inhabiting a role -- for as long as his body and their audiences' interest holds out.

I wonder if this sentiment was what Ridley Scott was driving at in Gladiator when he had Maximus, having mechanically slaughtered a good six men in quick succession, scream at the awed crowd: "Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained? Is this not what you came here for?" (The subtext being: no, they are not, and no, it is not - for they came for a dose of randomness, and were given mechanical butchery.) And Maximus hurls his sword down, spits on the ground, and walks off the arena. In that moment we saw all of the real skin-in-the-game warrior's contempt for the ritualised, game-ified killing in the Colosseum laid bare. We saw a man fully alive forced to perform like a caged circus animal.

And sports masculinise women, too. Look at pretty much any competitive female sport. You can drool over the asses of volleyball players all you like; not one of them has a tit between them and from a number of angles (certain and otherwise) they look more like men than women. Even gymnastics is questionable, especially given your dick gets confused about whether or not to get hard since the competitors are generally well under fuckable age (and often have to prostitute themselves for a meaningful job, but that's another story.)

Long digression aside - it's a solid book, like all of Taleb's work thus far. But if you like thinking deeply about simple propositions put forward, this book may well appeal to you.

[Al O'Peesha]

Adults in the Room, Yanis Varoufakis

https://www.amazon.com/Adults-Room-Europ...varoufakis

Amazon UK link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adults-Room-Bat...184792445X

An account by the former Greek finance minister of his three months in the job, and how his plans to put his country back on a financial even keel were scuppered by the EU and his own government.

To begin with, he describes his journey from teaching at the University of Austin to joining far-left Greek party Syriza (whose policies he has often been harshly critical of) in time for the 2015 Greek General Election.

He recounts a bizarre meeting with Larry Summers in a hotel where he states that he will behave as an insider (i.e. part of the global establishment) for as long as it serves the interests of Greece, but will not hesitate to return to his 'natural habitat' - as an outsider - should this not be the case.

If there's one message to be taken from the book, it's how undemocratic and unaccountable the Troika, the EU and its various bodies (e.g. the Eurogroup) are.

Much of the book describes how he would attend Eurogroup meetings - informal gatherings of EU finance ministers to suggest how to take policies forward - and put his proposals for getting his country out of debt, which would be met with enthusiasm and promises to discuss them, only to be met with hostility and ridicule by the same ministers at formal meetings later on.
They are going to go ahead with another bailout, one which is going to hit ordinary Greeks hard, with accompanying austerity measures imposed from the outside; bank closures, pensions and welfare to be brutally cut. And there is the possibility of Grexit, with the possibility of Greece leaving the Eurozone, if not the EU altogether. Both Varoufakis and his counterparts are opposed to this, at least ideologically.

He describes a meeting with representatives of Chinese shipping giant Cosco, who have a base at the port of Piraeus, near Athens. To his delight, they agree to a deal which involves huge Chinese investments in infrastructure and purchasing Greek government bonds, giving Greece a much-needed boost. This turned to dismay shortly afterwards when it transpires that 'Berlin' intervened to warn China not to get involved with Greece until they were finished with them...

Varoufakis states that there are no heroes and villains in his book; rather that it, like a classic Greek tragedy, portrays people caught up in the remorseless working of events. You might be inclined to disagree after reading the book. One particularly unpleasant character is former Dutch finance minister and Eurogroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem.

Another surprising revelation of the book is Varoufakis' friendships with Tory figures such as Norman Lamont and Gideon (George) Osborne, whom he seems to have more in common than thought.

One interesting anecdote towards the end of the book recalls how he and his partner (now wife) were out in the Athens suburb of Exarcheia and were accosted by anarchists who threatened him with broken bottles, telling him that he would be welcome back in the area when he wasn't a minister any more. He even quotes a Greek press article about the incident that refers to them as 'anarcho-fascist hoodlums'.
He actually described himself as an anarchist earlier in the book. Cognitive dissonance?

The book closes with his depiction of the referendum held in Greece on the terms of the third bailout - the so called Memorandum of Understanding - which the people of Greece voted to comprehensively reject. Although this did not change anything; as we know, the bailout went ahead anyway. Varoufakis resigned, vilified by a number of his colleagues and the Greek media; he claims that there is a movement to charge him with high treason.

He mentions at the beginning and end of the book his campaigning against Brexit. Personally, I put the book down feeling even more convinced than ever that voting leave was one of the best decisions we - over 17 million of us - ever made. Reading the customer reviews on Amazon's UK site, it seems that I'm far from alone...

He genuinely seems to believe that the EU is open to reform, and to this end he has founded a new movement - DiEM25 (No link provided; believe me, you have better things to do). What does he think he can do with a 'Pan-European, cross-border movement of democrats' that he couldn't when he was in government escapes me.

I mean, Dave Cameron went over as the UK Prime Minister boasting that he would get all manner of reforms and came back with his tail between his legs...

[Paracelsus]

The Last Wish, Andrzej Sapkowski



I fucked up when picking up this novel, i.e. I thought it was a novel. It isn't - or only loosely so. It's more a series of short stories which function as a prequel to the main Witcher story, although really what it amounts to is an introduction to Geralt of Rivia.

I got onto this series because Witcher 3 is essentially the best videogame ever made. As a result it's pretty damn impossible to read the story without hearing the videogame's version of Geralt in my head.

But holy shit it's a great fantasy novel, twenty times better than fucking Robin Hobb or any of that east-coast fat-spectacled-long-unkempt-haired-woman shit we have to put up with. It's the sort of book that doesn't explicitly lay everything out for you - characters' motives are not clear even if the stories themselves have good twists to them. We don't actually find out what Geralt's third wish (those of you who're familiar with Yen and Geralt's relationship will know what I'm talking about) actually was, and Geralt himself is a complex character, by turns merciful, merciless, compassionate, cold, and still has uncharted depths to him.

I thought the translation would fuck the book up, as it sometimes does. It didn't. The narrative is strong and the shit just works. If you liked David Gemmell's sort of books, or Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire book, you'll very much like this. I'll certainly be back for more of the books, they really do surpass the games, hard as I thought that was going to be.

[RoastBeefCurtains4Me]

I just read The Dead Zone. It had several interesting parts to it. First of all, as with a lot of King's writing, it's set in the 70's, which is when they were written. I was a child in the late 60's and 70's, and I remember that era pretty well. It's weird now to see stories set in that era. I remember reading that kind of book when I was young, and the setting seemed normal. Now it's like a story from the twilight zone. Everything has changed so much.

In some ways he seems blue pill in the way the women meet a nice man and fall in love and think of marriage and family. I think this was more realistic at the time, now it seems like a fantasy. However, he has plenty of realism. The main female character that was dating Johnny before the coma had a previous relationship with a hardass alpha type. He used to fuck her rough, and she liked it. She saw him pick a fight at a bar and beat the shit out of the guy, and while she's written as disapproving of the fight, she's also written as going home and having hot sex. In the end, he dropped out of college, got drafted to Vietnam immediately, and dumped her, and she missed him badly, even as she thought he was a jerk. She liked Johnny because he was a nice guy and wasn't like that. Pure Alpha Fux / Beta Bux.

Also, he seems to have a lot of middle aged wives that become increasingly batshit crazy, with long suffering husbands that put up with it. King clearly dealt with some women in this mold when he was younger. I wonder how things are with his wife, since she's of that age now.

The villain is a bit of a stock character from King's novels as well. I found there were some aspects of him that I respected from a red pill perspective. One thing that was funny was that he used to be a bible salesman in the late 1950's, as a pure cynical con in the bible belt farm areas. He also sold a book that talked about how all the communists and Jews were conspiring to destroy Christianity and Western Civilization. That book would probably be well reviewed on RVF today!

One final point: I was always a big fan of Jerry Pournelle, with books like Lucifer's Hammer, Footfall, and A Mote in God's Eye. Pournelle's writing actually resembles King's writing a great deal. This is interesting because I think both started publishing successful novels in 1973, so I don't think they influenced each other. However, Pournelle clearly has protagonists, love interests, and bad guys who are very similar to the ones I've seen in King's novels.

[Pride male]

Path of blood, Mzilikazi by Peter Becker.

[Bluey]

Three sips of gin by Timothy Bax.

Interesting look into the Rhodesian border wars from someone who ended up in the Selous scouts. Well worth the read.

[ozymdk]

The Languages of Pao by Jack Vance

Awesome book and very relevant with one of its topics being culture clashes.