• Zahille7@lemmy.world
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      When I was in elementary school I actually tried to just read the bible. I didn’t get very far through Genesis before I gave up.

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        You didn’t even make it to the part where a man of god uses nature magic to summon bears to kill 42 children, or where a guy is mad that a father gives him the wrong daughter as property that he combines genocide with animal abuse!

        • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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          For me, nothing tops the guy whose neighbors want to rape the angel that came to visit him, so he offers the crowd his daughters to rape instead.

          • DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca
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            It’s from Second Kings 2:23-25, which is part of the Torah and the official 66 books of the bible. Though some (most) translations say that the curse is in the name of the lord/god.

            From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys. And he went on to Mount Carmel and from there returned to Samaria.

            • Dave.@aussie.zone
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              some boys

              two bears

              mauled forty-two of them

              Just how many boys in totality are we talking about here? And did the bears have to stop and take a break?

              And he went on to Mount Carmel and…

              "And then he went about his day, completely disregarding the two exhausted bears and the 42 mauled boys that were part of a sizable mob that he casually called a curse down upon’

    • redballooon@lemm.ee
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      I don’t even need to buy them. They just pile up unread. One of them has nice art in it.

      • alokir@lemmy.world
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        I don’t even need to buy them. They just pile up unread

        How? I’ve read this many times, but I never understood it. Do people just hand them out on the street or is it customary to give bibles as a gift?

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          When I was in college, once or twice a year there were people from some religious group who would come and stand at the most busy intersections for foot traffic and literally hand them out on the street, yes. They were quite pushy about it

            • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.ml
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              Look, the people who hand out Bibles are usually from a specific sect of Christianity.

              I get it, they’re just as shitty as most Christians, in most ways, but…

              The reason they give the Bibles away is because they figure that knowledge is power and they don’t want to force people to have to spend money they don’t have to be able to read the Bible.

              I hate to say it, but I agree with their attitudes regarding freedom and access to information. They may not be distributing information I care for, but I can’t fault the attitude. Information and access to it shouldn’t be limited, because knowledge is power.

              Right attitude, wrong values otherwise.

              • richieadler@lemmy.myserv.one
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                The reason they give the Bibles away is because they figure that knowledge is power and they don’t want to force people to have to spend money they don’t have to be able to read the Bible.

                I want to choose when (and if) I read bullshit, thank you very much.

                • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.ml
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                  I mean they are giving them away freely and not forcing the book on people. They accept “no” as an answer if you don’t want a copy. You are really free to ignore them.

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              I have pretty bad social and general anxiety, it is extremely difficult for me to be pushy with anyone, at least in person. At the time I think I mostly avoided them or lied and told them I already had a copy at home, which seemed to placate them.

              In any case, I think all they really achieved was wasting a lot of paper and ink, because the trash cans around campus and especially the outdoor ones near those intersections were absolutely filled with bibles by the end of the day whenever those people came around. Once or twice I saw some student accept one and then two steps later toss it in a bin that was right next to the guys handing them out.

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        I inherited a ton of books from my father, who was a minister & a Jungian psychologist. Lots of old interesting bibles, in a handful of languages. (Plus a Koran, and some Crowley, and of shelf full of Trotsky… ha ha. Lotta books.)

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        I was going to contradict you, that bookstores always carry bibles…but then I realized the memory I was thinking of was from the 90s.

        I’d say this is just a good excuse for me to go to the bookstore and check…but they’ve all become so small and sad that I kind of don’t want to. I just get depressed.

        I know ebooks and audiobooks have massively taken off so people are reading/listening still…I just miss my childhood refuge being stuffed chock-full of treasures.

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    Anything by Ayn Rand. She’s a terrible author and most people are more interested in showing that they could have read The Fountainhead than actually reading that unfun, meandering garbage.

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      I read The Fountainhead in a high school English class and then got super into Ayn Rand and read Atlas Shrugged and some of her other stuff on my own. What actually happened was that I was a child in the Florida Public School System and so 1) didn’t understand what capitalism was, 2) couldn’t recognize terrible writing, and 3) was enjoying how proud my dad was for once.

      Now I’m in my 30s and I can’t bring myself to throw away books at all, but also refuse to give them away and put them back out into the world for other dumbasses and/or impressionable children to find. They live on a bookshelf in my back room strategically positioned so that even if someone did go into that room they’d have to dig through a bunch of French textbooks and ancient American Girl books to find them.

      If anyone would like some garbage propaganda advocating for a society of psychopaths written in the style of your drunk uncle’s auto-transcribed voice memos, hit me up.

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      There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

      -John Rogers

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      I tried to read the Fountainhead twice when I was a teenager and I never got more than a third of the way. It felt like watching an old person try to remember their shopping list

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      Yeah. My grandpa made me read Atlas Shrugged when I was in HS and it was so dumb it made me a communist. I did like the scene with the fast train on the green rails. Literally the only scene in the whole book with imagery.

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      Not in my experience. 100% of people I know that have it, also have read it. We buy that because we’re Tolkien nerds. People who don’t want to read it don’t buy it. Also it’s not at all like yellow pages for looking stuff up, it’s more like the Bible I guess, a collection of mythological tales of old.

      I guess there are some people that have inherited it, or just bought it for collecting, but I don’t think this is the main case.

      It might be different for The History of Middle Earth, it’s huge and requires a lot of time, and it’s more yellow pagey as far as I understand. I have them but have not read much of it yet. (Maybe you meant these?)

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        I rarely check people’s bookshelves but my experience has also been that people either don’t even know what it’s really about or they absolutely love it.

        But I guess it’s possible that some people buy it after reading LotR expecting more of the same and then give up after reading the first few pages of the Ainulindalë.

      • Zahille7@lemmy.world
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        I sought that shit out and read every word. I gobbled that shit up. “The Middle Earth Bible” is 100% an accurate description of it.

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        There is not much statistical evidence for my statement. Mostly from the people I know (though one actually read it, she is a true nerd) and myself (tried it but am probably not as much a middle earth fan as I thought)

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        As someone who has read the Silmarillion several times, any attempt at reading The History of Middle Earth peters out quite quickly.

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      It is literally easier to read the KJV of the Bible than the Silmarillon.

      • davidgro@lemmy.world
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        Strong disagree. I’ve read The Silmarillion. Sure I don’t remember much of it now, but at the time it was interesting and entertaining to me. It’s also not that huge a book, on the same order as one or two of the main LoTR books. If the KJV were in the same (normal) font size+width and paper thickness it would be Gigantic.

      • lud@lemm.ee
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        Alright, name 6 characters with a name starting with fin

        !/s!<

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    Atlas Shrugged.

    It’s a massive paperback and looks impressive on a bookshelf but it’s a dull narrative. I got about 200 pages in and was like fuck all these people and these stupid trains.

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      That was legit one of the few books I read halfway through then put down in disgust at how banal, ridiculous, and repetitive it was. The first part was okish because there’s something of a mystery, but the “revelation” that all the industrialists moved to a sort of entrepreneur’s shangri-la and that life without government created this perfect utopian society, it was just such a stupid thing and I was so tired of all the dead horse beating. Anybody who says they like this book is either lying or has mental problems.

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        When the completed manuscript exceeded 600,000 words, Cerf asked Rand to make cuts, but backed off when she compared the idea to cutting the Bible.

        Wow, I didn’t know this author, and it seems I wasn’t missing much.

        • paddirn@lemmy.world
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          Her writing is simplistic, but conservatives and libertarians have pushed her as an “intellectual” because it gives them a well-known writer that supports their trash values. She was strongly against the welfare state and altruism, yet she herself received social security, so she was a bit of a hypocrite as well.

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            She was also an unabashed atheist, which is why she was able to promote the idea of selfishness being good.

            What’s funny is it’s the mostly Christian right-wing which has embraced her.

            I guess they’re okay with atheism as long as its playing for the right “team.”

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              I mean, they’ve elevated Trump as their God-Emperor and he’s very likely an atheist, had multiple affairs, and paid women to get abortions, but whatever, none of that matters when you’ve been conditioned all your life to believe impossible things. Next to Jesus walking on water and two of every animal fitting on a boat, the rest of it is child’s play.

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              She was also an unabashed atheist, which is why she was able to promote the idea of selfishness being good.

              What the hell is this non-sequitur?

              • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.ml
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                Nearly every religion preaches to be giving and kind to those in need. It’s absolutely not a non-sequitor to admit that a large number of atheists don’t believe there is any guiding morality to the universe and that we have to come to our own conclusions about morals and ethics. Moral relativism is a generally accepted thing among many atheists. This does not mean all atheists are selfish, I would classify most as Humanists. Rand was mostly an outlier.

                She was able to promote the idea that selfishness could be good because she didn’t ascribe to any religion that defined that as a sin.

                • richieadler@lemmy.myserv.one
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                  She was able to promote the idea that selfishness could be good because she didn’t ascribe to any religion that defined that as a sin.

                  So basically she profited from existing bullshit to promote her own brand of bullshit. That’s even worse.

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                  I’m not an atheist and even to me, that’s a really transparent dig at people who believe something you disagree with. You don’t need religion to be altruistic as you are implying.

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          She wrote anotehr novel, ‘The Fountainhead,’ with all the same ideas but much easier read. I finished ‘The Fountainhead,’ but it was mostly WTF comes next kind of book. There’s an old B+W movie that sums up her ideas pretty well.

    • TxTechnician@lemmy.ml
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      Read the whole thing. It’s OK.

      The worst part of the book is that stupid chapter in the last third. Which summarizes the previous 2/3.

      • Evilsandwichman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        You joke but I read the dictionary as a kid (and not for the naughty words); helped me expand my vocabulary and gave me knowledge of stuff I wouldn’t have known about at that age.

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          Hey, I did that as a kid too! My school was a glorified daycare, it was often the only reading material available, and it was somewhat more interesting than staring at the clock all day.

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      I think kids might. I remember reading it front to back when I was first really getting into literacy, hoping to get adults’ seemingly godlike intuition for spelling words. Still like to open it up from time to time to peruse a letter

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        hoping to get adults’ seemingly godlike intuition for spelling words.

        Dit you manege to sucseed dough?

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          Haha kind of, but I still need to have little games for some words, like how the word “parallel” has two parallel “ll” next to eachother.

          I’m almost certain my spelling has got worse since autocorrect/suggest became a fixture of my daily life.

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      You can really tell that people who reference that thing have never read it. Honestly if you have a legitimate criticism of Western society to draw from a dystopian novel there’s probably better choices. The totalitarianism in 1984 is in no way subtle or hidden from anyone, that’s a big part of the point of it.

      Of course, to reference something relevant you have to have read things other than rage clickbait.

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        I think it didn’t need to be subtle for it to be realistic. You can see in certain communities just how unsubtle their hatred and stupidity is.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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          Yeah, exactly. Orwell was trying to paint a picture of how willingly people would accept gross oppression. You can see him talk about it in some of his letters IIRC.

          In the West way more than just your TV watches you, but it’s done in a very invisible way and for now you won’t even hear back unless you join ISIS or something. Cynical forces manipulate the political process, but it’s out in the open except for being just boring and complicated enough to avoid too much publicity. None of this is very overtly oppressive.

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      My Godfather tried to read that to me in it’s entirety when I was 4 lol.

      • NaN@lemmy.sdf.org
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        I think I learned the naming stuff while reading Metro 2033, or maybe it inspired me to look it up. Much easier read than Tolstoy.

      • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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        It’s actually not bad at all, especially if you’re into military history like I am. It’s basically just standard soap opera stuff interspersed with treatises on what war is really like. The worst part is that interminably long section about the fucking freemasons, thrown in for no apparent reason.

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        Read Anna Karenina you won’t regret it. I would argue it’s the best love story ever written.

    • the_kid [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      reading the bible is a horrible experience. there’s paragraphs where the same story is being told in two different ways, things are repeated all the time. there’s entire chapters that just go “x is the son of y is the son of z is the son of a who’s the son of b and the son of c”.

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        there’s entire chapters that just go “x is the son of y is the son of z is the son of a who’s the son of b and the son of c”.

        I can’t speak to how relevant this is to history in most parts of the world, but interestingly in places like ancient Ireland, genealogy was an important part of identity. Among the questions a stranger would be asked would be who his father is, what his clan is and what his profession is. Obviously today we value different aspects of identity, but historically at least in some places (and at the point I’m mentioning in history, Ireland was Christian) bloodline was part of how people knew you; it’s a fascinating look into historical mindsets.

        • Starshader@lemmy.ml
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          Yeah except that it’s a work of fiction. Even that part is just made up to gives some kind of authority to a character.

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        Sometimes yeah it’s frustrating reading it because some parts assume cultural familiarity with very ancient names or places. I think I remember in the book of Genesis an ancient military leader is named and it’s said he did some kind of trick to capture a town, but it doesn’t explain what he did or why.

        Storytelling has gone through a lot of development over the centuries

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        My partner bought a study Bible for academic use a few months ago, and our roommate bought herself one (for actual worship use) a couple weeks ago?

    • Gsus4@feddit.nl
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      Heya fellow raccoon, raccoon Bible is much better than the one compiled by Roman bishops in 325AD in Nicea e.g. “let there be trash for all” and “give to racoons what belongs to the raccoons” :D

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    Capital, clearly. Not a single anti communist has ever read it because they never once refute a single talking point from the actual book. But every anti communist acts like they totally understand what’s in the book and some go so far as to lie about having read it. And then you ask them what it says or why they’re anti communist and they just make shit up or parrot 1950s Nazi propaganda and pretend like that’s what’s in Capital or what communism is about.

    It annoyed me the first few times it happened to me but now it just makes me laugh. Having a book on your shelf or knowing the title of it is not the same thing as reading it or understanding it

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      I, Dagoth Ur, believe that the entirety of his theory rests upon a grievous error. He, in his folly, regarded labor as the solitary font of worth and, in his ignorance, failed to grasp that capitalism thrives not solely by the exploitation of laborers but also through the ceaseless march of technological advancement. He dared to belittle the other wellsprings of wealth: innovation, entrepreneurial spirit, and the unyielding progress of technology, all of which lie at the very core of his theory.

      Curiously, passages within “Capital” and the “Communist Manifesto” speak of the global ascendancy of capitalism, prophesying the vanishing of all things traditional and the dissolution of feudal remnants. Therefore, I, Dagoth Ur, put forth the audacious proposition that we may indeed regard Karl Marx as the inaugural, true theorist of globalization.

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        not solely by the exploitation of laborers but also through the ceaseless march of technological advancement

        interesting where does this technical advancement come from?

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        Hey look someone who didn’t read Capital talking about Capital.

        Marx definitely wrote literally chapters about industrialization

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        Marx talks about most of what you just mentioned in the first chapter of Capital. Socially productive labor transforming nature is the source of value in any society. He also mentions rarity as a source of value, like I remember him specifically mentioning pearls as an example a few times.

        He included machinery and technology as what he called “constant capital,” and the labor is the variable capital. To say Marx didn’t consider technology would suggest he was unaware of what a factory was and that he didn’t observe the industrial revolution as it was happening. He was born in 1818. He watched Germany in his childhood go from empty fields full of peasants to factories, railroads, and telegraph lines in his adulthood. You know what made that technology possible? Labor? And who operates that technology? Laborers. This is all cooked into his work.

        I’d also like to point you over to the Grundrisse, the chapter called Fragment on Machines, where Marx even speculates on if machinery were all fully automated, saying laborers could move aside from production and just become just “watchmen.” This part is good:

        “Capital itself is the moving contradiction, in that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as the sole measure and source of wealth […] On the one side […] it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature […] to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it […] On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created”

        He’s saying capitalism would have a hard tike reducing labor time to zero through technological advancement, since it would defeat the concept of value itself. In simple terms, how would you even price anything if there was no labor cost involved? How would a capitalist sell their product or assign value to it? Who would they sell it to?

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      Capital, clearly. Not a single anti communist has ever read it because they never once refute a single talking point from the actual book

      Almost no one has actually read capital it’s like the Bible hugely influential but almost no one is willing to actually read the thing

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    Without a shadow of a doubt the Bible.

    No, reading the Gospels, Paul’s letters, Revelations, Genesis, Exodus, and selected Psalms doesn’t count as reading the Bible. Do you count reading 10 chapters of a 60+ chapter book as reading the book? Of course not.

    • optissima@possumpat.io
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      1 year ago

      I was raised in a Christian household, and I was told that when I turned 12 I could be baptized. I looked forward to, and on the summer I was 10, I decided I wanted to be ready. I sat down and read the bible, front to back. I got to the end, and I paused: this was nothing like what they were telling me! I decided to read it again through, certainly I missed something? At the end, I decided to work through again, one more time, and then I was no longer Christian, at least not like these other ones. Now I’m not at all, but I love being able to source the bible more accurately than my Christian family members.

    • Omegamint [comrade/them, doe/deer]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I grew up in an evangelical house and I constantly get to wield the line: “I guess I took the wrong lessons” as my comeback to literally any political dispute and it is wonderful having the ability to actually quote the Bible when arguing with my child relatives

  • seth@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I wouldn’t say most people buy them, but Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. For me, they’re unreadable. Or, I should say I actually read them during a time when I was reading classics that everyone seemed to claim were great, but I didn’t know anyone who had actually read them. At the time I was doing it just to be able to say I did. A dumb reason.

    I got nothing thoughtful out of either of them. There were some individual sentences and paragraphs that were fun to read just because of the alliteration and poetic flow, but they made no sense. A book written for others to read shouldn’t need external commentaries or a knowledge of the author’s life and mental state to understand.

    Now if someone says they’ve read Joyce and not for a literature degree, I lose a bit of respect for them, as I did for myself, and as other people should for me. 0/10, not worth, would not buy again, would not read again

    • qdJzXuisAndVQb2@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Oh phew. I studied English Lit at university and had to wade through bits of both. I used to feel like I was some sort of uncultured swine for not “getting” them. But honestly, I just don’t think they work as novels. As a piece of art, I guess, sure. Fine and modern art can look like nonsense without context, but often make sense when seen as part of a conversation with other artists and movements. If taken like that, fine, you do you, Joycey-boy, and write incomprehensibly. I’ll be over here with my Iain Banks and Ned Beauman, enjoying them.