Books

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19239162

The 60,000 books in the Joanine Library are all hundreds of years old. Keeping texts readable for that long, safe from mold and moisture and nibbling bugs, requires dedication. The library’s original architects designed 6-foot (1.8 meters) stone walls to keep out the elements. Employees dust all day, every day.

And then there are the bats. For centuries, small colonies of these helpful creatures have lent their considerable pest control expertise to the library. In the daytime—as scholars lean over historic works and visitors admire the architecture—the bats roost quietly behind the two-story bookshelves. At night, they swoop around the darkened building, eating the beetles and moths that would otherwise do a number on all that old paper and binding glue.

The library dates the bats’ entry to the late 18th century. That’s when records indicate the purchase of large leather sheets from Russia, presumably to protect the hall’s desks and tables from the nightly rain of guano. Employees use the same system today, while the books themselves are behind wire mesh, says the library’s deputy director, António Eugénio Maia do Amaral. (The bats’ tendency to pee next to a portrait of the library’s namesake, King John V, is harder to address.)

TL;DR: Got any of them "banned" book recommendations for kids? We have a 2 1/2yr old and a 6 yr old who love book time

So a recent popular post in politics was about a book that stirred up controversy - My Shadow is Purple, which is the second book in a series (Here's the first).

Local library doesn't have them unfortunately, so I'll be putting in a request (then checking out a local store).

It made me wonder about some other great books out there that more conservative areas might not have. My township is pretty progressive (, but not large, so the school library is only OK. The county library is literally a few blocks away, so no town library. And while amazing as a library, the in-county magas have made the library slow down on some kinds of books. Its ridiculous, but one problem at a time.

So I'm hoping to get some kids books they might not otherwise see, like the My Shadow is Pink/Purple books mentioned, but I don't know what's out there.

Anyone have some favorites to share for the young kids? Looking forward to any ideas!

The term "neoliberalism" gets thrown a lot in intellectual and political discourse, yet with seldom clarity to what it entails. Some may loosely relate it to the de-politicisation of the economy, the weakening of the State in favor of private corporations, or even the revival of laissez-faire capitalism. While one cand find some truth in those assumptions, they inevitably stray from the ideology as conceived by the neoliberal intellectuals of the past century.

Besides narrating the marriage of neoliberalism and human rights (which we will cover later), this book sheds a light on what actually neoliberalism stood for. Whyte contends that what the neoliberals envisaged through their numerous gatherings following the second world war, was a new, global economic order premised on what they have termed the “morals of the market.”

[T]he ‘morals of the market’ were a set of individualistic, commercial values that prioritised the pursuit of self-interest above the development of common purposes. A market society required a moral framework that sanctioned wealth accumulation and inequality, promoted individual and familial responsibility, and fostered submission to the impersonal results of the market process at the expense of the deliberate pursuit of collectively formulated ends. It also required that moral obligations are limited to the requirement that we refrain from harming others, and do not require positive obligations to others. (Intro.)

Far from the early liberal concept of the "invisible hand" or the criticisms by opponents of “amoral economics,” what the neoliberals proposed was state interference for the sake of maintaining individualistic freedom in the market. Neoliberalism is what it is: it is not a return to the old fin de siècle liberal economy, but a solution to the problems that the latter faced.

In developing their moral order, neoliberal intellectuals played with notions of "civilisation" and "anti-totalitarianism." The Mont Pèlerin Society of 1947 met in the context of two fatidical events: the decolonisation movement in the Third World, and the drafting of an international human rights charter. The neoliberal discourse evolved in relation to colonialism and human rights throughout the decades. For instance, while neoliberal intellectuals were critical of the British administration of the colonies for obstructing the competitive market, they saw the decolonial movements as a turn towards "communist totalitarianism" which must be stopped in order to secure global free trade and the extraction of natural resources, in other words "neocolonialism".

Similarly, the intellectuals at Mont Pèlerin Society invoked many critical remarks regarding the UDHR. In particular, they sought to undermine the "superfluous" rights and prerogatives which it included, namely social, economic and cultural rights that, in the eyes of MPS, was a stepping stone for totalitarianism: welfare policies lead to socialism, socialism to communism and finally towards totalitarianism. Their criticism for human rights accrued in degree with the drafting of the human rights covenants which accentuated social and economic rights. However, the neoliberal criticism was not directed towards human rights per se, but the scope of said human rights. These intellectuals adopted a Lockean conception of human rights that limited itself to the protection of individualistic freedom and private property.

The theoretical doctrines of the neoliberals contended with the real-life events in an intriguing manner. Neoliberals supported several undemocratic regimes, namely in Pinochet's Chile where they enacted economic reforms and even defended the political crackdown of the Pinichet regime. This weird stance did not invalidate their defense of human rights and freedom:

Friedman’s argument in Chile was not that political freedom and economic freedom were ‘entirely unrelated’, as Letelier and Klein both argue.40 Rather, he argued that they were intimately related: property rights are the essential foundation of all other human rights, he contended, and a free market is necessary for realising the ‘equal right to freedom’. (Ch. 4)

In addition, the showdown between the neoliberals and human rights NGOs' investigating Pinochet's violations wa sless radical than what it seemed. NGOs such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Liberté Sans Frontières originated from a similar human rights discourse to that of the neoliberals, which limited the scope of human rights that are worth protecting.

Their [humanitarian NGOs] special contribution was to pioneer a distinctly neoliberal human rights discourse, for which a competitive market order accompanied by a liberal institutional structure was truly the last utopia. (Ch.5)

Whyte's critique of human rights and neoliberalism is very essential in this day and age, especially in a Third World inflitrated by humanitarian NGOs whose agenda serves the interests of global capital and reproduces the injustices of the past century's colonialism and coercive interventions in the affairs of postcolonial polities. Whyte's reference to postcolonial intellectuals such as Fanon and Nkrumah is also very much cherished.

The ending felt somber in the realization that, there is really nothing we can do to save this planet. We're living on borrowed time. The best we can do is help the next apex species realize the mistakes we've made so that they don't repeat them. But maybe I'm just over here dooming. What are your thoughts?

I haven’t read it yet. Just found this in our neighborhood little library 📚

i stumbled upon an offer of the kl noir series from malaysia > i remembered that it was brooklyn-based akashic books who had started the noir series

and it was also akashic who cooperated with peepal tree from uk > by now, their peekash collabo has already turned into a publisher of its own: https://www.peekashpress.com/

I've recently gotten into reading. I realised how much I love fiction, and a couple of tropes. So I'm here asking maybe some of you know any books that have them.

I love it when the story focuses more on world building rather than character. The theory crafting I can do in my head, or just before I sleep, is priceless.

Here I'll contradict myself by saying a character development related point, but the more important one. I'd like to read more works that show some mysterious big-bad first as a rivalry, later as a friend. They soften up with the MC and we they become friends or allies or whatever. We get to see a BBEG of sorts's friendly and weak side. I get that it's a bit childish, but I lost my mind of how cool of a character they made the first time I read it. Now, it was in a manga, so I'd love to read an example that made this best or first.

Thank you in advance, even if you just name some genres or authors.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5372070

Anyone else keeping up with the anti-library and book-banning movements?

Mods, please delete this if it's not allowed.

Hi everyone! I'm a very avid reader and would love to add more reading people to The StoryGraph. The more friends, the more books I may want to read I'll see!

Feel free to add me: https://app.thestorygraph.com/profile/amarnareads

So my main language is Greek and I read english and greek books. Depending on the book/author I may have 2-5 words per page that I may not understand (or at least I want to understand them better). Thus, many times after I finish a page, I use aard2 and either search the word in the english-to-english dictionary or (rarer) in the greek wiktionary for a translation. (For context, I'm reading ~mainly fantasy, sci-fi or dystopian books of the 20th and 21th century and currently I'm on "Croocked kingdom". I haven't dared to try reading a classic book in english.)

The issue is that this effectively slows me down by an extra ~50% time per page and I'm not even very sure that those words are remembered. I could simply keep reading without searching the words up and just use the context to get a vague sense of their meaning (or simply ignore them as they ~usually aren't necessary to the plot), but I think I'd miss on the whole experience by doing this and it doesn't address the underlying issue (being that I don't know english extremely well even if I have C2 and scored high on vocabulary), which will perpetuate the problem. I'd like to note that I have made searching words almost as efficient as it gets by using downloaded dictionaries, so I don't think I can reduce the time I spend looking up words by anything more, at least on paper books.

I'd like to ask anyone who searches up words like me:

Did you eventually reach a point where you learnt enough words this way, that it wasn't that much necessary to use dictionaries anymore? (I'd be kinda satisfied if I could reduce the frequnecy of unknown words to 1 per two pages or something.)

I've recently started a job driving a shuttle van across the city for the general public. I've got a wide amount of leeway, but the audiobooks I've been listening to have been... not hitting right. I started with "The Name of the Wind" which was extremely well reviewed. I liked it a lot for the most part, and for the most part so did my passengers, but at one point it started talking about how much the main character would like to see one of the young woman characters naked and would pay for that privilege. In the context of the story it sort-of made sense, but out of context it was completely gross and I was beyond embarrassed. The next day I tried "Consider Phlebas" (again well reviewed) which was a completely different thing, but almost immediately it started in with a vivid description the mc being drowned in sewage- It did not hit right, despite the interesting developments that I would ordinarily probably enjoy for just myself.

I'm looking for suggestions of completely SFW audiobooks I could listen to (through audible, alas) with random passengers of all walks of life coming and going without context. I cannot stress strongly enough that they should be quite literally safe for work. I don't mind skirting a bit of controversy or challenging preconceptions or introducing new or unusual perspectives (In fact I kind of relish the idea of being somewhat progressive and/or boundary-pushing, though I'd like to start small after these initial embarrassments), but it cant be crude, or sexual, or violent.

Thanks for your attention, please chime in with your suggestions.

Edit: Oh jeez wow this got more traction than I expected. I appreciate everyone's suggestions! I'll be trawling through them in the coming weeks and maybe even post my experience with some of them, "shuttle van reviews" or some such. Thanks!

Hello, I'm trying to find a book that I read a long time ago about a man who turned invisible because cosmic radiation hit his electric blanket while he was asleep. I've tried googling and chat GPT and neither of them turned up any results. Does this book sound familiar to anyone?

Hello everyone!

I'm looking for two book recommendations:

1. an "entry" book into SciFi. Something that is easy readable. I prefer sth. "positive" or utopian.
2. A similar book like "48 rules of power" but without the Machiavellian touch and the religious touch of "How to win Friends and Influence People". Maybe there is something more "universal" available on how to connect to people on a respectful level.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5141618

Check it out.

Last chapter.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5140656

"the more she ate the more she shat"

Classic GRRM.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5136444

Moar Selmy.

Moar "mummer's farce."

I'm not sure how useful this'll be to people, but on the off-chance that like me, you like to track your pages read daily (into something like Storygraph or Goodreads) and you happen to have an ereader, I've created a spreadsheet that may be useful.

Essentially I found that tracking pages when you're reading a book on an ereader is a little tricky because the number of pages will differ depending on the size of your device and the font size. You can use percentage instead, but:

1. My Kobo seems to calculate percentage based on number of words rather than pages
2. Sometimes with really large books, you can read a ton of pages and the percentage won't have changed

So I created a spreadsheet that can work out the equivalent page count on Storygraph (although this can work for any book tracking site).

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ehIw4dE_66yU0Km98i4fBtqMqWXvlN1zTSpLSgR4OCA/edit?usp=drivesdk

I think you should be able to save a copy of the spreadsheet from that link.

I've also added in padding. So for example if the actual text of the book starts on page 6, enter 6 in the padding start field. And then the final page number of the text in padding end. This prevents inflation of number of pages read at the start and end of your tracking (because of all the copywrite info, credits etc.)

Like I say, this probably would only be useful to a select few, but thought I'd share it just in case :)

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/15660272

I would like to recommend a book. It's a short read, but food for thought.

I heard a lot of praise for Bulgakov's oeuvre in the past, so I decided to give it a go.

I have read Russian literature in the past by recommendation of family and friends who always showed much interest in it; be it Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov or Pushkin.

But recently I noticed that knowledge of Russian literature virtually stops at the onset of the revolution. When it comes to the Soviet era, there is a sort of intentional silence regarding the literature of that time, at least in the West and its colonized peripheries. Anecdotally, I once had a conversation with my mother during which she claimed that the Soviet period was a dark time to be living in Russia. When I asked her what's the basis of her statement, she said this is based on the novels she read, citing Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. The awkward smile on her face after telling her that these authors died decades before the revolution was priceless; bless her heart, but I am digressing.

When a few exceptions of Soviet literature emerge out of the iron curtain, it turns out to be some anticommunist rambling, just like Bulgakov's Master and Margarita.

Considering the critical acclaim, it feels wrong to say that I found it to be average. Was I supposed to cheer for the devil and his retinue as they terrorize Moscow? Maybe it's my ideological orientation which prevents me from fully engaging with the novel, and I'm alright with that. Though I did enjoy the chapters narrating Pontius Pilate's encounter with Yeshua Ha-Nozri.

Anyhow, was Soviet literature ever popular? Did it die out after the collapse of the union? Or has it always been curtailed in the West?