Some of the bike tours are outdated for certain

There were 2 forks in the road at the end there.

Fork 1) The people running the institute were being totally evil. But it was to save the world. Oh what a moral conundrum!

King's choice : oh wait no, they were actually wrong about that. They were just being dumb. As explained by the genius. So all the bad stuff they did was for nothing good and the institute was just evil.

Fork 2) The psychic kids mindmelded into a magic hivemind deity. Wow. This is certainly something amazing and new in the world .

King's choice. : oh wait no, that whole thing immediately faded away after the climax.

Why? Maybe he was hoping for a tv series, which requires no big changes and moral simplicity

This one is from the First Ballentine Edition of Isaac Asimovs “The Robots of Dawn”.

I’ve got probably a dozen or so I’ve saved over the last few years of reading.

I would love to share more and others I come across if there’s interest.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.blahaj.zone/post/155940

...than having your first 5 star review?😱

Like the two Naomis [Wolf and Klein], conservatives and progressives become warped mirrors of one another. The progressive campaign for bodily autonomy is co-opted to be the foundation of the anti-vax movement. This is the mirror world, where concerns about real children – in border detention, or living in poverty in America – are reflected back as warped fever-swamp hallucinations about kids in imaginary pizza restaurant basements and Hollywood blood sacrifice rituals. The mirror world replaces RBG with Amy Coney-Barrett and calls it a victory for women. The mirror world defends workers by stoking xenophobic fears about immigrants.

But progressives let it happen. … Progressives cede suspicion of large corporations to conservatives, defending giant, exploitative, monopolistic corporations so long as they arouse conservative ire with some performative DEI key-jingling. Progressives defend the CIA and FBI when they're wrongfooting Trump, and voting machine vendors when they're turned into props for the Big Lie.

This thoughtful, vigorous prose and argumentation deserves its own special callout here: Klein has produced a first-rate literary work just as much as this is a superb philosophical and political tome. In this moment where the mirror world is exploding and the real world is contracting, this is an essential read.

ISBN 9780374610326 (don't buy from Amazon or its subsidiaries)

I created Daybook to recommend one interesting book every day

Book categories cover everything: from classics, startups, philosophy, biographies, science fiction, history, design, and more.

Each rec links straight into BookWyrm, so if you're new, it's a dead-simple way to start tracking, reviewing books on the fediverse!

visit Daybook

Crossposted from https://lemmy.world/post/30928435

In middle school I read The Three Musketeers and enjoyed it overall. Later in high school a movie adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo was released and I enjoyed it enough to read the book. I feel like I lucked out in picking up the Robin Buss translation. It was a recent translation based on the most complete original texts he could find. He explained how the first anonymous English translations would sometimes edit the story to fit English sensibilities of the era or simply not be very good at translation. The book is full of endnotes explaining things, like references that would’ve been obvious to contemporary readers but are largely lost to anglophones over a century later, or things that simply don’t translate well, like an important scene where a character uses the formal vous tense instead of the informal/familiar tu tense but this distinction doesn’t exist in modern English. It made me want to re-read The Three Musketeers in a translation by Buss, but the only other Dumas work he translated before his death at the age of 67 in 2006 was The Black Tulip.

Have you read Buss’s translation of The Count of Monte Cristo? Have you found a similar translation you liked for The Three Musketeers? Searching online the most helpful listings I’ve found are a couple old Reddit threads where it seems like the two recommendations are those by Richard Pevear or Lawrence Ellsworth.

A total banger. The first two chapters are a bit basic but then she starts spitting hard facts.

Democracy is dying because we are clinging to a dangerous and outdated myth: talking about politics can change people's minds. It doesn't.

This provocative debut from a bold new voice combines a fascinating range of research to show us the psychological and sociological factors that really shape our politics.

Drawing from ancient philosophy to modern neuroscience and social science, Dr Sarah Stein Lubrano reveals the surprising truth about how people think and behave politically. From friendship to community organizing and social infrastructure, she explores the actions that actually do change minds.

In a world where politics keeps getting more irrational, dishonest, violent and chaotic, it's getting much harder to reach people with words alone. So people who really care about democracy must ask: how can we stop arguing and do the deep work to build stronger foundations for political life, and a better world for us all?

“The Bellmaker” by Brian Jacques is part of his Redwall series, which kinda raised me. It’s amazing how much of this I remember.

Image created by ChatGPT

A life time ago I lost a friend to Objectivist philosophy. Not wanting to lose said friend, I read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged to try and figure out why he was acting like an asshole all of a sudden.

I took a couple points of psychic damage in the process, but at least I can stand my own when offering counter arguments against their edgy philosophies.

What are some other works that it would be handy to be knowledgeable of the next time a philosophical edge lord tries to quote me into a corner?

I'm looking to be more well informed in conversation.

The book switches between being a personal tale of growing through being neurodivergent in a world built around being "normal", how "normal" was created, and how normal doesn't even exist. It's a really good read

As a huge BTTF fan, I'm really excited to read this! I just added it to The StoryGraph, and you can shelve it for your TBR here: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/c02ec440-d907-4c9d-b13c-6bc967207a0e

Hello!

May I please have some book recommendations on the Russian Monarchy from the causation and the formation of the Russia Monarchy to the rise of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Thank you in advance!