Ya it's such a great book. It really makes you doubt your understanding of reality by the end.
What's everyone reading?
- Thread starter cyfan964
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I started Crime and Punishment last night on Audible. Will Poulter is the voice actor and he's great so far but it's funny cause he's the kid from We are the Millers.
I read The Brothers Karamazov 20 years ago and already in the first chapter I'm remembering why Dostoevsky is my favorite writer.
I read The Brothers Karamazov 20 years ago and already in the first chapter I'm remembering why Dostoevsky is my favorite writer.
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If you time the authors pateron right you can read the next book already. Finished parade of horribles a couple weeks back
Never read Animal Farm, but love Watership Down!
Cyclonepride
Thought Police
Animal Farm is excellent and is an easy read too. Watership Down is just brilliant. Read that and Lord of the Rings when I was in grade school and have struggled to find books that measured up ever since.
I liked The Fellowship but Tolkien gets long winded for me at times. Have you read Dostoevsky? He's my fav.
Cyclonepride
Thought Police
I love Tolkien, but I will say I skip through some of the song/poems at times. I have Brothers Karamazov and would like to read Crime and Punishment, but I haven't started either.
Ooh, buddy. Don't let the hardcores hear you say that.
I’ve read Evans, but his books seem to have disappeared from my library.
In the same vein, I recommend Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’, written and published in 1953 during the McCarthy era, which ended in 1954 with McCarthy’s censure. I think these are correlated.
Ya I read Slaughter House 5 and it's usually paired with Farenheit 451 on suggestions. I'll get there one day.
If you want to know about Germany, you can do a lot worse that Evans. Sucks you’re missing some of his work.
Fahrenheit 451 is pretty good. From what I remember, it’s really dark. I mean…it’s dystopian, so surely meant to be, but it reads dark. Not sure how else to explain it.
Or... How much of Pearl Harbor was just FDR trying to provoke an incident with either Japan or Germany to allow him to bring the United States into the war? (I'm not suggesting Pearl Harbor was an inside job. I'm saying he followed aggressive policies in both the Atlantic and Pacific creating a fertile environment where something was bound to happen sooner or later with either Germany or Japan.)
The main point of my earlier post was to suggest if you want to understand what and why Japan was doing what it was doing, dig into its wars of imperial expansion.
Mostly short duration land grabs followed up by a negotiated peace. They misread FDR by thinking he would follow the same pattern that China and Russia followed. The attack on Pearl Harbor was the initial blow to give Japan the time and space to grab the British, French, and American colonies in the Western Pacific. They needed their raw resources for their main wars with China and Russia and not be so reliant on the United States.
For Japan, WWI was just another one of those wars. For Europe it was a war to end all wars that marked the beginning of the end of European Imperialism.
I don't have any specific recommendations for books to read. But I believe you will find what you are looking for if you approach the topic that way.
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It did get rid of a few of Europe's absolute monarchs and kept the constitutional monarchs that shared power.
The question I always found interesting about WWI, the interwar years, WWII, and post war years is "Why did WWI, which was called the war to end all wars at the time set the table for WWII just twenty years later while WWII has resulted in eighty years of relative peace among European countries?"
What did we get right after WWII that we got wrong after WWI?
The two events are close enough that you can compare and account for most of the social, economic, technology, and political differences and similarities.
I think there is an important lesson somewhere in there humanity needs to learn.
I feel like I've seen someone make a really strong case about this exact point but I've lost it through all the information I digest on the daily.
I think the trench warfare in WW1 vs the blitzkrieg tactics of the Nazis had greater shock value to civilians. Europe was flattened and it was the second world war in only 30 years. People were fed up with it everywhere.
