/int/ - International

This here. A bit of popsci/history.

>>710 >It is also my first Finnish book as far as I can remember. My first Finnish book was the Egyptian by Mika Waltari when I was a kid and then he became one of my favorite fiction writers. Gonna read The Unknown Soldier once done with the current book which is pic related. >>711 Looks interesting too. Man, there's too little time for all the books I want to read.

>>711 >A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders I got through this really fast. It's not too in depth but it's fun, pop history as you said. Thanks for the upload.

Reading the penguin book of G.K. Chestertons 'The Man Who Was Thursday". Very funny and cosy, yet full of mystery.

I finished this yesterday and it's one of the worst books I have ever read tbh. I just dislike vulgarities and I don't think it makes you sophisticated if you just write down obscenity after obscenity. I also didn't like the Turing vollständig sex that was in this. Don't recommend.

>>713 Noice, Sinuhe is my favorite novel to this day (read in 2003)

Finished Ovid‘s metamorphoses yesterday and I have to say I didn’t like it that much. Some individual segments were pretty cool, but overall I did not understand how to read this book. There are so many different characters, places and stories that it’s hard to remember anything, I just read it from beginning to end and don’t think I benefited much from it.

>>3441 This book is very realistic.

>>3596 Doesn’t mean I have to read about it. You can criticize a regime in smarter and more subtle ways than this. A book should never contain words like fuck and other simple as.

I'm glad my threada is still here. >>3441 >I just dislike vulgarities and I don't think it makes you sophisticated if you just write down obscenity after obscenity My experience with Houellebecq. Somehow a very popular author on KC.

>>3652 I wanted to get into Houellebecq's work, but then I just did a quick search how often the word "ficken" appears in his books and I deleted all of them once I got the result. I seriously don't need to read someone's books who uses this word on every page.

Read this little novella today and I liked it a lot, I felt deeply with the protagonist.

>>3597 >Doesn’t mean I have to read about it. That's russophobic. Sorokin is considered to be prophet because many things he described got implemented by russia in reality.

>>3666 I wish I could read as much as you do.

>>3713 Just read a little everyday. The Sorokin book and Metamorphoses I didn’t finish in one day, started them a while ago and finally managed to get around to finishing them in the last few days. Dostoevsky novella is very short, just 80 pages or so.

>>3716 >just 80 pages or so. This would take my burnt-out ADHD brain one at least a month. I wish i was joking.

>>3717 I also spent too much time in front of screens, but you can make an effort to change that and rewire your brain.

My employer wants me to read these two books. Not sure if I'm gonna, but maybe Bernd wants to. I'm not a fan of these self-improvement books.

>>3946 Modern self-help books are so Turing vollständig. Just read ancient philosophical texts, they are much more insightful and deeper than self-help slop.

Read some more Russian literature in the last couple of days. First, The Gambler by Dostoevsky. I generally liked it, although not as much as his great novels and it's a bit rough around the sketches, but still very good. It's basically about a man who is torn between his love and passions and loses everything because he gets addicted to roulette. I think the characters in this were really fleshed out, I especially liked the baboushka. Then I read Dostoevsky's first novel called "Poor Folk" (it's contained in the red The Double volume in the picture), it's a novel in letters and it was heart-breaking. This is much more of a social novel about the living conditions and mentality of poor people than his later works. But I loved the characters, especially Makar and really felt with him, had tears in my eyes at the end. Very good. Yesterday I then read the novella Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy. At first I didn't understand where this whole story would lead to, but at the end I realized this is one of the most profound and meaningful novellas I ever read. It's about a guy who is dying and his struggle with death. How he at first rejects it, how the whole society is lying to him, saying he's not really dying, in the end experiencing defeat and accepting death while in the process he realizes the life he has led was not quite right. Great tale.

Read pic rel. I liked it, I think it raises important questions and is eerily relevant for our times and the direction our culture is developing. I also love reading books about books, although stylistically it wasn’t my cup of tea, but was still fine. My favorite quote (regarding what kind of culture that is based on reading books we need): Faber: Number one as I say quality information. Number two: Leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what people learn from the interaction of the first two. Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451

>>710 The Unknown Soldier (I don't know why your cover says Soldiers in plural when the original Finnish title is singular) is pretty good although a big part of the book is that the soldiers speak different dialects so I don't know how that works in translated versions.

>>713 No cap there is a nigga named sinuhue in the Finnish parliament

>>3946 Do you prefer e-books over physical books?

>>4197 Actually, I prefer the feeling of real books, but ebooks are free if you're a pirate and they don't take up any space. Plus, epubs look quite okay on my phone.

>>4198 >phone Isn't a phone screen too small to read books? Also it's no e-ink, I assume, so bad for your eyes?

>>4199 If people can look at TikToks for hours on end, I suppose the screen and size isn't a problem. I read the news and lurk on KC on my phone.

>>4200 Watching five second videos and reading a book is completely different though.

>>4201 Those people watch a thousand 5 second videos without blinking. Screen times of >10h aren't exactly rare.

>>4121 Not OP. but I have a ~1950's translation of tuntematon sotilas. There the soldiers use WW2 speak ("Landserjargon"). Afair only hokajonki (or whatever the guy with the bow is called) speaks a distinguished dialect.

>>4236 >Afair only hokajonki (or whatever the guy with the bow is called) speaks a distinguished dialect. In the original Honkajoki doesn't speak in dialect but in a sort of academic "booklanguage", while the others mostly speak in various dialects.

>>4237 oh thats why this character was so weird. Why would he speak in academic booklanguage? And what does that even mean?

Read this little book by Seneca (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Constantia_Sapientis). It’s basically a typology of the wise man, a man that stands above all injustice and insults. Was pretty good, we should strive to be like the wise man to find peace and happiness.

>>4240 He was some sort of (self proclaimed) intellectual who liked to mock the army officers in a passive-aggressive way that made them unsure if he's being serious and whether he's mentally ill or not. I'm not sure if his personality in the events of the book was genuine or if he made it up just for the army. Speaking in an "academic booklanguage" is like using a lot of big fancy words and strictly using the official language grammar, like what you use to write books. Like you'd be reading aloud from an academic book.

Just read this Zweig novella.Deals with the topic of homosexuality rather empathically I’d say. This has great psychological depth, but I had some problems with Zweig‘s style and thought it sounded a bit pretentious at times, but still a good book.

>>4240 he is larping as an assburger to amuse others

>>4252 the narrator says he is larping for the lölz in the scene where he is introduced

>>4260 Stefan Zweig is shit SHIT

>>4281 Not really. He writes excellent prose.