/lit/ - Literature

>>20578453
>Seneca
Recently finished his Dialogues and Essays and read Letters a couple of years back. I can now with confidence say that Seneca was a sycophantic cope lord and a condescending midwit. The only reasonable explanation to why anyone would ever put him on a pedestal together with Epictetus is that they've read neither.

Marcus Aurelius is humble, making him infinitely more enjoyable to read compared to Seneca.

>>13544671
>is there a science fiction monthly reading?
Yes. The same one actually. So far this year we've read more sci-fi than fantasy.

>>12906360
>REH never wrote a bad Conan story
He sure did. Vale of Lost Women, Xuthal of the Dusk and The Man Eaters of Zamboula to mention the worst that come to mind. Free hot take: The Hour of the Dragon is quite mediocre. Also, Olivia is best girl.

I won't defend Dune as I found it mediocre. I won't even defend Peace because I've not read it. I will not even demand that any of you plebs change your minds and start enjoying Wolfe. But if you can't see that Wolfe is a great writer and a talented stylist (you don't have to enjoy his works to notice that) you are a functioning illiterate and probably a fan of Joe Abercrombie, Jim Butcher or someone equally bland.

>>10523912
I was one of those that said that it's not sexist. It was almost two years since I read the books and my memory have faded somewhat so feel free to correct me if I say something wrong.

I felt that the female characters throughout the series were nicely characterized and contrasted against each other. Up until the entrance of Luo Jis waifu who was most likely a actor anyway most females were military and/or scientific types whose genders mostly mattered in context to society, ie they they where daughters, mothers or wives in the same way the males where sons, fathers or husbands. Our next stereotypical feminine character (not counting the murderous/moe AI robot with a fetish for tea ceremonies) is the second Swordholder, whose name I sadly don't remember, but she was picked for the role just because of her classical femininity so we can hardly assume that that is a comment on the female sex as a whole. I'm also quite convinced that both the author and that hardass Thomas Wade both believed that her non aggressive stance was the correct one.

I'd like to read your interpretations of things.

I also agree that the first two books are amazing and that the third somewhat lose itself in its crazy scope but at the same time I can't really imagine how it could have been done better.

>>10524048
Shut your face and let us enjoy things.

>>10401731
If you could somehow make thousands of people read a very good and underappreciated book, would you refrain from doing it because of embarrassment over some Powers-that-be™ meme from a Chinese erotica board? Because that's honestly quite a retarded standpoint.

>>9905266
This is, of course, open to interpretation since you could not really write a book criticizing communism in the Soviet Union 1964.

But the way I read it, there's two kinds of criticism. The first one is a more general attack on totalitarian societies and how they damage science and culture and it's quite straight forward, Don Reba simply turn Arkanar into a shithole. The more subtle criticism is that the Earthen political theory does not hold, Anton notice the horrible things about to happen but when he ask his colleagues for advice they tell him to have faith in the theory and not intervene (there's also a unspoken threat of being sent away to not-Siberia) but in the end Anton is proven right. Earth in the book is a communist utopia, a proxy for the soviet leaders, and Earths failure to predict and correctly act on what's happening is an analogy to how the Soviet Union ignored their problems and prosecuted those who pointed them out. So to clarify/correct myself, it's a book about how Soviet Communists were WRONG.

Also, the fore- and afterwords in the SF Masterworks edition really highlight this by talking about the political and cultural climate the book was written in. It apparently started out as a happy swashbuckling adventure but turned into a darker story during writing. For those of us not familiar with Soviet politicians of the 50s it also inform us that Don Reba is a stand-in for our guy Lavrentiy Beria.

>>9905361
Just about to start on A Handmaids Tale since it's the latest meme show among normies and I am going to pretend to have read it 15 years ago.