|
Lordshmee posted:Just finished The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti. I liked it but it could be REALLY heavy to someone who hasn’t already done a great deal of thinking about its thesis. I recommend it but only if you’re currently well nailed down psychologically. The narrator was particularly good. I'm going to get this because I love "The Better Angels of Our Nature"; not sure if you'd think they're as similar as I do, but the two of them together remind me of William Blake's paired poems.
|
#
¿
Dec 16, 2019 21:43
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 16:57 |
|
|
Lordshmee posted:You don’t mean the Steven Pinker book do you? Because I don’t think that book has anything remotely to do with the one I mentioned. I tried googling an alternative and came up empty. No, that's the one, and I meant it as a contrasting work on a similar topic, and I could be completely wrong about that. Please don't take this in a negative way, it's just that I'm at work right now and can't type out a longer, more detailed response, but I looked at your book in audible and it seemed something like "an examination of why people do bad things", which I thought contrasted with Better Angel's gist of "why people are increasingly less bad".
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2019 21:13
|
|
|
Lordshmee posted:The basic premise of the book is that consciousness is a terrible evolutionary mistake that renders human life a horror.  Oh good, a book that will give voice to deeply unsettling suspicions I try to avoid. Yep, I'll get on that as soon as Wolf Hall is done.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2019 23:18
|
|
|
Why are there no audiobooks of Romance of three Kingdoms? Why does the google web crawler find me long dead posts from other people, like me, screaming into the void asking this question, and maybe one reply saying either "nah I don't think so" or "if there is one it's probably on audible". Am I crazy? Am I thirty six years old and still not sure how to google? Please, please, prove me wrong, call me an idiot, anything, just help me either find an audio book for sale as a digital download or at least tell me with some certainty that there isn't one so I can quit looking.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 20, 2020 01:49
|
|
|
Thank you so much for helping me see my options and restoring some of my sanity; it's about as bad as I feared. Might just be me but I don't really want to read a text version because I'll mispronounce every noun. I'll check in on the podcast, if it's not done maybe listening to what's there will help me finish the rest in text.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 20, 2020 02:52
|
|
|
Thank you! I would never have thought essays like this even existed on Audible aside from, say, The Great Courses. I'm buying the Descartes one with my next credit. Edit: ok so now I read the reviews. Still interested.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2021 16:27
|
|
|
my kinda ape posted:Thank you everyone for all the recommendations! Feel free to keep them coming though I always need more to read! Master and Commander - absolutely peerless historical fiction Robert Caro's first book in his JBJ trilogy. Within the first hour of listening, as he describes the background of the region, it should become obvious that this is an absolute masterpiece. Midnight's Children - what if Charles Dickens wrote magical realism set in India!? A big old book that might be intimidating without audible.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2022 20:53
|
|
|
Armauk posted:Have you read The Power Broker? Yes, I read that first and it's also excellent. I read it after seeing a movie that has a major surprise plot point about Robert Moses Motherless Brooklyn
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2022 13:47
|
|
|
Ditto on not being able to follow Gravity's Rainbow on audio, and I don't merely use them for "background noise"; I can generally follow difficult fiction, non fiction, whatever. But too much of GR *sounds* the same for long, long portions of the work. I tried it twice and in both times there's a sort of fantasy or dream sequence where a character goes through a toilet and both times a literal hour would go by and I'd be forced to admit I've completely lost track of what's going on, what's real, is this a recollection, a fantasy, an aside that exists only as a commentary by the narrator, etc. I actually posted about it and got told "yeah that's GR, don't worry", I made it further on a third attempt but I still found it off putting enough to not pursue it further. I will say, I've heard the banana cooking bit several times now and it always makes me go buy and prepare them.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2022 20:23
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 16:57 |
|
|
chaibat posted:Do you remember who narrated it? The version I have is by George Guidall and he is great. That's the one I have: I don't mean that he does a bad job, it's just that a lot of GR is long tangents by a narrator so an hour can go by with the same "voice" and that can exacerbate an intentionally surreal book. I'll probably have to read it in print some day, but of course I still own the Audible version and could try it again.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 26, 2022 16:36
|
|