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Book Recommendations? (Patreon)

Published:
2021-11-14 19:57:53
Edited:
2022-02-01 17:54:51
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Right now I am reading Hollywood by Bukowski and Some Hope by Edward St. Aubyn. 

Bukowski is rather viciously good at depicting what an eloquent drunk experiences when you're being inexplicably paid for your writing. 

I am going to read more to stay sharp for ceaselessly writing and talking into perpetuity for money. What is your favourite book and what does it mean to you? What do you want me to read and why? I'll fuckin do it 

Comments

Nathaniel Nichols

Red Rider's Hood by Neal Schusterman, along with the two others in his twisted fairytale series. It tackles what to do when you've fucked up and invited the devil into your life, and the hard choices and folded morals that follow.

ILikeYarnAlot

Bukowski is like the ultimate problematic fav. Glad I'm not the only one. I definitely read 'Love Is A Dog From Hell' more than once at a certain point in my life. My favorite book, hands down, is The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. It's hard to say exactly why it's so important to me. I could talk about the plot, the characters, the beauty of the prose, the cleverness of the framing, but none of that would really capture how it somehow manages to describe something essential about my own human experience. It teaches me how to better understand myself and empathize with others in that deep intimate place that only good art can touch.

no special person

Simulation and Simulacra Cause your a genius, you can handle it Edit: plus it will help you be able to hold in your mind why something like this : https://www.amazon.com/Halloween-Masks-LED-Mask-Vendetta/dp/B08DXNP55B/ref=asc_df_B08DXNP55B?tag=bngsmtphsnus-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=80882941400134&hvnetw=s&hvqmt=e&hvbmt=be&hvdev=m&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=&hvtargid=pla-4584482468202410&psc=1 Is considered cringe. Roughly speaking. It's actually incredibly incredibly deep.

no special person

One last thing, very short book. Consise as fuck jean is a jeanus

Sierra

Literally anything by Gene Wolfe. He taught me a new way to read. Technically his work usually falls under the sci-fi/fantasy genres, but it’s so much deeper than that. The way he writes prose is just *chefs kiss*. Plus he invented the machine that packs Pringle’s cans! I would recommend starting with the Fifth Head of Cerberus, or some of his shorts from The Death of Doctor Island and Other Stories and Other Stories.

Jules de Bellefeuille Defoy

I'm mostly into short fiction anthologies these days, and one of the best I read recently was "How Long Till Black Future Month?" by N.K. Jemisin. Amazing stories with characters that feel more real than in most shows and movies, with twists and turns that really get you to consider your original point of view in the given context. Can 't recommend it enough.

Elliequence

I'd recommend "This Is How You Lose The Time War" because it's just a really good book, and also "Amatka" by Karin Tidbeck because it's intense and weird and made me think a lot.

Ben Haerle

I just read Zami: A New Spelling of My Name! Audre Lord in general is amazing. I’m reading Ocean at the End of the Lane by Gaiman and I love it so far. I’m also reading Axiom’s End and Lathe of Heaven by Leguine! If you haven’t read the Earthsea series they’re so good *_*

Ben Haerle

Oh! How to do Nothing is also great! I read that a while back.

Brian Gross

Dhalgren. A book about a bi poly man and the insanity of trying to fit our lives into stories and narratives.

August

"The Listening Book: Discovering Your Own Music" by W.A. Mathieu. This book has shown me how to free my soul. I know, that sounds hokey or exaggerated, but it's the only way I can describe this feeling. Speech is unnatural for me, I'm a non-speaking autictic, music and song are my true languages. Perhaps this book will connect with you as well.

JP Summoned

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Ace

You gotta read House of Leaves. It is an interwoven web of footnotes and translations by authors who aren't real, about a home film that doesn't exist, about a house that cannot be. The experience is the story, and there is no other book like it

Aaron DC

The Call by Peadar O'Guilin is my favorite book ever. It makes the Fae a monstrosity of beauty who hate humanity and combine it with magic that forces preteenagers to teenagers to survive being hunted by them. I highly recommend it!

Katie G.

Demons by Dostoevsky. Russia had a problem with domestic terrorism in the 19th century, and that's partly what the book is about, which makes it feel weirdly prescient and modern. It's long and ridiculous and extremely flawed, but also funny, surprising, complex, and deeply religious (like most of his work). Can't recommend it highly enough, changed my life reading it. Although, I made my brother read it and he hated every minute so there is always that risk. I recommend the translation by Robert Maguire. You can get really shitty translations with Russian stuff if you're not careful.

Anna Marie

I'll second House of Leaves (a postmodern masterpiece, albeit pretentious, esp if you liked the eldritch slimy-inside-house-world at the end of Coraline as you mentioned in your latest) and I'll also add Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (an eloquent blend of poetry, art, and science by an Indigenous author)!

Hazel Anderson

1000% woke up, saw this notification, and thought of ‘Too Much and Not the Mood’ by Durga Chew-Bose. Apart from being in title alone an absolutely singular banger, it’s like… there’s this part of your soul (👀) and your memory and how you interface with your memory that is so so integral to *you* that it has never once been exposed in your life, could never be expressed even to your soul mate if soul mates were a thing, because it’s not meant to, it’s not meant to be acknowledged hardly even by you. THAT is what this book (well, collection of essays) talks to (and from). I can’t explain it any better than that. Also, if you want a very short read that might just be the most powerful magical realist meditation on total incoherent grief, Levels of Life by Julian Barnes. Also, Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. Also, Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins. ALSO Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (or any George Saunders).

Catriona Lexy

Hard to narrow down a favourite but here are a few that have stayed with me: The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan is a great book about a disturbed girl who ends up in a home for chronic young offenders. A haunting mix of magic and brutal reality. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is about a Black woman setting out to find her destiny and to define her own identity in 1930s America. It's breathtakingly beautiful. Lastly, HHhH by Laurent Binet. It's about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and it's an incredible story of heroism in the face of pure evil, told in a very unusual but captivating style.

Beck

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer is an amazing book of essays that blends Western science with Indigenous knowledge in regards to ecology and biology, it’s so insightful and meaningful and I’ve learned a lot from reading it. I’d highly recommend it!

Selenium Yang

so i did consider giving you a book rec and then i remembered you're not my friend and i don't give a shit what you read

Azza McKazza

Not sure how you are with Apocalypse fiction but Station Eleven is great. Might be worth reading before the show comes out because I'm not sure how it will translate.

partly sunny

i like poetry so id recommend mercury by ariana reines, artful by ali smith, autobiography of red by anne carson, and registers of illuminated villages by tarfia faizullah. not all poetry but all poetic. mercury is a treatise on connection & communication in the 21st century (with all the greatest hits: cinema, money, alchemy, & internet porn). artful started as a lecture series on the nature and utility of art, and morphed somewhere along the way with a narrative about grieving one's partner of many years. pretty gay if you ask me. the autobiography is the most non-traditional novel ive read, and it follows geryon, a ruddy little boy-creature looking for love when he and the world seem to barely understand eachother. somehow exists both in the present and ancient myth simultaneously, it's kind of a head trip. kind of traumatic at times, definitely gay. the title of registers is a play on the "register of eliminated villages," a list of 397 villages in northern iraq that were completely leveled. faizullah is better than any poet i know at making an elegy beautiful, at turning death into a reason to keep living. obviously very traumatic. if you feel inexperienced with poetry and want something to get your feet wet with, id recommend c a conrad's while standing in line for death. each poem (or set) comes with a prose explanation of the events, exercises, or headspace that led conrad to write it. def read some content warnings about the first section, "mount monadnock transmissions." it gets a bit too granola-y for my personal taste near the end, but perfect if you dont "get" poetry yet

marine_dc

Currently my favorite books are : - L'Écume des jours (Froth on the Day Dream) by Boris Vian. I love it because it's very poetic without having to explain itself (I think that would be soft worldbuilding?). The characters are weirdly two dimensional and very youthful, which makes them surprisingly easy to empathize with - La vie devant soi (The Life Before Us) by Romain Gary: set in post WW2 France, a heartbreaking book from the perspective of a young boy who sees the health of his guardian deteriorate. The tone is so strange because it's written with a kid as the narrator, who is both naive and very perceptive due to a difficult life - Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald : his writing somehow calms me. Similar to Gatsby, it's a book where you follow privileged awful people for the most part, but the descriptions and the emotions speak to me in a way I cannot quite explain

Quinn Z

The Vegetarian by Han Kang is still one of the best books I’ve ever read. I still think about it all the time. It’s about a woman in South Korea who becomes a vegetarian en how her family responds to this. It draws some very interesting parallels between veganism and feminism (bodily autonomy is one of the main themes). Very intense read, though! Not for the faint of heart. And I’d like to add a content warning for rape/sexual assault from the POV of the perpetrator (although i did not find this content gratuitous or in bad taste, I understand why the author added this to her novel).

Justus

My favourite is The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin. That may make me a basic bitch but I have read that thing and both other volumes so many times it's not even funny

luckrej

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the writings of my soul in physical form. It's an arrogant philosophical novel with a heart that behaves in contradiction to itself.

ShipGoSync

"There Should Be Flowers" by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. There's a lot of her work that I really like, but this is the book of her poetry that I personally own I never really enjoyed poetry before I discovered trans and queer poets and now I can't get enough For me it hits that right balance between "This is cool af" and "I'm not completely sure what's going on" with art, it makes me feel a lot of complex things that I have to spend time figuring out why I feel that way about them. JJE in particular I think does a really good mixture of beautiful and abstract contrasted with dark and emotional in her poems, which is the perfect vibe for me given I've started transitioning in the last year If you search her up or look on her twitter, you can find a lot of her work without going ahead and buying one of her books (but I recommend you do anyway, of course) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xj_6bEFsU8 https://twitter.com/sadqueer4life/status/1452349929561620489 https://pen.org/five-poems-by-joshua-jennifer-espinoza/

teacupful

Godric by Frederick Buechner. One of my favorite opening sentences of any book: "Five friends I had, and two of them snakes". A fractious hermit-saint narrates his memories of his youth. The prose is a stunning evocation of the rhythms and imagery of Old English poems. It follows one human's fraught, psychospiritual evolution and reminds me of Tolstoy (especially his short story Master and Man) and Grahame Greene. Very short. One of the best and most unique works of fiction I've read-- the English professor who recommended it to me died of cancer, and I regret never writing to thank him.

Margot

I am a trash human and read gay shit: Favorite Written book w/ no pictures- Song of Achilles -beautifully written -Patroclus and Achilles are great -heartbreaking great for the mentally ills Favorite Book w/ Pictures (also a Webtoon)-Heartstopper (TW for Self Harm & Eating Disorders) -really well written characters -all the characters are gay and mentally ill, but that is not their most defining feature, they are people who are mentally ill or people who are gay. That story isn’t trying to say anything profound it is just people existing -a lot of times stories about mentally I’ll characters I feel are trying to say something about humanity or something where literally the characters here have mental illness and then live with it or are in treatment for it. -the books are very important to me personally because they talked about how codependency isn’t great for either person, which I never see in queer stories where the couples are usually codependent in one way or another -lots of different types of queer representation -quick read it’s a graphic novel -the main relationship is very sweet and lovely -Getting made into a Netflix show but the graphic novel will still probably b better

Kat S.

first test by tamora pierce cause it's fun and a great start to a very fun series. also cause the main character is a weird little kickass girl and I love that for her.

AV

You said you would do it I'm gonna fucking hold you to that. Sit down, pull up a seat. I know you are going to understand because all you want to talk about is how great the ladybug show is and what it means to you, and that's why you're gonna fucking love Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint. I'm gonna spoil you an itty bit because the appeal to the whole thing in a way requires that I tip the story's hand at least somewhat. I *could* just tell you it's a rad isekai about someone going into the world of their favorite novel and becoming a badass and how the main character uses meta knowledge of the book to succeed inside the world of the novel, and that there is a lot of clever writing and "It's like Hunger Games if the myths and gods of our world were twitchchat watching a livestream of the death of our world" but also if there were timeloops and-- Anyway that stuff is all cool but you'll figure it out if you read the first 1% of the story. What you need to *know*, the reason I want everyone to fucking read this book, is that it's about what it's like to love a work of fiction more than your own life. Kim Dokja, the main character, is not the typical "somewhat formless everyman so that everyone (but mostly cishet straight dudes) can imagine themselves in this fantastical situation through him". No, he's a very specific guy with a very specific set of problems, who has been reading one serialized work of fiction for 13 years in order to cope with his life being shit. When he enters the world of the novel, which uhh is an apocalyptic hellscape in which huge swathes of humanity die terribly for the entertainment of the *literal* stars, he is able to succeed because this book has been his hyperfixation for thirteen fucking years. It's over 4,000 chapters long, he's read it countless times. He is *only* one who has read it because it's universally considered trash by anyone else who looks at it. It has too much world building, is too boring, too long, goes off on too many random tangents, is too unbelievable, unrelatable, and endlessly miserable. Literally only one person in the universe loves this shitty book, but he loves it enough to do anything to reach the ending he's been imagining for this story for most of his life. And he's valid, we stan Kim Dokja. ORV is about validating one reader's love for one story, and in doing so validating all reader's love for any story. It's not always nice, it doesn't shy away from numerous fucked up topics (like, say your childhood hero is also someone you hate because he's a murderous psychopath because he's been stuck in the apocalypse for multiple lives and you are a now and adult who took solace and even enjoyment from reading about his suffering for over a decade, how do you deal with THAT) but it explores all of them with love and empathy for the subject matter and in doing so for the people who might relate to this. And honestly, I don't know of anyone who can't relate. And that's just a very rough overview, I could talk about ORV and everything that is great about it for a dozen hours easy. Here are some random bullet points: 1. Most epic ot3 love story ever told but without any romance 2. ENDLESS metaphors on stories, readers, walls, sacrifice, writers... honestly just anything tangentally related to books. 3. TIMELOOPS ARE COOL GO WATCH JACOB GELLER'S VIDEO ON TIMELOOP NIHILISM IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT YET THEN KNOW I IMMEDIATELY WENT TO HIS PATREON TO TELL HIM ABOUT GREAT ORV IS AND HOW HE SHOULD READ IT IF HE SINCERELY WANTS MORE STORIES ABOUT WHAT BEING STUCK IN A TIMELOOP UNTIL YOU BECOME A RAMPAGING MURDERER DOES TO SOMEONE 4. Honestly probably one of the best unreliable narrators ever 5. Canon says fandom is canon so when you finish it you can just fuckin go wild and you'll be correct 6. Meta meta meta meta meta meta 7. Escalation station. Did you watch Gurren Lagann? It's like that but More. 8. Honestly it's a feel good story but in that rip your heart out over and over kind of way. I read it in January and I still haven't recovered but I've managed to drag a few people down with me. 9. I've only mentioned the Serious High Concept Stuff here but it's like, VERY STUPID VERY OFTEN. It's written by a husband and wife duo and I swear to god sometimes random stupid shit happens because they were just trying to make each other laugh. There is an incredibly heart wrenching conversation that happens while one character's soul is stuck in the body of a dumpling. This absolutely makes sense in canon and is honestly not any less meaningful because of it. 10. Serialized novels are, as th ename implies, written chapter by chapter which is released very quickly. There's various threads that don't go anywhere, the writting is fast but can be choppy. The book doesn't fall as neatly into the typical three act structure because arcs happen quickly and each is trying to surmount the last. This story fuckin *goes places*. Now since you have PROMISED TO READ IT I will leave you to it shortly with some deets on where to find it, but there are also some caveats I must provide. 1. It's a Korean webnovel, one with an unfortunately mediocre translation. I think it survives this ok mostly because it seems like the writing was designed to be very simple and sparse. It's a great book with many wonderful things to say but I don't think it was ever going to have incredibly beautiful prose it just creates and engages with beautiful ideas. But if you are not used to reading stuff with poor translation it can be pretty grating (honestly if even if you are it can be). 2. It's 551 chapters at about 2k words long. I think this comes out to like north of 4k pages. IT'S LONG BUT IT'S WORTH IT YOU GOTTA JUST GO IN COMMITTED. (it is however COMPLETE) If you find it easier to start with pretty pictures, there is a webtoon over on webtoons.com under "Omsicient Reader" that is, despite their inexplicable decision to shorten the title, honestly a really good adaption and it staves off some of the translation problems for a while. Also since the books are pretty sparse on description it's helpful to see shit drawn to start. You can find the novel on an app called literally just 'Webnovel' for dollars, and I do support purchasing, but it also honestly becomes pretty expensive to buy all of the chapters individually so you can also find it at a website called boxnovel.com. Anyway, I do hope you read it. You seem like someone who loves to be both torn up and stitched back together by art and honestly it's been a long time since anything fucked me up like ORV, but it's really... really hard to explain if you don't just read it. And you really have to read the whole thing. One of the things that escalates exponentially is not just the power creep of the heroes but also the story's ability to just effortlessly eviscerate.

Hex Diesis

Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance changed the way I look at experience and caused a restructuring of my personal value system. My life has been better since I read it. I think you’ll dig it too. Xx

sherbear

Reading the Buddha of suburbia by Hanif Kureishi was the first time I felt truly seen in a book. An Anglo South Asian kid who is queer, witty, horny, messy, selfish and deeply sad comes of age in 1970s London. It's funny and heartbreaking and deeply resonant for me. I reread it recently for the first time in 10 years and it 100% holds up.

Howard 'Owenlars2'

My favorite book of all time is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and I've read it at least once a year for the past 20ish years. It was my first exposure to big creative giant ideas, as well as really good wordplay, and subversion. Still one of the best examples of it. The audiobook read by Stephen Fry is one of the best, but the original radio dramas are a lot of fun as well.

Jeffois

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse doesn't give a fuck about you, it isn't trying to convert you and honestly it's not even explaining the religion. It's written by a man who wrote a book where he was a furry before furries were a thing and at the end, spoilers, after the gautama buddha does like everything and fucks and has fire ants eat his asshole he finds enlightenment in craft. He is a boatman shuttling people back and forth across a river and when I read it I'm reminded that if I spend my life becoming perfect at one thing my life will have been perfect. Also there was a movie of it where Siddhartha, the first fucking buddha, was played by Keanu Reeves. If the unique whiplash you get from reading the book and then watching the movie isn't compelling enough for you I don't know how you convince yourself to get out of bed in the morning.

Leo Mintz

the goldfinch by donna tartt is my favorite book of all time, it's a really well done character piece with an unreliable narrator and compelling themes about art, grief, and love. it's long and sprawling and tends to be tedious, it's flawed and i know that, but ultimately it means a lot to me because of who i was when i read it, how it changed me and my understanding of myself, and the friends i made through it. also the movie was really fucking bad to the point where i've considered studying screenwriting specifically so i can make a better adaptation of it in the future.

Sabrina Winter

"Towards Another Summer" by Janet Frame

Casey Kerins

My favorite book of the year has been Circe by Madeline Miller. She is also the author of The Song of Achilles referenced by another commenter. I really enjoy her writing style and loved getting lost in a fresh re-telling of Circe's story in the greek lore. The book that has been most instrumental/directly impactful to me this year was Yoke: My Yoga of Self Acceptance by Jessamyn Stanley. It was a beautiful read and very challenging. It allowed me to confront why I haven't finished yoga teacher training yet and ultimately decide the most ethical choice for me was to stop pursuing it (no not because yoga bad but because yoga and capitalism bad; I still follow the 8-limbed path closely).

val gecko

feeling compelled to follow up as i just finished "we were liars" by e. lockhart in one sitting and it made my brain go boom

Maddie Moreland

Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions isn’t my favorite book, but it did make me audibly laugh in public and question the nature of reality itself. Something about the main character’s vicious psychotic break, and two different author inserts with varying levels of self-awareness. A terrible and confusing book full of non sequiturs that I recommend to everybody.

Anna K

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, it's incredibly fucked up and I love it, what the carnival season of ahs wished it was, and the prose is so goddamn good. Dunn is simultaneously incredibly visceral and reverent in her descriptions of bodies (the characters' bodies, what it feels like to have a body, the concept of bodies, etc), she pulls absolutely zero punches in the most gruesome and disturbing moments of the novel but still manages to make you fall in love with the twisted world she's created, make you want to dye your hair red and start barking for the carnival or consider going into geekery. It's a fucking good book my guy.

V. Strange

I'm a bit late to the party, but it's okay cause my book recs are the fucking best and they're worth it. 1. The Book: On the Taboo of Knowing Who You Are, by Alan Watts; all I gotta say is, if you like the way Jordan Peterson spins philosophy and pragmatics by interweaving all sorts of disparate threads from different areas of thought and study and shit, then this is your shit, cause Alan Watts wasn't a reactionary lobsterfucker and had some damn insightful and eloquent yarns on spirituality and being and all that fun stuff 2. House of Leaves, as two people have said already. You know the "vast incomprehensible forces" you've mentioned being drawn towards? Yeah, that is this book. But I would actually also suggest Mark Z. Danielewski's SECOND novel, Only Revolutions. It's a road novel written in a weird mixture of poetry and stream-of-consciousness, very linguistically rich and conceptually stunning. Just google "only revolutions pages" and you'll see. 3. The Little Prince, a very simple and short children's book that changed my life in indescribable ways. And I can tell you have some quality taste for children's literature, so if you've never encountered this one, you should do it. 4. Into the Woods, by John Yorke; the best book on storytelling this writer has ever read. if you've been researching Joseph Campbell's work and Harmon's narrative embryo, this might be a very beneficial book for you. 5. Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir, by Kai Cheng Thom; a surrealist fairy tale pseudo-memoir wherein a girl runs away and joins a "vigilante gang of glamorous warrior femmes called the Lipstick Lacerators, whose mission is to scour the street of violent men and avenge murdered trans women everywhere." Need I say more.

Anonymous

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo. It’s fairly recent novel and combines 12 different perspectives across generations into a single novel. I’m still processing what it’s exactly about. I just started watching your videos and I’m super impressed by your oration. Based upon the little I’ve seen the book could offer a high ROI on a mix of perspectives on similar situations. Really looking forward to more videos and well done!!

Luna

Idk if there's a statute of limitations on this but I really need people to read the locked tomb series. It's this series by an actively catholic lesbian about enemies to lover necromancers in space. recommending things is hard so I'll just list things I like about it in the order I think about them. Alludes to Catholicism as necromancy in nuanced way that allows for criticism of catholic imperialism but with enough respect for spirituality that it never veers into edgelord antitheism. Employs fanfic tropes in a way that feels so earnest and heartfelt that it really encapsulates my favorite aspects of fanfic while being its whole own thing. shallow selling point but so goth and gay and neurodivergent The worldbuilding really gave me a new perspective on the whole you are one with the universe type thing. I'm jewish and its really nice to read something that sincerely engages with spirituality even if that spirituality is catholic. Unrelated but if you were a homestuck you should read psycholonials, its everything I loved about homestuck minus everything I hated about homestuck.

Anonymous

Late comment but whenever I can I reccomend The Collector by John Fowles, and the best way i could describe it is that it's everything the Netflix show 'You' wished it was. Fowles does an excellent job at offering a double perspective and humanising and analysing two types of characters who have become common archetypes. It's about a man (F. Clegg) who collects butterflies, wins the lottery and kidnaps an art student (miranda) . The first and last chapter are narrated by him, and the second chapter is told by Miranda in diary entries, and its such a wonderful climax to the way Clegg narrates. I admit i may be very biased in my enjoyment because I read it I think when I was 11 and it was the first book I really loved, but every few years i reread it and it holds up every time.

Anonymous
>>75089962

Also something to note with the 'You' comparison is I think aside from everything else I was never sure how the audience was meant to see Beck in that show, but in 'The Collector' Miranda (though she could be interpreted as having the same pretentiousness as Beck) is written in a way where her intelligence and passion for life and art is so clear and her own analysis of her character and life before being kidnapped is so good to read, I absolutely fell in love with her, which is something i could never do with any of the characters in 'You' despite (i think) the writer's similar intentions for them.

Dave Furbush

Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti. My dude wrote and released Inventing Reality before Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, and Parenti won't put you to sleep. The deeper down the hole I get, the ummm... "Left-er"(?) I end up. Cheers. 😘

Zion Meier

This is very late haha but the Dutch House by Ann Patchet is one of my all time favorites. Get the audiobook version though. Tom Hanks reads it and I swear his voice was made for narration

Anonymous

hello from months after you posted this! i would recommend “the starless sea” by erin morgenstern- it contains possibly the most beautiful prose ive ever read combined with an intriguing interconnected web of seemingly independent short stories combined with absolutely stunning worldbuilding and settings. someone said that trying to describe it was like trying to pour a bottle of wine into a shot glass which is incredibly truthful, but i’d absolutely recommend it! her other novel, “the night circus”, is my favorite for pure nostalgia- however, “the starless sea” is the better book. this is way more info than i intended to give but i hope you enjoy if you read this at some point LMAO

J.R

Going back in time to answer this question. My favorite books are probably not your favorite’s although i do wonder if you have read Notes on the Underground and your thoughts about it. X

Anonymous
>>84518458

Amazing!! The Starless Sea became my all-time favorite book just last year ... beating out Mark Helprin's "Winter's Tale" which had held that title for decades.

Halley

I'm currently reading 2 books that I would really like to recommend both to CJ the X and people who connect with their work because they both deal with art and philosophy, and spark the same kind of conversations in my head that CJ's videos inspire. 1. The Courage to Create, by Rollo May This is a book I have come back to again and again because it takes time to absorb and digest each sentence, though the ideas are presented simply. Not the kind of book you can read in one sitting. Themes include the creative impulse, art philosophy, psychology, and courage. 2. The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram A good friend gave me this recently and it is already radically shifting how I think. (the same friend who introduced me to Braiding Sweetgrass- if you enjoyed that you would probably also get a lot out of this too.) Themes include phenomenology, magic, shamanism, perception, relations, language, and ecological philosophy.