konniecanread's reviews
71 reviews

This is completely incoherent, which is particularly surprising because as far as I can tell she is right. I am upset. Why do I keep reading continental philosophy? It's unclear.

It's okay. It's written sorta weirdly, with ~experimental~ structure and style, but not too much so. It's pretty pretentious, with a lot of masturbatory chapters and scenes that seem to mainly serve the purpose of making the author feel smart and edgy, but also the author is actually kind of smart and edgy so he gets to do that, I guess.

Reading about this book online will make you think this is the most difficult read, the most intelligent, the most experimental and groundbreaking book of all time. The book's marketing department did a good job. But to be honest, there are harder-to-read, more intelligent, and definitely more experimental books. The only part of its reputation it ends up remaining true to is its length - this could have easily been 200-300 pages shorter without losing much.

The emperor isn't naked for sure, but he's probably just wearing like maybe some jeans and a nice hoodie.

Bad popular philosophy, in that the philosophy is poorly argued and it's not even popular. Please please at least define some words or do more than just dogmatically rejecting all hints of post-Christian thinking :((

+0.5*s because all of his opinions are correct.

A really bizarrely beautiful collection of descriptions of fictional, often magical cities. That's it. Somehow the cities are also metaphors for human life. Or Venice maybe? Or maybe it's just cool cities.

I give this rating a little unhappily, because I agree with almost everything he is saying here. The project of this book is to argue against human-centric, progress-driven, post-Christian perspectives of the world which (both in 2002 and now) dominate our thought about the world. I am extremely sympathetic toward this.

However, the way he goes about arguing for this is bad, even if we judge this by the standards of pop philosophy. Almost every argument he offers is dramatically underspecified and vague, and even if he arrives at all the right conclusions (no free will, no morality, no purpose to life, humans are just like animals, human development is random, and so on), all of his arguments could for these ideas could be easily dismantled by an averagely smart teenager.


He does have some really hard lines in here. Some of my favourites: 

"But the idea that we can rid ourselves of animal illusion is the greatest illusion of all. Meditation may give us a fresher view of things, but it cannot uncover them as they are in themselves... We are far more than what other humans have left in us. Our brains and spinal cords are encrypted with traces of far older worlds... To see ourselves as figments is to awake, not to reality, but to a lucid dream, a false awakening that has no end."

"Genocide is as human as art and prayer."

"Religious cultures could admit that earthly life was hard, for they promised another in which all tears would be wiped away. Their humanist successors affirm something still more incredible - that in the future, even the near future, everyone can be happy."

"Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal seemingly cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?"

A cute little pop-philosophy book trying to get some lessons for our lives from the lives of cats. If you have any friends who are kind of nihilistic and sad and really love cats, give them this.

This is a pretty fucked up book. In the short 130 pages, there's random violence, orgies, detailed drug usage, suicide attempts, overdoses, and prostitution. But it's not dark for its own sake - through the author's detached, dissociated, often poetic descriptions of all of the above (at least partially based on his own experiences), you get a real insight into how and why people living these sorts of lives continue in them. Something about how alienated the protagonist is from everything that is going on around him makes you just accept all the horrible shit he witnesses.

From this dissociated perspective he then paints these viscerally detailed images of things in his environment - a rotting pineapple, cum in his mouth, a needle being disinfected before use. The level of sensory detail these images get makes them first and foremost very beautiful, in their own way, but also by far more disturbing and disgusting than anything else that goes on in the book.

Yeah idk, I liked this quite a lot. Good book, don't read it though.

EDIT: Props also to the author for not making this book unnecessarily long, though that would have been a possibility. Really kept to the perfect scale.

Nice set of short stories, well written, but the ""true"" meaning is absurdly hard to figure out on your own, you basically have to read these with a companion.

A short little exploration of Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own. Makes some nice points, but also is about as long as (and only a little bit less confusing than) the original, so I am not really sure what the point was.

A really really good book, though hard to read. While I appreciated the theme (the collapse of the USSR and the impending doom its citizens felt in the years leading up to it), the style was what really stood out to me.

The first thing you notice when you read this book is the sentences. Often pages long, they meander about with no real aim, sometimes dwelling on experiences or idea, but also often drawn to new things the character comes across or thinks of. Frequently you get the impression that the author himself did not know where the sentence would take him when he started it.
The second thing you notice is that no experience is raw. Everything is always cast in the light of the person doing the experiencing. There is not just a room, there is the room that reminds you of your family home, or the room that is claustrophobically old-fashioned, or the room that smells of cigarettes your last partner used to smoke.
These two features capture parts of our subjective experiences that I think books often fail to convey. It made me really appreciate and understand each character fully, to take them as they are in their entirety, in a way I am rarely able to do.