Forum Overview :: Wall Street Kid :: Oh okay let me help with that.

[quote name="Zsenitan"][quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"][quote name="Bananadine"]I like epic fantasy stories myself, and I don't care much about philosophy, so I just pretended all the heroic industrialists were a strange, new kind of elf, while the life-hating collectivists were only especially talky orcs, and that, solidly buttressed by my fascination with craziness, made it easy for me to enjoy the book--which was a big surprise after I'd heard it denounced so many times as a tedious presentation of a bad philosophy.[/quote] This is the first review I've ever read of the book that made me want to read it, by the way. Do you consider Rand to be a good <i>writer</i>, regardless of her philsophy? I know, it is easier for me just to find out for myself by going to the library, but still, I value your opinion. [/quote] Do you like... fanfiction? [quote][quote]It's still somewhat retarded though, and it would be perfectly reasonable for you to skip it.[/quote] That being said, it's always stupid to proclaim that you "refuse" to read a book, like I did earlier, especially since I have no other classic books around to take up the slack, with the possible exception of some dog eared Red Dwarf "novels." [/quote][/quote] Here are some much better, funnier, and more philosophically enriching books that you can run out and get! <b><a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/wid/exhibits/gaberbocchus-press/uburoi.html">Ubu Roi, by Alfred Jarry</a></b> This is a play and you should be sure to get a repressing of the Gaberoboccus press edition (New Directions or Dover Thrift are both fine,) which was set in someone's chunky handwriting and overburdened with shocking sketches of fat buffoons in their buffoonery. The play is about why people like Ayn Rand are fundamentally ridiculous. It's one of the best satires of the brutal self-serving stupidity of all the world's Alan Greenspans ever written, by the Creexul of the French absurdists. <b><a href="http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=Uhh0B0IHz4YC&dq=hindoo+holiday&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=8xkcwEGX3Z&sig=-bO8o6hlSs5PrCyZJDpJtsiWL2Y&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result">Hindoo Holiday, by J. R. Ackerley</a></b> The true story of a appallingly reserved buggerer serving as envoy to an appallingly unreserved maharajah in India during the Raj. Full to overflowing with oily, loathsome, pratfalling people who will be hilarious for all time. It starts out with the maharajah requesting a companion who is "like some character named Olaf" from a Rider Haggard novel and ends up with a sea of misunderstandings and understandings arrived at too-quickly. The malpropisms alone are worth it. <b><a href="http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=4558">Barry Lyndon, by William Makepeace Thackeray</a></b> Really not like the movie, for better or worse. Funny on two levels if you have the patience for it: on the first, the native hilarity of a braggart and buffoon rising to the top of English society on strength of bluster and sleight of hand, then plunging to its most depressing and excoriable bottom by the same means. A cruel story! On the second level it's funny because it's outdated in a very specific way: the (many, extensive, heavyhanded) prejudices which were the mainstay of the book's humor back in the 1800's are now ridiculous, so the whole thing comes off like a kind of Blazing Saddles in period costume at times. If you like to take books apart as you read them, I can't recommend this one enough. <b><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2760">Celebrated Crimes, by Alexandre Dumas</a></b> Less funny, more delicious. An <i>immense</i> compendium of (lightly embellished) tales of true crimes. Nothing petty here: popedoms bought and sold, regicides, massacres, poisonings, intrigues of all varieties. All in Dumas' bustling, swashbuckling, and highly detailed prose (they say he had a team of secondary writers, and at this length he would have to.) The point is that it's just as long and intricate as any Ayn Rand novel, but much less stupid. <b><a href="http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=I5gYWtcfMioC&dq=stanislaw+lem&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=q6bkgZw2me&sig=mF5eDVZNlInqz019v4vBkmgT-UA&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=9&ct=result#PPA80,M1">His Master's Voice, by Stanislaw Lem</a></b> I can't get anyone to read this, and to be fair, it's slow-going at the start. But it's incredibly and bittersweetly funny on the topics of science, fiction, science fiction, and the relationships between science, what it studies, and who pays for it.[/quote]