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There have been a few books like this, that are supposed to be massive and life changing, but when I read they just fell flat. Everything by Ayn Rand I read was
by tibbon 16y ago
There have been a few books like this, that are supposed to be massive and life changing, but when I read they just fell flat. Everything by Ayn Rand I read was like this too.
I could get past the pacing, the circular storytelling, and largely the premise of it just didn't work in my mind. It was not something I could get into and getting past more than a chapter at a time was painful.
Oddly, I like philosophy and I ride motorcycles too.
My only theory is that since these books have been published, the core ideas have worked their way through our culture so throughly that reading it now just seems like 'duh'. This is the way I felt reading Ayn Rand and not a single interesting thing there popped out at me as new or novel.
- neutronicus 16y ago> My only theory is that since these books have been published, the core ideas have worked their way through our culture so throughly that reading it now just seems like 'duh'. This is the way I felt reading Ayn Rand and not a single interesting thing there popped out at me as new or novel. Either that, or the ideas are presented within the pages as interesting and novel, but they're actually simple takes on simple questions. You get all the aesthetic of intellectual challenge and none of the challenge, and then you get to congratulate yourself for understanding something so highbrow. Kind of like literary video games. I put a lot of hacker-culture sacred cows (Vonnegut, Twain, Huxley, Orwell) in this category. An alternate hypothesis is that being raised by two professors of literature turned me into an insufferably snobby twat.
- davidmathers 16y agoOrwell is revered precisely because he was both simple and correct. Whoever told you that Orwell was supposed to be some sort of intellectual challenge or deep philosophy did you a great dis-service, because that's entirely missing the point. He cut through complex or pretentious intellectual bullshit like a chainsaw through butter. Imagine your job was to explain the Bolshevik revolution to humanity. Not to intellectuals, to everyone. In the most clear, straightforward and plain way possible so that the greatest number of people could read and understand what you wrote. Now try to imagine a book better at that than Animal Farm.
- neutronicus 16y agoI was referring more to 1984 that Animal Farm. The only thing 1984 does a chainsaw/butter number on is nuance.
- davidmathers 16y agoIt was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I'd decided, had gotten out of hand - in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as "similar to the Nazis" or "Hitler-like" was a recurrent and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer. So, I set out to conduct an experiment - to build a counter-meme designed to make discussion participants see how they are acting as vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme...and perhaps to curtail the glib Nazi comparisons. -- Mike Godwin: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if.html 1984 may be the most successful memetic engineering project in history. He developed viral antibodies for totalitarianism and then injected them into our culture. It worked so well that people say "Orwellian" to mean "totalitarian-esque" in the same way they say "Kleenex" to mean "facial tissue". Making ideas as simple as possible, but not simpler requires some amount of creative genius. Nuance is not viral. EDIT, a thought experiment: Your job is to write a short book that if it could somehow be read by the population of North Korea would cause the Kim Jong-Il regime to collapse. Could such a book be written? I think 1984 would do it.
- neutronicus 16y ago1984 may be the most successful memetic engineering project in history. Dressing down your prose a little, you're saying "1984 successfully manipulated a lot of [gullible] people". And that is, in a nutshell, why I don't like it much. Orwell does not treat his reader as a peer. There's no respect there, just manipulation, because the author doesn't trust the reader with nuance. EDIT (in response to yours): Luckily for me, I am nobody's minister of propaganda. I would (were I a much better writer than I am) tell it like it is, nuances and all, and let them do with that what they will.
- BrandonM 16y agoI'm curious why you chose to put Twain and Vonnegut in there. My take on their writings is that they were amazing storytellers. Twain used simple language and local color to produce wonderful imagery with an expertise that few achieved before him. He whisks us away and drops us into a place in history that we otherwise never could have experienced. Vonnegut lets us in on the insane parts of his mind. He tells interesting stories and frames them in a way that I, personally, never would. Even if I had some of his crazy ideas, I wouldn't think about them at all like he does. I've never seen another author break down the fourth wall the way Vonnegut did; after reading a few of his books, I felt like I understood a lot about the way he thought. (Another author who did this was Douglas Adams, whose output was markedly less than Vonnegut's, and Adams wasn't quite as "out there" as Vonnegut.) In other words, I've never really heard of reading Twain and Vonnegut for their ideas or philosophies. While I would argue that their beliefs were rather anomalous for their times, I wouldn't consider their philosophies to be the main virtues of their writings.
- neutronicus 16y agoPlenty of people treat Vonnegut/Twain as insightful political criticism, which I think is giving it way too much credit.
- Gilpo 16y agoPirsig and Rand both embed their philosophy within fiction, thus leaving you befuddled and oddly unsatisfied: "Did I just read a philosophical treatise or fiction?"
- sfphotoarts 16y agoDoes it matter? Isn't the point to read these ideas and to as with all good ideas they get told in many forms. As with art movements, perspective shifts and whole genres of the arts move in unison, from performing arts to fine art. Unless as is the case with some ideas, the medium is the message, then the format used, be it a nice comfortable paperback or a think hardcover text is of no importance.
- Gilpo 16y agoDoes it matter? Hmm. That's a good point -- it may not. But ZAMM and Atlas Shrugged certainly felt to me a bit dishonest in that these works are primarily delivery devices for the authors' philosophical ideas. Other authors inject philosophy and ethics into their "straight" fiction, such as the philosophical rant-free work of Tolkien (LOTR = a treatise against fascism) and Stephen King (The Stand = a treatise against organized religion), but their philosophies never smack you in the face. [edit: grammar]
- Eliezer 16y agoI think it's okay to smack the reader in the face with all sorts of knowledge provided you're sufficiently up-front about it, make sure there's more to the book than that, and give the other side a fair voice. (MoR!Dumbledore, MoR!Quirrell, the Lady 3rd Kiritsugu from Three Worlds Collide...) I suspect that what goes wrong is not writing a philosophical treatise in the form of fiction - what goes wrong is that the One True Philosophy is treated as a Mary Sue within the context of the fiction.
- prospero 16y agoI think Ayn Rand is writing to an audience who already fundamentally agrees with her ideas. A lot of her writing strikes me as clarification of her philosophy, rather than a justification of it. I didn't get that same sense from Pirsig, but while the ideas he presented were interesting, I didn't feel I was getting a novel perspective on them.
- Eliezer 16y agoI would be curious as to what you thought of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, if you looked at that.
- tibbon 16y agoI'm loving parts of it so far. Its funny and clever at times. Other times, its just didactic in the worst way.