You should ask this in r/AskHistorians and I believe you'd get a very in depth response!

That's not even the right quote.

My suggestion then is to simply read more books. That way you can find less trivial things to be infuriated about. This may come across as me being sarcastic. It's not meant as such. Stickers or whatnot on books is really such a inconsequential thing.

Call the publishing company directly. Tell them you'll pay them an additional hefty amount to have a copy of the book in question reprinted without the sticker or logo. They can, and for a high enough fee most certainly will reprint you your own copy, because they're not going to stop printing them with stickers if it makes them more money through contracts with movie and television promoters and helps push overall book sales. If displaying the book that you love is of such significant importance and such stickers or logos are really ruining the aesthetic to such a massive degree as you make it out to be, the additional few hundred dollars should be money well spent.

The other option is to not sweat little things in life. Be Zen about it and say fuck it, it's no big deal.

Yes! Gravity's Rainbow is incredible - one of my all-time favorites. Hard as hell, especially the first time, but so, so worth it. Glad you're liking it - it's quite a journey, so just hang in there and enjoy the ride.

Also, come over to r/ThomasPynchon - if you have questions or want to chat about GR with fellow weirdos, it's a great community! :)

And that's admirable! But I feel like either you've got to come up with incredibly arbitrary terms to use which just feel made up and hard to understand the connotations of ("Yuck, that dude is such a gooseberry!"), or you pick another term which already has sort of negative vibes ("I thought that book was really sludgy"), but you have to work to wrap the word around a meaning it doesn't have. And either way, it feels inevitable that if either of them caught on, they would be applied to ostracized groups in a way that would bring us right back to where we started ("I hate that dude, he's such a gooseberry" -> "You shouldn't call people gooseberries, it's got an ableist history".)

What more creative insults did you come up with, out of curiosity?

Fun fact: William Gibson is a huge fan of Gravity's Rainbow and has said that it absolutely influenced his writing in Neuromancer!

You have to mention he always brought a towel with him

I think it's a common misconception that Pynchon talks down to the reader or is just trying to make himself look smart. On the contrary, I feel like he writes in a very challenging way, but he expects the reader to be able to get there, too, with a bit of effort. He trusts the reader's intelligence.

And he's clearly not writing for everybody - there's a specific type of reader who will pick up books like that and love them, and others who won't, any that's okay.

He was a journalist not a historian, but try Randy Shilts' books for excellent nonfiction about historic events. He died too young.

Different guys

It's not exactly literature, but I enjoyed the memoir Whatever you do don't run. However, there is no content outside of his work life, including colleagues, tourists and animals.

I would suggest you begin reading it NOW. Old Age shows up a lot faster than you suppose. Besides that, once you get a bit of life "under your belt," your reading tastes change: what you like in your 20s might become ridiculous in your 30s. Unless the books are considered "classics," chances are, they're not going to hold up even 10 years. Good luck.

Me too. I’m a bit horrified thinking about how most of my perspective of the country is from a white man, belonging to a culture that colonized the culture he’s writing about. 😬 I guess it’s part of our responsibility as readers to explore more and read literature by Batswana.

> I’ve also read most of the Honorverse and and Safehold, and… I agree completely. Love his work, recommend it to others, but 20ish books in and you see a distinct pattern :)

Yes, Honerverse should have ended with "At All Costs"

Realy like the Idea of Safehold, but the last book was a waste, yes it is realy intresting to have post war economic story, but you tempted with "whats under the tempel" since book one, and that was the only thing that prevented Merlin from go full terminator and win the war day one.

It was so stupid to make Clyntahn >!a true beliver, what will you do if you "know" that your religious beliefs are real, and the devil trying to destroy the world, that make him a well-intentioned extremist, and not a power hungry villan. The final confrontation feel so bad, a real devil visit me in my cell, and taunt my fate, great further evidence my fate is true, and I will soon be a blessed martyr. Insted David Weber just have Clyntahn know that Merlin say is true, and he louse his fate!<

I didn’t appreciate it until I was in my mid-late twenties.

I used to love the Honorverse. Here was a series where a woman being a fantastic hero is normal. Honor is special due to her skill not due to her gender. Then Weber decides to abandon this fantastic and rare premise to focus on religion. Now we have Honor as extra special because she is a woman. We have a giant side rant over evil fundies against good ‘moderates’.

This is made explicit in Safehold which is good not Protestants against evil not Catholics. We had to make sure it was explicit by making the not Catholics commit the worse excesses of the Spanish Inquisition mixed with echos of the Holocaust.

That is just annoying. I wanted to read popcorn books about space navies not religious rants.

Got em

My all-time favourite

No. They're blaming the "sexualization". That is an action by the person doing the sexualizing.

Read: If you sexualize teen girls for dressing in a certain way, we should not blame the girl; however, we should blame the person who sexualizes the child.

Also, this person is stating facts. History is what it is. The person stating the facts is not a homophobe for speaking the truth.

Seriously, people? Taking an excellent topic to spur intelligent intellectual conversation and using it as a chance to go all "social justice warrior"? What a drag.

It's cheaper than a sticker, that's why. Sucks but it's true. 🫠

It's cheaper to print that way, so probably not, especially with the recent exponential increase in paper costs. Don't worry, I hate them too 😤

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I have not tried the long Russian novels other than Crime and Punishment which I was assigned in school. I may tackle them in retirement.

Earthsea 😍 tbh she's one of my fave all time authors, hands down.

That is the first real work of fiction that I read and loved. I was 12 years old and it started my interest in dystopian fiction. Thank you for bringing back a happy memory!