Recent comments in /f/books

JonathanCue OP t1_j6f3b9d wrote

Reply to comment by GrudaAplam in What is a plot/world-building issue that breaks your suspension of disbelief? by JonathanCue

Not necessarily. Depending on how long your secret world has existed, there is a thousand years worth of time for different factions/clans/races to act. It would be super unrealistic if those within it only had the idea to take over the world at the back end of those thousand years.

Think of the societies we have now in our world. It doesn't exactly take long for them to go to war over land or plunder. What makes *this* faction, which is by necessity so MUCH more powerful than everyone else, different in that regard? What motivation do they have to STAY secret?

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Icy-Ad2082 t1_j6f1kcu wrote

Reply to comment by moon_dyke in Dickens' David Copperfield: Were men more affectionate with each other in the 18th century? by angelojann

So the origins are a little more loosely Goosey, but I’ll spell out how I see it. So around a thousand years ago chattel slavery really started its decline, it took a long time though. We see the start of it’s decline with the moral philosophers of the dark ages, and really even earlier than that, the late Roman Empire did not see slavery as moral, it was just a fact of life. It would be like asking if war is moral. As less and less of the labor force was legally compelled yo work, either by being owned directly or being serfs that came packaged with the land they were on. If people aren’t legally obligated to work for you, how do you keep them working? One effective way is to control access to sex. It wasn’t just homosexuality that was less repressed, like I was saying in the other comment Roman’s did not consider having sex with a prostitute to be adultery. By disenfranchising women and making it illegal for them to own property, you put women in a situation where they have to marry. By making fornication and same sex encounters illegal, you force men to have to enter into a marriage contract to (legally) get access to sex. Burdened with dependents, you limit a man’s economic freedom of movement and his freedom in general. A man with mouths to feed is less likely to stand up for himself due to poor treatment. It’s even pretty explicit that this was the goal at points in history, there is a lot of talk about marriage being an institution meant to civilize men. Which is another way of saying “this system helps preserve the status quo.” It also keeps the population growing, which was seen as more and more imperative as industrialization ramped up and the labor potential of any able bodied man skyrocketed. We of course also see that in laws being passed against sodomy, those laws weren’t just for gay folks, it was the states way of saying “fucking is only for making babies and nothing else. You don’t get to have sex unless there is a chance of it producing offspring in a stable family environment.” It seems from a modern perspective that the repression around sex really peaked in Europe during the Victorian era, but it’s hard to tell as historical resources about gay life are often destroyed. For instance, at the same time that homosexuality was punishable by imprisonment in Europe, we have records of various “Molly houses”, which were quite a bit like modern gay bars or burlesque houses. We also have some old words that imply a more complicated situation, for instance the historical meaning of the word “Minion” is the lover of a powerful man. Powerful men were allowed things like that, so long as they fulfilled their martial duties as well. Even here in the US I’ve seen the rhetoric shift just in my life time, when I was younger you would hear a lot of talk from the political right about “family values” and “ensuring a stable society”, these days, now that gay marriage has been around for awhile and society didn’t spontaneously collapse, they seem to have switched to calling trans people pedophiles.

But the reason I think this moment is different and not just part of the cycle is the legalization of gay marriage. That’s an endorsement that these relationships are allowed in our societal setup. And I think things have been moving that direction since the sixties. Ironically, the birth control pill might have paved the way for gay acceptance. The advent of the pill meant women could have careers, and could also plan out when they were going to get pregnant. The women’s rights movement sprung out of that, and that disruption of the “men provide for women” setup created room for gay relationships to fit in.

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GoalPuzzleheaded160 t1_j6f1bfl wrote

Reply to comment by Celeonore in I'm trying to read more. But it's almost like I'm forcing myself to and not because I do it for the enjoyment by Mad_Season_1994

That happened to me with jogging. I think sometimes it's just not your thing. For me, I realized my body type is just not right for jogging. Reading is a physical activity in that the eye movement is rather unnatural; not eye movement you do in every day activities. Also, you have to give yourself over to the writer---not everyone is okay with that. That communion with the writer doesn't come naturally to extroverted personality types because they are more action oriented. So maybe you should try table games or even chess to whet your intellect.

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GrudaAplam t1_j6f13gf wrote

Reply to What is a plot/world-building issue that breaks your suspension of disbelief? by JonathanCue

Well, doesn't it make sense to start the events of the plot just before the super powerful race/clan/faction of beings makes its move to take over everything? That's the whole point, right? That's where the action, the conflict, the tension arises.

If the super powerful race/clan/faction of beings made its move to take over everything earlier then you'd have to start the events of the plot earlier.

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Raemle t1_j6f0sr1 wrote

Reply to It Ends With Us Recent Criticism by hmacias25

There are so many things to criticize that book for, but when lily got out of the relationship is so not it

If you want to make fun of something just point to the name lily blossom bloom and her flowershop

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cmererestmychemistry t1_j6f087h wrote

Reply to I'm trying to read more. But it's almost like I'm forcing myself to and not because I do it for the enjoyment by Mad_Season_1994

You need to figure out what interests you. The genre, author, length of a book, setting, style, the year it was published, etc. are all very important when choosing what to read. Personally, I'll pick up several new books and start reading them around the same time, and eventually I might find that one or two are that I keep going back to.

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Soft_Air_8461 t1_j6ezmhb wrote

Reply to Reading In Another Language For Pleasure by 7mariam

Read a book you already read but really loved. I started reading in english when I was like 12 (main language is spanish) and the first books I read were the hunger games. They were easy and it was easy to translate words I didn't know based on the context. It helped a lot and since I already knew I would enjoy the story it wasn't scary to start at all :)

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echolm1407 t1_j6excv9 wrote

Reply to comment by TheJester0330 in Dickens' David Copperfield: Were men more affectionate with each other in the 18th century? by angelojann

Thanks.

>The earliest times we see this change on same sex relationships is with the first Christian polemics (such as Paul) who preached on the vices of Rome decadence with a core critique being same sex relationships as a "sin".

I know that the original codex that we have of the Greek and the Latin Vulgate of the New Testament are on average hundreds of years later than Paul. And yet they can be interpreted more in line as to what you described here in the same sex interactions in Roman civilization. The real detachment seems to be in the translation of the Greek codex which would indicate a loss of culture knowledge.

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yellowyellow2 OP t1_j6ewxsl wrote

Reply to comment by queenhaggard in Finished the first four Earthsea books, and I have been storing an emotional ramble inside (super long post, sorry!) by yellowyellow2

The criticism of it like that is so funny to me. Her afterword was really good, she mentioned something like people thinking she was taking away Ged’s power as some sort of emasculating punishment, which makes no sense to me seeing as he gave up his power to save and change literally everything, and the only people who have judged him are men obsessed with power.

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