Mind Blowing Books

Cause no one gives a shit about quotes and dialogue

Example: The Valis Trilogy

Sanguo Yanyi (The Romance of Three Kingdoms) by Luo Guanzhong is seriously one of the best things ever written.

It starts off as a kind of dry historic account, but then shit escalates and holy fuck does it become one epic tale. It's homungous, but awesome throughout. Clever battles are a pleasure to read, awesome characters are memorable as all hell, and the whole thing feels fresh as nothing before. It certainly is medieval-ish fiction, but author was a super-talented fuck with a never-ending well of imagination.

Also, before the Sanguo book, which was rather historical, Luo actually specialized in ghost stories. When his well documented characters doing well documented historical deeds occasionally explode into cosmic supernatural at the very brink of tragedy, and then fade back into realistic and dry history textbook narrative... HOLY GOD, you'll SHIT BRICKS every time that kind of crap happens.

Go read the thing. It's awesome, and it's so long it'll keep you occupied for a month or two, even if you read daily (in printed form, it's around 1300-1400 pages, more if illustrated).

Mein Kampf.

Of all the mass imbecilities which have demoralised mankind, this of racial equality between all peoples, White, Black, Red and Yellow, is the most inane. Politically, it has already stirred up all the minor races into a state of belligerence and discontent which will impose minor wars on the dominant nations for years to come. But when it comes to racial integration between the White and Black races, sanity has descended to the looney bin of the impossible, because the intermixture of blood between those races must degrade the White race to the level of the Negro and cannot raise the Negro to the level of the White. Where today we see some evidence of the effect of education on the Negro it is the White blood in him that stirs some animation in his sluggish mental faculties, but the Negro pure, as he exists in Africa, cannot be educated even up to the standard of the lowest content of the White race. He may learn to parrot all the political and sociological clichés of today, but unless he is buttressed by the White race, and policed by it, he must relapse back to the jungle, which is his predestined habitat.

There appears to be an illusion today that this age is the first one in which the Negro has come into contact with a White civilisation, and so had a chance to benefit by its cultural and sociological ordinances. This is not the case. Since the genesis of this present civilisation some six or seven thousand years ago, the Negro has had contact with many past episodes of civilisation, but always, as each subsided, he has relapsed back to the jungle. The other three races, White, Yellow and Red, have devised their own civilisations, and have maintained them through the ages, but it is only in quite recent years that the Negro has come into relations with them. As in the past, his status has been one of slavery, because he has never been able to compete culturally with their achievements in the arts and crafts and intellectual standards. Nor can he compete today with those same achievements, because he utterly lacks the creative faculty: he has no thumbs. The only thing he ever learned to do was to smelt iron ore and hammer out his spear heads. That weapon was essential to the preservation of his existence in his tribal wars, and his food derived from wild animals able to defend themselves with teeth and claws.

Save for the Chinese, and other Asiatic peoples, all other civilisations were generated on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Negro penetration of them was very slight, except, perhaps, with the Egyptians, who were themselves a dark coloured race, but with no relation to the Negroid peoples. Only the Moors and Arabs, because of their geographical contiguity with Africa, have kept up the slave trade with Negroes, but sexual union with them was strictly prohibited. Or impossible for that matter. By a very simple clinical ritual, the Negro became a harmless guard and menial to the Harem. It is only since the colonisation of Africa by the British, Dutch, French and Belgian peoples that the Negro has become a momentous world problem within the last two decades. The British, French and Belgian peoples solved it for themselves by handing their colonies over to the Negroes. The Dutch could not do that. They had been so long in South Africa that they had built up another white race there—the Boers. And there, the world may be assured, they will remain, and the Negro will not be permitted racial equality with them. What must happen shortly between those peoples is already predestined. The only other country on which the full weight of the Negro falls is America.

And the Politician’s solution to it of race integration is a desperation measure which never can succeed, as the politicians themselves know, but at present, they dare not do anything about it, for President Johnson won the presidential campaign by handing himself over to the largest section of the community to command the vote, just as Roosevelt did to capture the presidential chair. We know that section, which is the pestilential problem of all peoples who seek to keep a sane balance of rationality in the conduct of their political and sociological affairs. In Australia, we call them Wowsers—a stigma word which Mencken incorporated in his American Language, but as yet Americans have not adopted it. A stigma word has great power.

In America the Wowser is the self-elected Dogooder—the temperance crank, the Purity Leaguer, the anti-saloon leaguer, the Comstock bookshop smasher and picture slasher; in short, that chapel product of the cheap suburbs and the rural back blocks which seeks to impose its own horrible codes and doctrines on all that makes life tolerable for well constituted humanity. They are the people who imposed Prohibition on America and very nearly wrecked the country. In Russia, they were largely responsible for the Revolution by cutting off the people’s need for liquor during the 194 war. They are the Pacifists—the peace at any pricers, the appeasers at any threat of war which thereby makes it inevitable by inviting aggression from piratically inclined nations. They are today trying to cripple Johnson’s handling of the Viet Nam war: the finest piece of statecraft since the great days of England as a world power, when half a dozen words from Lord Salisbury was enough to send Russia scuttling back from the Oxus. It is a great pleasure to know that our men are fighting with the Yanks, and that more are being trained to follow, if needed.

It is the Wowser, then, to use one stigma term for a generic type common to America, England, and Australia, who is doing all the mischief today by inflating the Negro with a state of megalomania which convinces him that he is the victim of monstrous injustice by the white peoples, and all revenges on them are his by right of martyrdom. And that revenge he will take whenever he has power to do so.

We must concede him injustice so far in that the Whites have invaded his country and taken possession of large sections of it. In the past, they made a commodity of him in the slave market. Those same Whites have now handed back to him the sections of country they had occupied and have freed him from slavery. Justice can go no further than that.

But America, swung off a sane balance of rationality by the maudlin sentimentality of the Wowsers for the assumed sad lot of the Negroes, has allowed its politicians to establish them in equal civil and social rights with the Whites. They have ordained that the white children must consort intimately with the black offspring from infancy to adolescence, and that alone insures sexual intimacy between the two races. That American mothers—always so passionately possessive over their young—should have allowed them to do such a noxious thing is evidence that they are too dazed by the bulldozing tactics of the politicians to realise its inevitable consequences. It is assumed that education will dispose of the physiological compulsions inherent in all such propinquity of the human species.

Education! This age has become besotted over its assumed potentialities to perform a universal miracle, which is that text books alone can create a civilisation. It ignores the irrefutable evidence that only a civilised mind can be educated. Education is nothing more than a procedure for exercising intellectual faculties which are a content of the mind at birth. It has taken the white race six thousand years to develop those special faculties on which all civilisations have been built. The craftsman’s fingers, the musician’s ear, the artist’s hand and eye, the scientist’s investigation of all natural phenomena are inherited from progenitors who have left behind them the brain cells, and the muscular reflexes essential to all creative effort. And it is now assumed that education, in a generation or two, will allow the wretched Negro to develop those special faculties and so allow him to compete on equal terms with the White race as a civilised being. Imbecility can go no further than such a preposterous assumption.

Already the Negro mass is in a vicious state of resentment because it has not straightway been vested in all the rights and privileges of the Whites. The Los Angeles episode is a sufficient evidence of a universal state of mind among the Negroes. And that is only the beginning of the trouble. When he finds that the higher-class whites will not consort with him on equal terms, and that there is no place for him among the trained working class, no police force in the world will be adequate to control him.

Americans are not a docile people when politicians impose arbitrary interdictions on the free conduct of their civic rights and their private lives. The politicians’ failure to inflict Prohibition on the American people is evidence of what they must expect by this proposal to impose racial integration with the Negroes on them. It only required an adjustment of the legal code to dispose of Prohibition, but no such adjustment can solve the Negro problem for them. There is only one possible solution to that, but I am not going to take it on myself to suggest it. It must be already pregnant in the minds of all higher class American thinkers today.

>>3
You're not allowed on 4chan if you're not yet 18. Please leave until you are at least 18 years old.

>>2
I must've been reading a different translation, because the countless regular battles were barely described.

>>6
Well, I wonder if that's possible, or if we're actually talking about the same thing. Was your book... erm, BIG enough? It should have been huge. My version stands at about 3 million symbols, which should be above 1000 pages in print. Maybe you read some kind of adaptations. I've seen that kind of adaptations for Water Margin. They were basically picture books with some condensed text descriptions.

But maybe we're talking about the same thing. Have you read the whole book? He drops battles at first. Real deal begins when Zhuge Liang gets hired. He's described as absolutely awesome. He fukn used eight chariots with his impersonators to lead eight armies from eight directions to scare his enemy shitless. He once killed an older enemy general by horribly insulting him until he died of a heart attack, thus winning the battle where enemy was superior. And so on; won't be spoiling that stuff for you anymore.

>>7
It was the fourteen-fifteen hundred page Moss Roberts translation.  I read close to eleven hundred pages of it during my factory work breaks before I put it down for a change of pace. Never got around to finishing it, come to think of it.

Now that you've refreshed my memory, it did become better once the three of them had formed their own power blocs. Before that though, the fights were more or less about two guys getting it on in a rather nondescript way.

Whether that was because of the translation, I don't know. I have a vague memory of a Chinese poster saying that one English translation abridged most of the single battles, but I don't know who, and the memory is vague anyway.

>>8
Well, yes, certainly there are no battles before Zhuge Liang. But don't forget genius parts, like when Guan Yu fukn stood on the bridge alone and yelled so badly that a hundred thousand strong army thought that the fucker can't be sireous and there must be some horrible shit going on, and was completely scared off. Or like when he rode out of the battle with a child under his armor.

Anyway, you should have noticed that you're reading quality stuff when Cao Cao killed that man and his family close to the beginning, when he thought that they overheard him talking; and when the man told him how his family is somehow dead and Cao Cao understood that he made a huge mistake, he became confused and killed a man, too.

Or when that one official is killed on the ceremony in pronce's court; and then a maid comes into his wife's chambers, and the wife is all "oh my, girl, you reek of blood, wtf go wash yourself", and the maid yells "THEY KILLED ME, MY WIFE, THEY LURED ME IN AND KILLED ME."

Sanguo is fucking awesome.

>>9
I certainly didn't mean to detract from Three Kingdoms by my comments my friend. I enjoyed it greatly, and the only reason I put it on hold in the first place was because it wasn't exactly optimum reading for twenty minute breaks.

It was only the single combat scenes that they fought before their troops clashed that I criticized for their repetitiveness. I still remember scenes like where that one SpearGuy who died fighting a rear-guard action to protect his lord (Dong Zhuo?) from ambush.

>>10
Well, they certainly are similar to each other. There isn't much kung-fu going there indeed. He even had a princess, whose maids all carried swords and were trained in using them, and even that didn't lead to some awesome ninja flip-outs, sadly. But I was talking about mass battles. After all, the whole thing was intended to be epic shit, all those 500,000 armies clashing against 800,000 armies and everything. No place for kung-fu there, he must've though.

>>11
While I'm sure you didn't mean anything by it, I somewhat resent that you think I expected kung-fu out of the series. It is historical fiction after all, not wuxia(?).

But anyway, you like it, I like it, I misinterpreted your 'battle' as 'fight' when I shouldn't have, Three Kingdoms is great. Woop.

P.S. I realize from my last message that the wording implies SpearGuy scene relates to my complaint about repetitiveness, when it is the exact opposite.

>>12
Yay, Anon.

Neverness by David Zindell. Holy shit is that heavy.

>>9
it was Zhang Fei that held the Chang Ban bridge, and Zhao Yun that rescued Liu Shan (the baby), not Guan Yu.

>>15
Oh shit, I guess it's time to read the book again. I was kind of waiting for when I'll forget most of the stuff.

Oh a related note, can somebody supply me with a download for the Water Margin? I can't find it in English for the life of me.

>>16
You'd read some two thousand pages from your screen?

>>17
Did that many times already. Bookreading hardware is much less stressful for your eyes than light-reflecting white paper with highly contrasting black letters, actually.

>>18
You are one crazy sonuvabitch, Anonymous.

lolicontachi

>>19
Really, reading from real paper is very bad for your eyesight. LCD, or moreso the specifically designed bookreading screens, are much more healthy by comparison.