QTDDTOT

based honey nut cheerios

May sound stupid but how do some of you guys know so much? Like there's that thread on Linkola/primitivism at the moment and a lot of the repliers don't just have a cursory knowledge of him, they have actual opinions. Is it naive to assume everyone in that thread has read literature on primitivism? If not literature, where do most of you learn about 'stuff' widely? Documentaries? Other online boards? Or just lots of reading?

autism.

Currently reading 1984. Still have Paradise Lost/Regained and The Grapes of Wrath.
Just bought Moby Dick and Siddhartha today.
Monday I'm buying: The Rebulic, The Art of Rhetoric, Beyond Good and Evil, Invisible Man, Inferno (maybe all 3), The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Leaves of Grass.

Is that a good starting list for really trying to study/read literature and improving my grasp on the subject?

>note
I mostly chose them, and was asking about them, because I'm very rusty with reading and don't want to dive into more difficult or stylized books that I wouldn't understand well. (I'm holding out on Paradise, and I'm going to read those listed before trying the Bible, Ulysses, etc.)

So I'm not so much asking about content but more for them being a good footing in a growing ability of literary comprehension.

You have a brain, don't you?
You'll find most schools of thought have a baseline for contemplation that most anyone who puts in a few good moments of brainstorming can begin to see. Once you've got your threads, it's up to you to weave an ideological blanket with varying prominence of chosen strands.

Why are you buying so many at a time?

am i gay?

maybe

Bulk investment. Spend $40 now, then don't for months.

Also, thanks for the radiant input. My mind is quite bathed by it.

You're diving into some fairly difficult books. Don't bother with Rhetoric, honestly. It's minor and needs a gallon of context for every drop of content. Instead of reading The Republic, try reading a decent undergrad book on Greek philosophy or on Plato in general, or just reading one of Plato's shorter and earlier dialogues to see if it's to your liking. The Republic is also best understood once you can contextualise it a bit, but it's also long as balls.

Milton and Dante are great, but you may get bored - both will be mostly looking up references, for most people.

The Nietzsche is fun but you might find yourself surprised at how difficult Nietzsche is, given his reputation for being colloquial, pithy, aphoristic, etc.

Don't touch Ulysses for a while. What you're suffering from at this point is "peak syndrome" - you're only seeing the peaks of great literature and Western thought, and you think they have to be tackled like individual boss fights. Let yourself breathe for a little while. Read fun literature. Read Stendhal, Balzac, Cervantes, Hesse, Mann, Melville, Dickens, Apuleius, Tacitus, Suetonius, etc. Have fun with it and realise literature was meant to be enjoyed and felt, often by average people, not just decoded and analysed. I'm not saying "LOL THOSE ELITIST FAGS WITH THEIR ULYSSES, JUST READ FUN LITERATURE!" I'm just saying that before you watch Fagatovsky's Eraserhead 2: Electric Boogaloo, and start analysing lighting and direction choices and trying to recognise which boom mic the director used, you might want to watch the fucking Godfather or some Sergio Leone first.

As for philosophy, philosophy is 90% context, 10% agonising over comprehension. You aren't going to understand a fucking thing for a long time. Even after you start to understand stuff, the middle phase of understanding is even more frustrating because you understand JUST enough to go "so.. wait, he's saying...?" but you still won't have the context and outside knowledge to know that "yep, that's what he's saying, and it's fucking dumb" (e.g.). Philosophy has a really gay initial learning curve, if you want to understand it reasonably well as a whole. Read surveys and online encyclopaedia entries and watch lecture series and listen to audiobooks and read textbooks, and sample from the primary sources. Don't kill yourself over perfectly memorising everyting - it will fall into place. Let your mind be elastic about it, and don't try to forcibly slot every thinker into a rigid classification. Way, way later, you'll realise that even the safer classifications are still approximations for the sake of teaching undergrads.

Find some visually pleasant chart of all the "major" French/Russian/English/modern writers, and bounce around it sampling them, occasionally reading all the great works of one or two that you end up loving. It's more like an open world game whose terrain will be familiar to you after a year or two, than a ball-breaking treadmill.

youtube.com/watch?v=24KnwTepKdU

>buying books
>especially classics

lello

This is good advice. You're a good person who exists on Veeky Forums. I'm actually stunned.

My honest plan was to finish 1984, then move onto Grapes, followed by Moby and Leaves of Grass. Once those helped me back into the groove, I was going to move onto Siddhartha, Nietzsche, and the rest.
As I said, I'm certainly holding out on Ulysses and other daunting reads.
But I'm not unlearned or thoughtless; I have a grasp on many philosophies and religions, and haven taken influence from them, and those I've named, over the years. But I'm trying to read them as whole now, to see what I agree with, disagree with, and what expands on what I've already thought.

Given that context, does your opinion still hold? And either way, I might consider dropping Rhetoric and picking up some Hemingway or Tolstoy, since I'm also trying to improve my own creative writing abilities along with literary comprehension.

The Wild Palms (If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem) is my recent fav.

And by 'other daunting reads', out of the ones I'm actually getting monday, I meant to imply saving Plato, Dante, Milton, and Nietche for later (just about in that order). All while intermittently mixing in other, smaller reads (or even just taking time in between to study and branch from and upon what I read) so I can digest the larger works better.

>implying I honestly care

Is there good fiction about either the Capgras or the Fregoli delusion?

A mix of these. Autism gives you the focus needed to study topics no one outside of Autistic Literature Forums will talk about, Most Schools of Thought can be "spark noted", a little Wikipedia here, a little googling there, and bam you can understand certain points in most Schools of Thought, However, reading the source materials and books on the topics at hand will give you more in depth knowledge of the topic and unless they have in depth knowledge of the topic, their opinions are based on Wikipedia summaries and some guys blog.

Still me, but there's a lot of content you pushed at me all with great information. But at the same time, you take some generalizations that don't nessessarily apply to me, and I want to refine your advice since it seems very helpful and we'll thought. I can't thank you enough for putting the time to answer and help.

I've never been one for strict classification and fully believe philosophies of one sort or another may unintentionally correlate in ways that obstruct them from rigid classification. I'm almost glad I'm trying to teach myself and not go to school for Lit because I feel that my unbiased naivety almost gives me as much an upper hand as it does hinders me.

I'll be saving your recommendations and looking into them as well as looking for a great chart which outlines just what you suggested (though I do believe I was unconsciously aiming for such a thing by singling out Melville, Whitman, Steinbeck and Dante and Milton; and also why I threw in Tolstoy after your suggestion of dropping Rhetoric).

And good context sources to suggest before I attempt The Republic, The Divine Comedy, and Paradise? Maybe just a site, image, or a brief summary?

I would just like to point out this kind of thinking might not work. Bulk investing might work on something like food but with books you'll find yourself with a large stack of books and you'll only have read a few before you realize it takes much longer to read through these books than you once thought. You'll also come to learn that some 300 page books are actually disguising their true length, each page will be words from top to bottom, fitted on the page perfectly, you'll realize that if this books font was one or two steps bigger and more spread out it would be a 600 - 800 page book.

That's okay. I started 1984 about a week ago and between work and social life, I'm a little over halfway.
I've got my whole life. And though I want to read them all, I want to understand them more. So I'm not in an inherent hurry. Which then makes buying bulk seem like the perfect idea and why I took some time deciding that list, and did not just throw darts at covers.

That list is pretty solid but Beyond Good and Evil is not a good intro to Nietzsche. Nietzsche is one of those people who you can't read his books randomly. I would suggest starting with "The Gay Science" or even the "Basic Writings of Nietzsche"

amazon.com/gp/product/0679600000/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_35?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A2CE7EN4TBTG38

Awesome, thanks for the input! That's the consensus that I've noticed about Nietzsche, and I suppose I may have been overzealous in deciding BGaE. (it was that or Zarathustra initially)

I also suggest adding "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley into your reading list. It is much better than I thought it would be and its so very different from the portrayals of Frankenstein in the media.

Shit, thanks. Y-you too senpai.

I probably overgeneralised you as a total newbie to readin' stuff, so sorry for that. But also, please don't take what I'm saying as anything other than some dude's opinion, with several grains of salt. I'm not trying to schoolmaster you or anything like that.

You seem like you're going about it the right way. I think I projected my past self onto you. I bought Rhetoric and some other Aristotle thinking it would be some self-contained, understandable, etc. and it threw me off how impenetrable it all was. I did this with a lot of stuff, and it's only much later after I had really let myself soak in a thousand things that everything became enjoyable and started to make sense. It's just so easy to burn out in that early period, or to plateau and feel too exhausted to start climbing again.

It was just a very important realisation for me that you need to build your personal Road to Erudition out of medium-sized enjoyment, rather than thinking of everything in terms of leaping from sterile peak to sterile peak. And I see lots of people on Veeky Forums thinking the way I did at first, that reading some shit like Pynchon or "getting Finnegans Wake" is the point of reading Chaucer. Or beating themselves over the head because they don't have a mystical experience reading Dostoevsky as a 19 year old whose entire view of the world is still very small. I think being well-read is about widening and refining your aperture, not just aiming it at the right stuff and knowing what that stuff is.

I agree with you on not learning it through university being an advantage. There's a weird brain sickness that university people get where their unconscious mind associates the fact "I Took A Shitty Course On ______" with "I Know _____," which leads to really shallow appreciation of stuff. But there are certain benefits to it. It will force you to read a lot of shit, push you into areas you wouldn't have encountered otherwise. Telling someone they can get a university education in the library is like telling someone they can teach themselves math or computer programming based on free resources - sure, they can, but how many of the ones who intend to do it are actually going to follow through? If you're one of the few who really will though, you're golden.

I say read Dante, Milton, Plato all you want at the outset. I'm only saying be conscious that later you might want to reread them later. Again I just clench my asshole when people go "I want to learn philosophy, so I'm reading The Republic." The Republic is a giant assrape of exegesis. You're supposed to have a feel for geology, so you can at least vaguely appreciate the nature of a rock, and what some of its subtleties hint at, not just be some dude who picks up a rock and memorises every aspect of it unfeelingly. But to get a feel for geology you need to start by just fucking around with rocks. So it's kind of a chicken-egg thing. Hard to articulate.

Also sorry for walls of text I have autism. I don't mean to come off as "I AM PATRICIAN, BEHOLD MY FEATURE-LENGTH ESSAYS." Just some dude who empathises with this situation.

As far as plot twists go, what do you guys consider better, a twist that came completely out of nowhere or one that was hinted at throughout the entire story?

>The Republic is a giant assrape of exegesis.

How does Philebus fare? I bought it the other day from a charity bookshop thinking it was one of Plato's more famous works (must've got it muddled up with Phaedro or something). Anyway, is it an 'important' Plato text? Of course I'm going to read it regardless - just want a bit of a pointer.

both, but moreso a twist that is consequential and internally logical

One that is hinted at but very subtly. Like most people would only see the hints on the second read.

What kind of nonfiction should I get?

I'm currently rereading old favorites (Odyssey and meditations) but I want to read something a bit more practical.

I'm a CS major, if that helps narrow down what I would be interested in. Books on logic and maths are great. But I've also heard promising things about memoirs from nazi tank operators

What are your favorites, /lit /?

you should read Ziggy

>I think being well-read is about widening and refining your aperture, not just aiming it at the right stuff and knowing what that stuff is.
This right here is what I'm trying to say is my end goal. I've thought in depth my whole life, and thought about thinking for half. I'm an analytical and rhetorical person who usually is giving life advice to friends, family, and strangers. I live like a recluse and spend most of my time analysing the world around me. In this, I've ordained an out-of-place modern, but not-quite postmodern, philosophical view which I feel has many large roots stemming back to great thinkers who've already expressed these ideas in different ways. I feel I'm in the right position to study past philosophies that acted as marrow to my current beliefs, and gain a more prevalent knowledge of them to grow an actual skeletal frame.

>If you're one of the few who really will though, you're golden.
I am and I will. There's no doubt in my mind. I can't help but feel my life has been leading up to this in the way that I've gone about it.

>I say read Dante, Milton, Plato all you want at the outset. I'm only saying be conscious that later you might want to reread them later. Again I just clench my asshole when people go "I want to learn philosophy, so I'm reading The Republic." The Republic is a giant assrape of exegesis. You're supposed to have a feel for geology, so you can at least vaguely appreciate the nature of a rock, and what some of its subtleties hint at, not just be some dude who picks up a rock and memorises every aspect of it unfeelingly. But to get a feel for geology you need to start by just fucking around with rocks. So it's kind of a chicken-egg thing. Hard to articulate.
This was most helpful from your excerpt--though I'm not saying the rest wasn't certainly reflective. Maybe I might be well off to make an attempt to mush through the avalanche of texts that I'm certain I will struggle to fully grasp, just so I can gain a respect and feeling for what reading comprehensive habits that I'm striving for.
I understand your analogy, to which I will say that is not only how I actually am with geology--of course, unrelated--but I am as that with both philosophy and literature. Now I am striving for mastery. And until then, I'll need to realign and replace some of my bearings.

All in all, solid advice. And I think I've taken some good tips from everything. Never apologize for walls of text; if the information is kosher, then length is desirable. There's more content, and less loopholes and gaps in the coverage.
Thanks a lot user. You gave me one of the most down to Earth talks I've had on this site, let alone the board, and the knowledge paired with your advice was very nice.

Made a thread for this just a moment ago, but perhaps it belongs here. I'm looking for someone the explain the joke for me in this scene from Doctor Faustus:

FIRST SCHOLAR. I wonder what's become of Faustus, that was wont
to make our schools ring with sic probo.
SECOND SCHOLAR. That shall we presently know; here comes his boy.
Enter WAGNER.
FIRST SCHOLAR. How now, sirrah! where's thy master?
WAGNER. God in heaven knows.
SECOND SCHOLAR. Why, dost not thou know, then?
WAGNER. Yes, I know; but that follows not.
FIRST SCHOLAR. Go to, sirrah! leave your jesting, and tell us
where he is.
WAGNER. That follows not by force of argument, which you, being
licentiates, should stand upon: therefore acknowledge your
error, and be attentive.
SECOND SCHOLAR. Then you will not tell us?
WAGNER. You are deceived, for I will tell you: yet, if you were
not dunces, you would never ask me such a question; for is he not
corpus naturale? and is not that mobile? then wherefore should
you ask me such a question? But that I am by nature phlegmatic,
slow to wrath, and prone to lechery (to love, I would say), it
were not for you to come within forty foot of the place of
execution, although I do not doubt but to see you both hanged
the next sessions. Thus having triumphed over you, I will set
my countenance like a precisian, and begin to speak thus:--
Truly, my dear brethren, my master is within at dinner, with
Valdes and Cornelius, as this wine, if it could speak, would
inform your worships: and so, the Lord bless you, preserve you,
and keep you, my dear brethren!

the joke is that wagner is going full autism on a pair of chads. they just wanted to know where a nigga at.

He's fucking with them.

>can I go to the bathroom?
>I don't know, CAN you?
>insert many lines of philosophical fuckery at the nature of the question and its wording
>...
>but really, you can go to the bathroom. God bless

Both should be there, but both are badly overused. I just got done reading a book by Abercrombie, and I'm tired of all the goddamn plot twists. He goes out of his way to make the book unpredictable, and ends up making the plot twists predictable themselves. No major character can be killed unless they've had 3 or 4 unexpected rescues from the brink of death, and if some character has put any time and effort into a goal, you can be 100% sure it will fail in "unexpected" random ways.

Is this an epic prank or an actual book? What is the full title ?

Procrastination and lack of self-discipline is ruining my life. Are there any good books on overcoming this? I don't think I'm looking for a self-help book, I have the biased on ignorance opinion that self-help books are garbage; but what the fuck do I know.

It sounds like your problem is that you're fucking stupid. Try not to take it personally, i'm no fucking wit myself.

I suppose stupidity and procrastination are correlated, so you might be right.

You forget about yourself and focus on a subject to work on.

Does anyone even really use onomatopoeia?

Is it just a meme I was taught in middle school?

Is written laughter an onomatopoeia?

i don't think so, I'm reasonably smart by every measure and I'm a huge procrastinator, unfortunately

i have an outline for a 10 page paper due tomorrow and I havent started yet

very rarely.

Buzz, whine, screech,
haha, thud, zoom,
slap or clap,
ring-ding-ding-dong. dong-ring-ding-dong
Whoosh, splat,
Pop, crinkle, chirp

etc,.

i know what it is, thanks

what author writes ring ding into their books

or simply "buzz". maybe he writes, "there was a buzz", but thats not the same thing.

I think it can be used effectively, italicized, to give a hint at something that cannot be directly observed by the characters. Especially if you want to break up your text a bit.

a car that hits a bird and the driver thinks it was a funny and lucky.
Church bells ring as the bird hits the ground while the car drives on.
Many of the bones break as it hits with the ground and it lands on a bag of chips as it let's out a one last note.

You see it more in poetry.

Anyone noticed how a lot of otherwise very good authors have some specific, small, and fucking annoying flaws that persist throughout all their works?

>Joe Abercrombie: All the incessant bitching about regretting past decisions, and being forced to do unpleasant things. All his main characters do it.

>Glen Cook: Shamelessly recycled fucking villains. The entire Black Company series only had a handful of villains in it. It got to the point where when a "new" villain arose, you don't wonder whether or not it's an old villain in a new costume, but which one of them it is.

>Gene Wolfe: Fucking melancholy, overly philosophical characters who make all their decisions impulsively for no good reason. I spent his entire series asking, "why the fuck did he do that?"

Are there any books that talk about the capacity of 'abstraction'? I'm not quite sure what I'm even looking for, abstraction seems to be the single most critical ability that separates us from the animal kingdom. I guess I'm looking for some kind of philosophical/metaphysical(?) system that explains abstraction, so I can ponder on it. I just know abstraction is a crucial human ability, but I want some deeper understanding of it as an action and its consequence on us as beings, or people in a civilization.

Should I read next pic related, Tropic of Cancer, or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle?

You could do worse than to read pic related.

Or perhaps pic related.

Tropic of Cancer. Murakami is a meme.

Read this: plato.stanford.edu/entries/abstract-objects/

How hard is Gravity's Rainbow?

I managed to get through Ulysses, but it was a challenge. If GR is harder than that I don't think I'll be able to handle it.

Stop putting the pussy on a pedestal.

Which is the best edition of Ulysses to get? I don't really want to get a book full of annotations, for the references I'm going to get a separate companion or maybe just rely on the internet.

I've seen a bunch of people on this board with the one in the link, and it's apparently the text as Joyce himself edited it (I'll post the link in a reply to this post because the system thinks my post is spam)

This is the link: amazon.com/Ulysses-James-Joyce/dp/0486474704

dont be a bitch just read it

Anybody know of some sort of encyclopedia with short, lesser known events from history? I need plot inspiration

Really? I'm almost done with Northanger Abbey and I was pleasantly surprised by how subtle Austen could be. Have you read any of her other books?

Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman.

Someone posted a painting in a "post art and get a rec" thread featuring chubby people flying/falling out of the night sky over a miami-ish looking city illuminated by colourful city lights. They looked kind of grotesque. Another painting by the same artist featured some disturbed ice cream truck thing flying over the city adorned with bathroom graffiti style slogans.

I think the artist has won a prestigious award or teaches at an ivy league school. Can anyone help me out? It's driving me mental.

An actually helpful reading advice post on Veeky Forums. I never thought I'd see the day. Nice post user.

anyone ever use thriftbooks?

What's a book that has some thought provoking ideas, or something I can sink my teeth into, but is still a fun and 'easy' read?

I'm a uni student and it's exam season so I'm looking for something I could read for say half an hour at night to get away from work. I was thinking something like Knausgard, I've heard a lot of people say it had a page turning quality to it

Thanks in advance everyone.

she's a great writer. her characters are charming and resourceful, but not flawless and they develop in such a believable, comprehensible manner. people tend to write her off as some kind of chicklit prototype, but her novels always have a good lesson/moral to them that are, in my opinion, still applicable today. she pokes fun at english society in a good-natured way that is not overtly ridiculous, and her books are, as you said, subtle, but you still get a sense of completion and resolution when you've finished a book by her.
pride&prejudice is a must-read tbqh, emma is also great. lizzy from p&p is my forever waifu

Long shot but does anyone know how the German translated version of Stoner by John Williams is? The one translated by Bernhard Robben

I've read them all. If you want subtlety, Emma is Austen's paramount. It's also her most stylistically radical novel. She utilises the style indirect libre (before it was a thing), which means as a reader you get stuck in Emma's worldview, and you almost can't help having her errors become your own. For this reason it rewards multiple readings and re-readings, because when you know how it ends and what's really going on, Emma's mistaken assumptions actually become reflections on her own character.

In The Pale King, was Shane Drinion, the guy who talks with Meredith Rand in one of the last chapters, supposed to be an autist?

Johannes Cabal The Necromancer.

I don't have that much free time to read books, though. What recent quick reads are good? Quick reads being between 300 and 400 pages.

My doctor who I am now not seeing claimed I may be lapsing into schizophrenia now he is absolutely fabricating this and it is not true but what is some literature that has to do with that mindset

Knut Hamsun - Hunger

What are the best translations of Xenophon's Conversations with Socrates and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War?

Mother, father says im not your son.

I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing with Plato

could someone tell me what dialogues I should read, preferably with a rough order?

My community college gave this away for free. Why is that? Would it trigger or something?

Depends a little on what you want to get out of it, but I'd say start with either the Meno or the Euthyphro, then follow the Euthyprho with the Crito, the Apology, and maybe the Phaedo.
Take your time. Think about how the arguments are supposed to work, and whether you think they're convincing, and how they might be challenged or improved. When someone responds to some argument with "Of course, Socrates, nothing could be clearer!", don't just accept it and move on. Ask yourself if it's really so clear that this thing follows from that.

If you enjoyed reading these, try the Republic. Don't worry too much about figuring out all of it--there's a lot going on. Go a book at a time, and think a lot about the first couple books especially. Probably worth getting a companion book either on the Republic or Plato generally, or find some online course with lectures.

Plato is great, but I'm not sure he's the best way to get into philosophy, since there's a fair amount of superfluous stuff going on that makes things more confusing than they need to be. If you're new to philosophy, you might want to start by reading some contemporary or 20th century stuff or maybe stuff by the early moderns (like Descartes and Hume).

For most topics, plato.stanford.edu is a good resource.

>I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing with Plato

I think Phaedo more than any other. It's not any one dialogue really, though, it's the entire process of dialogue itself. You have to see Plato's dialogues as a ritual, an initiation. If you read Plato in an analytic way to break down his points and discover his opinions and try to assess where he fits in the history of Western philosophy, etc., you are reading him wrong (or, at least, not on his own terms). The point is to have your mind swept up in the process of the dialogue, to be fully and completely engaged in it. The dialogue begins with the presentation of an idea, then that idea is attacked, a new idea is offered to correct it, etc., all the while your mind is being trained to contemplate ideas fairly without dismissing them out of hand. Then, when the dialogue reaches its peak, your mind reaches a state of aporia (loss, confusion). This is when your mind feels completely blank. It's hard to describe. Your mind loses all perception, you totally forget the world, your surroundings, your self, and are just in the immediate presence of your own mind. This is when you realise that you have a mind and how immanent it is. The danger here is that you will fall into the Hindu trap of believing that you are part of the divine mind that makes up existence, the experience is that powerful. And then the dialogue introduces its best take of the ideal (usually given by Socrates), and your now freed-up mind is able to contemplate the idea as though it were a statue stood right in front of you.

Thanks for the information

I have been interested on the works of Schopenhauer for a while. The catch is that he often makes references to other philosophers which I am not familiar with, notably Kant, Hegel, Fichte and Schelling.

What would be the best book to get a good overview of their ideas, enough to understand Schope's critiques?
Or which works by these philosophers are the groundwork of their ideas?

What are the differences and similarities between saussurean semiotics and wittgensteinean picture-theory of language? I know they are form different philosophical traditions, but in the end they seem similar, right?

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald.

Fucking incredible how time doesn't flow chronologically in his novels, but rather seems to accumulate at the present moment, giving every situation and every sentence the weight of the entire catastrophe of the history of man. Like Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, the main character and the reader looks upon layers and layers of rubble stacked on top of each other.

How do Williams other novels compare to Stoner?
I haven't seem them mentioned.

For the biopolitical subjectivation of man by medicine, law and social relations, see Kafka. Or Camus, maybe.

For philosophy, see Foucault's "The Birth of the Clinic".

100 Years of Solitude. Deep ideas, but surface level in a good way. Huge page turner.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie has the same quality to it, but isn't quite as deep.