serafiym posted:

book so entertaining to read.

Citation needed. Haven't read the book in over a decade, but I remember it being a chore to get through. Not to say the movie wasn't great, but that's mostly because the director Mary Harron was consciously parodying the source material. Watch a movie truer to Ellis's writings like Rules of Attraction and you'll quickly lose track that it's a satire and realize it's a movie about awful rich kids (it's the story of Patrick Bateman's younger brother going through college).

ialdabaoth posted:

though they had over a dozen copies of some thomas freidmam book about the environment. optimistially determined this is because people dump books they don't want and good ones get snapped up right away

I think that's true. There is a very interesting used bookstore where I live and I'd dig through the war nerd section and see good stuff from David Glantz pop up, buy one then come back later and someone else will have grabbed the rest. Meanwhile the books that collect dust in that section are just not particularly interesting, like memoirs from somebody's B-17 grandpa named Buster L. Nixon who wrote as a way of working out his POW trauma after bailing out over Germany: I Must Escape From Camp 29! I'm making that up but it's pretty close.

I think I've told this morbid story before but I rent a place in an older neighborhood and most of my neighbors are very old and very conservative and kicking the bucket at a rapid clip so there are estate sales all the time and I pick through their stuff -- that's how I got this '80s vintage alarm clock for a dollar.

Anyways when looking at their bookshelves, I can usually understand why they hold onto the stuff they do until the end. People keep a lot of practical books, or self-help stuff (and religious books) or books that relate to hobbies; gardening books, cookbooks, and this one guy in his 70s who went down in a plane crash (he was the pilot) mostly had aviation books. If they're into fiction they're into genre stuff, and even though it's mostly blazingly reactionary adventure novels like Tom Clancy for the men. But I read a lot of pulpy sci-fi junk because I am a goony nerd and I can hardly act shocked that 70-year-old white men who own Cessnas in a county Trump won by 20 points like Tom Clancy.

I knew someone who worked in a high-volume used bookstore who thought the most interesting subculture he dealt with were the women who read romance novels since they'd bring in plastic tubs full of these paperbacks, sell them and then take the money and fill the tub back up, then come back a few months later to repeat the cycle all over again. He thought the romance genre was far and away more advanced as a productive process like in terms of how the authors have the formula down and can pump it out on enormous scale.

Edited by trakfactri (July 9, 2019 14:02:57)

trakfactri posted:

romance genre

pump it out on enormous scale

There was an abundance of game in the Rauhe Alb in Wurttemberg in the sixteenth century, but the peasants were forbidden to use large dogs on them; this right was reserved for the foresters. Meanwhile in Persia, not only were there wild boar, stags, bucks, gazelles, lions, tigers, bears and hares, but also prodigious quantities of pigeons, wild geese, ducks, turtledoves, crows, herons and two types of partridge. Naturally, the more deserted the region, the more freely animal life multiplied. Father Verbiest (1682) when he travelled with the Emperor of China's enormous suite (100,000 horses) in Manchuria, was a reluctant and exhausted participant in some fantastic hunts: a thousand stags and sixty tigers were killed in one day. Mauritius was still empty of people in 1639, but turtledoves and hares were so numerous and so unafraid that they were caught by hand. In Florida in 1690 'quantities of wild pigeons, parrots and other birds were so numerous that boats often came away full of birds and birds' eggs'. Of course everything was magnified in the New World: there was a superabundance of uninhabited regions (despoblados) interspersed with a few tiny towns at enormous distances from each other. The twelve large wooden carrioles drawn by thirty pairs of oxen that accompanied the bishop of Santiago de Chile, Lizarraga, in 1600, took about twenty days to travel from Cordoba to Mendoza, in what later became Argentina. Indigenous animals were few, with the exception of ostriches, llamas and seals in the south. Instead, the empty countryside had been filled with animals (horses and cattle) brought from Europe, and these had multiplied. Enormous herds of wild oxen had worn regular paths across the plain; they remained at liberty until the nineteenth century. The silhouettes of the herds of wild horses huddled together sometimes looked like vague hillocks against the horizon. In the pampas where not the tiniest piece of wood could be found, 'not even as large as a little finger', a chapeton, a newcomer to America, caught a glimpse of one such small hillock in the distance and cried out in delight: 'Let's go and cut some wood!'

how radically different the world is today.