@read-and-be-merry List of Books to Read Before You Die
- Any book you want
- Don’t read books you don’t want to read
- That’s it
- Congratulations you did it
@iammewhooaryou | really like this list. All my favorite books are on it.
@ read-and-be-merry Thanks | worked really hard on it
I have to disagree with this list and say that, at least sometimes, it’s good to read books you don’t want to read.
Absolutely. Ignoring all the books you don’t like is a perfect recipe for ignorance.
It’s a tricky situation, because reading a book you don’t care about, whose topic triggers no interest in you, most likely will not improve for life at all. On the other, challenging yourself, discover new things, reading some “unpleasant” books (I am thinking along the lines of the Anne Frank’s Diary) does expand your horizons and help you develop. And sometimes I read some books I only understood in hindsight, maybe with some help. Off the top of my head I can think of “the man in the high castle” making way more sense after reading its Wikipedia page, or “de Avonden”/“the evenings” clicking in my brain only after a friend of mine told me “it’s a book about PTSD”. While reading the last one, I thought it was quite dull but stick with it just because. Now I’m glad I did. On the contrary, I also stuck with GRRMartin way too long, and nobody is going to give me back those hours. I still think those books are an exercise of “look how many plot twists I can stack!” and I dislike them all.
There’s always room for people in this wild world whose opinions are wrong.
So, a Zionist is correct to avoid any book that shows the Palestinian side?
I think you’ve mistakenly lost yourself on the path to the “c/stridentpolitics” group. This is “c/books”. It’s an easy mistake to make, seeing as the names are nearly identical.
TIL ‘books’ only means safe fiction and not scholarly works.
So, you’re saying it’s okay for people to avoid fiction books by LGBTQ+ people, or Africans, or any book that might upset their ideas?
We should only stick to things that don’t upset us?