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The master and commander series isn’t really about ships, it’s a story of friendship between the captain and his surgeon. Most people grow super attached to these characters. When I finished the entire series it was so sad not to have more stories about these two characters. That’s probably why there is so much fan fiction.

We keep unread books to remind ourselves to be humble and curious. The larger our collection of unread books, the more we know we do not know. They signify potential. (or at least, that's what I say to myself, looking at my overflowing TBR shelf)

of kazuo ishiguro, i found "the unconsoled" to be enlightening, but the only friend i recommended it to wasn't a fan. and if you're interested in china, my personal favorites are john k fairbanks and yang se (of "chinese lives")

I have the same stack problem with my backed up catalog of ~200 video games, but fortunately not with my books 🙂

OMG WHAT A TREMENDOUS VIDEO THANKYOU I have books, different books, in that exact same way also. If it helps, I am ‘on the spectrum’ as they say. Speaking of ‘The Stack’, a thing, not just of unread books, but another thing that I encounter daily. In its form as the thing in it’s specific technical and bulk computational type, at least for a couple of hours, sometime more, up to 5 or 6 days a week (usually). Except on holidays. Thus, I’m attuned to this term. Highly attuned. And in reference to your video about ”<some guy>, CEO of Zoom, the video conferencing company that got hacked and which looks like this: (gestures (declining graph));”. Right? To where said dude (repeat the description) gestures crudely to ‘The Stack’, for someone, somewhere, anywhere, just to magic AI-away fix his own self-inflicted business problems of personal representation and meeting services that his company offers (poorly). Somehow the ‘Stack’ will provide him his ‘AI’ product solving complex organisational problems and even decision making. The AI - just a big mess of matrices and Complex matrix transformation - Linear Algebra. This isn’t the thing that does the thinking in the machine. I know you know this. Therefore kindly in this vein, I’ve got an offering for your physical Stack, perhaps of Shame, that’s technical, or probably more precisely academic and scholarly, rather than being literature per se. And then I’ll tell a tale. A tale of The Stack. My offering: Benjamin H. Bratton, ‘The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty’. Author is a leading design professor at a fancy institute and describes ‘the stack’ as the structure which has been built / is building (and subverts and ruins too), the world. Its the thing some of us have constructed on this planet. Workplaces, trade routes, resorts, capitals, cities, networks, businesses, business centres (banking, finance and industry), and also the technical mechanisms, __logistics__ , and individuals, corporate entities, dynasts, and other parties, personal, social, legal, national, transnational, multinational, and extra-, extro-, super- and supra- national, planetary, orbital mechanisms and _processes_ (now i’m just riffing but you get the picture). Let the propostion be: take the descriptive academic philosophy above and imagine it, at that moment revealed, in your exemplar of the failing Zoom CEO. The hilarious thing about his appeals in that context is that (as defined or described above), he is _part_ of The Stack, as are his video meeting and conferencing products (lol i use teams), and his employees, customers and suppliers and so on. Probably even me sitting here talking about it in this way too, and your video on the matter. So what does he mean, or where does he fit? My tale: it’s just ‘The Stack’ channelling itself through to some other part of itself, through this person and his company and shareholders and suppliers and your video and me here talking about your video. ‘The Stack’ is talking to itself, we’re as if some cells in its planetary and orbital structure signalling with proteins and enzymes to each other, slowly becoming ever so slighty more aware of itself. Maybe in this case, as the particular neuron dies from dementia or brain cancer (transformating into a cell that just eats its surroundings to hell with it). It’s how the machine, specifically not in the plural sense, but the whole technical enterprise, as it develops networks of operations and primitive ideas of logistics, logic (strictly boolean generally), and purpose (*) the ever-problematic child, all of which is both internal to, and external of, humans. So now ‘The Stack’, as a machine, operates through the people as if the cellular microbiology, using all our many technical extensions of ourselves, our knowledge, languages, inventions, societies, media, to become aware - conscious - of itself, through the coming decades and through history, not just the kind of history you could find written in libraries but through the people who comprise and operate it. All this held together through physics, chemistry, biology, the social, the political, media, the ‘discourse’, individual emotion, human greed, all components of its semi-biological mechanism. Maybe it already does, the philosphers have described it (blind men feeling the elephant? you decide), so perhaps it’s just this particular case has just layed bare to me at least, as part of the mechanism. A consciousness that operates over years in what we think of as days. How would we know? Are cells aware of all of the rest of the organism?

I'm jealous - my stacks are made of Steam games and Kindle books. Even if you never open another new cover, those books will, at least, be nice to look at (and less expensive).

Journey to the End of Islam is a fantastic shame stack book. You’d read it to learn, and while it covers difficult things it doesn’t make you terribly sad. Plus amazing cultural reflection on western culture of 80s-2010s.

Buying books makes you feel like a god, reading books makes you realise you're not.

100% get the love for traditional media as a traditional artist, theres something particularly special about something you can physically hold that is tangible. i think i remember in one of your videos you showing this old photography telescope thing that prints the images out on these discs

Gonna start referring to my Steam library as my shame stack.

If you find east of Eden by Steinbeck, might be more enjoyable then grapes of wrath

My favorite episode ever is, "The Midnight Sun."

My mom has a couple dozen boxes of novels in her garage most of which she has never read. She's had them for like 20 years.

About China, I think you would love "Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China" from Leslie T. Chang. The author interviews and tell the stories of several factory workers from China (some sad, some happy) and it's such an intresting look at a country in the midst of lots of change in the economy, culture and politics, but unlike in most history books, its perspective is from the young girls in the factory floor! Fun thing, this book was recomended by an EE professor who comented that the majority of the electronics manufacturing is done by women for a miryad of reason.

To Be Taught If Fortunate by Becky Chambers is very good sci fi. It’s also short.

When ponder starting a new book, I know the investment in time will be x-hours. Once I start a book, I tend to try to finish it even if it's turning out to be stinker (throwing good time after bad). For that reason, I will often not start a book I would really like to start. Maybe you can relate. Anyway, it's one of the reasons for my growing shame pile.

I love your videos and channel. Thank-you.

Tortilla Flat is the short funny Steinbeck novel you "thought" you were getting when you picked up Of Mice and Men :)

You can add Zinky Boys to the depressing stack

I wish you'd publish your pride stack (the list of all the books you've read) so that I could know what recommendations you don't need.

You should read Memoirs of a Space Traveller by Stanislaw Lem! It feels similar to I, Robot (at least the beginning of I, Robot) in that most of the book is a bunch of stories, but there's a lot of really interesting philosophical themes about consciousness and communication with aliens and whatnot. According to my philosophy professor (yes, we read a chapter in my class), this author was only translated into English relatively recently compared to when he lived, which is interesting? Also, Descartes' Meditations! Super short and compartmentalized. Fun fact, Descartes wrote his meditations as an introductory textbook for consciousness stuff, but no university wanted to use it, and it ended up becoming his most famous work.

Do you use a TBR list? It helped me get my reading prioritized and organized. Once you've put a book on the list, you're committing to read it. I'm also never reluctant to DNF a book I'm not enjoying; time's too short to waste on something you don't like. My granddaughter, who's an English major and extremely well read, made a helpful suggestion too: Make sure you have books from a wide variety of genres on your TBR. But did I hear you say you've already read 77 books this year??? In that case, you don't have a problem at all. Just stick 3 books from your shame stack on your TBR each month. And good luck!

I buy tons of books. And, I read most of them. (Not to brag.) And the two best books that I have ever read are - 1) 2666 by Roberto Bolano. 2) Don Quixote by Cervantes. I recommend both of these books to anyone who is an avid reader. And…Stoner is absolutely a beautifully, sad story. Highly recommend it! Also(!) if you want a fun read from history, check out the Anabasis by Xenophon. It’s also called the March Up The Country. Great story, and it’s true.

SEVERANCE was turned into a hit series on Apple TV+. A RUMOR OF WAR, by Philip Captuto, is an eye-opening first-person account of a US Marine shipped off to fight in the jungles of Vietnam. I was a small boy during the Vietnam war. Growing up, I never fully understand what it about, but I witnessed the turmoil and upheaval it caused in America. After I graduated university, I decided to educate myself. This was the first of many books I read on the subject. I recommend it for your journey.

It's probably too obvious to recommend, but if you like old novels and books about China and you haven't read Journey to the West, it is so much fun. It's wacky! Here are some excellent shorter books for people like me who don't have much time for reading: The Ruined Map by Kobo Abe - a creepy metaphysical noir set in 1960s Tokyo. Mr Palomar by Italo Calvino - an odd little book about the interior life of a philosopher. Kafka's collected short stories - wild, surreal, vivid... and short. The Stranger by Camus if you haven't already. Cannery Row for a smaller Steinbeck. Leonard Cohen's short stories are also really good. If you find Kazuo Ishiguro frustrating I would like to hear what people thought about The Unconsoled. I love that book but it could send you crazy, it's like being trapped in a bad dream.

the fact that james somerton praised this book like there was no tomorrow instantly turned me off of it honestly

A few things: 1) you might consider renaming your “shame stack” to something less judgmental, or even whimsical. I just call mine my “to-read shelf”, which, now that I think about it, is pretty dull. I’ll come up with something…. 2. Is 36 unread books a lot? My to-read shelf has 119 books; is *that* a lot? 3. I’m resigning myself to the thought that I’ll die with unread books in my possession, and I’m okay with that.

I read half a dozen books this summer inspired by your sci-fi books video. Really liked Roadside Picnic but you've probably already read it?

My shame stack is in e-book form, where no one but me can see my shame. I can respect buying books based on their physical appearance, especially at a thrift store. Even if the book itself isn't very good, it still functions as a tiny piece of art on a bookshelf.

Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series is wonderful. Each book has a bit different feel, and while life aboard ship and naval battles are part of the series, the character development and relationships are what bring me back to them again and again.

When I was in grad school a friend organized a reading of Arcadia. We had dinner first, I think, then passed out copies of the book, assigned parts, and read the whole play as a group. It was fun - I love doing play read-throughs and spending structured time with friends - but I don't remember being seriously impressed with the play.

you should read Clarice Lispector or Machado de Asis if you want to read something from Brazil

Here is a recommendation for your second stack: I recently read Rust In Peace by Endre Fejes. It's about a murder committed in 1962 in the junkyard (rust cemetery) of a machining shop in Budapest. The story then jumps back to the end of the great war, the era of Horthy fascism and starts with an ancestor of the murderer. You can read about the story of his large and typical family, and understand why the murder happened by the end. Of course you actually learn about Hungary and communism. It's told in a very matter-of-fact manner, which strangely makes its highs and lows very impactful. I wonder how comprehensible it would be with your background. Having grown up hearing about the socialist system but not living it, I definitely learned a lot reading this book, and some parts went over my head. I might read the English translation too, so if you don't end up liking it, I can say to myself it's because of that.

IMO the amount of shame you should feel over having stacks of unread books is exactly 0. What you're experiencing is something that basically all avid readers deal with. Think of it has just having the conceit that you will live forever (or at least "long enough to read all of these books"). That is, every book you buy you (most likely) DO actually intend to read. The only question is "when will you get to it." I'd encourage you to not beat yourself up too much over this. Rather I'd encourage you to celebrate the fact that you DO read books... a thing which seems to be becoming less common in our society which often celebrates ignorance, pseudo-science, and superstition over being informed, educated, and aware.

My take on your response is that you are way too young and have experienced way too little of life to be reading most of these books. You will enjoy most of these more when you have more life and experiences behind you.

Also, I believe it will make better videos if you can hold up the books and not move them for several seconds. Felt like you were yanking out my eyes as I tried to look at the covers while you were moving your hand expressively while talking. Thanks. E

Any Means Necessary is great. Also, | A Life of Reinvention, Malcolm X. | by Manning Marable. Biography is sympathetic and sharply realistic, exhaustively researched by noted Civil Rights academic, back of book is Notes, Bibliography and Index. Wonderful book, corrects some parts of the previously written Autobiography. In my youth and teenage years Malcolm X was portrayed to the US public to be a dangerous, evil person and it's been an experience becoming educated about who he really is and what a Pillar of the Civil Rights Movement, what a Great Man Malcolm was. How he was so brilliant at learning and changing and recreating himself and his life choices. It is inspirational and triumphant, only a couple of pages of the tragedy of the end of his life. For a fantastic Biography out of 20th century Physics History, | Lise Meitner, A Life In Physics |. By Dr. Ruth Lewin Sime. Perhaps you already know Meitner's story, how she struggled to earn a Doctorate in Physics from U of Vienna in 1906. Pretty frickin badass to be Female and earning a Doctorate in 1906 Austria. She did pioneering research in Atomic Energy, collaborated with Otto Hahn until forced to leave Germany by threat of Nazi persecution. She continued to be a resource for Hahn by correspondence from Sweden. Her part in discovering atomic fission was not acknowledged when Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize. George R Stewart also wrote Earth Abides . A very early science fiction treatment of a civilization ending plague and a group of people who gather to survive and eventually form a small village. Excellent book. And Patrick O Brian is another great author. He wrote a long series of books (20?) set in the British Navy and the life and adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey. I recommend them highly. Great writing. You buy books like I do, addictively. And like you some of my books sit around unread for decades until one golden moment I scoop it up and lose myself in a new universe. You may find yourself hauling some of them back to the used book store for store credit. Are you thinking about where you will put new bookshelves? Erica

I get reading subject matter books like econ or stem or history and even literature with one exception fiction .... what's the point of reading fiction, its like watching tv except no one is proud of how much tv they watch so what the point of fiction ? how does it benefit the intellectual course ? not criticizing hoping for real insight to learn here pls. 😅

TRUTH : we live in a society that bombard us with stimuli, so we feel compelled to do stuff that we don't really want or need. That's why you have a shame stack: you like the idea of reading way more than reading itself.

Uh! Uh! I have something on my "Books I should read to learn but they will make me feel sad" list: The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II" by Svetlana Alexievich It has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, has stunning reviews and I bought it because its about a definitive Blindspot for me about the war. I know basically nothing on that topic. But I am honestly afraid of the book. I haven't read it yet. I just heard of one story that is supposedly in there. And I ... I'm afraid of this book.

I pay a guy to read my books for me. It's way easier.

About the second list --The path to wisdom is almost continually painful... so, yeah

No shame. It is funny how the enjoyable part of buying books is often just the imagined future we have with them. You would probably like bookstodon.

Akutagawa is amazing! He wrote the short story that Kurosawa based Rashomon on. I particularly love his short story "Hell Screen". If you like "Kappa" you should definitely look for the collection Penguin put out.

19:08 how does remembering the lack of books in childhood makes you feel?

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it is too dark to read. “ - Groucho Marx

Sometimes you just have to be at the right time of your life before you’re ready for a specific book!

I know Lucy by the Sea didn't win the Pulitzer but I went in completely blind to Elizabeth Strout's previous work and I thought Lucy by the Sea was a pretty good book, for what that's worth

The sci-fi works of Becky Chambers. To Be Taught, if Fortunate is a nice and short appetizer to start with, then her Wayfarers series. Brilliant world building and storytelling. Highly recommend.

Big, huge, massive recommendation for James Baldwin. His essays aren’t just good reading, they’re in that short list of literature so profound and insightful that you can sense it changing who you are as you read. That’s just my personal experience of course, but The Fire Next Time is famous for a reason.