After reading the incredibly long books The Foundation and Atlas Shrugged, I figured that this time I’d go with something a bit shorter. So with that in mind, I picked up an old classic that I read back in school a long time ago: Fahrenheit 451. And while it’s not as deep or moving as the previous two books, it is still well worth the price of admission and has a lot of valuable things to say.
Ever since I saw Jennifer Burns’ interview on The Daily Show, I knew I had to read Ayn Rand’s books and see what all the rage was about. In a nutshell, she was on promoting her new book and how Republicans in the United States are embracing the works of Ayn Rand and the potential pitfalls involved. At a very superficial level, the idea is that Republicans tend to be elitist and traditionally want a small government, which is more or less what Ayn Rand is proposing. But at the end of the day, Ayn Rand is a Libertarian, and Republicans and Libertarians just don’t mix. There are, however, a slew of other reasons why Ayn Rand is not a good fit for the Republican party. But in order to talk about why Ayn Rand is not a good fit for Republicans, we must first talk about Ayn Rand.
So I just finished The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand and had quite a bit to say about it, but here’s the thing. There’s really so much going on in it that I will definitely need a full blog post or two to really get it all out there, and since I’ll be reading Atlas Shrugged soon anyways, I figured I can combine the two into a super-long essay that you and Google will enjoy even more. That, and the fact that the interview that turned me onto these books in the first place pretty much said everything I feel like saying in this lazy state:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Jennifer Burns | ||||
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This blog attempts to catalog my experiences, and as such focuses on books I’ve read and software I’ve written (albeit heavily biased towards the former). As such, I feel this is a perfect time to talk about why I came across the particular name of this blog that I did, “Byzantine Reality”. Of course, if you’ve read the “About Me” page, you’ll know that Byzantine refers to software of a certain quality and not the empire of the same name. So let’s dive a little deeper and talk about what we really mean when I say we live in a Byzantine Reality.
Previously we discussed a critical storytelling element: the power of characterisation. It seems to me as though books are the best medium for character development, and there seems to be something about the medium that really makes it stand out here. Fundamentally, it’s tied to how long the reader is engaged with the material. The typical moviegoer’s attention is fixed for two to three hours on average, while someone reading a book tends to focus their attention for much longer. Thus with the extra time, books can really develop their characters in a superior fashion. By the same logic, a television series also has great potential to develop and strengthen its characters over time, since the TV series also has ample time to engage its viewer. But while characterisation is an important storytelling element, I feel like we beat that point into the ground last time. This time, I want to talk about a different key storytelling element: immersion.
It’s probably fair to say that I watch a good amount of television and movies. I also read quite a bit of books and play a lot of video games. So with that under my belt I think it’s reasonable to say that I have to see characters developed and realized somewhat often. And yet it’s only now, after reading Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, can I really say I “get” characterization and the underlying paradox involving making a character really stand out. With that, come along on our adventure of “how to develop characters and how not to” that will take us from Jane Austen to the world of Heroes and with a little stop-off in the Warhammer 40000 universe.
Since I’ve been reading a lot of history books lately, I’m taking a short break from them for now. With that said, I suppose it would have been difficult to pick a more mainstream or “in” book right now than today’s choice, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It’s been out for a while now, so unless you’ve been living in a cave as far as books go you’ve likely heard about it by now. Let’s see how it stacks up.
Many of the Communists we’ve seen heavily base their philosophies on the teachings of Lenin, so since we haven’t looked at a Lenin book at all, it seemed like a natural thing to read about. That’s why today’s book, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe, is such a revealing look into the dark side of the first half of the twentieth century. Its author, Robert Gellately, does an amazing job of showing the devasting consequences of Soviet Communism and Nazi Fascism and why it happened.
Continuing on my quest to get a better handle on why the world is the way it is today, I figured I’d read about a prominent figure in recent Latin American history. That naturally led me to Che Guevara, who I initially had a bit of doubt about. From the Mao book, I learned that he had great plans for Che and Latin America, but was spurned away when he learned that Che wouldn’t allow Cuba to be dependent on Chinese aid. So since Mao rubbed me the wrong way, I suppose a bit of guilt-by-association made me feel a bit sketchy about socialism and all related things. But I resolved to give Che a fair shot in our greater quest to learn about recent history, and I was pleasantly surprised in what I found.
A while ago I was watching a clip from The Rachel Maddow Show and saw Jeff Sharlet talk about a mysterious underground group named the Family. I was, like many people, pretty surprised to hear about a secret Christian organization that has connections all over the world who only recently became exposed after a number of its Republican members have been in trouble in the news and were found to all have been going to this organization for “help”. So naturally after seeing Jeff Sharlet go back on this show numerous times and eventually make his way onto the Daily Show, I decided I had to go pick up his book, aptly named The Family, and see what all the fuss was about. And rest assured, it is a shocker.
