Ten Great Books

[MelissaBaby]

Ban this person. The book describes a vivid encounter between a child and a prostitute. Never mind that the child's mind is filled with filth. It's a horrible book. Every copy of it ought to be burned.

Also, I am pretty sure that quite a few of the listed books contain nonconsensual sex and eroticized violence, but I haven't seen anyone bellyaching about them.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I think there is a significant difference between discussing underage sex in the context of a fetish and as an aspect of a work of mainstream literature.

Good point.
Also, there is a difference between one saying that as a kid, they read this or that erotic work and that it made an impact on them. That is stating a fact without sexualizing it in any way. It's pretty much the same thing as us being allowed to put children in our smut stories without sexualizing them in any way. The context is important.

I'll also add that the kind of moderating these two have displayed so far is more suited to managing a kindergarten than moderating a forum frequented by adults. I don't know, maybe their parts of the forum are filled with immaturity and pettiness but AH most certainly isn't, apart from a few rare cases. Even when people do argue here, it's mostly tame and self-limiting.

 

[VerbalAbuse]

Also, I am pretty sure that quite a few of the listed books contain nonconsensual sex and eroticized violence, but I haven't seen anyone bellyaching about them.

Ban them all.

 

[lovecraft68]

Also, I am pretty sure that quite a few of the listed books contain nonconsensual sex and eroticized violence, but I haven't seen anyone bellyaching about them.

Literotica is a porn site, and by nature more male driven. Rape, abuse, torture, degradation, and humiliation of women is always acceptable. Look at what flies in LW BTB style stories-let alone NC and BDSM-but watch how fast a story where a man is tormented is removed.

Just to remind the class, this is a site that says they don't allow rape and....has a non-consent section. And a "victim has to enjoy it" rule to perpetuate the male driven misinformation that no never means no.

And for those who really do get up in arms about underage? Yeah, that's not as frowned upon here as they think. Just have to know how the game is played. Wink wink wink.

 

[yowser]

Interesting thread from a generational perspective. Did anyone but me name any books published since 2000?

I don't mean that to be snarky, I just find it interesting. At what age do people become less open to influence?

I know it's generally thought that most people lose interest in hearing new music around the age of 25. Is something similar true with literature?

I've got one on mine and there's surely more in others.

I think literature fashions are far slower (I want to say less volatile) than music tastes (and your observation there is spot-on, the 'courtship' years). And I think literary classics have tremendous staying power, and often reflect enduring human values/ideas.

EDIT: Also, book published date doesn't equate to 'influence' date. Nabokov and Middlemarch came to me relatively recently.

 

[lovecraft68]

In no particular order:

Animal Farm - George Orwell
It was an early introduction to political philosophy in a very accessible package.


The New Testament
Seriously. Reading it cover to cover was empowering for me because I no longer had to take someone else’s word for what is in it, and I found that a lot of the people who thump it the hardest are using their own interpretation to gaslight and manipulate others.

Animal Farm just missed my list. That and Atlas Shrugged, and Fountainhead.

Reading the old and new testament is interesting. In the old it was all war and death and eye for an eye. In the new it was turn the other cheek and don't judge

As for the judging, and to your point, I learned very early on that the thing with the bible-or any holy text is people push what they want, and conveniently ignore what they don't.

 

[YmaOHyd]

Interesting thread from a generational perspective. Did anyone but me name any books published since 2000?

I don't mean that to be snarky, I just find it interesting. At what age do people become less open to influence?

I know it's generally thought that most people lose interest in hearing new music around the age of 25. Is something similar true with literature?

When I was thinking about putting my list together, the #1 entry on it was Jacqueline Carey's series Kushiel's Legacy, the first of which came out in 2001. So, other than #1, the following list is unordered.

1. Kushiel's Legacy as a whole, though essentially books 1, 3, 5 and 6. There's nothing wrong with the rest (maybe book 10 of 10), but those four are the ones that I'd consider influential. I'd probably credit reading the first book when I was in eighth grade with not growing up homophobic despite growing up in a small town that had more people skipping school for the first day of hunting season than openly gay folks.
2. The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings for decades of being into fantasy.
3. A Season on the Brink by John Feinstein, which helped a young me understand that people contain multitudes, that they're not just one thing or just the other. I re-learned this lesson years later reading The Outpost by Jake Tapper; a guy I remember as a bully in middle and high school died heroically at COP Keating.
4. Ball Four by Jim Bouton, for slaughtering a lot of my sacred cows.
5. R. A. Salvatore's Drizz't novels, for helping me learn that popular is not the same as good.
6. I don't have a specific entry here, but as a kid I read a lot about the American Civil War and its causes. That's uhhh annoyingly relevant now. Maybe Battle Cry of Freedom goes here, but I read everything in my county's library system on the topic.
7. Ender's Game taught me a lot about the ways that gifted kids were smart but also a lot about the ways in which they're very stupid.
8. Three unrelated entries -- Fire and Other Essays and The Perfect Storm by Sebastien Junger and The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monserrat, which are linked in my mind as being about the pointlessness of snobbery, the dignity inherent in blue-collar work, and what it means to die well, if anything.
9. "The Case for the Empire," by Jonathan V. Last in The Weekly Standard and most of the works of Mercedes Lackey taught me about criticism, why critical analysis matters, and why you can't just take the word of the creator as gospel.
10. Finally -- I've gone way over ten books anyway -- Colleen McCullough's Caesar's Women, which is one of the only novels I've read which changed my view on the actual underlying historical facts.

 

[AlexBailey]

…

I know it's generally thought that most people lose interest in hearing new music around the age of 25. Is something similar true with literature?

Humans have a familiarity bias.

My theory that could explain what you mention is that before twenty five a larger amount of our experiences are novel. When we’re young we have less context to pre-judge new things with. By twenty five we have established a lot of what we are or are not into and base our first impressions on that background rather than being open to interpretation “through a child’s perspective”.

(Oops! Did I break the forum rules there?)

 

[KittyOfSteele]

I love how this thread turned from listing books that made an impact on us into flanderizing the mods.

Just checking a few lists tells me that ten was not enough for me.

E: Oh wow, they really did it...

 

[jaF0]

Also, I am pretty sure that quite a few of the listed books contain nonconsensual sex and eroticized violence, but I haven't seen anyone bellyaching about them.

Mentioning a book that contains content isn't the issue. Saying how it affected you and that you used it to teach other elementary school age children is. That most certainly falls under:

To that end, we DO NOT publish works of any type featuring the following content:

• Sexual activity involving characters under the age of 18 (including but not limited to explicit sexual discussion, voyeurism, exhibitionism, fantasizing, masturbation, and graphic sexualized descriptions, in addition to actual sexual intercourse). Literotica has always had a strict policy against any under-18 content, and any attempt to violate that policy is grounds for account termination.

https://www.literotica.com/resources/content-guidelines

 

[SinclairGroupLLP]

Did anyone but me name any books published since 2000?

I had a few - Sanderson, Ready Player One, Cornwell.

 

[SinclairGroupLLP]

Kushiel's Legacy as a whole, though essentially books 1, 3, 5 and 6. There's nothing wrong with the rest (maybe book 10 of 10), but those four are the ones that I'd consider influential. I'd probably credit reading the first book when I was in eighth grade with not growing up homophobic despite growing up in a small town that had more people skipping school for the first day of hunting season than openly gay folks.

These were some of my favorite sexy fantasy books - probably need to go back and reread them again.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

So many old favourites here! Here are mine.

The Deptford Trilogy, Robertson Davies. Yep, I'm cheating, but the three blend into each other to make this one of the greatest literary works going.

Dune, Frank Herbert. One of the top three sci-fi novels ever.

Fate is the Hunter, Earnest K. Gann. Fate - my muse, my lover, my master.

The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman. Like reading a train wreck. Horrifying, yet enlightening. One wants to grab the Big Names by their collective collar and scream at them to wake up!

King James Bible. Just ‘cause. It’s far more than mere moralization.

The King Must Die, Mary Renault. Renault had such a grasp of both humanity and Ancient Greece. I get jealous of her abilities every time I read one of her works.

Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant. Fascinating in so many ways.

Sharks and Little Fish, Wolfgang Ott. One of the greatest war novels of all time. Arguably ahead of Das Boot.

The Story of Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant. Yes, another cheat, ‘cause it’s in eleven volumes. So sue me – IMHO the most wonderful work of history ever written.

Time Enough for Love, Robert Heinlein. Another S-F classic. I fell in love with Heinlein at a young age and have never ‘fallen out’.

 

[jaF0]

Personally, I'd be surprised if the AH Mod sees this as a violation.

Are you surprised yet?

And it seems Laurel acted also.


TPH also stated elsewhere that she would remove it. That's three or four Mods and Admin that found it inappropriate.

 

[YmaOHyd]

These were some of my favorite sexy fantasy books - probably need to go back and reread them again.

I think the only one I haven't read into tatters is Cassiel's Servant, and it only came out a few years ago.

(Plus, you know, it suffers from being a retelling of the first novel from the point of view of a character who's less intelligent, less perceptive and less involved. Difficult structural problem to overcome, which is why I thought Carey's blog post about it was really interesting.)

 

[SinclairGroupLLP]

That most certainly falls under:

To that end, we DO NOT publish works of any type featuring the following content:

• Sexual activity involving characters under the age of 18 (including but not limited to explicit sexual discussion

I hate to lawyer you here, but it doesn’t actually fit.

First, he was referring to his actual life, not a character or a story. Second, there was nothing “explicit” - either in the dictionary definition of the word or its use in the vernacular as a stand in for lewd.

What he said could be interpreted many ways and I didn’t read it the way you and the one other person in here did

I understand the goal here but there’s not a prosecutor on the planet who would look at what was posted here and start getting an itchy trigger finger.

Chill.

 

[jaF0]

I hate to lawyer you here, but it doesn’t actually fit.

And yet, both posts have been edited.

 

[jaF0]

I hate to lawyer you here, but it doesn’t actually fit.

First, he was referring to his actual life,

That especially is not allowed on the forum.

I've seen people banned form the site for less.

 

[SinclairGroupLLP]

And yet, both posts have been edited.

Mods aren’t final because they’re correct. They’re correct because they’re final.

Kind of like the Supreme Court.

 

[SinclairGroupLLP]

That especially is not allowed on the forum.

I've seen people banned form the site for less.

Really?

There’s a personals forum on here, there are thousands of naked pictures of people purporting to be themselves - are you honestly going to tell us that mentioning something in someone’s real life is permaban worthy?

 

[AwkwardMD]

Interesting thread from a generational perspective. Did anyone but me name any books published since 2000?

Mine was from 2019.

 

[lovecraft68]

Really?

There’s a personals forum on here, there are thousands of naked pictures of people purporting to be themselves - are you honestly going to tell us that mentioning something in someone’s real life is permanent worthy?

I've talked about this for a long time, Lit does not think revenge porn laws or anything of the like apply to them. If you're interested PM me and I'll tell you about KC Cummings.

But FWIW Jafo does side with the problematic picture issue, but the site overrules him on it.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Are you surprised yet?

And it seems Laurel acted also.


TPH also stated elsewhere that she would remove it. That's three or four Mods and Admin that found it inappropriate.

The posts were edited by a moderator, You, if I had to guess. It wasn't done by the AH Mod because he signs his name when he does his moderation, and it most certainly wasn't done by Laurel, as she nukes the posts rather than editing them. You obviously don't have such privileges. But by all means let's keep this pretense that it's Laurel and five mods, and the president of the US as well.

 

[jaF0]

Really?

There’s a personals forum on here, there are thousands of naked pictures of people purporting to be themselves - are you honestly going to tell us that mentioning something in someone’s real life is permaban worthy?

If it involves anything underage, it absolutely is.

It's one of the fastest ways I know of to get booted.

Casually mentioning you, yourself did something as a minor is one thing. Saying you intentionally and knowingly involved other minors is quite different.

 

[jaF0]

The posts were edited by a moderator, You, if I had to guess. It wasn't done by the AH Mod because he signs his name when he does his moderation, and it most certainly wasn't done by Laurel, as she nukes the posts rather than editing them. You obviously don't have such privileges.

There is only ONE Mod that has edit access on the AH. Only ONE other than two Admins, Laurel and Manu can edit a post here. And no one other than one of those two would dare post [REMOVED BY ADMIN] within a post as in shown in the second post.