9 Comments
User's avatar
тна Return to thread
HBI's avatar

If you can sit through a reading of Mein Kampf, cheers. What a POS book.

Expand full comment
Koshmarov's avatar

I couldn't, frankly. I still think people should be allowed to read shitty books if that's what they want to do.

Expand full comment
Indecisive decider's avatar

ThereтАЩs no accounting for taste. People watch the kardashians.

Expand full comment
MichaelJohnWilson's avatar

I remember very little of what ended up being a partial reading that IIRC reminded me a little of the excessive ranting of Ayn Rand, who was also on the reading list of every dedicated working class teen intellect in those dark days.

Expand full comment
Koshmarov's avatar

I am not a credentialed mental health professional, but I speculate that both Hitler and Rand were somewhere on the autism spectrum. I think it comes across in their writing.

Autists sometimes muster their energies into changing the world.

Expand full comment
HBI's avatar

How Mein Kampf was written, exactly, is an interesting topic. It appears it was dictated on the fly in Landsberg, but I have a hard time imagining that there was something lost both in the communication from dictator (ha) to writer, who filled in gaps, and the ultimate translation to English.

Expand full comment
HBI's avatar

It's insulting to Ayn Rand to compare the two, as Ayn Rand's books were at least readable from cover to cover without thoughts of suicide, but they have certain strains of rant in common, I agree.

Expand full comment
Koshmarov's avatar

We all got our own literary criticisms, but, man, for me ATLAS SHRUGGED was a slog. I think THE FOUNTAINHEAD is way better. She makes the same points with like 1/3rd of the pages.

Expand full comment
HBI's avatar

I generally agree with that. There was a South Park episode where the local cop, Barbrady, learns to read and is given a copy of Atlas Shrugged as an award. He comes back a couple weeks later and says as a result of reading that piece of crap, he's never reading again.

Expand full comment
ErrorError