NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on November 10, 2011. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct. 

One of the Big Problems of our epoch, according to smart people, is how nobody’s reading books anymore. This is horrible, no good, and very bad for the future of Uh-Mare-Eca. Those durned kids spend all their time on Facebook and playing World of WarCraft instead of reading books, and as a result they’re getting dumber and dumber with each passing year, so dumb their tongues hang out of their mouths and they can’t tie their shoelaces or keep score for a bowling game by hand or recite the Gettysburg Address from memory. Y’know, because the best way to ensure someone understands a famous speech is to force them to memorize it and have them repeat it back to you.

Smart people who lament the end of fancy book-learnin’ are not so smart retarded. Yes, it’s true that people don’t read books as much as they used to. But the average schmuck back then wasn’t reading War and Peace, he was thumbing through the likes of The Thin Man, The Long Goodbye, True Grit or any number of mass market paperbacks aimed at the lowest common denominator. No preaching, no philosophizing, no complex themes or symbolism for tenured college professors to force their students to write fifteen-page papers about; just action, adventure, mystery and sex. Even the likes of Horatio Alger or Ayn Rand have had far more impact on American culture than F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Creeley or any of the other unreadable hacks that the lit-crit types gush over.

And yet we’re supposed to pretend that Creeley’s illiterate free verse poems on buying tampons for his girlfriend represent the height of American letters. That’s why nobody reads anymore: the writers you idiots are pushing suck, suck, suck. Take this excursion to Parnassus by Sherman Alexie as an example of the sheer awfulness of modern literature:

On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City

The white woman across the aisle from me says ‘Look,
look at all the history, that house
on the hill there is over two hundred years old, ‘
as she points out the window past me

into what she has been taught. I have learned
little more about American history during my few days
back East than what I expected and far less
of what we should all know of the tribal stories

whose architecture is 15,000 years older
than the corners of the house that sits
museumed on the hill. ‘Walden Pond, ‘
the woman on the train asks, ‘Did you see Walden Pond? ‘

and I don’t have a cruel enough heart to break
her own by telling her there are five Walden Ponds
on my little reservation out West
and at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane,

the city I pretended to call my home. ‘Listen, ‘
I could have told her. ‘I don’t give a shit
about Walden. I know the Indians were living stories
around that pond before Walden’s grandparents were born

and before his grandparents’ grandparents were born.
I’m tired of hearing about Don-fucking-Henley saving it, too,
because that’s redundant. If Don Henley’s brothers and sisters
and mothers and father hadn’t come here in the first place

then nothing would need to be saved.’
But I didn’t say a word to the woman about Walden
Pond because she smiled so much and seemed delighted
that I thought to bring her an orange juice

back from the food car. I respect elders
of every color. All I really did was eat
my tasteless sandwich, drink my Diet Pepsi
and nod my head whenever the woman pointed out

another little piece of her country’s history
while I, as all Indians have done
since this war began, made plans
for what I would do and say the next time

somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own.

Forget the whiny racial identity politics of the poem and simply concentrate on the structure. Doesn’t this poem seem a bit off to you? There’s just something wrong with it, but you can’t tell exactly what? Here, let me help:

The white woman across the aisle from me says ‘Look, look at all the history, that house on the hill there is over two hundred years old, ‘ as she points out the window past me into what she has been taught. I have learned little more about American history during my few days back East than what I expected and far less of what we should all know of the tribal stories whose architecture is 15,000 years older than the corners of the house that sits museumed on the hill.

‘Walden Pond,’ the woman on the train asks, ‘Did you see Walden Pond?’ and I don’t have a cruel enough heart to break her own by telling her there are five Walden Ponds on my little reservation out West and at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane, the city I pretended to call my home.

‘Listen,’ I could have told her. ‘I don’t give a shit about Walden. I know the Indians were living stories around that pond before Walden’s grandparents were born and before his grandparents’ grandparents were born. I’m tired of hearing about Don-fucking-Henley saving it, too, because that’s redundant. If Don Henley’s brothers and sisters and mothers and father hadn’t come here in the first place then nothing would need to be saved.’

But I didn’t say a word to the woman about Walden Pond because she smiled so much and seemed delighted that I thought to bring her an orange juice back from the food car. I respect elders of every color. All I really did was eat my tasteless sandwich, drink my Diet Pepsi and nod my head whenever the woman pointed out another little piece of her country’s history while I, as all Indians have done since this war began, made plans for what I would do and say the next time somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own.

That’s right, take away the line breaks and this “poem” becomes a bunch of run-on sentences. Not only does it not rhyme, it doesn’t even have any meter. The number of syllables in each line is completely random. This Alexie guy wrote a few paragraphs, hit the Enter key a few extra times, and tried to pass it off as legitimate verse. And the Beigeists in the publishing world lapped it up and begged for more.

Speaking of which, since this guy loves to sermonize about the evils of the white man and the suffering of “Native Americans,” I’d love to know which Indian language the name “Sherman Alexie” comes from. I’m guessing it’s from the Fullashit tribe, who live on the Ur-Anus Reservation in northern Idaho, but I’m no expert in Indian linguistics, so someone feel free to correct me in the comments.

But “On the Amtrak” is small-time hackery: there are far more sob-squirters, schlockmeisters and all-around frauds out there with completely undeserved fame and critical reputations. But thing is, I can’t really blame them too much. It’s a fact that you can’t spell “stupid” without “U,” and it’s thanks to U that these fools are allowed to run around mass-murdering trees for their banal, bathetic books. Snake oil salesmen can’t ply their trade without credulous dullards to give them their money and praise, and that’s what U’ve been doing.

So, in an effort to help push back the tide of blandness and idiocy (and put my college education to use), I’ve decided to start reviewing books more often. If you scroll up to the top of the site, you’ll see a new page in the header entitled “Book Reviews” under the “Support Us” button. Every time I write up a book, you’ll find it there. Plus, I’ve decided to get with the program and add links to buy each book in each post. If you buy any book I recommend by clicking those links, I get a commission at no extra cost to you, and in the case of Amazon links, I’ll still get a commission even if you end up buying something completely different.

To keep this post from being too long, I’ll start with just one book, but man is it a good one. I’ll pick up with more reviews next week.

The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi

This is honestly one of the few books I’ve read that changed my life, and one of the few I make a point to re-read once a year. I’d wager that 100% of the people who poo-poo me for liking Ames and Taibbi haven’t read it. My opinion may be skewed by the fact that I picked it up as a teenager, but even guys like Roosh who’ve had their own share of foreign adventures have been blown away by the eXile.

The book is divided into eight chapters, half by Ames, half by Taibbi. Fans of muckraking will appreciate Taibbi’s contributions, which deal with the unbelievable amount of corruption and fraud in late 90′s Russia. The mainstream narrative about Russia is that Boris Yeltsin was a great capitalist, pro-Western reformer unexpectedly decapitated by the 1998 economic collapse, and that Vladimir Putin is an evil fascist who hates freedom and probably eats cute puppy dogs. The reality is that Yeltsin was a venal bastard who aided and abetted the rape of his own country by capitalist oligarchs (both Western and Russian), and Putin is beloved by the Russian people because he had all the looters murdered, imprisoned or driven into exile (heh). The reason you don’t know about this is because the entire Western press corps in Moscow, with the exception of the eXile, either turned a blind eye to the corruption or actively collaborated with the oligarchs. Hmmm, this all sounds kinda familiar… but nah, it can’t happen here.

To this day, Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi are despised by the MSM because of the way they caught them with their pants down. To give just one example of how far ahead of the curve they were, the eXile was one of the only newspapers in the world that predicted the Russian financial meltdown of 1998. Particularly eye-opening is Taibbi’s chapter on Michael Bass, an American crook who symbolized the worst of 90′s expat excess. Bass was a convicted felon who came to Moscow to pimp Slavic nubiles for quick cash while simultaneously trying to present himself as a respectable public figure, writing a society column for a now-defunct expat rag, The Moscow Tribune. After the eXile ran a story on how he sold an aspiring Californian runway model into sex slavery to an Arab sheik, Bass gave Taibbi what may be the most passive-aggressive death threat of all time:

After I got off the phone with Liz, I called Bass right away. I told him that, while I wouldn’t print a retraction, I was willing to publish his side of the Paris story. He hedged, diving straight into his creepy rehab-therapist voice:

“I don’t know, Matt,” he said. “I just don’t know what to do. I mean, I’m really hurt about this. I cried. And you know, the worst thing is that my charity programs are going to suffer. That’s the thing that hurts me the most.”

Was all this really happening to me? Was he serious? “So what are you planning to do?” I asked.

“I don’t know…My roof wanted to kill you right away, but I really don’t know what to do. I mean, what are my options? I can have you killed, or I can pay someone a couple of hundred bucks to have your legs broken, or I can just let it go. And I don’t like any of those options.”

“Michael, I can’t believe you’re threatening me like this. What is this, the Solntsevo gang? You’re talking about having me killed.”

“I’m not threatening you,” he insisted.

“You’re sitting here, saying you don’t know what you want to do, and talking about having me killed as one of your options! That’s a threat from where I sit.”

The tale has a happy ending, with Bass humiliated and exposed for all of Moscow’s expats to jeer at.

All this isn’t to argue that Ames and Taibbi are saints: Ames’ half of the book will dispel that notion pretty quickly. Beginning with his contracting the worst case of scabies ever from a one-night stand in St. Petersburg, Mark Ames takes us from his early years living in a run-down California nursing home with his Czech girlfriend to his first months hustling in Moscow, and his eventually founding the eXile with a pair of proto-SWPL faggots from Seattle. The passage where he fantasizes about their violent deaths at the hands of Chechen gangsters may be some of the most disturbingly funny writing in the history of the English language.

But Ames doesn’t hit his stride until the book’s midway point, with the chapters “Our God is Speed” and “The White God Factor.” “Our God is Speed” details his adventures with drugs and is full of sick, graphic detail (such as his junkie pal Kolya’s “shooting bloodied water from his infected needle across [their friend’s] floor”), but “The White God Factor,” about his experiences with Russian women, is of particular interest to us manospherians. In between recounting his sexual encounters in Russia and Belarus, Ames tears feminism and American women to itty-bitty pieces:

Out in Russia, you gain a little perspective, which can be dangerous. Deep down, as it turns out, even the most emasculated, wire-rimmed glasses, cigar-smoking and martini-drinking American guy fantasizes about living in a world full of…well, I’ll let you guess:

a) self reliant women who are also your friends

b) sluts

Okay, still stuck? I’ll amend it. All men – that’s right, all sane men – fantasize about a world populated with:

a) self-reliant androgynous women who are also your friends

b) young, beautiful sluts

Envelope please… Whoah! This is a shocker, folks! Hold on to your seats! Turns out, when you scrape away the surface implants, every single sane man wants…drum roll, maestro…young, beautiful sluts!

CUT TO: Young, beautiful sluts seated in third row, hands cupped over mouths in shocked surprise…They stand, crying-laughing, hugging each other, then slowly make their way towards the podium, kissed by vigorously applauding men on their way there…

Young, beautiful sluts. It’s a censored fantasy, and best kept that way: After all, in coastal America, reality couldn’t be further away from that fantasy. It exists only in chat rooms, and even there, most of the alleged F18′s are gay 50-year old men with spiked five-inch butt-plugs wedged up their asses.

Nearly every Westerner who comes here – male and female – is shocked by the beauty factor. It takes a while for the brain to trust the eyes…Their Eurasian features (pale skin, eyes that are both slanted and large, colored gray or ice-blue, and sleek legs like a gazelle’s) and exaggerated feminine gestures stir things in the expat male’s primordial consciousness. Perhaps it has something to do with the gratuitous fellatio-friendly lipstick jobs girls here wear: bright red paint from nose to chin, which screams: “I am capable of sucking your dick so hard that you’ll have to pull the sheets out of your ass!” In America such women are available only to producers and rock stars. In Russia, they’re everywhere – they’re the norm. And expat men have a leg up on everyone.

And of course, no book on late 90′s Russia is complete without a mention of the Hungry Duck, a Moscow expat bar whose nightly bacchanalia made 120 Days of Sodom look like a church social:

Shortly after, Doug created a special Hungry Duck version of Ladies’ Night that made our champagne bottle seem like bathroom graffiti in comparison. Ladies’ Night is another word for rape camp. On Ladies’ Night, only girls (generally ages 12 through 25) are allowed in, while all men are kept at bay from 7:00 P.M. to 9:00 P.M. The girls are offered free drinks, as much and as fast as they can down them. Not just offered free drinks, but pumped full of free drinks…Russians aren’t known for their moderation when it comes to liquor; your average five-foot-one dyev could put any NFL lineman under the table. The point of Ladies’ Night is to get the girls as drunk as possible in a two-hour period, then to open the floodgates to the guys and let the rape camp festivities begin. It was a brilliant idea to raise the volume of vomit and semen to levels yet unseen even in the Duck.

Ames then relays the story of the time he and Taibbi tended bar during Ladies’ Night, where he “drunkenly slobbered into seven or eight different teenage mouths” and there was a “river of vomit coming out of the stalls” of the women’s bathroom.

When I posted an excerpt of Ames’ in which he bragged about threatening to murder one of his girlfriends if she didn’t get an abortion (and convinced another to have her little bastard vacuumed out) a few months back, commenter PA referred to him as a “piece of shit” and claimed he “ruined” the girls. Ames is a piece of shit, to be sure, but Russian women are as equally vile, as he shatters the fantasies of white knights and mail order bride-site cruising beta schmucks with this passage:

…[Russian women] live it up to the max while they have the upper hand, when nature is good to them. They know that time is working against them. Youth is a dirty word here – most go straight to adulthood by the age of 14. I can count five women I’ve slept with who lost their virginity at age 11; they treat it as dry fact, like when their first teeth grew, and not as a psychology-loaded tragedy. A Russian woman is at the peak of her power from about age 13 to until 20. After that, beauty is subjected to the cruel forces of entropy, which renders them unrecognizable beasts – Division II noseguards – by the age of 30. That’s why most have been married at least once by the time they hit 20 – in the provinces, the age is more like 17.

To hammer home the point, Ames quotes Edward Limonov (another great, underrated writer, and one of Ames’ intellectual inspirations): “Russian women are usually, physically speaking, attractive, but morally – they are repulsive creatures, cripples.” Oh, Spengler’s Universal Law of Gender Parity, you haven’t failed me yet.

One of the nice things about the eXile book is that it comes in a nice big 8 1/2 by 11 inch size, allowing the editors to toss unabridged reprints of eXile articles, cartoons, and covers in the margins. It adds value to an already action-packed title, but you definitely don’t want to read this one in mixed company, unless you want to explain away a picture of a dyevushka with a champagne bottle jammed in her asshole or an prank cover with the headline “NIGGERS! Where Do They Come From… and Why Are They Here?”

When I first read this book a decade ago, it planted a germ in my mind, a desire to see the world beyond my country’s shores. Mark Ames’ Russia no longer exists, as shown by the collapse of the eXile itself three years ago. This is a good thing for both the Russians themselves and for proponents of nationalism across the globe. But the grip of go-fuck-yourself Calvinist conservatism and its hanger-on ideologies is still choking the life out of America and the West at large. Even with the Occupy protesters pushing back against the state religion, I doubt Americans can snap out of their stupor in time to halt the coming collapse. One decade later, I’m closer than ever to breaking out of the asylum.

Some will argue that Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi are bad men, and they’d have a point. But as is the case with so much of human history, it’s not a case of good vs. bad, it’s bad vs. worse. Ames and Taibbi are slime, but they’re far more honest, truthful and talented than their detractors, the defenders of everything that’s wrong with the world. People like them make the world a far more interesting place. If the choice is between them and you amoral, two-faced cocksuckers, I’ll take them.

Click here to buy The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia.

Read Next: The Way of Men by Jack Donovan

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on April 11, 2012. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

During my first semester at college, I had the misfortune of having an emo for a roommate. Everything about this guy was effeminate and despicable: he talked with a lisp, he wore his hair long with bangs, and all of his friends were girls. We clashed on almost everything, from his habit of making out with his girlfriend underneath the sheets to our fights over the thermostat (he always bitched that it was too hot, even when it was five degrees out). Living with him was like being married. I initially just tried to avoid him, spending most of my non-class time hanging out with my friends or other stuff, only coming home to sleep, but things eventually came to a head and I ended up transferring to a new room.

But despite his general obnoxiousness, Emo Roommate had one thing over me: he got laid. All the time. With reasonably cute girls. During the short time I lived with him, he basically had a rotating harem of three or four girls at any given time, inexplicably drawn to his fey mannerisms and pissy passive-aggressive behavior. In fact, one Sunday morning I came home from a long night of drinking Keystone Light and striking out with the ladies to the sight of his girlfriend making out with a redheaded girl on his bed while he grinned. I suppose it was a violation of the bro code to cockblock him like that, but I couldn’t have cared less at the time; served him right for being an unbearable prick.

As desperate as I was to remake myself, I had my limits. Emo Roommate may have been getting more pussy than I was, but he was something I didn’t want to be. He was a fag.

I’m from the generation for whom “fag” and “gay” were common taunts, much to the consternation of our teachers and parents. To a bunch of third-graders jostling for social status on the playground, faggotry was like porn: they couldn’t define it, but they knew it when they saw it. Faggotry doesn’t refer specifically to homosexuality, though a lot of homos happen to be fags. Faggot, gay, girly-man, fairy, fruit: these are all terms to describe men who fail at being men. More than that, these men not only don’t care that they’ve failed at being men, they revel in it and demand the world reorient itself to accommodate their failures.

I couldn’t have articulated all this a decade ago, but at a certain instinctual level, I knew it. So did my friends, and so does any man who’s ever used “fag” as an insult. So does society at large, never mind their claims of gender being a social construct. Look at all the mindless “man up” shaming coming from the media today. Implicit in using the phrase “man up” is that there is a fixed definition of “man” that the males of today have failed to meet. More importantly, “man up” implicitly states that manhood is something that males must earn. There’s no equivalent phrase for women, nobody calling on them to “woman up.” The reality that Bill Bennett, Kay Hymowitz and the rest acknowledge but won’t say aloud is that women are born and men are made.

Jack Donovan’s latest book, The Way of Men, is not a self-help guide. Reading it won’t get you laid, make you money or give you bigger abs. The Way of Men is an attempt to answer the questions, “What is masculinity? What does it mean to be a man? What is the essence of manliness?” It’s an articulation of what makes men men, unencumbered by ideology, philosophy or religion, the truth that we all know and have known for millennia but could not find the words for.

This is going to sound like hyperbole or ass-kissing, but The Way of Men is easily one of the best, most valuable books I’ve ever read. Decades from now, when the current dystopia becomes nothing but a bad memory, Donovan’s book will be seen as one of the seminal works of the alt-right/manosphere canon. I hate even using this analogy because it trivializes the sheer impact of Jack’s work, but it’s the only way to make my point: The Way of Men will do for men what The Feminine Mystique did for women.

The Way of Men is important precisely because Jack approaches masculinity from an objective, amoral, almost mathematical standpoint, a perspective that is literally absent in the past few decades’ writing on the subject. The problem with defining masculinity is that every single clique in the world wants to repurpose masculinity and men to serve their own interests. Ask a dozen people what manliness is and you’ll get a dozen different answers:

• To a traditionalist Christian, being masculine entails getting married, having children and going to church every Sunday.
• To a gamer/manospherian, being masculine entails having sex with lots of women.
• To a feminist, being masculine means serving the interests of women every minute of every day.

Donovan dispenses with all this noise and distills manliness down to its core attributes, independent of culture and morality. These are the virtues that define men throughout space and time, whether we’re talking about the samurai of feudal Japan or the knights of medieval Europe:

To understand who men are, what they have in common and why men struggle to prove their worth to each other, reduce male groups to their nucleic form. Sprawling, complex civilizations made up of millions of people are relatively new to men. For most of their time on this planet, men have organized in small survival bands, set against a hostile environment, competing for women and resources with other bands of men. Understanding the way men react to each other demands an understanding of their most basic social unit. Understanding what men want from each other requires an understanding of what men have most often needed from each other, and a sense of how these needs have shaped masculine psychology.

Relieved of moral pretense and stripped of folk costumes, the raw masculinity that all men know in their gut has to do with being good at being a man within a small, embattled gang of men struggling to survive.

The Way of Men is the way of that gang.

This short section should give you an idea what Jack’s writing style is like: direct and unpretentious. This isn’t a dry academic work full of puff words and run-on sentences. Donovan is economical with his words and doesn’t waste your time. Indeed, he actually cut a section out of the book because he felt it was a diversion; he released these chapters for free as No Man’s Land last November.

Jack’s concept of the “gang” being the way of men informs the entire book, specifically his analysis of the central traits of masculinity: strength, courage, mastery and honor. The “gang” is the basic unit of male organization going back to the caveman days. All effective male organizations, from the police to the military to the mafia, are gangs in which the four aforementioned virtues are necessary to survive and advance the group’s interests. Drawing on evolutionary biology, history and philosophers from Aristotle to Hobbes, Donovan breaks it down:

People like to make friends. Being on the defensive all the time is stressful. Most people want to trust other people. Most people want to be able to relax. If you are smart, until you know them,they will remain out there on the other side of the perimeter. Even if you let your guard down to cooperate or trade with them, they may or may not be absorbed into us. As long as other men maintain separate identities, there is always the chance that they will choose to put the interests of their own ahead of your interests. In hard times, agreements between groups fall apart. Competition creates animosity, and men will dehumanize each other to make the tough decisions necessary for their own group to survive.

Donovan also distinguishes between the concept of a being a good man (“good” as in moral) and being good at being a man (being masculine), noting that most people confuse the two:

A man who is more concerned with being a good man than being good at being a man makes a very well-behaved slave.

It goes without saying that certain figures would do well to read that quote carefully.

The second half of The Way of Men is concerned with the state of men today, serving as a great antidote to all the “man up” articles coming out of the media today. Society has gradually crippled mens’ ability to be manly by making the world safe and neutered, yet the Bennetts and Hymowitzes of the world wonder why the Millennial generation has no interest in anything aside from porn and video games. The chapter “The Bonobo Masturbation Society” drives the point home:

If you’re a good boy and you follow the rules, if you learn how to speak passively and inoffensively, if you can convince some other poor sleepwalking sap that you are possessed with an almost unhealthy desire to provide outstanding customer service or increase operational efficiency through the improvement of internal processes and effective organizational communication, if you can say stupid shit like that without laughing, if your record checks out and your pee smells right— you can get yourself a J-O-B. Maybe you can be the guy who administers the test or authorizes the insurance policy. Maybe you can be the guy who helps make some soulless global corporation a little more money. Maybe you can get a pat on the head for coming up with the bright idea to put a bunch of other guys out of work and outsource their boring jobs to guys in some other place who are willing to work longer hours for less money. Whatever you do, no matter what people say, no matter how many team-building activities you attend or how many birthday cards you get from someone’s secretary, you will know that you are a completely replaceable unit of labor in the big scheme of things.

This is a woman’s world; we men are just visiting.

But it won’t be a woman’s world for much longer. With the slow-motion collapse of the economy and the government’s impotence, it’s only a matter of time before new gangs of men arise to take their place. Donovan is critical of the men’s rights movement’s first principles and pessimistic of their chances of success, though he does praise the work they do. The future of men is the same as their past: the Way of the Gang, good, bad or wretched.

A while back, the author of the Danger & Play blog Tweeted something to the effect of “this is the first generation of males who were not taught how to be men.” Generation Zero is the generation of Sesame Street and Ritalin, a generation raised without any memory or first-hand knowledge of a world in which masculinity was encouraged and celebrated rather than punished. The Way of Men is the first complete roadmap to masculinity ever published, the truth your fathers never told you. For the men of my generation, this book is beyond invaluable.

But even if you aren’t a Millennial, you have to own The Way of Men. There is literally nothing out there like it: a book that describes the fundamentals of manliness without getting bogged down in religion or politics. It is a guiding light out of the darkness.

And whatever you do, don’t be a fag.

Click here to buy The Way of Men.

Read Next: Women Are Just as Socially Retarded as Men

I haven’t read any of Orhan Pamuk’s other novels, so I can’t judge the quality of his work, but Snow is a pretty good excursion into both the emptiness of modern life and the wretchedness of being a beta male. I don’t care for Pamuk’s postmodern trickery (for example, he inserts himself as a character near the end), but Snow is otherwise a tightly written and engaging novel.

The plot concerns Ka, a Turkish poet living in Germany, and his journey to the far eastern Turkish city of Kars to report on a spate of suicides by young women. That turns out to be a cover; Ka is actually pursuing İpek, a former schoolmate of his he crushed on and who recently divorced her husband. Yep, he’s that kind of sap. It’s later revealed that Ka practically lived like an “herbivore man” back in Deutschland; he dwelled in a filthy apartment and his only sexual experiences consisted of masturbating to porn tapes. And of course, it’s later revealed that while Ka was pining over her, İpek was sleeping with Blue, an Islamist terrorist living in hiding from the military.

She had enormous olive-colored eyes with a slight cast to them. Her skin was fair, her legs were long, her lips, which an Ottoman court poet might have likened to cherries, were small but full. She was quite well known. The video section of the World Sex Center was open twenty-four hours a day, but it took me only twenty minutes to locate six films bearing her name. I smuggled these videos back to Istanbul, and only after having watched them did I begin to have some sense of what Ka might have been feeling. Whatever sort of man it was she was kneeling before—he could be the coarsest, ugliest fellow in the world—Melinda always responded to his moans of ecstasy in the same way: Her pale face softened with a compassion unique to mothers. No matter how provocative in costume (whether as an impatient businesswoman, a frolicsome stewardess, or a housewife tired of her ineffectual husband), she was always fragile and vulnerable when naked. As I would later come to see on making my own visit to Kars, there was something of İpek in her manner, her large eyes, and her curvaceous body.

Pamuk originally intended Snow to serve as an explanation of the appeal of radical Islam to Turks both poor and elite, though with 9/11 more than a decade behind us, that theme seems awfully quaint. Still, Snow is an affecting novel well worth reading.

Click here to buy Snow.

Read Next: Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life by Edna O’Brien

Poetry sucks. Just admit it. Every single one of us hated reading it in school. The older stuff from the Romantic and Victorian periods isn’t so bad, but I’d rather have my fingernails removed then have to read a single line of “free verse” ever again (unless it’s by Stevens or Cummings). Byron is one of the few poets I’ve enjoyed, mostly anyway. Naturally, since Byron is actually worth reading, that means that you’ll never read much of him in the schools and colleges, aside from a couple of his short poems and snippets of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, that self-indulgent mess.

Those of you interested in game or seduction will enjoy Byron in Love, a recent biography focusing on his love life. Byron’s reputation as a womanizer is well-known; it’s from him that we take the term “Byronic hero,” the model for the antihero in just about every decent work of literature in the past hundred years. Byron in Love chronicles the man’s sexual exploits from his early days in school to his “Satanic” life abroad in Italy and Greece. Think of him like a 19th-century Roosh.

Marianna’s nemesis came in the person of another fiery young woman, Margarita Cogni, the Fornarina, wife of a baker, also young, with tantalising black eyes, the Venetian looks and the spirit of a tigress. Murray would be told in gleeful detail of the contretemps between these two women, La Segati and her gossips discovering by the neighing of his horse that he had gone late at night to meet the Fornarina, whence they followed, staging an operatic brawl, screams, curses, the throwing back of veils and in explicit Venetian, the Fornarina telling his amica: ‘You are not his wife, I am not his wife, you are his Donna, I am his Donna’, then stormed off. She then made herself indispensable to him in the running of the Palazzo Mocenigo, former home of the Doges, which he had rented for £200 a year, the Fornarina walking about in hat and feathers and a gown with a tail, intercepting his mail, paying a scribe to write letters for her, and servants continuously ‘redding the fray’ between her and any other feminine persons who visited. Her Medea traits and Venetian ‘pantaloonery’ amused for a time, but when she became ungovernable and he asked her to leave, she refused, wielding a knife, Fletcher had to disarm her. Boatmen carried her out whence she presently threw herself in the canal and was brought back intending to ‘refix’ herself in the place. Byron threatened that if she did not quit the premises then he would, and ultimately she was returned to her irate husband.

Click here to buy Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life.

Read Next: BUtterfield 8 by John O’Hara

Most people have forgotten John O’Hara and this book by extension, one of his finest novels. If they do know BUtterfield 8, it’s only because of the movie based on it, and then only because Elizabeth Taylor won her first Oscar for her role in the film. O’Hara was an immensely talented novelist, referred to by Fran Lebowitz as “the real F. Scott Fitzgerald” for his uncompromising, unpretentious depictions of American life during the 1920’s and 30’s. His first novel, Appointment in Samarra, is a great read, but BUtterfield 8 is truly his masterpiece, an underrated classic of the American canon.

The novel revolves around the life of Gloria Stannard, a party slut-cum-call girl living a seedy life in Depression-era New York. The novel opens with an account of her death, inspired by a news story O’Hara had read several years prior. While it wouldn’t be hard to slip into a sentimental tone with this kind of subject matter, O’Hara deftly avoids this trap, cross-examining Gloria’s life with a frank and non-judgemental eye:

“—for a decent bathing cap. Jimmy, before we go, I want to tell you again, for the last time you’ve got to stop saying things like that to me. I’m not your mistress, and I’m not a girl off the streets, and I’m not accustomed to being talked to that way. It isn’t funny, and no one else talks that way to me. Do you talk that way to the women on newspapers? Even if you do I’m sure they don’t really like it all the time. You can’t admire my dress without going into details about my figure, and—”

“Why in the name of Christ should I? Isn’t the whole idea of the dress to show off your figure? Why does it look well on you? Because you have nice breasts and everything else. Now God damn it, why shouldn’t I say so?”

Click here to buy BUtterfield 8.

Read Next: Unafraid of Virginia Woolf: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell by Joseph Pearce

This review in one sentence: man, I wish this book was around six years ago.

Aaron Clarey (aka Captain Capitalism) is on a mission to save America’s youth from throwing away their money and time on useless college majors. That’s the purpose of Worthless; educate youth as to why most majors are worthless and expose the gigantic conspiracy to get young’uns to sell themselves into debt slavery for a Master’s in Puppetry.

Much of the content of Worthless is pretty standard fare for the kinds of people in this section of the blogosphere: most non-STEM degrees are a waste, any degree that doesn’t involve math is a waste, and the entirety of American academia is a scam designed to bleed students dry and enrich itself at any cost. What separates Worthless from the avalanche of “you stupid kids shoulda majored in something useful!” finger-wagging coming from the media today is that Clarey is blunt and sympathetic. He recognizes that while yes, teenagers are making dumb decisions, their elders (Generation X and the Baby Boomers) are actively encouraging them to make dumb decisions, either because they themselves are ignorant or they stand to profit off of those dumb decisions.

Smart as you may think you are, you aren’t the only one to come up with the genius diabolical plot to major in a cake subject and then somehow hope you land some kind of easy, government, non-profit type job. Matter of fact, two entire generations before you came up with that exact same idea! Millions of people before you also majored in Philosophy, Women’s Studies, Communications, English and all the other worthless degrees. Where do you suppose they ended up?

This is why Worthless is such a powerful and important book; it not only offers practical advice, it illustrates the big picture in an easy-to-understand way. Clarey doesn’t sugarcoat the truth, but he isn’t needlessly hostile or antagonistic either. Because of this, as Frost wrote last week, his book actually stands a good chance of altering peoples’ thinking.

My biggest beef with Worthless is a bit irrelevant to its purpose, but I’ll get it out there anyway. Clarey, like most writers on this subject, urges young college-goers to major in STEM disciplines or learn a trade because those are the only disciplines that are in any kind of demand. The problem is that if everyone (or a critical mass of students) were to follow this advice, we’d be back at square one; a glut of graduates, not enough jobs for them.

The ultimate problem here isn’t useless college majors, it’s the uselessness of college itself.

If the institution of college isn’t going to be burned to the ground, it needs to be radically reformed. Having a bachelor’s degree should not be a minimum requirement to enter the middle class, because only a small minority of the population needs to go to college (the ones majoring in something worthwhile). Kids interested in entrepreneurship should be encouraged to start businesses instead of going to college and so on. But again, since Worthless’ purpose is to advise kids on how to plan their futures, and not about reforming the American educational establishment, this is not that important.

Bottom line: if you’re a teenager planning on going to college, buy this book. If you have a son or daughter planning on going to college, buy them this book. If you have a friend or SO planning on going to college, buy them this book. It’s way cheaper than tuition and can be read in a single afternoon.

Click here to buy Worthless: The Young Person’s Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major.

Read Next: The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle by Steven Pressfield

I credit this book with encouraging me to get off my ass and change my life.

The War of Art is a brief guide on overcoming procrastination and laziness on your way to accomplishing your dreams. Steven Pressfield identifies the enemy of artists as Resistance, a nebulous force that saps your will and prevents you from doing the things that you want to:

Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever bailed out on a call to embark upon a spiritual practice, dedicate yourself to a humanitarian calling, commit your life to the service of others? Have you ever wanted to be a mother, a doctor, an advocate for the weak and helpless; to run for office, crusade for the planet, campaign for world peace, or to preserve the environment? Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

In a series of concise bullet points, Pressfield breaks down Resistance and why it is such an insidious and dangerous enemy. Overcoming Resistance is what separates amateurs from professionals. The final third of the book is dedicated to helping you cultivate the mindset to defeat Resistance once and for all. He gets weird near the end talking about the Greek Muses and whatnot, but his ideas work.

If you’ve wanted to accomplish something great but’ve kept putting it off, I urge you to read The War of Art as soon as you can.

The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist.

What Henry Fonda does, after puking into the toilet in his dressing room, is to clean up and march out onstage. He’s still terrified but he forces himself forward in spite of his terror. He knows that once he gets out into the action, his fear will recede and he’ll be okay.

Click here to buy The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle.

Read Next: Unafraid of Virginia Woolf: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell by Joseph Pearce

The South African poet Roy Campbell (1902-1957) is a perfect example of how “great literature” is defined more by politics than by actual talent. While far from perfect, Campbell’s verse is energetic, masculine and passionate, a joy to read. Think Hemingway in iambic pentameter. But the reason you’ve never heard of him is because he made the fatal mistake of siding with the wrong group of thugs: he was a passionate supporter of Franco’s Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War when every major literary figure was on the Republicans’ side. Merely because of this, Campbell was wiped from the public consciousness, condemned to languish in the backs of college libraries.

Of course, Campbell was a far more complicated character than his enemies made him out to be. A lifelong iconoclast and outdoorsman, he became notorious for attacking the racism of his fellow South Africans in his satirical poem The Wayzgoose; relocating to England, he became active in the Bloomsbury Group, the circle of intellectuals and authors that included Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, John Maynard Keynes, and Bertrand Russell. Tiring of their snobbery, Marxism and anti-Christian attitude (and upset over Sackville-West’s lesbian affair with his wife Mary), Campbell shredded them in another satirical poem, The Georgiad. Relocating to southern France and later Spain, Campbell and his wife converted to Catholicism and became Nationalists after witnessing first-hand the horrors of the Red Terror. Despite his fascist sentiments, he later enlisted in the British Army during World War II despite being well over the draft age, when the communist chickenhawks who had been agitating for war with Germany in the first place either fled the country (W.H. Auden) or slithered into noncombatant positions in the civil service (Stephen Spender).

So whatever you may think about Campbell, he was definitely difficult to pigeonhole.

If you want a comprehensive and unbiased look at Roy Campbell’s life and works, Unafraid of Virginia Woolf is your best bet. Author Joseph Pearce covers Campbell’s life from his childhood to his untimely death by car crash, extensively quoting from his poems and interviews with his daughters. The book also includes rare photographs of Campbell and his associates. While Pearce is overly critical of Campbell’s satiric verse, his treatment of the man’s career is unparalleled and worth a look.

Getting your hands on any of Campbell’s actual books is difficult nowadays as they’re all out of print. If you can, I recommend Selected Poems, a compilation of all his poems released before 1946 (just as well, as everything he wrote after that was forgettable anyway). Here are some of my favorites:

The Zulu Girl

When in the sun the hot red acres smoulder,
Down where the sweating gang its labour plies,
A girl flings down her hoe, and from her shoulder
Unslings her child tormented by the flies.

She takes him to a ring of shadow pooled
By thorn-trees: purpled with the blood of ticks,
While her sharp nails, in slow caresses ruled,
Prowl through his hair with sharp electric clicks,

His sleepy mouth plugged by the heavy nipple,
Tugs like a puppy, grunting as he feeds:
Through his frail nerves her own deep languors ripple
Like a broad river sighing through its reeds.

Yet in that drowsy stream his flesh imbibes
An old unquenched unsmotherable heat-
The curbed ferocity of beaten tribes,
The sullen dignity of their defeat.

Her body looms above him like a hill
Within whose shade a village lies at rest,
Or the first cloud so terrible and still
That bears the coming harvest in its breast.

The Sisters

After hot loveless nights, when cold winds stream
Sprinkling the frost and dew, before the light,
Bored with the foolish things that girls must dream
Because their beds are empty of delight,

Two sisters rise and strip. Out from the night
Their horses run to their low-whistled pleas—
Vast phantom shapes with eyeballs rolling white,
That sneeze a fiery stream about their knees:

Through the crisp manes their stealthy prowling hands,
Stronger than curbs, in slow caresses rove,
They gallop down across the milk-white sands
And wade far out into the sleeping cove:

The frost stings sweetly with a burning kiss
As intimate as love, as cold as death:
Their lips, whereon delicious tremours hiss
Fume with the ghostly pollen of their breath.

Far out on the grey silence of the flood
They watch the dawn in smouldering gyres expand
Beyond them: and the day burns through their blood
Like a white candle through a shuttered hand.

Mass at Dawn

I dropped my sail and dried my dripping seines
Where the white quay is chequered by cool planes
In whose great branches, always out of sight,
The nightingales are singing day and night.
Though all was grey beneath the moon’s grey beam,
My boat in her new paint shone like a bride,
And silver in my baskets shone the bream:
My arms were tired and I was heavy-eyed,
But when with food and drink, at morning-light,
The children met me at the water-side,
Never was wine so red or bread so white.

Autumn

I love to see, when leaves depart,
The clear anatomy arrive,
Winter, the paragon of art,
That kills all forms of life and feeling
Save what is pure and will survive.

Already now the clanging chains
Of geese are harnessed to the moon:
Stripped are the great sun-clouding planes;
And the dark pines, their own revealing,
Let in the needles of the noon.

Strained by the gale the olives whiten
Lke hoary wrestlers bent with toil
And, with the vines, their branches lighten
To brim our vats where summer lingers
In the red froth and sun-gold oil.

Soon on our hearth’s reviving pyre
Their rotted stems will crumble up:
And like a ruby, panting fire,
The grape will redden on your fingers
Through the lit crystal of the cup.

Click here to buy Unafraid of Virginia Woolf: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell.

Read Next: Anonymity is for Guys with Something to Lose