But there is, nevertheless, many a petty trader that has navigated the Pacific whose course from island to island might be traced by a series of cold-blooded robberies, kidnappings, and murders, the iniquity of which might be considered almost sufficient to sink her guilty timbers to the bottom of the sea.
Sometimes vague accounts of such thing’s reach our firesides, and we coolly censure them as wrong, impolitic, needlessly severe, and dangerous to the crews of other vessels. How different is our tone when we read the highly-wrought description of the massacre of the crew of the Hobomak by the Feejees; how we sympathize for the unhappy victims, and with what horror do we regard the diabolical heathens, who, after all, have but avenged the unprovoked injuries which they have received.
We breathe nothing but vengeance, and equip armed vessels to traverse thousands of miles of ocean in order to execute summary punishment upon the offenders. On arriving at their destination, they burn, slaughter, and destroy, according to the tenor of written instructions, and sailing away from the scene of devastation, call upon all Christendom to applaud their courage and their justice
(thanks @wickedcestus for recommending this book, I’m reading it before watching your video contrasting it with Robinson Crusoe and I’m already excited to get into it once I’m done. I’ve also been reading Friday, or the Other Island by Tournier. Triangulating these three books has been super fun – interesting to find myself engaging in an amateur academic exercise all of a sudden just because one book really compelled me. Books rule)
According to a number of comments I have seen on YouTube and Reddit, “no one has ever finished Infinite Jest and anyone who claims to is a liar.” Well forum, I am happy to share with you that by this logic I am the first person on earth to have finished Infinite Jest1. More thoughts to come in the future because right now I am exhausted
wait how did you add a footnote? I was trying for 10 minutes and couldn’t figure out how. This is going to be very important for me when I write my word vomit about I******* J***
how often do y’all find yourselves just skimming books? I ask because my partner and I were talking about our reading styles and she’s a fast reader in general but also skims during sections she feels aren’t doing much. Based on our talks about books I also can’t say that her style hampers comprehension or appreciation, which would be my fear with skimming stuff. On the other hand I tend to read pretty slowly and thoroughly and sometimes I feel like it actually burns me out on books.
When it comes to fiction, if I start skimming it means I’ve disengaged from the book emotionally and there’s no point in me continuing to read. I’m pretty all-or-nothing in that respect. I read for the little moments moreso than the overarching plot; if I’m not engaged on a paragraph-by-paragraph level, then I just don’t really care enough about what happens next to skip ahead.
In non-fiction, I’ll skim ahead if I feel the author is getting repetitive or focussing on details that I’m not interested in. Especially if it’s a topic I already know something about and don’t need the recap. But I still don’t do it that often because if I get carried away it can get very confusing later on.
Not a skimmer can’t retain anything or maintain interest if skimming. I get selective about reading because it’s a time commitment for me with paying attention
I too am a slow reader, and relate to this! I’ve adapted by becoming more willing to abandon books I’m just not into. Often I’ll return later, I find I’m often just not in the mood for a particular style, genre, or author, especially if I’m on the third of a trilogy and I’ve blasted through the first two. Like I finished N.K. Jemeson’s Broken Earth trilogy, but I took a few weeks long break between starting book three and finishing it up. In that time I read some completely other stuff - non-fiction, “literary” short stories, that kind of thing. I found it relieved burnt out feeling.
I have no sure fire method of picking books to read that become incredibly impactful. Often I find the act of choosing stressful. That can be the real problem with reading (Moyra Davey essay scanned, pdf warning!) Again, my compromise is a willingness to abandon, though that carries a kind of guilt, too.
I’ve spent the past however-many-minutes trying to corroborate this, and I can’t find any direct evidence for it. Oh, I can find plenty of people in both languages referencing this having happened, but going to the source text, I can’t find anything like that quote. Further, this dedication being written in 1904 tells me Nitobe may have had an ulterior motive for claiming this spiritual connection between Poland and Japan.
As long as we’re grabbing dubious claims from Wikipedia for the funnies, though…
a realization that’s helped me have more fun reading (20th and 21st century) non-fiction, especially the more academic varieties, is that a lot of it is made to be skimmed (or at least skipped through). it varies from book to book, but a common pattern is that there will be an introduction or first chapter summarizing the book, which one should read very carefully, several chapters of background information which one might skim if they’re already familiar with the topic but should also read carefully if they’re new to it, and then several chapters that are more of less independent, so you can jump directly to what interests you. I also think non-fiction is more supportive of reading in disconnected chunks over many years, rather than having to read the whole thing in a week or two in order to appreciate what’s going on like with novels. So I have a lot of books whose early parts I’ve read that I sometimes pick up and read later parts from whenever I’m in the mood.
Though to be clear skimming in this context means “scanning 20-30 pages for passages that are of interest and then reading those in detail”, which seems different from skimming in order to have a vague idea of what happened in one part of a book. I almost never have any recollection whatsoever of the parts I skimmed over. When I actually do read a chapter/section/passage, I agree with others that it’s an all or nothing thing, and once I start skimming in the fast-reading sense, it means I’m either done with this and need to move on, or I need to go back and reread something I might not have understood so that the passages I find myself skimming make more sense.
I’d guess there is a non-trivial crossover between early scouting and exoticizing militarist orders of other cultures and times.
Baden-Powell modeled much of scouting on indigenous American groups and stereotypes as well as American explorers
He drew extensively on his Boer Wars background, including appropriating the kudu horn for his scouting camps
There were also a lot of parallels to other youth organizations, like the Christian group Boys’ Brigade or the medieval-themed boys’ group The Knights of King Arthur
The first edition Boy Scouts guide mentions Bushido, though this may well be another collection of stereotype: “There have always been certain written and unwritten laws regulating the conduct and directing the activities of men. We have such unwritten laws coming down from past ages. In Japan, the Japanese have their Bushido or laws of the old Samurai warriors. During the Middle Ages, the chivalry and rules of the Knights of King Arthur, the Knights Templar and the Crusaders were in force. In aboriginal America, the Red Indians had their laws of honor: likewise the Zulus, Hindus, and the later European nations have their ancient codes.” It’s actually rather boggling to see a Scouting guide put anything else next to knighthood, which would have been the go-to reference for martial virtue for white Anglicans in the early 20th century. There is another excerpt expanding on the connection in Boy Scouts Beyond the Seas.
He visited Japan multiple times, apparently (Google Books) , and also there may have been a “Yokohama Boy Scouts” (Google Books).
So it’s exceptionally hard to prove that Baden-Powell’s eyeballs went over the entirety of Bushido: The Soul of Japan, but references to Bushido were interwoven into his legacy of Scouting quite early, and deliberately, by him. Given that Bushido itself offers a chivalric framing of the samurai, it’s not a stretch to believe that he read enough of it to come away with knighthood-in-another-place.
I’m working my way through the collection Time and the Gods, which consists of six previous collections of stories, one of which is also called Time and the Gods. The photo I posted is from “The Secret of the Sea” in The Last Book of Wonder. I think my favourite of the books in the collection is The Book of Wonder, which was the first Dunsany I read. Each story in that one is only a few pages long and I really enjoyed most of them. “Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men” and “Chu-Bu and Sheemish” are my favourites, I think. There is a lot of orientalism in these books - Chu-Bu is about idol worship from the perspective of a British aristocrat, for example - and I’m not sure how bothered I should be by it. I think it’s supposed to be knowingly inaccurate. There’s also “A Tale of London”, in which a foreign character describes London with a mix of realistic and fantastic elements, which I take as a demonstration to the reader of the fictional nature of Dunsany’s depiction of the orient.
It’s hard to get a grasp on his work I think because there’s so much of it, a lot of it has aged very poorly, and from what I can tell there haven’t been many recent attempts to edit or compile it. But The Sword Of Welleran and a couple of those other collections in that style are great yeah. Ever played Koudelka?
, and also there may have been a “Yokohama Boy Scouts” (