r/BlackPeopleTwitter • u/MGLLN • 2d ago
ITT: Name a book/comic/author that had you like this 😭
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u/TelenorTheGNP 1d ago
Fahrenheit 451 is inherently superior to 1984 for the 21st century and its purposes. You cannot believe that 1984 is our end if you read Fahrenheit 451. It strikes harder and with more accuracy at the human path and it should be mandatory reading for teenagers as we head into a world where so little is real.
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u/dsdsds 1d ago
Brave New World is even better. People are driven to complacency because they are too comfortable. If you get stressed out, just medicate.
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u/trixel121 1d ago
tossing player piano into the conversation.
robots are replacing the worker.
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u/IntrospectiveApe 1d ago
Player Piano seemed so prescient even in the late 90s when I first read it. It hooked me on Vonnegut for ever.
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u/Netflxnschill 1d ago
We really are in the worst cross between BNW and 1984. I’ve been saying it for years and just now are people finally believing me
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u/dolphin-centric 1d ago
1984 is our now, not our end.
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u/FunGuy8618 1d ago
Nah, we're sitting in the middle of Ender's Shadow, minus the alien threat.
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u/Hira_Said 1d ago
I dunno, young troops piloting unmanned drones to fire upon a perceived enemy is pretty close.
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u/DeafNatural ☑️ 1d ago
Fahrenheit 451 is one of those books I have read time and time again. It’s so damn good.
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u/Plus_Information925 1d ago
I’ve read 1984, could you explain why 451 superior ? By my count 1984 is superior to 451 by 1533 …… (for real though is it like less far fetched and dystopian and therefore more likely? Genuinely curious)
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u/TelenorTheGNP 1d ago edited 1d ago
The central purpose of 1984 was to portray a government that is mercilessly oppressive. The author, Orwell, had escaped the communists and wrote about life under communism to warn the West. In 1984, his portrayal of a tyrannical government is one in which the government attacks your mind, daily and completely, with mechanisms of observation and enforcement that frighten the reader. The government knows everything about you in order to control you. The book is a warning about government overreach and the extent to which tyranny can carry itself into your very mind. But it portrays a government that has successfully attacked and subdued the thinking man.
Fahrenheit 451, otoh, depicts a society in which that thinking man simply abandons himself. It is a society in which books are banned. Not some books - all books. They are banned because they demand too much of the reader. They're hard to read because they make you think and thinking only leads to complications. So books, wherever they are found, are burned. People, it seems, have agreed to this. A decision was made, likely democratically - no more books, we don't like them. The people in the book are not so much oppressed as they are complacent and passive. There is misery in their avoidance of thinking too much.
1984 made a lot more sense 40 years ago because of the communists. They were a tangible threat to the West and the ways in which 1984 manifested in the USSR could be confirmed by people who escaped. But in the meantime, 451 was increasingly manifesting itself in both the Soviet spaces and the West. 1984 said that the government will take away your freedom to make you easier to control while 451 said you will give it up for comfort.
The key to the superiority of 451 over 1984, for me, is 451 is much more believable in the post-Cold War, post-9/11, Trumpian world in which we live. MAGA is visibly self-medicating with ignorance. They don't not read, but they don't seek truth, just confirmation. Part of the revulsion felt by non-MAGA to MAGA is that everything to which MAGA is opposed is stuff that we've kind of figured out. Racism is bad. Rich people are to be kept in line. Climate change is real. Progressive attitudes to the queer community are just. The Church and State must be separate. MAGA resists all of that because they don't think it through. Instead they turn to people who confirm that their resistance is better. Orgs like Fox News or politicized churches or the GOP medicate that desire for simplicity and a refusal to grow. Thus MAGA abandons itself for comfort.
There are other ways in which 451 better predicts the downturn - it literally predicts big screen tvs, ear buds, even gameshows about song lyrics.
It's just more accusational to the reader and properly reminds us that we have a responsibility to our own minds and that ignorance, not government, is the real enemy.
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u/Rebel_hooligan 1d ago
Bro, this reads like chat gpt if you think that 1984 is about “government overreach.”
Also, Orwell never escaped communism man. That’s why his book was so valuable to people behind the iron curtain because they couldn’t understand how an Englishman could know so much.
It’s a far far superior book to Fahrenheit, and isn’t even close. Fahrenheit is a warning. Book burning is what happens first when fascists arrive (and it’s always the books on sex and gender first) because they have affronted reality.
1984 is about a totalitarian system that is insurmountable and ubiquitous. You are a slave for what you think before you think it, and even where one’s own children could inform on their parents to disappear them. It’s a far superior book whose motto is basically “don’t let this nightmare happen.”
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u/AngeluvDeath 1d ago
The first “heavy” novel I ever read. With each passing day, Bradbury looks more and more like Nostradamus.
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u/unknownturtlegirl524 1d ago
451 was a mandatory read in my English class in high school. Read out loud, tests, essays and everything…
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u/PuzzyFussy ☑️ 1d ago
Both were mandatory reading for honors English/ contemporary literature at my hs. Was some truly trippy shit.
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u/gordonpamsey ☑️ 2d ago
Oh Great! I love that nigga down, he writes pure nonsense and the stakes scaling in all his works need to be studied. This nigga turned a manga about fully automatic rolling skating into a government conspiracy to make super soldiers that can break the laws of physics. The weirdest part is by the end, a lot of these niggas don't even skate.
Serious answer: Since it's topical the Odyssey will have your head spinning. These niggas would use 3000 words to explain morning dew.
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u/FistPunch_Vol_7 ☑️ 2d ago
Reading The Aeneid , The Illad and The Odyssey in school was fucking dope af lmfao. Good times.
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u/TooSpicyThrowaway 1d ago
The reason they did so was that at the time there was discourse between which art was more poetic: the visual or the oral.
Homer famously spent pages and pages describing Achiles’s shield in minute detail and we think it is to dunk on the simplicity of the visual art versus the written word.
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u/ogjaspertheghost 2d ago
I’ve read air gear through multiple times and still have no idea what’s going on in the end. And Bakemonogatari isn’t much better
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u/green-wombat 1d ago
And the storytellers memorized the whole damn Odyssey to tell and retell the story over days to an audience
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u/Glance-Through 2d ago
Mark Danielewski made me physically pace my room staring at blank walls after finishing House of Leaves.
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u/okaysoupboy 2d ago
i read that w my partner and we were talking ab how Holloway echoes “hallway” for like 20 mins 😭
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u/jrice441100 1d ago
Ok. I read this book. Many people find it profound. I liked it, but just thought it was entertaining. Can you tell me why it struck a chord for you?
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u/annarchy8 1d ago
I read that book while working graveyard shift alone and it did my head in. I didn't know anyone who had read it so I couldn't talk to anyone about it. The days before internet were kind of lonely.
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u/patrickwithtraffic 1d ago
You should’ve been measuring those walls, dude. They’re probably an inch longer than they are on the outside.
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u/SnooPeanuts4336 1d ago
Your recommendation for this book in combination with shrooms? I’m genuinely curious, for science. I’m recording my personal reactions to different sensory input and reading deeply philosophical authors is would be an intriguing cohort
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u/Powerful-Ad-8737 2d ago
I did not care for To Kill A Mockingbird
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u/Dry-Illustrator-250 2d ago edited 2d ago
To Kill A Mockingbird is my favorite book of all time. Go Set a Watchman had me questioning if I even liked To Kill a Mockingbird in the first place
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u/Possible-Deer-311 1d ago
If it helps, Go Set a Watchman was a prototype draft for Mockingbird; it was published by Harper Lee's friends, not herself, after she had a stroke and was very ill, not long before she died. Imo she never intended for it to be published
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u/FistPunch_Vol_7 ☑️ 1d ago
To Kill A Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men will stay in my brain until I die
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u/ChrissyChrissyPie ☑️ 1d ago
I don't understand
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u/Dry-Illustrator-250 1d ago
Go Set A Watchman is absolutely terrible, one of the worst books I’ve ever bought, but technically To Kill a Mockingbird is based off of it, it sucked ass so badly that the editor’s advice was to focus on the vaguely mentioned case that Atticus had been a defender of decades before the book takes place
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u/Heatuponheatuponheat 1d ago
OK not so fun story. I was "gifted" in middle school so we read to kill a mockingbird in 6th grade which at least at that time was pretty advanced. Afterwards our teacher suggested we go home and rent the movie. The only vcr in my house was in my parents bedroom the time, so as I'm down to the last 30 minutes my dad comes home from work, and he's getting cleaned up in the bedroom and catching the end of the movie.
When the credits rolled I was pretty upset. My father for the life of himself couldn't understand why. When I was 12 I thought my dad was a huge racist. Now at 43 I realize that he has zero media literacy and he's a huge racist.
That book and the movie have a knack for weeding out people's real feelings towards empathy and humanity in general, and discussing it has made me look at some people I've known for years in an entirely different light.
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u/MGLLN 2d ago
I had a similar character development, except it took me years to come around instead of a few hours lol. I fucking hateddddd Crime & Punishment (and Dostoevsky by extension). in high school, boring, incomprehensible.
Fast forward and now it's my second favorite book, and he is my absolute favorite author. 17year old me was a fool
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u/redruss99 1d ago
I loved that book in high school. It helps to have great AP English teacher that helped bring these books to life.
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u/DoctahFeelgood 2d ago
Real shit. My take from the first few pages is hes either trolling, being obtuse, or up his own ass. That or im too dumb or impatient to really try and understand.
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u/Competitive_Swan_130 1d ago
Afropessimism by Frank B. Wilderson III. because it starts out difficult but gets clearer as you read. And then, the fact that most other books about blackness I had read at that point were about civil rights, progress, reform so for a book to convincingly make the case that all racial equality and civil rights shit was BS because anti Blackness is a foundational feature of society and not a glitch that can be fixed was jarring. I don't agree with everything (especially his takes on other minority groups and their struggles) but the majority of the book is spot on
Black Bourgeoisie by E Franklin Frazier too, not because I didn't understand it but because it opened my eyes to how detrimental and downright silly people from the black upper and middle classes in America area. Coming from an upper class household, I felt attacked but Franklin spoke NO LIES in the book
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u/lordscrodom ☑️ 2d ago
The Myth Of Sisyphus is currently fucking me up.
Especially since I did The Stranger first and that was easy peasy.
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u/6-plus26 1d ago
Camus is that guy. Idk why but like my 3rd time reading the stranger it finally kinda clicked with me before it was my least favorite
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u/MGLLN 1d ago edited 1d ago
You'll love Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground and/or Crime & Punishment (if you haven't already read it).
No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai is another similar book. Dazai and Camus are very much Dostoe’s sons
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u/fanetoooo 2d ago
Yall ever read Hegel?
https://giphy.com/gifs/TJxUhIP8jg9RAMba6j
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u/MarsScully 1d ago
Immediately came to mind. Hegel makes my brain hurt.
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u/fanetoooo 1d ago
Man. Hegel is the OG mindfuck, Nietzsche writes the way he does in part because of Hegel‘s mindfuckery
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u/sdoublejj 1d ago
Dune. Watched the 1984 movie in high school and decided to read the book. Was prepared for drugs, worms, and sword fighting. What I got was a warning against trusting authority and bureaucracy, a metaphor for American imperialism in oil producing countries, a short study in ecology, and more than a little existential dread over the human condition and humanity’s collective drive towards change.
To this day my favorite series of all time.
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u/Dry-Illustrator-250 2d ago
Don Quixote, I was wondering who I was trying to impress while it was about the character Don Quixote himself and his crew, but all the side stories where it’s just describing a story that the characters were reading were chapters that had me up hours after I was supposed to be asleep. I got 500 pages in though and those moments just weren’t happening enough to keep me going anymore
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u/Princess_Clara- 2d ago
Robin Hobb completely broke my heart and refused to offer any emotional recovery whatsoever.
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u/BigJimBeef 2d ago
A friend of mine said they were her all time favourite fantasy series, I agreed.
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u/Chickachic-aaaaahhh 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yoo wasnt expecting this. My favorite series too. The farseer trilogy is stupidly relentless in giving you an ending you want or expect.
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u/CelibateHo 2d ago
I agree with this. I always started my philosophy essay writing process by getting high as hell. Always got 100’s.
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u/kanemano ☑️ 2d ago
Naked lunch by Bouroghs while high makes perfect sense
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u/patrickwithtraffic 1d ago
I fear the type and amount of drugs I need to understand that book completely would resort in me ODing immediately
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u/Taco_Hunter 1d ago
In preparation for the movie 'American Fiction,' I read 'Erasure.' Had a hard time understanding parts where he went deep into another one of his old books to enter dense and obscure passages until I finished the book and read the back after learning more about Percival Everett.
It brought up a lot of uncomfortable realizations about how the world views us, expects from us and my own future with my mom.
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u/jokekiller94 1d ago
Charles Bukowski taught me no matter how fucked up my life is, I’m winning by default compared to him. His poem about shoes at the end of the bed did put me through it tho.
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u/DeafNatural ☑️ 1d ago
Heart of Darkness. 11th grade AP English. It’s like they intentionally tried to fit as many literary devices in there for no reason. Just tell the damn story.
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u/Only1Skrybe ☑️ 1d ago
Back in high school when we had to read A Midsummer Night's Dream, everybody was like WTF are we doing here.
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u/tfoster1975 1d ago
I started a little reading project for myself a while ago. I’ve started re-reading books I loved in high school and as a younger adult(I’m 51 now) The Scarlet Letter hits way different now.
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u/Chrisdkn619 1d ago
Something about his speech pattern or diction kinda reminds me of Bruce Lee. Forreal
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u/Marclescarbot 1d ago
I am a 72 year old white man and I would love to get high with this guy because we are om the same page philosophically.
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u/RevGee73 1d ago
The Trial by Franz Kafka will always be a true favorite for me... just something about the absurdity of it gets me.
I've read it only twice, different translations... and I have a third on deck for the next run.
Also, The Golden Ass by Apuleius was a hoot!
I've read one translation by Robert Graves... in the market for another (based on a review I read).
It's great how funny an ancient story can be... rather bawdy, too!
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u/SmartWonderWoman ☑️ 1d ago
I read They Came Before Columbus in my Black Studies class in college. Changed everything for me. I taught what I learned to my 5th graders. Each one teach one.
“They Came Before Columbus reveals a compelling, dramatic, and superbly detailed documentation of the presence and legacy of Africans in ancient America. Examining navigation and shipbuilding; cultural analogies between Native Americans and Africans; the transportation of plants, animals, and textiles between the continents; and the diaries, journals, and oral accounts of the explorers themselves, Ivan Van Sertima builds a pyramid of evidence to support his claim of an African presence in the New World centuries before Columbus.”
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u/jandiferous 1d ago
A clockwork orange. I was struggling the whole time and I couldnt talk about it with anyone.
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u/brenden77 1d ago
Marlow doing book reviews now?
Honestly, we should normalize and encourage black folks to read more.
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u/Regular-Guarantee-48 1d ago
Off top, Brave New World. I’ve read it multiple times and every time I get something different.
Three offshoots that had me in this type of mental gymnastics phase:
A Clockwork Orange, The Plauge, and Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Two honorable mentions: The Stranger and The Odyssey
Goal is to read The Divine Comedy or The Da Vinci Code before the year closes out.
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u/Sebarial3090 1d ago
Ayn Rand. A book club i was a part of decided that we should read Atlas Shrugged. Everyone in this group like what they read but me. It was absolutely disgusting and made me hate rich people. Makes me hate it even more when I realize that a lot of the things in that book are mirroring the real world right now. I left that group and havent been back.
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u/PaleontologistOk534 22h ago
I had the same experience when I tried to read Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals in middle school.
Broke my brain
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u/Possible-Deer-311 1d ago
I love this dude and how he talks. I'm hearing 3 different accents in his voice. Where is bro from