Monthly OT Book Club Discussion: Edited title edition

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I just read The Martian.

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Here comes the next 20 or so people who read The Martian this month!

Wirting a book is harder than making a movie.

Reading is for queers and uppity folk.

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Wirting a book is harder than making a movie.

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Is that why the budgets for writing a book are so much higher than making a movie

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Is that why the budgets for writing a book are so much higher than making a movie

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How many people help make a movie?


How many people write a book?

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I read The Truth by the dude who wrote The Game about picking chicks up. It's about his spiral into rehab as a sex addict.

It was really REALLY good.

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So is it a follow up book to The Game?

Like, this is what I did. Now, this is the repercussions?

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is my current book. its ok so far.

This will be book number 87 this year.

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Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed, I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book's autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life

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“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
- William Faulkner

vs...

Henry Miller, who, upon compiling a list of books which influenced him while writing The Books in My Life, muses, "One of the results of this self-examination — for that is what the writing of this book amounts to — is the confirmed belief that one should read less and less, not more and more…. I have not read nearly as much as the scholar, the bookworm, or even the ‘well-educated’ man — yet I have undoubtedly read a hundred times more than I should have read for my own good. Only one out of five in America, it is said, are readers of ‘books.’ But even this small number read far too much. Scarcely any one lives wisely or fully."

Miller was considered a fairly voracious reader, so his advice to not read may seem disingenuous, but his commentary is really an oblique approach to the existential paradox of learning & searching for meaning vs. simply being.

Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse, is a nice examination of this paradox, imho... Is it better to strike off on your own and be your own teacher as Siddhartha does, or to learn as much as you can from great teachers, as Govinda does when he follows The Buddha?

The answer isn't easy. As the book is written, clearly Siddhartha needed to leave all teachers and rely on himself. In pop culture, we see similar examples: Neo has to stop being a student and trying to learn in order to be The One in The Matrix; and Danny needs to forget what he knows about putting to "be the ball" as Chevy Chase advises. But such characters are always naturally exceptional in some way. And if other characters in these works attempted the same feats, they would fail. So, it doesn't always seem like sound advice.

I'm going with Henry Miller on this one, be banged Marilyn Monroe.