Books have the ability to grant you a tête-à-tête with the mind-concentrate of the greatest men in history. Living or dead. This is an incredible opportunity that you must exploit.
Bookstores are utterly depressing nowadays. “Classics” get shoved off to their own couple of shelves, as if “classics” doesn’t mean “books actually important enough to be worth reading”. And then only some small subsection of the classics section contains books in English. That subsection must again necessarily be broken down into all the same genres the rest of the entire book store contains.
Somehow they decided to make the vast majority of the bookstore into the “won’t ever be considered a classic” section. It’s full of relevant local-language books. Shelves upon shelves of trivial pop-science, romantic dramas and sci-fi books that will be forgotten within the year. To have such a golden medium of distilled and refined thought wasted on modern trivialities is insulting.
However, know that reading can be so much more than this. Do not let this taint your view of books. Books can allow you to tap into ancient and forgotten wisdom, esoteric knowledge and the journals of long dead legends. All free from comment section retardation, lo-fi hiphop background music, unskipable ads, “algorithms”, and overbearing censors. This can be the true arena for free thought, contemplation, and the ultimate medium for mental growth. If you allow it to be.
2024-03-28: Mencius Molbug — A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations2024-02-04: Bronze Age Pervert — Bronze Age Mindset2023-11-17: William Gibson — NeuromancerThis list is obviously non-exhaustive. I am only mentioning the ones I remember, and thought enough of to give a mention.