I know this post might make some people on here squirm a little bit, but I think that's what makes it fun and challenging. Any reader should explore works they disagree with on some level because exposing yourself to only those things that you agree with is by definition confining yourself to an echo chamber and I want to prove that this sub is not an echo chamber.
I'll start with two of my favorite very obvious ones:
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu and No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.
by SlitchBap
9 Comments
I have never thought of books as conservative or liberal the way you are suggesting. I do not have a favorite book with a conservative theme.
Talking about books like there is an echo chamber is odd to me.
For those of us who haven’t read them, what makes the Liu and McCarthy novels obvious examples? What sorts of conservative themes do they cover?
Depends what you mean and how those themes are presented.
For example, both The Handmaids Tale and Hunger Games deal with conservative governments and themes surrounding them.
I would love to hear what conservative themes there are in those two books.
Could you expand on what you feel those conservative themes are? And perhaps what you like about the books. Just listing names isn’t much of a discussion
How do you know you ‘disagree’ with something before you read it? Surely you’d only know that afterwards, so it’s not something you can set out to explore before the fact surely?
No Country For Old Men is conservative? I didn’t get that reading from it. My reading was that _Bell_ is conservative, and that the world around him is not agreeing with his values. He blames the senseless violence around him on people not being polite anymore, when in fact what’s happening is there’s a psycho killer named Anton Chigurh who’s out there killing people because he’s a psycho. People saying “please” and “thank you” aren’t going to make that go away.
To me it’s more nihilist than conservative. And I don’t think the author is advocating for nihilism. He’s just _showing_ us nihilism to force us to think about it and come to our own conclusions.
I don’t think you’re obligated to read fiction out of your comfort zone. This is like saying you should watch TV shows you loathe once in a while for fun. “I’d love to watch more Chernobyl but I feel obligated to load up Keeping Up With The Kardashians next”…
You should absolutely read non-fiction, articles and editorials that challenge you, but reading fiction is what I do for fun. Am I fuck going to choke down Ben Shapiro’s garbage novels to “get out of my echo chamber”
There are lots in Sci Fi; Ender’s Game, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Cryptonomicon, Lucifer’s Hammer, Starship Troopers (the movie is satire, the book is not).