[Slayer] Book review 2024

[Honest]

philosophical works of 2024 (ordered by date of reading, earliest first):

• essays and aphorisms (schopenhauer) - 6/10. amusing and interesting.
  
• tao te ching - 5/10. interesting.
  
• jonathan livingston seagull - 2/10. embarrassing.
  
• ralph waldo emerson's 1st and 2nd essays - 3/10. lost some respect for nietzsche while reading.
  
• walden and other writings - 3/10. repulsive, naive, uncritical personality, entirely removed from the 'nature' he claims to love.
  
• discourse on metaphysics and the mondaology - 2/10. ramblings of a sanguine, uncritical mind; a mind unsuited for philosophy.
  
• tractatus logico-philosophicus - 5/10. partly interesting, partly tedious.
  
• manfred (byron) - 3/10. lost some more respect for nietzsche.
  
• candide - 4/10. unnecessarily prolonged.
  
• the gay science - 8.5/10. extremely interesting, varied, undogmatic, original, playful, critical. considerably different atmosphere than later works.
  
• genealogy of morals, and beyond good and evil - 8/10. second reading. still as interesting as the first time i read them.
  
• the wisdom of life (schopenhauer) - 3/10. undisciplined ramblings. offers naive advice, while pretending the opposite.
  
• enquiries concerning human understanding - 5/10. interesting, but proved to be much less interesting than the first time i read it.
  
• enquiries concerning the principles of morals - 3/10. dull, weak, sentimental argumentation. still, a couple interesting sections.
  

of the novels i've read, the 3 best were:

1. middlemarch
   
2. the red and the black
   
3. ulysses
   

confessions of an english opium eater was the worst book of the year, and lyrical ballads and other poems (wordsworth & coleridge) was enough to convince me that i despise pretty much everything about the romantic movement