The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati

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Picrel because it helped me realize just how hollow and worthless my hobby of playing video games was. The book is not about video games, but casinos and gambling machines and the ways many very smart and very wellpaid people design every last part of them to guarantee addiction, down to texture, smell and the carpet pattern. And it's kind of cute to read when you realize that the greediest casino operator form the last century would clutch his pearls and call for moderation if he saw what your avarage "moderate" and "generous" video game does these days. Can recommend.

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>>25210030
Zorba the Greek. No one on this entire board ever discusses Kazantsakis. This is the most life-changing book I have ever read. The dichotomy between the cold intellectual and the passionate man who wishes to embrace life, their "real" relationship, their own different perspectives, the stories which are told by Zorba, the depiction of Greek village life... what an excellent and subtle novel. It seems to touch every aspect of the human condition. Kazantsakis is a true genius and he seems to litter literary allusions to every important philosophical work or poem. Even the arrival on Crete mirrors Dante entering hell. It's also semi-biographical. I want to be Zorba, but I am the narrator.

>>25210165
Keats's complete works (Endymion in particular)
Iliad, Argonautica
Oresteia, Medea tragedies
Beowulf
Homeric Hymns
Ovid's Metamorphoses
Burckhardt's Greek culture
Paradise Lost

>>25210158
do they really do all of that intentionally? i've been tempted to read that book, but is there any documentation showing casinos really intentionally designed the carpet to be addictive, etc.? or is it one of those leftist conspiracy theory things that's just kind of vibes based?

>>25210177
And? I have read most of those besides Keats' complete works (although his Ode to a Nightingale is one of my favourite poems and I have explored his catalogue extensively), Buckhardt and Homeric Hymns.

>>25210201
>And?
? You want even more books that changed my life? Those are the ones that tinted my life with a love for Greek culture, showed me what is proper and ushered me into a poetic sanctum far away from the gay brown hell that is modern society. They're responsible for the direction. Any further recs would just be "cool books".

The works of Turner, Whitehouse and Frederic Leighton also took part in this transformation.

>>25210188
Its not really a secret. The industry has been under public and governmental scrutiny for decades and they have conferences and cons where they openly discuss strategies and trade tips. The book is full of quotes from industry insiders explaining exactly what they've done as well as how and why they've done it and being quite proud of themselfes. That makes it extra evil in my opinion. They have no need for secrets, they can lay it all out for the world to see and people will still get hooked, addicted and sucked dry, quite fascinating.

>>25210232
Good example of intelligence without wisdom.

>>25210232
Good example of intelligence without wisdom. Selfishness

>>25210101
This.

>>25210158
>all games are like gambling machines, bro!
retard alert
you would be right about specific games (vampire survivors, diablo 2 etc.), but all games? how about you stop talking about things you know nothing of?

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>>25210030
Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis is my favorite book
Here an early excerpt
>Of Psyche’s beauty—at every age the beauty proper to that age—there is only this to be said, that there were no two opinions about it, from man or woman, once she had been seen. It was beauty that did not astonish you till afterwards when you had gone out of sight of her and reflected on it. While she was with you, you were not astonished. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. As the Fox delighted to say, she was ‘according to nature’; what every woman, or even every thing, ought to have been and meant to be, but had missed by some trip of chance. Indeed, when you looked at her you believed, for a moment, that they had not missed it. She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad—she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes—the toad became beautiful. The years, doubtless, went round then as now, but in my memory it seems to have been all springs and summers. I think the almonds and the cherries blossomed earlier in those years and the blossoms lasted longer; how they hung on in such winds I don’t know, for I see the boughs always rocking and dancing against blue-and-white skies, and their shadows flowing water-like over all the hills and valleys of Psyche’s body. I wanted to be a wife so that I could have been her real mother. I wanted to be a boy so that she could be in love with me. I wanted her to be my full sister instead of my half sister. I wanted her to be a slave so that I could set her free and make her rich

>>25210158
I am very interested in this topic but the book is written by a woman so no way I will read it

>>25210165
i read it in high school (greek here)
i remember i thought it was shit, way too overhyped slop

>>25210030
>for worse
I hated In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan. Freaked me the fuck out.

>>25212082
Anon, Video games all use the same mechanisms to get you hooked and interested. Some are more honest about it than others and some don't use them for to extract money from youbut they are nontheless addicitive. Today's video games are logical continuations of gambling machines.

>>25212738
Try read it again. Sounds like you were filtered.

>>25212821
All games is still an overgeneralisation. You can't say Terranigma or Ico are games as addictive as machines - maybe the multiplayer based ones, which are shit anyway.

>>25210158
>>25212821
You're a mental slave if you get hooked on video games enough for them to be something that ruins your life anywhere near as badly as slots. Swapping them out for novels doesn't address the core issue that you're cattle, it's just an attempt to feel better about the form of media which is still being thoughtlessly consumed.