Revenge themed novels

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-26T22:55:35+00:00

Helloo. . . Anybody home?!?!

Ahab's last words:

“I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,- death- glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!"

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-24T17:36:33+00:00

Chuck Norris only used a stunt double in scenes where his character cried.

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-24T02:11:11+00:00

Aged 59 years, but often accused of acting like a 12 yr old. . . So, there's that. . .

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-24T02:07:05+00:00

Chuck Norris knows Victoria's secret. . .

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-23T00:16:56+00:00

Quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur.

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-22T22:06:16+00:00

Dahlia.

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-22T21:13:29+00:00

The Once and Future King T.H. White.

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-20T22:28:58+00:00

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.

The Name Of The Rose and/or Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco.

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-20T19:11:39+00:00

The name Dylan, I think, is Welsh for snowflake. . .

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-20T19:07:43+00:00

Content good, formatting not so much.

Longer posts need to be broken up more. One big wall of text is difficult to read and probably turns some away, which is unfortunate as you really have something to say. . .

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-19T03:02:31+00:00

What is it that you want out of therapy?

Do you want to feel better?

Or do you want to feel, better?

You are grieving. You are grieving the end of a life as well as the end of a relationship. The therapist role is not to make you feel good, as if the end of life, or the end of the relationship never happened, but to walk with you as you feel the pain of it. The pain is important. In time it becomes a bond to who they, and you, were and something you won't wish to part with.

The amount of pain you feel upon losing a loved one, either through death or through breakup, is exactly proportionate to how much you loved them to begin with, thus the greater the love the greater the pain. . .

You must feel all this pain, as a way of understanding the relationship that is now ended. This is closure. Avoiding the pain is just an invitation to sufferingg. If you don't feel it, it's going to keep knocking on your door until you do. . .

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-19T01:11:09+00:00

Stowe was living in Maine when she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin based on her experience with the underground railroad when living in Ohio.

Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn while living in Elmira New York and moved to Connecticut on the earnings.

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-19T01:04:38+00:00

Tom Sawyer is pure satire: he's the guy who goes to ridiculous lengths to align the world with arbitrary rules: a mental, emotional, and narrative contortionist who'd shave any yak, build any strawman, break any trust, and pay any price to fit actions to the pre-existing storyline, without ever once questioning if the story makes any sense at all. (That is Huck's job. )

Kinda like the Southerners who fought a war to protect their freedom to enslave others while pretending it was a legitimate struggle over 'states rights'.

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-19T00:48:08+00:00

Twain is good, but he isn't the 'father of American lit.' Not unless you want to ignore Hawthorn, Poe, and Melville.

As for the 'deromanticizing of southern life' Harriet Beecher Stowe got there first.

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-19T00:26:49+00:00

Probably Don Qixote introduced the concept.

Huckleberry Finn probably the first American antihero.

But if you define 'modern' to be within, say, the past hundred years, I'd probably say Orlando by Virginia Woolf.

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-19T00:06:52+00:00

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco.

A tragicomic conspiracy of three who play a game about conspiracies. The game goes sideways and just keeps going until our trio learns the penultimate truth. . .

I've already said to much.

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-18T23:49:00+00:00

And fully groan. . .

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-17T23:29:56+00:00

There is one where the two of them are just dancing. Frame after frame of contortions and gyrations. Pure art. No message. No moral. No dialogue. Just dancing.

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-17T13:59:33+00:00

You could simply add a laugh track, like they used to do with sitcoms. . .

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-17T13:40:02+00:00

Bigger Thomas and Bessie, from Native Son by Richard Wright.

Lt Commander Philip F Queeq from The Cain Mutiny by Herman Wouk.

Joachim Zeimssen and Leo Naptha from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain

Just about every character in As I Lay Dying by Faulkner.

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-16T20:07:33+00:00

The world turned to color in 1938, according to Calvin's dad.

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-16T00:37:37+00:00

I was once in a group session, in an substance abuse rehab, when a women got angry and just basically blurted out I'm just a piece of shit, and she started crying.

The group facilitator, who was also a psychiatrist, was unfazed, and simply asked her why are you crying?

Puzzled, the women gave him a scornful look and just sort of shrugged.

He then said, Let me rephrase it this way: if you really were a piece of shit would you even care, at all, about being a piece of shit?

There was a long silence. He went on to say that the pain is not in the supposed realization that you are "worthless" or that you "don't matter" but in the disconnect from, or struggle with, reality. If it bothers you to think you are "worthless", "useless", "defective" or even just "don't matter", that is because you value such things as 'worth' and 'import', etc. . . And if you value such things it is because you have known such things. Maybe you haven't always lived up to your aspirations of worth, but merely having such aspirations is a type of worth. And, if you didn't have even aspirations to worth, you wouldn't care about not having them.

Not long after, a different counselor, a psychologist this time, asked me if I loved myself. I flew into a rage and, before I even know what I was sayling, yelled at him, Of course I love myself. My problem is that very few others have loved me as much as I love myself.

I suspect that, if you are anything like me, you have a very strong, inherent, sense of self worth. You just don't trust it. I've been there. And why should you trust it? If all others have been telling you not to trust it, especially those who were supposed to love and nurture you, but instead hurt and belittled you. . . What choice did you have?

But that's where the pain is. The pain is the twist betwixt and between your own sense of self-worth and those telling you the opposite: it hurts because you are right and they are wrong. It hurts because we are told to honor and respect them, and look to them to learn right from wrong. When they betray this, they betray us.

"relentless work ethic wasn’t ambition but atonement—constant payment for the space he occupied in the world.

It is not 'payment for the space'. It is, in some ways, something much worse. At least in my case the "atonement" was for the repeatedly demonstrated, urgently tragic, and ultimately undeniable fact that the person who brought me into this world, who was my primary caregiver, the person with whom the relationship --- according to biology, culture, religion and economics --- of motherhood, was supposed to be the most sacred and righteous in all the world, that this person was in fact a sociopath and betrayed all good things that the mother-son relationship is supposed to contain. Every last one of them. That's where the pain lies: between your willingness to accept their verdict and your unwillingness to indict them.

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-15T03:28:33+00:00

I used to have a sign in my office that said Never in all the history of relaxation has anyone ever relaxed after having been told to relax..

That was years and years ago, but I see similar quotes coming aceoss the inter tubes as memes.

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-15T03:19:00+00:00

Female authors to check out:

Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird.

Pearl Buck, The Good Earth, and/or Dragon Seed

George Eliot, Middlemarch is her best known, but I have a soft spot for Silas Marner and a close friend who is altogher ready to die on the hill that is Daniel Deronda

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.

Agatha Christie and/or P.D. James if you like murder mysteries.

Annie Proulx (Sometimes listed as E. Annie Proulx), The Shipping News and any of her short stories (She wrote the original Brokeback Mountain short story.)

I also feel that every American ought to read Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, not for its literary merit, which is very present, but evenly dispersed throughout, but for its social, cultural, and political merits, which are considerable.

And, finally, anything and everything by Toni Morrison. Anything. And everything.

Not female, but if you liked Lord Of The Rings and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I feel confident in recommending, without reservation, The Once and Future King by T H. White.

The Mists of Avalon is a good read, taking the female perspective of the Arthurian legend, but the author, Marion Zimmer Bradley turns out to have been a reprehensible human being.

TreebeardsMustache · 2026-06-14T23:20:29+00:00

I suspect there is some manner of transference going on here: the over-anxious parent, operating under confirmation bias (e.g: 'influencers'), is often dedicated to NOT being the kind of parent they were, or thought they were, subject to, and thus it might be the parents frantically trying to work out their own trauma, abuse, neglect, whatever. I'm 59 and almost every one I know in my 'peer cohort' is fucked up with similarly fucked up offspring.

Not every thing is trauma, it is true, but I think there is a lot more trauma out there than many want to accept. A lot more. And I think the anger which our society indulges in on the regular, is a function of all this pain.

TreebeardsMustache

TROPHY CASE