Welcome goonlings to the Awful Book of the Month! In this thread, we choose one work of Resources: Project Gutenberg - http://www.gutenberg.org - A database of over 17000 books available online. If you can suggest books from here, that'd be the best. SparkNotes - http://www.sparknotes.com/ - A very helpful Cliffnotes-esque site, but much better, in my opinion. If you happen to come in late and need to catch-up, you can get great character/chapter/plot summaries here. For recommendations on future material, suggestions on how to improve the club, or just a general rant, feel free to PM me. Past Books of the Month [for BOTM before 2014, refer to archives] 2014: January: Ursula K. LeGuin - The Left Hand of Darkness February: Mikhail Bulgalov - Master & Margarita March: Richard P. Feynman -- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! April: James Joyce -- Dubliners May: Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- 100 Years of Solitude June: Howard Zinn -- A People's History of the United States July: Mary Renault -- The Last of the Wine August: Barbara Tuchtman -- The Guns of August September: Jane Austen -- Pride and Prejudice October: Roger Zelazny -- A Night in the Lonesome October November: John Gardner -- Grendel December: Christopher Moore -- The Stupidest Angel 2015: January: Italo Calvino -- Invisible Cities February: Karl Ove Knausgaard -- My Struggle: Book 1. March: Knut Hamsun -- Hunger April: Liu Cixin -- 三体 ( The Three-Body Problem) May: John Steinbeck -- Cannery Row June: Truman Capote -- In Cold Blood (Hiatus) August: Ta-Nehisi Coates -- Between the World and Me September: Wilkie Collins -- The Moonstone October:Seth Dickinson -- The Traitor Baru Cormorant November:Svetlana Alexievich -- Voices from Chernobyl December: Michael Chabon -- Gentlemen of the Road 2016: January: Three Men in a Boat (To say nothing of the Dog!) by Jerome K. Jerome February:The March Up Country (The Anabasis) of Xenophon March: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco April: Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling May: Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima June:The Vegetarian by Han Kang July:Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees August: Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov September:Siddhartha by Herman Hesse October:Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse November:Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain December: It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis 2017: January: Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut February: The Plague by Albert Camus March: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin April: The Conference of the Birds (مقامات الطیور) by Farid ud-Din Attar May: I, Claudius by Robert Graves Current: Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky Book available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BPDN33W/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 About the book: quote:Kurlansky's dizzying new book, ''Salt: A World History,'' has countless such revelations. This is indeed a world history of salt. But it is also a history of the world as seen through those white crystals. To an almost absurd extent, he finds the salt connection nearly everywhere. The Erie Canal? Built for the sake of salt, which needed to be moved from the upstate Onondaga region to New York City. The West Indian slave trade? Underwritten by sales of salt, even more than by molasses and rum, as most history books have it. The tangled network of roads across North America? Credit the trails animals plodded as they searched for salt licks. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/24/books/nacl.html quote:When a publishing company agrees to produce an author's first book, it will often try to stake a claim to his or her second by writing a "first refusal" clause into the contract. This requires an author to submit any subsequent book proposal to the original publisher before hawking it elsewhere. The traditional way out of these handcuffs is to write such a dire and tedious tender for book two that no self-respecting commissioning editor will touch the project with a barge-pole. Once a rejection has been secured, one is free to write a proper proposal for a different publisher. I once asked a literary agent what would constitute a suitably boring topic. "Oh, I don't know," she said, staring at the ceiling for a moment. "How about the history of salt?" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/feb/16/historybooks.highereducation About the Author quote:Mark Kurlansky (December 7, 1948) is an American journalist and writer of general interest non-fiction. He has written a number of books of fiction and non-fiction. His 1997 book, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, (1997) was an international bestseller and was translated into more than 15 languages. His book Nonviolence: Twenty-five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea (2006) was the non-fiction winner of the 2007 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Pacing Just read, then Post. Please bookmark the thread to encourage discussion. References and Further Reading You will never need to read another book about salt after this one. Final Note: Thanks, and I hope everyone enjoys the book!
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 03:43 |
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# ? May 21, 2024 16:17 |
Seriously, this book is way better than it has any right to be. The first time I picked it up, I stayed up all night reading it.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 03:46 |
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Dope, I'm on board. Read his cod book last year and it was hella fun and informative.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 04:47 |
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Sure, I'm in. Got just a little bit left of Claudius the God and need something interesting to read next.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 09:04 |
Oh wow LOOK AT THAT ITS ON SALE on Amazon kindle for TWO dollars
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 14:02 |
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Oh jeez, you folks are making a book that I've wanted to read for a long time into June's BoTM? Damnit... If I can finish up A Fire Upon the Deep in the next couple days I'll pick this up and join in on the fun. I love history of the world via X books, they are usually a ton of fun.
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# ? Jun 7, 2017 04:38 |
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Just started, almost done with part one. Very readable and entertaining so far, got my inner Roman history geek tickled pretty good too.
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# ? Jun 9, 2017 19:37 |
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My library has this book! I'll read it when it gets in, assuming my mom doesn't steal it from me to read it first.
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# ? Jun 11, 2017 04:58 |
StrixNebulosa posted:My library has this book! That's cool, just get your mom to join SA and post Nothing bad will happen Promise
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# ? Jun 11, 2017 05:00 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:That's cool, just get your mom to join SA and post Ha ha ha no no no My mom's in her 60s and is comfortable emailing and that's about it for electronic stuff. She does constantly poach books from my library orders as well as having me order her titles, so she's well-read. e: We got her a kindle some years back and she read a bunch on it, but lately we've all had the hankering for more dead tree books, so I'm very happy our library has a good inter-library loan system.
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# ? Jun 11, 2017 05:08 |
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So, started reading this over the weekend and managed to blaze my way through the first part. It is very easy to read, which is nice. Lots of interesting little tidbits as well, like I was unaware that Rome/France/etc. had a version of fish sauce that they used. Having just taken a vacation to Vietnam, I can attest to how, while fish sauce is good on the dishes it's designed for, I couldn't imagine it on what I think of as French/Italian/European fare. Small question for those of you reading, but do you have a hard time following all the different places that the author mentions? I'm a layman when it comes to history, although I do love the subject, and following the names of all the different ports/people that are mentioned in each chapter can be a bit daunting for me. Sometimes I feel like I'm missing out on part of the wow factor of a particular section because some-person-from-some-port did something that allowed his country to grab control of another port and start to dominate the salt trade/destroy salt works/etc.
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# ? Jun 12, 2017 02:25 |
USMC_Karl posted:
I think there are basically two strategies: the first is to google every word and placename you don't know, and the second is just to roll on forward past it and figure if it's that important you'll figure it out as you go or catch it on a re-read. I don't think either approach is wrong, it's just a matter of personal taste. Sometimes it's more enjoyable to nail down every detail, sometimes it's more fun to just let the book carry you along past.
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# ? Jun 12, 2017 03:47 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:
I'm definitely in the Charlie Brown camp. I mostly do my reading in the 45 minutes of quiet time I have before my wife and the dogs roll out of bed in the morning or on my 2 hours of daily commute. Can't be bothered to Google stuff. It does make me feel really guilty for not knowing exactly what is going on, though.
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# ? Jun 12, 2017 03:58 |
No guilt! No shame! read as thou wilt is the whole of the law
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# ? Jun 12, 2017 04:01 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:No guilt! No shame! Them words are words I like to hear! I do have a salt-based question that hasn't been addressed by the book (at least yet), though. We are introduced to solar evaporation, mining, and very briefly boiling methods of salt production. Does anyone know if there is any difference to the end product when we talk about solar evaporation vs. boiling? Solar evaporation seems to be used way more throughout history, is that just a function of not wanting to chop down every single tree for miles around and burn 'em all up for salt, or is there a taste/consistency/etc. difference to solar evaporated salt vs. boiled salt. And while we're at it, Kurlansky talks about the differences in grain of salt, how fine grain was preferred for actual table salt for the rich folks and coarse grain salt was the choice for salting fish/meat. Besides being amazingly labor intensive, is there any reason a coarse grain salt couldn't just be ground to be fine? Seems like you could add in an extra grinding step and suddenly be able to sell your cheap coarse salt as premium fine salt? (Sorry if these questions are answered later in the book -or- they are just amazingly stupid questions, I'm honestly curious about them) USMC_Karl fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Jun 12, 2017 |
# ? Jun 12, 2017 04:33 |
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USMC_Karl posted:I do have a salt-based question that hasn't been addressed by the book (at least yet), though. We are introduced to solar evaporation, mining, and very briefly boiling methods of salt production. Does anyone know if there is any difference to the end product when we talk about solar evaporation vs. boiling? Kurlansky talks about this at pages 121-122. In general, solar evaporated salt (in addition to only being possible in some particular climates) is less pure. Where possible, though, solar evaporated salt is a lot easier to set up. USMC_Karl posted:And while we're at it, Kurlansky talks about the differences in grain of salt, how fine grain was preferred for actual table salt for the rich folks and coarse grain salt was the choice for salting fish/meat. Besides being amazingly labor intensive, is there any reason a coarse grain salt couldn't just be ground to be fine? Seems like you could add in an extra grinding step and suddenly be able to sell your cheap coarse salt as premium fine salt? Same page, but what people would do is to actually dissolve the coarse salt and then boil it down themselves to get a finer salt.
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# ? Jun 12, 2017 13:59 |
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ulmont posted:Kurlansky talks about this at pages 121-122. In general, solar evaporated salt (in addition to only being possible in some particular climates) is less pure. Where possible, though, solar evaporated salt is a lot easier to set up. Thanks! I actually finished reading that section today and thought to come back here and answer my own questions, but you beat me to it. I'll put the quote up here for any that are curious. page 122 posted:By "Bay salt," he meant solar-evaporated sea salt. ... There were better salts. Norther salts made from boiling peat and southern salts such as that of Setubal were far whiter, which meant purer. French bay salt ... was large-grained, inexpensive, and nearby [northern Europe]. Middle-class homes bought inexpensive bay salt, dissolved it back into brine, and boiled the brine over a fire until crystallized to make a finer salt ... On to another thing brought up in the book, sauerkraut! I've been living in South Korea for a long time and, while I never really thought of it, sauerkraut is pretty close to Korean white kimchi. The diagrams showing how to make choucroute (which, at least to me, sounds pretty much like sauerkraut) on page 152 even look pretty much like how one is supposed to salt cabbages before making "normal" kimchi or white kimchi. For those of you that haven't had it, white kimchi is just like what you picture kimchi as, just without pepper powder added to it. It's also generally served with a large portion of the juice that it is fermented in. As a kid, I never really dug sauerkraut all that much, but I know I love white kimchi now. Maybe I'll have to retry sauerkraut...
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# ? Jun 13, 2017 07:52 |
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Just started this last night and only got as far as Preface + 1st Chapter but I'm already enjoying it. Been meaning to read this for ages so thanks for the impetus to finally get around to it. In the brief overview of ancient Chinese politics, I thought it was kind of interesting that the Confucianists were pretty much liberals, the Legalists were pretty much conservatives, and the Huns seemed to fill the same role (or at least same rhetorical role) as radicalized Muslims (or, more generally, the "other" role). Doesn't actually have much to do with salt but I found it interesting and a bit depressing.
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# ? Jun 13, 2017 14:29 |
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I know Hollywood takes liberties with the source material but man this way different from the Angelina Jolie movie
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# ? Jun 13, 2017 15:00 |
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Update: Salt came in from the library and as predicted Mom has already read the first few chapters. I'm going to have to wait to read it - she says it's really well written!
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# ? Jun 13, 2017 23:24 |
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Have just gotten this from the library. I'm delighted with this month's selection as just the other day I was wondering how people managed to do things like salt meat and fish before there were well established trading routes. Very much looking forward to reading this.
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# ? Jun 14, 2017 11:36 |
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Chapter 14 and the whole section on the French salt tax is nutty. A law where, if you commit suicide, your body is salted and put on public display is just nutty. (This is a fun book)
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# ? Jun 15, 2017 08:37 |
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History is generally full of batshit stuff like that.
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# ? Jun 15, 2017 09:34 |
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I am going to read this book.
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# ? Jun 15, 2017 15:35 |
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I bought this cause you pointed out it was $2 and read it and it is really good!
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# ? Jun 16, 2017 18:37 |
Guy A. Person posted:I bought this cause you pointed out it was $2 and read it and it is really good! I will never steer you wrong
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# ? Jun 17, 2017 16:08 |
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I enjoyed this but it shows that when all you have is a salty hammer, everything looks like a salty nail. Moreover some of the history is really wrong -- I'm in a bit of discussion on page one of the history book thread https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3458502 and while it looks like that was fixed, I can't really trust a guy who makes errors so blatant. E: When did the "History of [item]" subgenre get started, anyway? Kurlansky seemes to have gotten in quite near the beginning.
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# ? Jun 17, 2017 18:16 |
Safety Biscuits posted:I enjoyed this but it shows that when all you have is a salty hammer, everything looks like a salty nail. Moreover some of the history is really wrong -- I'm in a bit of discussion on page one of the history book thread https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3458502 and while it looks like that was fixed, I can't really trust a guy who makes errors so blatant. AS far as I have been able to figure out, Kurlansky basically started the genre, yeah. Most of his other work seems to be historical food writing -- I really enjoyed his "Food of a Younger Land," which was one step away from a cookbook. I've noticed some errors too, though I'm also re-reading my old paper copy. For example, he talks about Marco Polo not discussing paper money, but my copy of the Travels of Marco Polo (Edited Manuel Komroff; wood block illustrations by Witold Gordon), repeatedly mentions paper money. To be fair, I usually find at least one error in just about every historical book I read -- I even found one in Edmund Morris' Theodore Roosevelt trilogy (he describes Theodore's mother as enjoying Uncle Remus stories several decades before they were published). That said I don't see it so much as "hammer -> nail" as it is using history of [thing] as a lens through which to view the history of other things. Focusing on a specific economic good and viewing history through that good gives a different picture than viewing history through, say, battles, or religion. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Jun 18, 2017 |
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# ? Jun 17, 2017 18:50 |
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Yeah, it's not all the time. But blaming the Albigensian Crusade on the French King's desire for salt is a bit misleading...
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# ? Jun 18, 2017 05:33 |
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Finished the book and boy was it a lot of fun. I'm sure there are times where the authors assertions on the importance of salt got a little out of proportion with actual history, but really how else could you write ~500 pages about salt and make it all more or less interesting? I definitely learned a bunch from this book and am glad that I finally took the plunge and decided to read it. The definite downside to the book is that I now have a crazy huge craving for some roast fish. I found the sections on the French salt tax and on the ACW to be the most interesting, personally, but maybe that's just because they were a little closer to modern day (and I really like Tabasco sauce). The section on the dead sea were also pretty cool, definitely made me want to put it on my list of places to visit someday. All in all, good choice Hieronymous Alloy!
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# ? Jun 19, 2017 03:11 |
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My copy of the book gets in this week, so I might be reading it somewhat into July. Am I going to get in trouble for reading the book off-month?
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# ? Jun 19, 2017 04:06 |
alnilam posted:My copy of the book gets in this week, so I might be reading it somewhat into July. Am I going to get in trouble for reading the book off-month? Only the cool kind of trouble chicks dig rebels
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# ? Jun 19, 2017 04:24 |
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Finished, was a good and cool read. Now I've got a craving for dried and salted cod and I'm also pretty sure I'll be putting the author's earlier book Cod on my to-read list. (I come from a long line of Norwegian fishermen -- everyone up to my grandfather and uncle made their living hauling fish (a lot of it cod) out of the North Sea. Dried and salted cod was a major export article from the region where I live (still is today, really, it's just the rest of the economy has grown more) and we traded a lot with the continent and got back some little bits of foreign culture -- the "national dish" of the area is an Portuguese-style casserole based on that dried and salted cod, featuring lots of tomatoes and olive oil and hot peppers and stuff that you wouldn't really associate with traditional Norwegian cuisine, but there you have it. Goddamn now I'm hungry.)
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# ? Jun 19, 2017 08:44 |
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This was way more interesting than a history of salt had any business being. A really interesting deep dive that only dragged in a couple instances, in my opinion, and most of that is my general ignorance of Chinese history leading me to miss connections and references unless I paused to do outside research. Fun read!
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# ? Jun 19, 2017 17:27 |
Groke posted:Finished, was a good and cool read. Now I've got a craving for dried and salted cod and I'm also pretty sure I'll be putting the author's earlier book Cod on my to-read list. Kurlansky also wrote a similar history of cod, titled "Cod: a Biography of the Fish that Changed the World." Dude has an oevure.
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# ? Jun 19, 2017 17:32 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Kurlansky also wrote a similar history of cod, titled "Cod: a Biography of the Fish that Changed the World." The Cod book is really good. It was kind of depressing when he was describing why the wild cod population probably won't bounce back, and farm raised cod probably won't be able to supplement the wild stocks, though. I'm hoping to get the Salt book sometime this week, I've been looking forward to more of Kurlansky's style.
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# ? Jun 21, 2017 16:41 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Kurlansky also wrote a similar history of cod, titled "Cod: a Biography of the Fish that Changed the World." I believe I may already have been aware of that, yes. ...seems these days for every book I read, my to-read pile grows by at least one more (#firstworldproblems)...
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# ? Jun 21, 2017 18:32 |
Need next month's suggestions.
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# ? Jun 21, 2017 20:31 |
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Babyfucker by Urs Allemann
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# ? Jun 21, 2017 20:33 |
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# ? May 21, 2024 16:17 |
CestMoi posted:Babyfucker by Urs Allemann Don't we already have a whole thread about not reading that?
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# ? Jun 22, 2017 03:50 |