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What’s the rarest/weirdest book you own?
(lemmy.world)
I have volume 1 of Kim Il Sung’s works in English - printed in North Korea in the 70’s. I don’t know if the Foreign Languages Publishing House survived long enough for a Volume 2. They did put out some of Jong’s thoughts on film, if I recall correctly.
This is probably the prize of my collection. I have a first American printing of Lolita, which unfortunately has a bit of cat vomit stain on it or might be in that spot.
What’s really interesting when reading is that you are looking at a retelling of events that happened more than a thousand years before the author wrote it. These were ultimately all real people, and there’s distant traces of politics in all of it.
Eg, Zhuge Liang probably didn’t do the Empty Fort. It was a real strategy that was attested to later in history, but by someone else. I thought Luo had come up with that story himself, but I think there were some earlier stories with that claim.
Just a fascinating piece of historical fan fiction, which we lack so much context for as Westerners.