My Uncle Oswald
Roald Dahl's first-ever novel presents the scurrilous memoirs of that delightful old reprobate from switch bitch, Oswald Hendryks Cornelius - connoisseur, bon vivant, collector of spiders, scorpions, odd walking sticks, lover of opera, expert on Chinese porcelain, and without doubt the greatest fornicator of all time. In this delightful picaresque story, it is revealed how Uncle Oswald first achieved great wealth - all thanks to the Sundance blister beetle, which when ground to powder has the most electrifying aphrodisiac qualities. It is 1919 - armed with the powder and aided by the beautiful amoral Yasmin how comely, Oswald begins an audacious commercial enterprise which involves seducing the most famous men in Europe - from crowded heads to Bernard Shaw and Marcel Proust.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
7mentions
7people
2010–2023years
71% recommend29% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Non-Fiction: travels by Michael Crichton. Fascinating book that gives you different perspective on a variety of topics. Very well written
Fiction: My Uncle Oswald by Roald Dahl- nsfw story about a young guy in early 20th century Europe who develops a method for increasing libido - hilarity ensues.
- Boy you'll love e.g. "My Uncle Oswald" - I've only consciously discovered Dahl while looking for dark humored books in my teens and then was surprised to find out he was the author behind a lot of very well known childrens books also!
- > respectable literature along with scandalous content (for instance, Roald Dahl
If you've never heard of "My Uncle Oswald", you're in for a surprise...
- It's worth reading My Uncle Oswald, which is a mildly amusing story about sex and Nobel prizewinner sperm banks.
- Here's a few I've really liked that have a broader subject matter than only what you asked for. I figure that if you like to read you'd like these books.
--- NON-FICTION ---
Darkness Visible
A Mathemematician's Apology
Omnivore's Dilemma
Fermat's Enigma
The Code Book
Born to Run
Judgement of Paris
Siddhartha
Killing Pablo
The Victorian Internet
Lone Survivor
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman
Papillon
Into Thin Air
Born on a Blue Day
Touching the Void
Got Fight
The Conquest of Happiness
--- FICTION ---
Switch Bitch
Lost Horizon
The Cuckoo's Egg
The Simlarillion
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Alchemist
The Count of Monte Cristo
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Neverwhere
My Uncle Oswald
Stories of Your Life and Others
Invisible Cities
Life of Pi
Atlas Shrugged
--- WALL STREET / FINANCE ---
When Genius Failed
Liar's Poker
Buffett (Lowenstein)
Bull!
Black-Scholes and Beyond (textbook)
Fixed Income Securities (textbook)
The Road to Serfdom
The Smartest Guys in the Room
Fortune's Formula
The Fourth Turning
Inside the House of Money
--- ENTREPRENEURSHIP / COMPUTERS (non-textbook) ---
Masters of Doom
It's Not About the Bike
Dot. Bomb
Founders at Work
The PayPal Wars
Coders at Work
The Mousedriver Chronicles
Leaving Microsoft to Change the World
The Soul of a New Machine
Startup
The Hypomanic Edge
Small Giants
Small is the New Big
Four Hour Work Week
The Boy who Harnessed the Wind
Four Steps to the Epiphany
Pour your Heart into it
Beyond Software Architecture
Setting the Table
--- DESIGN / UX ---
On Writing
The Design of Everyday Things
Understanding Comics
The Elements of Typographic Style
Don't Make me Think!
A Pattern Language
--- PROGRAMMING ---
Programming Pearls
Effective Java
The Algorithm Design Manual
Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment
The Pragmatic Programmer
Refactoring
Java Concurrency in Practice
Java Puzzlers
Expert C Programming
--- COOKING ---
The Secrets of Cooking Revealed
Cooking for Geeks
The Bread Baker's Apprentice
The Brewmaster's Table
--- MISC ---
Robot Building for Beginners
Mountaineering - The Freedom of the Hills
A First Course in Coding Theory
The Computational Beauty of Nature
Total Control
The Ashley Book of Knots
Make: Electronics
- > they can’t differentiate legitimate pearl-clutching from someone (in that case, Dahl’s estate / the publisher)
The 'woke edits' (for want of a better term) at the direction of the publishers on behalf of the estate (their client) was the furtherest thing from legitimate pearl clutching possible.
They (both parties) wanted to make money, they released a new edition, and they made their PR releases to highlight the changes made to "make Dahl better" (for a new and more woke audience).
That's not pearl clutching, that's just marketing .. and worse very likely deliberately manipulative in order to reach eyeballs via contraversy.
What was the end result of that?
Double payout!!
They have apologised for the sin of altering Dahl and are re-releasing 'Original Dahl' - so they are making bank from both their new revision edition and from a new release of old editions for all the outraged new self declared Dahl fans that want only the original works with the enormously fat descriptors.
Dahl's My Uncle Oswald would have loved the marketing here.
