Unofficial What are you Reading Thread?

[Cramulus]

any office pranks you'd like to share?

[Scribbly]

"Kraken" by China Mieville is my current read, after The City & The City

I absolutely love this guy's style. The City & The City is particularly awesome for being a surreal novel based on the limits of perception and how people can convince themselves not to see things they do not want to see - at least, to a point.

Kraken is a bit less engaging to me (the mystery isn't as compelling), but both are very enjoyable. Highly recommend this guy, and I think I'll be working my way through his books for a while.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

any office pranks you'd like to share?

None that I've tried personally, as I'm currently unemployed, but there were a couple that struck me as particularly clever, such as:

1.) Call a co-worker's home phone number during the day; WHen the amswering machine picks up, transfer the call to that co-worker, so that it seems like their answering machine has somehow called them at work

2.) Remove the music chip from one of those greeting cards and hide it somewhere in a co-worker's office or cubicle, possibly affixed to a ceiling tile or the underside of their chair or somewhere out of the way like that so that there will be an annoying song playing over and over again coming from a source small enough that it is extremely difficult to locate.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

any office pranks you'd like to share?

Hey, where's that thread with all the office pranks? That was a good thread.

[Triple Zero]

I also read a lot of clopfics and stuff.

... I only learned yesterday what those are ...

[Lenin McCarthy]

The saga of Gísli Súrsson. Things I've learned from it so far: Mortally wounded vikings always had time to recite a poem before they died.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

I also read a lot of clopfics and stuff.

... I only learned yesterday what those are ...

[TMI]Not just clopfics of course, those are rather conventional. Also similar stuff based on Dragon Tales, and a Land Before Time fanfic where the sassy triceretops girl gets gangbanged by everybody in the Great Valley.[/TMI]

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

"'Would You Rather...?' 's Mind F*cks" (BTW, The asterisk in the middle of the word "Fuck" is part of the title as it is referred to on the cover and throughout the book) Is another book that I've been flipping back through again. They've got a few good prank ideas, unfortunately they're all either so off the wall that I can't do them in any place that I ever plan to go back to again or where I don't wanna completely fuck shit up, or else mundane enough that they would be indistinguishable from my 'regular' idiosyncrasies.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

I double post to draw attention away from the horrible and deeply disturbing things I say in the first post in a given sequence.

[Cain]

/purposefully ignoring all of the above

I've been going through Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, taking notes.  I'm about a third of the way through, and although I'm sold on parts of his thesis (history does progress, from a certain point of view - Ian Morris' comparison of eastern and western civilizations shows certain standards which, when reached, nations never fall below - even in the event of supposed civilizational collapse or total war) but other parts of it are still highly contentious (that liberal democracies actually allow for the thymotic impulses of their citizens, that there will never be a theoretical model which will supersede liberal democracy, that Fukuyama's managerial technocrat approach to democracy is in fact democracy as widely imagined by the population at large etc etc).

I still think Universal History is retarded though, have no fear.  Contradictions will arise ultimately from all forms of government, and there will never be one which resolves them for forever, in theory or fact.  Solutions of pre-existing contradictions create new contradictions which are in turn only resolved to create yet more.

Apart from that, I'm also browsing Richard Overy's Russia's War.  I'm sure I've previously mentioned how I hate most WWII history, because I'm an elitist snob and most WWII histories take the form of Churchill wanking and pulp fiction.  And if I haven't, well, now you know.  This is an exception for two reasons: Overy is a brilliant historian, and it deals with the real theatre of conflict against Nazi Germany - the Eastern Front/the Great Patriotic War.  The Commonwealth (barely) contained Germany to the Continent, and American entry did spell the ultimate endgame for the regime - but without the Soviet Union, it probably would've taken closer to a decade, or involved the use of nuclear weapons in Europe.  By contrast, the Soviet Union crushed the Nazi war machine, absorbing everything it could throw at them and then steadily turning the tide.  It was truly terrible as well, especially when contrasted with western Europe.  The Nazis gave no quarter and the Soviets expected none.  The Nazis saw their enemies as subhuman, and the Soviets saw their own troops in more or less the same light - no cost was too high to stem the German advance. 

The most amazing thing is how much information on that theatre of the war is still missing.  Successive Russian governments have released military documents, and unedited versions of biographies from the generals were (eventually) released, but intelligence files remain "lost".  We also know almost nothing about Stalin's thinking either, other than the letters he wrote, which cannot ultimately be trusted.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

/purposefully ignoring all of the above

Yes, I think that's probably the wise thing to do.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

For once, I am reading nothing but the interbutts.

[dontblameyoko]

Hildegard von Bingen's Mystical Visions

[Placid Dingo]

Read Daisy Miller. Was tolerable until a shit ending.

[Cain]

Got my copy of The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of our Times by Giovanni Arrighi in the post today.

Ippy and Pickles might find this of interest in particular.  As I understand it, his basic thesis is that "financialization" of the economy is not an end-stage or further stage of capitalist development, but a reoccuring event throughout history, which tends to undermine the pre-eminent economic powers and create a new system whereby challengers depose that power and become a new hegemon.

Though there is more to it than just that.  As Arrighi says in the introduction, the book is essentially about the two interdependent master processes of the modern era - the creation of a national state system and the formation of a worldwide capitalist system".

So, should be fun.  Arrighi's prose is quite readable as well, which always helps.