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Unofficial What are you Reading Thread?

Started by Thurnez Isa, December 03, 2006, 04:11:35 PM

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Kai

J London -Call of the Wild-White Fang
Doctorow- City of God
The Complete Cladist
Animal Behavior
Insect Behavior
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. --Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

Her Royal Majesty's Chief of Insect Genitalia Dissection
Grand Visser of the Six Legged Class
Chanticleer of the Holometabola Clade Church, Diptera Parish

Rococo Modem Basilisk

Over the week+ that I was away from the intertubes, I ended up reading a lot. Here's my list:

- John A Keel - The Mothman Prophecies
- Chris Hyatt - Undoing Yourself with Energized Meditation
- Jacques Vallee - Confrontations
- Jacques Vallee - Passport to Magonia
- Jacques Vallee - Revelations
- parts of:
-- Charles Fort - Parade of the Damned
-- Agent 139 - Join My Cult
-- Peter Carrol - Liber Null
-- Anarchy for the masses: The Disinfo guide to The Invisibles
- Pop Magic Zero! by Grant Morrison
- Jacques Vallee - The Physics of High Strangeness


I am not "full of hate" as if I were some passive container. I am a generator of hate, and my rage is a renewable resource, like sunshine.

Corvidia

Writing Women's Worlds, Bedouin Stories by Lila Abu-Lughod. Pretty good so far.
One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told.

Iason Ouabache

I just picked up Daniel Dennett's "Freedom Evolves" today. Don't know when I'll actually have a chance to read it. He has some interesting theories on free will, it seems. Conversations about free will typically either bore me or make me feel extremely paranoid so there is a good possibility that I will never finish it.
You cannot fathom the immensity of the fuck i do not give.
    \
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Cain

Quote from: Iason Ouabache on August 23, 2009, 05:38:21 AMConversations about free will typically either bore me or make me feel extremely paranoid

I'm pretty much the same, though usually the former because most people seem to take a simple binary position of "YOU HAVE ABSOLUTE FREE WILL" or "EVERYTHING IN YOUR LIFE IS DETERMINED, INCLUDING YOUR NEGATIVE REACTION TO THIS.  YOU ARE A COG IN A MACHINE, WITH SELF-AWARENESS AND NOTHING MORE", and there is no nuance at all.  Everything I've read on neuroscience and so on suggests it is a hell of a lot more complex than that, which also meshes well with my general rule of thumb: the world is more complex than we think it is.

But I haven't done too much reading on free will in the past 5 years or so, maybe things have improved.

Rococo Modem Basilisk

Meh. I have been more irritated by the idea that these two binary positions are somehow at odds. You may be fully deterministic from the POV of a full understanding of physics, but that doesn't mean it makes sense to think of yourself that way. Determinism is a valid model for physics, but not for vacation planning. The other side is that as soon as you take into account your own deterministic actions, they immediately become more complex since you start feeding into yourself on a higher level of abstraction.


I am not "full of hate" as if I were some passive container. I am a generator of hate, and my rage is a renewable resource, like sunshine.

MMIX

Quote from: Cain on August 23, 2009, 12:40:50 PM

[snip]

But I haven't done too much reading on free will in the past 5 years or so, maybe things have improved.

I love the implication in your reply that they may be able to come up with a cure . . . [/only partly tongue in cheek]
"The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently" David Graeber

That One Guy

Currently reading The Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon. So far it's a damn good time (I'm only about 30 or 40 pages into it and it's just starting to get rolling), and I just picked up almost all of his books other than the newest one, so I'll be working my way through them in the next couple weeks.

As much as I liked Gravity's Rainbow (which I really liked), this one is much more accessible. GR needed a pretty sizable effort to stay on top of the characters and underlying motivations (which made it so good), and it's really interesting to get that same writing style in a story that's much more straightforward than GR in Lot 49 while still keeping that sense of the absurd-as-normal that wound through the narrative in GR. WASTE, indeed!
People of the United States! We are Unitarian Jihad! We can strike without warning. Pockets of reasonableness and harmony will appear as if from nowhere! Nice people will run the government again! There will be coffee and cookies in the Gandhi Room after the revolution.

Arguing with a Unitarian Universalist is like mud wrestling a pig. Pretty soon you realize the pig likes it.

dr retard

Currently reading: Jean Ferry, Le mécanicien et autres contes.
in a swedish translation, translations are very unreliable.
I dont trust them at all.

The book it pretty nice, but i cant stop wondering how it would
be if i could read french. Irritating.

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!

Rococo Modem Basilisk

I'm a quarter of the way through Forbidden Science. I have been on a Vallee/Keel kick recently, and got through Our Haunted Planet on top of the stuff listed earlier in the thread.

One of these days, though, I plan to handwrite margin notes in my dead tree copy of the Illuminatus trilogy, because the references seemed far more obvious when I looked through last night to figure out what RAW had gotten when he translated "serpent power" into german.


I am not "full of hate" as if I were some passive container. I am a generator of hate, and my rage is a renewable resource, like sunshine.

Corvidia

A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: The Life of William Dampier by Diana and Micheal Preston. After three years of sitting on a bookshelf, it's finally aired out enough I can read it (my grandparents both smoke like chimneys and I hate the smell of stale smoke).
Very, very good so far.
One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told.

Halfbaked1

I recently read Collapse, I forget who wrote it, but it was a riveting good read about the collapse of civilizations in general.  I am terrible at remembering authors these days, but if someone would point me at some good material I would certainly appreciate it.

Cainad (dec.)

Quote from: Halfbaked1 on September 10, 2009, 09:50:19 AM
I recently read Collapse, I forget who wrote it, but it was a riveting good read about the collapse of civilizations in general.  I am terrible at remembering authors these days, but if someone would point me at some good material I would certainly appreciate it.

Jared Diamond, of Guns, Germs, and Steel fame. I have yet to read Collapse though.

AFK

For once I have something to contribute to this thread.

I am starting to read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

It's kinda work related.  I'm going on this retreat/excursion thing out on one of the Maine islands with a local health coalition.  We're going to have a mini book-club where we discuss the introduction and 1st chapter with the author. 

Anyway, the book is centered around this idea of "Tipping Points", where a concurrence of events on the margins combine to enact a large scale and sudden change on something.  In the intro the two examples given are the crime rate in a couple of Brooklyn neighborhoods and the resurgence of the Hush Puppies shoe brand.  Back in the mid/late 90s the Hush Puppy shoe brand was on the way out.  Nobody but a few die-hards in their 50s wore them.  But, some kids from SoHo started wearing them.  A couple of clothing designers picked up on this and had models wear them as accessories to compliment their clothing lines.  It picked up from there and all of a sudden Hush Puppies were the rage with the couture crowd. 

It's a pretty interesting book and I'll share any other pertinent nuggets as I move through the book. 
Cynicism is a blank check for failure.

Captain Utopia

My impression of Malcolm Gladwell is that he writes interesting stories about coincidence and correlation and sprinkles some pseudo-science on top to make the reader feel smart and empowered. Readers like feeling smart and empowered.