What are you currently reading?

[Some_porcupine]

From boredom, about miracles in Dechtice, Slovakia. Basically Lourdes copycat, on net people say lol.
They have problem the Mary the helper who shows there, try to go before God or idk lol.

Also, Tina turner book Power becomes you. It was fine, woman read, but felt better than I would if I read Oprah or other type of those books...

 

[A L I X]

From boredom, about miracles in Dechtice, Slovakia. Basically Lourdes copycat, on net people say lol.
They have problem the Mary the helper who shows there, try to go before God or idk lol.

Also, Tina turner book Power becomes you. It was fine, woman read, but felt better than I would if I read Oprah or other type of those books...

Nice to see you back, Porcupine

 

[Some_porcupine]

Nice to see you back, Porcupine

Hello who is this, is it you Alix?
I got cough, it slowly goes away :>, so I layed in bed and take care for myself, off-line. Felt nice bit I was scared you guys would be scared lol.
But improving, you?

 

[llillilll]

Just finished Milena, a book about a women that dated Kafka for a short time. i started reading because of that but Her being Kafka's former lover wasn't even abig part of he book. She was a amazing women, reading her writings and things she did was a great experience.

 

[A L I X]

Hello who is this, is it you Alix?
I got cough, it slowly goes away :>, so I layed in bed and take care for myself, off-line. Felt nice bit I was scared you guys would be scared lol.
But improving, you?

Yeah, its me, with a new account. These months feel longer than they have actually been. I was getting scared that I couldn't access the forum for some reason even after so many tries, but luckily it's back. This place is just special.
And I hope your cough goes away, coughs are probably the sickness that I hate the most, it wont kill you or cause you a lot of pain but it's absolutely the worst

 

[sleepwalker]

Somehow still reading Dune at a snails pace...

 

[UCD]

I've read a lot of books in the last month partially because I have shittier internet.

I just finished the quantum thief and the fractal prince, I might read the third book but the second book was worse than the first so no plans. finished reading sekai series yesterday, pretty interesting but nothing special. Started reading neverwhere but gave up halfway through due to some plot hole that I forget now.

finished meditations,
It was clearly made by a man trying to fix what he saw as very important moral issues within himself, not by a perfect sage of wisdom.
he is writing a diary, in which he tries to convince himself of several ideas by putting up a brave face and being purposely biased. It is not a written description of how he lived his life. He may have acted completely different. Is advice from a hypocrite valuable? how could he know what is right If he likely never practiced what he preached? I don't think it is some masterpiece of literature but there were some interesting ideas there .

currently pushing through simulacra and simulation and Xunxi. Very slow going.

 

[WKYK]

Just finished Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. Good book but man does that guy love his sex scenes. Still I'd recommend it, pretty short read. Next I think I'm reading Pale Fire with a friend and 1776 by David McCullough on my own.

No Longer Human

I was going to read this with some friends soon, it sounds really interesting. Let me know what you think of it when you finish, I'll report back too.

 

[A L I X]

I only have some pages left to finish Crime and Punishment. After that I'm going to read Do Androids Dream of Electrig Sheep and No Longer Human.
Also, I'm currently finsihing Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher, probably one of my favourite books right now.

Already finished DADoES and Brave New World. The next books that I'm going to read will be The Catcher in the Rye and Anarchy, State and Utopia.

 

[mimikyu]

Just finished Brave New World (hot take: better than 1984). Now reading Aeneid because I want to know why Virgil was master of Dante Alighieri before reading Divine Comedy.

 

[Herostratus]

I am currently reading Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History. I have not progressed far but that is a given, since I have to handle university concerns first. Reading Leo Strauss has given me the urge to pursue other things such as historicism, and so I plan on reading Frederick C. Beiser's The German Historicist Tradition after this accessible work of Hegel is complete + fully comprehended.

 

[y4k$ha]

I'm actually slowly working my way through a self-help / improvement book called Mastery by George Leonard. He was a pilot in WWII, an accomplished martial artist, and a writer focusing on human potential.

 

[Kyou]

General book update. I don't have anything else I feel like posting about, so I'll try and update more often with what I've been reading.

This is from the last month and a half, or so.

Edith Hamilton - Mythology
I got this because it's the general "beginner's book" for starting with the Greeks, at least according to the /lit/ wiki, that is (which, I am a bit embarrassed to admit, is where I get most of my book recs). It's serviceable, although not as mentally stimulating as I was expecting it to be. It reminded me a lot of those Youtube videos that calls themselves "movie analyses" but are really just retelling the plot.
It has a few chapters recapping the Iliad and the Odyssey, and a general overview of most of the early Greek poems and plays. The commentary along side them, though, was simple-minded. I don't know what else to call it. It's just, for a supposed "classic bestseller" written with "sure taste in scholarship", it was unsatisfying. The book also has a section tacked on at the end about Norse stories too, though by that point the quality has particularly dropped off. There are quite a few formatting errors I noticed as well.

Thomas S. Kane - The Oxford Essential Guide to Writing
This is among a collection of textbookish tomes I have bought, hoping that at some point I'll magically find one that explains a way out of this authorial constipation of mine. It's an obviously hopeless search, I know, but I'm trying, okay? Evidently, it didn't help me, since I am at this very moment overwhelmed with a mass of thoughts, and yet not a single one among the sexier ones are being verbalized. And the ones that do come out? Still as unorganized as ever.
I will at least give it that it is clearer that a lot of the other writing books in my repertoire. The Trivium, for example, is one that comes to mind as being so drunk off its own sobriety that I cannot accept anything it says as helpful; for a book on rhetoric, it came off rhetorically as amateurish, even for me.

Emil M. Cioran - A Short History of Decay // History and Utopia
Now, as a good Christian man, it might seem unusual that I would read someone like Cioran, much less consider him to be among my philosophical maitres.
If you're not familiar, Cioran is the kind of philosopher whom, were I to introduce him in his entirely to the average Agoran, would certainly be called a redditor. I mean, I tried checked out the English translation of Decay, and, while "accurate" in a technical sense, reads like that classic example:

Now in French he's... well he's the same, but, and maybe it's just a French thing, he's also a master of the language. I've seen him sometimes described as a more misanthropic version of Nietzsche, but man is he effective in his writing. He's both erudite and compact, and so when I think of myself wanting to "write better" I mean I want to express my visions in the same way he does.

Aristotle - Poetics
I have a lot of thoughts on this one, way too many to detail here. Among them, though, is, "damn. does it really not get any better than this?" I mean, on pretty much every other topic that Aristotle wrote about, from metaphysics to logic and all that: it's been picked apart and rebuilt and reanalyzed by a whole number of sides, and philosophy has grown in so many different ways since then. But "literature criticism?" "Aesthetics?" It's nothing. It doesn't seem to me to have grown much since its birth. My references for that, of course, are a couple more academic-oriented books, like this one (and none of them were satisfying) and my exposure to the general way that people talk about the stories they're familiar with. If I collected all my thoughts, then I'd like to maybe compose some sort of radical new approach to literature criticism, but I fear I'll end up looking not to different from the Aalewis above.

And I'm saying this because I care about media analysis. I care about it as much as others do politics or Current Event or whatever. To them, I have my equivalent of movies and books and games and anime: that's what I want to talk about. But I get more and more embarrassed about that as time goes on. I want to know what the proper way to enjoy something is, though the more I think about it, the more it seems to me like there's no point in trying to form an opinion like that in the first place.

Oh and Death of a Salesman rocks btw lmao

 

[Digital Cheese]

Fahrenheit 451 and 1984

Slowly, barely in fact, but thats what im reading currently. Will note reading is way funner when u can just read a book and not have to write a ton of useless bullshit for it at school, you actually want to invest your time in the book instead of do literally anything else with your time (or hell not even just a book, but any writings)

 

[DyingIon]

Recently finished Starship Troopers and Orphans of the Sky by Rovert Heinlein. Thought about jumping to Mark of the Beast by him but just started the prequal to MYST instead!
.

 

[zalaz alaza]

Silmarillion in the morning, almost finished, then onto Unfinished Tales.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind at night, just for fun

 

[Ticbow2003]

I've just reached midway through volume one of the Isaac Asimov short stories collection. It's really good and a great place to go for hard sci-fi

 

[Slumber]

Currently I've been revisiting Byung-Chul Han's 'Burnout Society', it touches on the mass burnout and increased levels of depression we're currently experiencing in industrialized societies. I won't spoil anything of it, but, if the topic is interesting to you then I highly recommend it.

 

[Kyou]

David Foster Wallace - A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
(anyone know the context behind the cover btw? It's lost on me.)

Seven essays. All thought-provoking.

Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley: I say thought-provoking, but the first ~20 pages of the book are a hard read. I first had contact with this book quite a while ago, in my senior year of HS, though I never got past the first essay. It's Dave's origin story, I guess, or at least the origin for a lot of what you'll be finding later in the book and in IJ. The references to calc and linear algebra kind of filtered me the first time through, though now I know about enough to be able to decide whenever one of those metaphors doesn't actually apply, and reads more like DFW trying to sound academic on purpose (which happened more than once, I promise you, and I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing).

E Unibus Pluram: So after congratulating myself on getting past the roadblock that the previous me could not, I immediately found myself mindbroken by this one. It's about television, advertisements, and fiction, and it was written in the early 90s, so I naturally face it with both a sense of archaiety and also curiosity. I'll say right now that it is I think more truth-piercing, or otherwise at least mindful, than all of the post-internet cultural speculation following it. I'm sure there's like a billion essays you could approach in this style, but I'll leave it at that.

Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All: Again, I think that this is where DFW shines in terms of style, rather than any sort of depth in his topic. In that way, he's entirely unpretentious. Actually, I think that might be his best quality as a writer, that being, the way he can so casually switch from the math terminology of the opening essay to the city-slicker forced normal-guyness of this one. Also made me regret my childhood quite a bit, this one did. I have vague not-memories of this sort of thing for some reason, though the haziness of the memories themselves I think indicates that I was unable to partake in them.

Greatly Exaggereated: Is a book review, the shortest section among these here essays and/or arguments. Honestly not much I can say about this one, since it is about the book Morte d'Author: An Autopsy, which I have not read and apparently very few others have done so. There are quite a few other books in the review, mentioned due to relation, which I do currently intend to read at some point, so I'll maybe end up looking into this one. too.

David Lynch Keeps His Head: I really wish people would stop talking about movies...
...And I still stand by that view but I'll admit this is maybe the most engaged I've been in reading someone's thoughts on movies. A lot of insight here I think into Lynch's stuff, which I'll admit I'm still not very familiar with, though this has made me more receptive to going deeper into his stuff.

Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness: I FUCKLING LOVE TENNIS. Honestly this made me want to start taking tennis lessons. Never done it before. Can't be that difficult, right? There's quite a bit in here about how the highest end of professional tennis players are almost dehumanizingly good at the sport. but honestly?
Nah. I'd win.
...Well, at least, I do fencing (mostly foil, if you're wondering) and comparing how David describes tennis to my actual experiences with fencing is rather disheartening. You probably think fencing is some sort of high-society rich person thing, though just comparing it to tennis? We're like the broke crackhead relative who lives in a ripped-up minivan which reeks so bad of cigarettes that even their nephew, whom pretends to not have a sense of smell, can't help but admit smells bad (in a nostalgic way).
Was that too much of an analogy?
Anyways, I'm also a bit embarrassed to admit, the main think I was thinking about while reading this was that I could totally right a bishoujoge about a tennis player girl. I have all the material. It would rock.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: The title essay, the one about the cruise ship, the one which people keep telling me to read. Since I still have a bit left to read I still haven't entirely made up my mind on it but it is really good. Good in a similar way to the state fair essay, I mean. I've seen quite a few people compare Tim Rogers to DFW, and I think I see the resemblance now. Also a bit embarrassing to write that out, comparing an eceleb to an author like this, but I find both of them to be thought- and feeling-evoking.

All things considering, I would recommend this book to basically anyone who can tolerate DFW's intentionally west-coast-sounding, half-down-to-earth, half-academic authorial voice.

 

[Kyou]

Some smaller stuff from the first half of December. All of these are around the length were you can finish them in two or three sessions.

Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot
Missy gave this to me, telling me that it was her favorite book. I've had it sitting in my mind, after finishing it, for about 20 days now, though since I haven't had any noteworthy conclusions come to me in that time, I think it's going to be a couple rereadings before I decide what it's "about". I watched this performance of it, to get a better idea of the movement of the play.

While it lacks the explosive, often bipolar interactions of Death of a Salesman (which were my favorite parts) it does always try to do something interesting with each conversation, and I did atleast laugh a few times. It's got that kind of similar attitude, the one where more cliched interactions have a sort of counterpoint movement to them, which I think is best exemplified in Xavier: Renegade Angel.

Edwin A. Abbott - Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
This one has a lot of "filler" to it, even though I finished it in like 3 days. It's about higher and lower dimensions (geometrically, I mean) though also written in a more-than-verbose voice that I think makes a lot of people give up on it. I don't think there's much said here that you probably couldn't find somewhere better, in something written since. Aside from maybe some funny parts about women. I will admit though, it did reawaken a certain part of my brain which hasn't been exercised since I was 12.

Steven Pressfield - The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle
This book, which if your reaction to the title and general premise is close to mine, will be offputting, because it seems like it would consist of the surface-level quotes you could find in one of those (now-probably-AI-generated) 'best inspirational creative quotes'-type videos.
It is.
I think it's okay, though, in that it is at least organized into some context to make that surface-level advice more soul-enveloping. And, it's at this point—that I came to the book after going through multiple academic and anatomized introspections of creativity—where I can say that you'll get more practical advice from this book than any of those latter ones.