What are you reading ?

[Baley]

 

The Place of Dead Roads by William S. Burroughs, published in 1983, is the second book of the trilogy that begins with Cities of the Red Night and concludes with The Western Lands. It chronicles the story of a homosexual heroin-addicted gunfighter in the American West. In convoluted fashion it begins with the gunfighter

[Musopticon?]

Frank Herbert's Children of the Dune, it's slowly but surely becoming one of my favorite books.

 

I've also read oh-so-much Pratchett(Night Watch, Going Postal, Soul Music, Moving Pictures) and some Chomsky(Profit and People).

Edit: Just for you, Nibbler

Edited June 19, 2006 by Musopticon?

[Pidesco]

Le Langage Cin

[Dark Moth]

Well, I've fallen to the dark side. I've finally picked up The Da Vinci Code. Now I'll finally be able to see what all the damn hype is about. As a little side reading, I'm also looking at Every Prophecy in the Bible. Fascinating stuff.

Edited June 19, 2006 by Mothman

[Baley]

Ecclesiastes

 

Ecclesiastes, Qohelet in Hebrew, is a book of the Hebrew Bible. The title derives from the Greek translation of the Hebrew title: קהלת (variously transliterated as Qoheleth, Qohelethh, Kohelet, Koheleth, or Coheleth).

 

The author represents himself as the son of David, and king over Israel in Jerusalem (1:1, 12, 16; 2:7, 9). The work consists of personal or autobiographic matter, largely expressed in aphorisms and maxims illuminated in terse paragraphs with reflections on the meaning of life and the best way of life. There is a long discourse on death.

- Gala Galaction|Vasile Radu, 1939 Edition.

 

King James

New Revised Standard Version

 

 

1 The words of the Teacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

 

  Preface

 

  2 Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,

    vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

  3 What do people gain from all the toil

    at which they toil under the sun?

  4 A generation goes, and a generation comes,

    but the earth remains forever.

  5 The sun rises and the sun goes down,

    and hurries to the place where it rises.

  6 The wind blows to the south,

    and goes around to the north;

    round and round goes the wind,

    and on its circuits the wind returns.

  7 All streams run to the sea,

    but the sea is not full;

    to the place where the streams flow,

    there they continue to flow.

  8 All things are wearisome;

    more than one can express;

    the eye is not satisfied with seeing,

    or the ear filled with hearing.

  9 What has been is what will be,

    and what has been done is what will be done;

    there is nothing new under the sun.

  10 Is there a thing of which it is said,

    "See, this is new"?

    It has already been,

    in the ages before us.

  11 The people of long ago are not remembered,

    nor will there be any remembrance

    of people yet to come

    by those who come after them.

Edited June 19, 2006 by Baley

[Dark_Raven]

Les Fleurs du Mal Charles Baudelaire

[Checkpoint]

Has anyone read this sci-fi book Chasm City by what's-his-name-anyway? It's a book I've been persuaded to pick up, but I'd like a verdict if anyone's read it (preferably without spoiling half the plot, of course). I'm having trouble regarding my concentration these days, so it's a bit hard getting started, but if someone besides my friend could put in a good word for this book I might try harder.

[Musopticon?]

Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds? Yeah, I've read it and it's good fun. Really, I think Reynolds' Revelation Space is a bit better, but they both have the ingeniously imagined universe, raw wit and story arch that moves on two different timelines. It's scifi, so don't expect amazingly well-crafted characters andstoryline, but the twist took me by suprise and I was suprised to feel something like missing the characters when I finished the book and went to read something else, so it's not all bad. Although Reynolds focused more on creating an interestingly twisted world.

 

Go and read it.

[Oerwinde]

I'm currently re-reading Dragonlance Legends vol 3. Is the war of souls books any good? And after reading legends, what should I read that fits into the continuity between then and Dragons of Summer Flame? If the War of Souls books are any good, is there anything I should read before it to prepare me for new characters and such?

[Musopticon?]

There's nothing really, just jump on to War of Souls. Did you read the book before Dragons of Summer flame? I think there was this sort of epilogue book after the frist trilogy. Anyways, as whether War of Souls is any good...well, not really. I say you dump DL and read Death Gate. A lot better series from the same authors.

[Lare Kikkeli]

Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. A nice mixture of SF and Fantasy, all set in Tokyo. Murakami is my fav author nowadays.

[Deadhoax]

I read three books:

- Prince of Lies, James Lowder

- La routes des Elephants, ???

- The C language, Tony zang

[Baley]

 

The Waste Land (sometimes mistakenly written as "The Wasteland") is a highly influential 433-line modernist poem by T. S. Eliot. It is perhaps the most famous and most written-about long poem of the 20th century, dealing with the decline of civilization and the impossibility of recovering meaning in life. Despite the alleged obscurity of the poem

[Baley]

 

Sample.

 

all I've ever known are whores, ex-prostitutes,

madwomen. I see men with quiet,

gentle women

Edited June 22, 2006 by Baley

[Fionavar]

Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation

[Laozi]

"don't ever bring a whore around," I tell my

few friends, "I'll fall in love with her."

 

 

 

I remember my friend Jesse uttering those lines to our friend Ryan about his girlfriend, luckily Ryan never read the book so he never really understood. Different worlds colliding there.

 

 

 

The Sun Also Rises

[Judge Hades]

The Apologiy of Socrates, Crito, and Phaedo by Plato for some odd reason.

[Anastase]

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, Lonesome Dove, Gone with the Wind. I sometimes have books all over the house that are half read.

[metadigital]

Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

She is an amazing person; I have a copy of her History of God on my book shelf ...

 

Currently storming through:

 

 

 

Written before Freud published his findings, it is a piercing and searing expos

[Xard]

Re-reading King's Dark Tower series.

 

Still pure gold, I say thankya to sai King

[Baley]

I've recommended this book before around these parts, and trust me, I can't find enough good words to say about it.

 

Notes from Underground

 

Notes from Underground (also translated in English as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld) (1864) is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It is considered the world's first existentialist work. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg.

 

Right up there with his best novels. Fantastic psychological portrayal.

 

Full Text at Wikisource.

 

It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature. That is my conviction of forty years. I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I tell all old men that to their face, all these venerable old men, all these silver-haired and reverend seniors! I tell the whole world that to its face! I have a right to say so, for I shall go on living to sixty myself. To seventy! To eighty! ... Stay, let me take breath ...

 

 

 

And also

 

 

The famed new translation. Giving me an immense hard on. Thank you, D.

 

 

 

As for today,

 

 

 

Leaves of Grass is a collection of poems by American poet Walt Whitman, the best-known of which are "Song of Myself", "I Sing the Body Electric", "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", and his homage to the assassinated U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, "O Captain! My Captain!".

 

This book is notable for its frank delight in and praise of the senses, during a time when such candid displays were considered immoral. Where much previous poetry, especially English, relied on symbolism, allegory, and meditation on the religious and spiritual, Leaves of Grass (particularly the first edition) exalted the body and the material world. Influenced by the Transcendentalist movement, itself an offshoot of Romanticism, Whitman's poetry praises nature and the individual human's role in it. However, Whitman does not diminish the role of the mind or the spirit; rather, he elevates the human form and the human mind, deeming both worthy of poetic praise.

 

Full Text at Wikisource.

 

Come, said my soul,

Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one,)

That should I after return,

Or, long, long hence, in other spheres,

There to some group of mates the chants resuming,

(Tallying Earth's soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,)

Ever with pleas'd smile I may keep on,

Ever and ever yet the verses owning

[metadigital]

Thanks Baley, I'll check it out.

 

I simply       

hinted that an 'extraordinary' man has the right... that is not an         

official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience         

to overstep... certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for     

the practical fulfilment of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit       

to the whole of humanity). You say that my article isn't definite; I       

am ready to make it as clear as I can. Perhaps I am right in               

thinking you want me to; very well. I maintain that if the discoveries     

of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by             

sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred, or more men,             

Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty           

bound... to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of         

making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity. But it does not     

follow from that that Newton had a right to murder people right and       

left and to steal every day in the market. Then, I remember, I             

maintain in my article that all... well, legislators and leaders of       

men, such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on, were all       

without exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new         

law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their             

ancestors and held sacred by the people, and they did not stop short       

at bloodshed either, if that bloodshed- often of innocent persons         

fighting bravely in defence of ancient law- were of use to their           

cause. It's remarkable, in fact, that the majority, indeed, of these       

benefactors and leaders of humanity were guilty of terrible carnage.       

In short, I maintain that all great men or even men a little out of       

the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must           

from their very nature be criminals- more or less, of course.             

Otherwise it's hard for them to get out of the common rut; and to         

remain in the common rut is what they can't submit to, from their very     

nature again, and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to         

it. You see that there is nothing particularly new in all that. The       

same thing has been printed and read a thousand times before. As for       

my division of people into ordinary and extraordinary, I acknowledge       

that it's somewhat arbitrary, but I don't insist upon exact numbers. I     

only believe in my leading idea that men are in general divided by a       

law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to     

say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have     

the gift or the talent to utter a new word. There are, of course,         

innumerable sub-divisions, but the distinguishing features of both         

categories are fairly well marked. The first category, generally           

speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they       

live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is         

their duty to be controlled, because that's their vocation, and           

there is nothing humiliating in it for them. The second category all       

transgress the law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction         

according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course       

relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways       

the destruction of the present for the sake of the better. But if such     

a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade     

through blood, he can, I maintain, find within himself, in his             

conscience, a sanction for wading through blood- that depends on the       

idea and its dimensions, note that. It's only in that sense I speak of     

their right to crime in my article (you remember it began with the         

legal question). There's no need for such anxiety, however; the masses     

will scarcely ever admit this right, they punish them or hang them         

(more or less), and in doing so fulfil quite justly their conservative     

vocation. But the same masses set these criminals on a pedestal in the     

next generation and worship them (more or less). The first category is     

always the man of the present, the second the man of the future. The       

first preserve the world and people it, the second move the world         

and lead it to its goal. Each class has an equal right to exist. In       

fact, all have equal rights with me- and vive la guerre eternelle-         

till the New Jerusalem, of course!"                                       

[Ellester]

Lets see,

 

Neil Gaiman Angels & Visitations

Steven Erikson

[Dark Moth]

[Laozi]

This again: