Here it is... the book thread!

Started by scatcat, November 30, 2007, 03:55:17

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PearlThompsonsBloodflower

Currently re reading Cured. I got it for Christmas n finished it in 3 days. I am re readin it just bc I love the book so much even if I'm not huge on Lol anymore.

dsanchez

Watching a series in Netflix and the main character wrote some interesting stuff that is in my to-read list:

Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski, a.k.a. "The Unabomber"

Seems something worth reading, specially for those pasted to their mobile phones everyday...
2023.11.22 Lima
2023.11.27 Montevideo

Ulrich

I'm currently reading Dan Brown's "Origin".
I've never been his biggest fan, but mostly his books were "entertaining", even though the adventures of Professor Langdon always follow the same pattern: he gets into some kind of mysterious adventure, meets a woman he can drag along through secret pathways, while solving a "mystery" and on the way explaining some (religious or other) "symbols"...

Quote from: dsanchez on April 03, 2018, 23:26:12
Seems something worth reading...

Are you sure? The guy was probably right to be a critique of industrialization etc., but apart from that he seems a little insane...
I myself do not think it's worth reading if the guy who wrote it thinks his own writing is so important he needs to kill to get people to read it.  :roll:

From Wikipedia:
QuoteTheodore John Kaczynski (/kəˈzɪnski/; born May 22, 1942), also known as the Unabomber, is an American domestic terrorist. A mathematics prodigy, he abandoned an academic career in 1969 to pursue a primitive lifestyle, then between 1978 and 1995 he killed three people, and injured 23 others, in a nationwide bombing campaign targeting those involved with modern technology. In conjunction, he issued a social critique opposing industrialization and advancing a nature-centered form of anarchism.

In 1995, he sent a letter to The New York Times and promised to "desist from terrorism" if the Times or The Washington Post published his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom and dignity by modern technologies that require large-scale organization.

How did you write your post btw? Using any kind of modern technology?   ;)
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

dsanchez

Quote from: Ulrich on April 04, 2018, 11:13:28
Are you sure? The guy was probably right to be a critique of industrialization etc., but apart from that he seems a little insane...
I myself do not think it's worth reading if the guy who wrote it thinks his own writing is so important he needs to kill to get people to read it.  :roll:

he is insane, but most genius were/are insane. Yes, I obviously disapprove his way of making his thinking known, but the few I read, I agree with. Plus the guy was subject of an experiment when he was student in Harvard, this definitely fucked him up and probably made him do the (bad) things he did.
2023.11.22 Lima
2023.11.27 Montevideo

Ulrich

Quote from: dsanchez on April 04, 2018, 12:11:32
he is insane, but most genius were/are insane.

I know. And if you won't read my genius postings here, I'm gonna kill someone!  :x  :P  ;)

Anyway, I'm 99% certain there are better authors out there warning about industrialization, finance system and so on - only they are modest enough not to kill someone to get heard...
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

dsanchez

Quote from: Ulrich on April 04, 2018, 12:55:38
Anyway, I'm 99% certain there are better authors out there warning about industrialization, finance system and so on - only they are modest enough not to kill someone to get heard...

will let you know after reading ;)
2023.11.22 Lima
2023.11.27 Montevideo

Ulrich

Quote from: dsanchez on April 04, 2018, 21:00:52
will let you know after reading ;)

Reading that after watching a series via "netflix" (!) is ... oh well you know...  :lol:

Before letting me know you should of course read other critics' works, for example:
Friedrich Georg Jünger: Die Perfektion der Technik, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 8. Auflage 2010 [written in 1939!!]

Michael Adas: Machines as the Measure of Men. Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY u. a. 1990

Wolfgang Klems: Die unbewältigte Moderne. Geschichte und Kontinuität der Technikkritik. GAFB – Gesellschaft zur Förderung Arbeitsorientierter Forschung und Bildung, Frankfurt am Main 1988

Quote
Prominente Vertreter der Technikkritik sind u. a. Friedrich Georg Jünger, Günther Anders, Jacques Ellul, und Lewis Mumford. In einem weiteren Sinn kann man auch Teile des Werks von Martin Heidegger und die kritische Technikgeschichte (David F. Noble) der Technikkritik zurechnen.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technikskepsis

(Yes, I used google to find some info... :oops:)
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

MeltingMan

I'm just finishing Joséphin Péladan 1858-1918 by Christophe Beaufils.
The next one will be Röda rummet by Strindberg.
En cette nation [Russie] qui n'a pas eu de théoriciens et de démagogues,
les pires ferments de destruction ont apparu. (J. Péladan)

chemicaloverload

I landed in Espania with no books. Luckily I found a little market in a town outside of Barcelona where they had a donation stall with some English books. I picked two up and I just finished reading the first one called "nobody true" by James Herbert. I had not prepared myself for it's content. It's not the kind of book you read on the beach in the sun...it's a night book, for when everyone is asleep and can't see your face twisting as you read the words, asking you 'good book?' in the process, only to be met with a silent nod.

Asides from that, I recommend it. To those with a strong stomach :)
Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves

Ulrich

I'm reading "Room to Dream" written by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna

QuoteAn unusual hybrid of biography and memoir, Room to Dream alternates chapters by each writer. First, co-author McKenna supplies a conventional biographical account of Lynch's life, reported through conversations with his family members, his friends from childhood to the present day, and such collaborators and supporters as Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, and Naomi Watts; then Lynch responds to that material in chapters that read like transcribed and lightly edited interviews.

Room to Dream devotes almost as much of its page count to his visual-arts career as to his films. He loves to make things with his hands, from the shed he built for his landlord out of scrap wood when he was living in a Hollywood bungalow during the 1970s to the furniture he has designed more recently...
He began making short art films after feeling the desire to add movement to his paintings.

Room to Dream runs on the ebullience of Lynch's creative process: his gee-willikers enthusiasm, his quirks, his often cryptic yet effective direction of actors ("It needs a little more wind," he once told MacLachlan, the star of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks), his openness to improvisation and luck, his do-it-yourself spirit. By all accounts, actors adore him, and a few—Nance, Dern, Watts—have worked for him repeatedly, even when it meant having to do things like don suffocating rabbit costumes to make web videos that no one understands. Don Murray, whose Hollywood career stretches back to playing opposite Marilyn Monroe, describes the set of Twin Peaks: The Return as the happiest he had ever been to. The Lynch of Room to Dream is uniformly kind, considerate and cheerful, with an almost superhuman ability to remember everybody's first name, even if it's just the kid who brings him coffee.

Of course, the great puzzle of David Lynch is how this sunny personality can create such disturbing films. Or perhaps it's no puzzle at all, and every shadow in his psyche gets so comprehensively siphoned off onto screen and canvas that there's none left to trouble his actual life.
https://slate.com/culture/2018/06/david-lynchs-memoir-room-to-dream-reviewed.html
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

chemicaloverload

Finishing off Victorian Murders by Jan Bondeson. Not only does she tell you of the murders, but the locations of the houses today.
Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves

dsanchez

Currently reading "Outliers":

QuoteOutliers: The Story of Success is the third non-fiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown and Company on November 18, 2008. In Outliers, Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success. To support his thesis, he examines why the majority of Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, how Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates achieved his extreme wealth, how the Beatles became one of the most successful musical acts in human history, how Joseph Flom built Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom into one of the most successful law firms in the world, how cultural differences play a large part in perceived intelligence and rational decision making, and how two people with exceptional intelligence, Christopher Langan and J. Robert Oppenheimer, end up with such vastly different fortunes. Throughout the publication, Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to achieving world-class expertise in any skill, is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing the correct way, for a total of around 10,000 hours, though the authors of the original study this was based on have disputed Gladwell's usage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)
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chemicaloverload

Enid Blyton- Five Give Up the Booze
Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves

SueC

Hooray!  A book thread!  :heart-eyes

I've just finished Northanger Abbey, the first part of which was hilarious, and am continuing my obscure-Austen binge with Mansfield Park.  Before the Austen binge I read The One Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared.  I'm midway through a Mike Scott biography and Sy Montgomery's The Soul Of An Octopus, and revving up to read another title by Haruki Murakami, having finished Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (which got me started) and a few others.  I read Cured and the coffee table book A Perfect Dream last year.

Brett is currently reading Richard Morgan's Broken Angels, which he says is a military cyperpunk archaeology science-fiction thriller; and he's also reading Brian Ward's How Linux Works cover to cover because although he uses Linux as the basic operating system, he's never been formally trained in it and this helps remedy it.
SueC is time travelling

Ulrich

I've been reading "Die Geschichte der Baltimores" by Joel Dicker, a real page-turner, so I might be finished with it all-too-soon.

Also, I've started re-reading "Road Series" by Hugo Race.
http://www.hugoracemusic.com/rough-velvet-records/road-series-by-hugo-race

And I want to re-read "Cured" by Lol Tolhurst!
The holy city breathed like a dying man...