What are you reading?

[ProCarsteNation]

ooooh, Michael Pollan looks really interesting, he goes on the List for after I finished the three Hararis,
but I've been procrastinating from reading them by re-reading Ted Chiang... wanna get his new one also...

[Faldoe]

ooooh, Michael Pollan looks really interesting, he goes on the List for after I finished the three Hararis,
but I've been procrastinating from reading them by re-reading Ted Chiang... wanna get his new one also...

Yeah, This book is also amazing. Everyone should read it.

[MrNovember]

ooooh, Michael Pollan looks really interesting, he goes on the List for after I finished the three Hararis,
but I've been procrastinating from reading them by re-reading Ted Chiang... wanna get his new one also...

Yeah, This book is also amazing. Everyone should read it.

I read that one in school. It was definitely a great read

[Seance]

I did recently finish reading The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil.

It was a pretty big read (two volumes worth). I think I originally encountered
quotes from it in Montano by Enrique Vila-Matas. At points it was hard to
keep going... but then there are passages like this, which I think perfectly describe
the modern moment even though the novel is set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire
before WWI breaks out.

It is often hard, nowadays, to avoid the impression that the concepts and the rules of the moral life are
only metaphors that have been boiled to death, with the revolting greasy kitchen vapors of humanism
billowing around the corpses, and if a digression is permissible at this point, it can only be this, that one
consequence of this impression that vaguely hovers over everything is what our era should frankly call its
reverence for all that is common. For when we lie nowadays it is not so much out of weakness as out of a
conviction that a man cannot prevail in life unless he is able to lie. We resort to violence because, after
much long and futile talk, the simplicity of violence is an immense relief. People band together in
organizations because obedience to orders enables them to do things they have long been incapable of
doing out of personal conviction, and the hostility between organizations allows them to engage in the
unending reciprocity of blood feuds, while love would all too soon put everyone to sleep. This has much
less to do with the question of whether men are good or evil than with the fact that they have lost their
sense of high and low. Another paradoxical result of this disorientation is the vulgar profusion of intellectual
jewelry with which our mistrust of the intellect decks itself out. The coupling of a “philosophy” with
activities that can absorb only a very small part of it, such as politics; the general obsession with turning
every viewpoint into a standpoint and regarding every standpoint as a viewpoint; the need over every kind
of fanatic to keep reiterating the one idea that has ever come his way, like an image multiplied to infinity
in a hall of mirrors: all these wide-spread phenomena, far from signifying a movement towards humanism,
as they wish to do, in fact represent its failure.
—Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Pg. 648.

[coldbrightsunlight]

Good passage that could have been written yesterday. Plus ça change...

[JereFuzz]

Wow... great stuff on this page. My brother got me the Cigar Box / Junk Guitars DIY project book for Christmas. Looking forward to diving into that.
It's not FUN. It's literally my ideal aesthetic. I just love shitty shit.

Picked up a cigar box geetar with what appears to be a humbucker for $100 off OfferUp. Love everything about it so far. Good luck on your first build!

[JereFuzz]

Reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Great so far! It’s like present day fiction with a philosophical/sci-fi vibe!

[JereFuzz]

Reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Great so far! It’s like present day fiction with a philosophical/sci-fi vibe!

I’m actually jumping into cyberpunk headlong. The genre is much more than a future of robo-hacking humans with Mohawks and zines - it seems to have been a prelude to today ... there seems to be nuance to the genre than meets the eye ...

[jirodreamsofdank]

The entire Blue Ant trilogy is solid.

Curious about his new one building off The Peripheral but when I first read about it post-2016 he was going off an alternate timeline where Hillary won and that could be entirely too Twitter brain worms #resistance-y.

[coldbrightsunlight]

I enjoyed Pattern Recognition but haven't got round to reading the others in the series yet

[TraceItalian]

I just got finished reading Clockers and Freedomland by Richard Price. Apparently the original drafts of Clockers was so well researched you could use it as a recipe book to make crack.

[VREEEEVROOOOOW]

If you like Sapiens, I recommend Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! by Fredy Perlman. It's kind of the history of civilisation. Also, Origins by John Zerzan.

Anyway.

I've read a bunch of stuff lately, but A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay was really interesting; so I thought I'd mention that here. It's touted by some as the best book of the 20th century or so, and it is admired by C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Philip Pullman, and many others—as if Lindsay were "your favourite author's favourite author". It is one of the most extraordinarily *strange* works I've read. It truly manages to make me feel *foreign*. I can't recall any other book (or work of art in general, come to think of it) that has succeeded so much in this regard. Thoroughly unique book.

[JereFuzz]

Picked up 2018 A.D. in 2018 with a plan to read it then. Well, reading it now. It was written in ‘74 and so far, 1/3 of the way though:

- 7 billion people on earth
- Mass media and consumerism provided by multi-nationals control people’s lives
- Gulf kingdoms have tremendous influence due to oil reserves


Good stuff so far but the USA and England are at war with each other ...

[dubkitty]

give it time...if devolution becomes a reality in the UK the US will be after Scotland's North Sea oil reserves before you can say "American imperialism."

[D.o.S.]

Definitely not: If Scotland leaves they're getting back in the EU asap.


On that note and on topic, Lanark is sitting on the table as of a couple of days ago. V. excited.