What are you reading?

[jirodreamsofdank]

Rick Perlstein's The Invisible Bridge, had been planning on doing Reaganland next but I don't think I can do it. Gonna find some nice easygoing fiction, maybe a Stephen King novel

[sears]

As much as I loved Nixonland I thought that The Invisible Bridge was a little dull. Its subject isn't as interesting.

I'm reading the Milstborns. For some reason I have been needing my horror and fantasy for the last few years.

[Achtane]

Seance posted some slappers on this page, that bi-decade Levi binge that so many seem to have is a good one.

I've been crawling through 2666 lately, it's not really what I wanted it to be but it's still good.

Recently re-read a bunch of Harlan Ellison stuff and Richard Stark things, short and entertaining because it feels better than watching a lot of the wank I'd usually watch.

Looking for more grim westerns if anyone has and neat recs that might have flown under the radar.

Have you read Blood Meridian? That was my shit.

Currently:


This book has awesome macro photos of all kinds of plants and good info about identifying plants via their broader categories.

[cosmicevan]

Also, just want to give you a heads up as it doesn't sound like you've read them before, but they get quite a bit darker at the end of the 4th book/after the 4th book.

Good to know since my son has a weird thing about a death and blood...but I'm sure we are too deep in to stop at this point, but I'll be prepared for some weird talks.

[jirodreamsofdank]

As much as I loved Nixonland I thought that The Invisible Bridge was a little dull. Its subject isn't as interesting.

I'm reading the Milstborns. For some reason I have been needing my horror and fantasy for the last few years.

Reagan's enough of a dullard that he's a less interesting subject for a historian but psychologically he's such a model of Dubya and Trump - true believers of every word that they say in the moment they say it, forgotten 1.7 seconds later. More than Nixonland, this one is a funhouse mirror to our age in a lot of ways with the social dissolution, economic hopelessness, the ascendancy of the know-nothing evangelical white conservatism that's giving one last push at minority rule right now.

[Olin]

Have you read Blood Meridian? That was my shit.

It's my favourite book, I'm a huge Cormac stan and it's why I want more! You might like The North Water by Ian McGuire, vaguely similar feel to BM.

[Dowi]

Good to hear you enjoyed it, one of the many many PKD books I haven't got round to reading yet (but one day I'll catch em all)

Three or four years ago there was a special offer with like 12 PKD books at 4€ each, so i bought them all and i'm (slowly) making my way through them all. I'm down to 3 left. It's one of my favorite writers but i have to be in the right mindset to read his works, so i have to alternate with other stuff.
I feel bad about it, but during the last couple of years the time i dedicate to has been DRASTICALLY reduced because of life and things, also when i have some spare time my priority is usually to play/record/jam.

[coldbrightsunlight]

haha I feel that with the balance.

I also can't just read PKD books one after another. I probably haven't read one yet this year so I guess I'll pick a couple up soon haha

[Seance]

I'm currently reading The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf.
It's great. Humboldt saw the negative human impact on nature and warned of environmental collapse in the
1800s. He was an enthusiastic polymath, and the part about his interactions with Goethe are fascinating.

But I do wish there was at least an acknowledgement of Giordano Bruno in the brief table-setting
section about changing worldviews. That part mentions the impact of Copernicus suggesting that the earth
was not the center of the universe, but Copernicus just compared a geocentric and a heliocentric worldview
without claiming to come down on either side. Giordano Bruno, on the other hand, followed the fact of heliocentrism
to its full implications (infinite suns with infinite worlds orbiting them, no crystalline sphere of perfection with
base corrupt matter on earth, but instead existence unfolding to its full potential perpetually everywhere, etc.).
There is mention of Kant and Schopenhauer, Goethe and Schiller, but no mention of the influence and impact of
the writing and thinking of Giordano Bruno on all of them as well as on Spinoza.

Andrea Wulf also posits that Humboldt was the first person to see the world as completely interconnected, which
obviously doesn't take into account Giordano Bruno's belief in a World Soul (everything is one interconnected organism),
a view that was influenced by and indebted to the views of Plotinus, Anaxagoras, and others). Giordano Bruno also
believed that not only humans, but also plants and animals, had a soul. So while the Enlightenment vision of the
universe as mechanistic came after Bruno, Humboldt wasn't the first to see through this mechanistic worldview.

Anyhow. It is a great read.

[coldbrightsunlight]

That sounds fascinating Seance! It's on my list now

Currently I'm reading The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins, which is a classic mystery novel. It's very engaging actually though it always takes me a while with each book to get into the florid prose of 19th century literature. About halfway through I am hooked, I have to say.

and Kindred by Octavia Butler. I have read the Lilith's Brood trilogy before and thoroughly enjoyed them, this is very different! Not so much the writing but the underlying "realism" of it despite the time travel plot device. Sure there's time travel but it's not especially about time travel, which surprised me going in because I was expecting more of a sci-fi style book. I'm enjoying this a lot though.

[Seance]

Currently I'm reading The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins, which is a classic mystery novel. It's very engaging actually though it always takes me a while with each book to get into the florid prose of 19th century literature. About halfway through I am hooked, I have to say.

I haven't read that one. But it is definitely of interest to me as early mystery/detective fiction.

[Seance]

If anybody out there is interested in Giordano Bruno, the most accessible starting places
are either his own work The Heroic Frenzies or The Art of Memory by Frances Yates.
Frances Yates wrote a book about Giordano Bruno, but while full of enthusiasm and
quite compelling in its way, Yates sees Hermeticism everywhere, even where it's not.

The complication with the writing and thinking of Giordano Bruno is that everything is
interwoven and linked. In most of his works there is a section left sketchy or shadowy,
and often that is because one of his other works fully explores that area.



There's a translation of The Heroic Frenzies from 2013:


Or the text of the 1964 translation can be found online:
http://www.esotericarchives.com/bruno/furori.htm

Or if you prefer something in the ribald, Rabelaisian philosophical realm, The Candle Bearers
is full of sexual and philosophical innuendo.

[Achtane]

Have you read Blood Meridian? That was my shit.

It's my favourite book, I'm a huge Cormac stan and it's why I want more! You might like The North Water by Ian McGuire, vaguely similar feel to BM.

Thanks, I'll check it out.
I skipped school to read Blood Meridian back then.

[coldbrightsunlight]

Currently I'm reading The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins, which is a classic mystery novel. It's very engaging actually though it always takes me a while with each book to get into the florid prose of 19th century literature. About halfway through I am hooked, I have to say.

I haven't read that one. But it is definitely of interest to me as early mystery/detective fiction.

I recommend it for sure if you're interested in the genre/history/19th century English literature in general.

[Dandolin]

The Woman in White is classic, and once you get in the groove, wonderful....

I'm reading Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year" which is, as you might imagine, fairly pertinent. Another that takes an adjustment to the prose style, but Defoe, though perhaps not as noted as a satirist (compared to Swift or Rabelais) has an eye and an ear for the absurdities and the patterns in the darkness. Bracing.