Literature

After hearing so many good things, I think I am going to start reading "The Life Of Pi" by Yann Martel soon....

Strider, was Soul Mountain originally in Chinese or English? I know, its probably a dumb question but if it was originally in English that would be keen.

The last book I read was Jack Kerouac's "On the Road", a pretty famous book with good reason, its brilliant.

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Originally posted by Stone
I'm rereading David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, and that's about it. Pretty sad, I dunno, haven't had a whole lot of time to read recently.

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Hume has, occasionally, a poetic way of writing but I generally find that he was very boring. I've read a bit from him, but no total recogonised work. I remember a dialoge between "Philo" and "Cleanthes" about the nature of god I think.

I'm reading The Silmarllion and thats all for now.

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Originally posted by StriderKyo


The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking - I have no head for physics at all, but I still find the topic fascinating. Which is why I'm glad there are guys like Hawking around to explain it all to non-specialists.

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Good call. Try Carl Sagan as well.

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Originally posted by sggg
After hearing so many good things, I think I am going to start reading "The Life Of Pi" by Yann Martel soon....

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read that like a year ago, I recall it being good. Same with The uni in a nutshell.

i'm revisiting bill flanagan's "U2 AT the end of the World" - i've already read it many times before but I'm doing so again because it helps me get back into a self-educational mood - the book is about alot more than just the band U2 - most of it revolves around social commentary-ish type stuff.

Also working on:

The Ultimate Hitchhikers Guide - Douglas Adams
The Silmarillion - Tolkien
The Universe in a Nutshell - Hawking (will take me a while, I read a chapter at a time and let it marinate... this stuff needs time to fully appeciate or understand.

The People's History of the US (new edition) - Zinn - will pretty much shake the foundations of everything you've been taught to believe in the public education system regarding history and social culture. Has gotten me thinking about many many things. And I'm going to have to shudder now everytime I hear 'America the Beautiful'.

I've also been reading - oddly enough, alot of Oscar Wilde, and I want to (after my current reading schedule is freed up) try my hand at conquering James Joyce's "Ulysses" - has anyone here ever read that before?

I'm reading 'The Sniper.' Very long, but good, lots of killing.

Update: I'm now reading Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino.

It's an odd book, but I would recommend it to anyone who wants to read 1st person stories about the creating of the universe, when the moon drifted away from the Earth, rise and fall of dinosaurs, evolution, and not to mention some crazy stuff like a being creating a sign in space and then looking for it again in billions of years amongst a galaxy now filled with signs.


From the link listed above, "Each chapter of Cosmicomics begins with a blurb which sounds like the dry, tasteless extract of a physics, astronomy or geology textbook, describing how solar systems formed from nebula, the universe started from a point smaller than an atom, the orbit of the moon changed long ago, dinosaurs became extinct, space is curved, expands, etc. On each of these topics, our narrator, Qfyfq, immediately launches. His idiosyncratic voice, omniscient, blithering, self-centered, unerring, ridiculous, is recognizable, exactly consistent, no matter if he is talking about his life as a mollusk, a dinosaur, a moon-being before color, or life before there was form, when the whole family lived on a nebula, or in the point before space."

I didn't know Requium was a book.

"If chins could kill" by Bruce Campbell.

Very entertaining light reading. I would definitely suggest it.

I just ordered The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide and Philip K Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch