Poor phrasing on my part, I didn't mean to imply Selfish Gene was about atheism. I was also unaware of its obsolete-ness, I was offering a path to take if the god delusion was of interest to him. You've read GEB? thoughts?
It's not obsolete, more foundational and representative of one viewpoint out of several. I'm not qualified particularly to say more. I am enjoying Godel, Escher, Bach in the extreme but I haven't reached the parts that are supposedly more troublesome. I haven't taken any math in some time so I'll probably attempt to draw big picture conclusions more than follow individual arguments. We'll see. I challenged myself on hubski a month or so ago to read 30 books this summer and I'm at 26. I imagine I'll get closer to 50. Will make a big post at the end with suggestions and so on.
jesus. Do you enjoy/retain those books? I read fairly slowly, I guess you could call it leisurely, but when I'm assigned a book at school or have a deadline to read it, I'm paralyzed and can't do it at all- certainly not while enjoying it at the same time.
Well, sure. Compartmentalized recall. It goes without saying that I enjoy them, it's free knowledge. I don't understand why the source of a book has to do with your enjoyment of it, but that seems to be a pretty common phenomenon with school books.
I'm not aware that it's a term per se. I meant it literally. I've read around 45 books so far this summer and I couldn't sit here and name them all but if you named the title of one I could give you the plot, the characters or events, what I thought about it, etc. To me that counts as retention, because your memory is rarely going to be tested in the former fashion.