Will post an update later! Life is a little busy right now
Edit:
I just finished Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff. Story about a plane that crashed into an unexplored tribal area and the first (ish) contact and rescue attempt. They paratroopered in military to help with the evac but they also dropped in a cameraman, and the video is available today. In hindsight / with a modern view most of what they say about the natives is completely false, but it's crazy cool to get a view into a unexplored culture like that.
Here's the video (possibly NSFW)
Puzzles in Logic, Languages and Computation: The Red Book, and Puzzles in Logic, Languages and Computation: The Green Book Geoff Cox - Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression Peter Bebergal - Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll The Nightwatches of Bonaventura John Claude Smith - The Dark is Light Enough for Me Serenity Rose: 10 Awkward Years Serenity Rose, printed. I have not been sleeping much.
I started a book about Shakespeare lil sent me. It's light but I've been traveling so I haven't dented it yet. My foray into Guy Gavriel Kay is pretty much over. In about a month I'll have cleared out the miscellaneous books on my bedside table and I'll be ready for a new project.
Hey flags, start denting. I just read the Hamlet chapter. He is describing Hamlet as caught between the feudal world and the Renaissance: "He wants to shape the old chaotic and corrupt world according to the principles of the new rationality which he has studied at Wittenberg. And of course you cannot do this; you cannot live in one world according to the principles of another world. This is what we call tragedy." (. 48) Here are the details (p. 50): I'm heading towards Othello now. Edit The book is called Shakespeare Is Hard, but so Is Life.This is the contradictory Hamlet who takes his father's ghost's orders seriously enough to say that he doesn't care if he dies in carrying them out, and who then does not execute them. This is the Hamlet who says that theatre is a lie and then says that it can reveal the truth, the Hamlet who laughs at the idiocy of Young Fortinbras and says that he should try to be more like him. The is the Hamlet who believes that he can deal in a world of death and yet bring order to it, the man who would try to make the irrational reasonable. It is the contradictions of his time, embodied in his own thinking that make for Hamlet's delay, not his desire to sleep with his mother or his tragic flaw as a shirker. By accepting his duty to kill and then trying the make that killing significant in all the proper details, Hamlet is trying to keep a foot in each of two contradictory worlds, to use the ideas of one for the sordid tasks of the other.
I am never sure about judging literature in the context of social change. I wonder if the author is making a similar mistake to those 19th-century critics who extrapolated Shakespeare from Euripides, or whatever. Shakespeare is more genuinely timeless than basically any author I have read, but the author goes from 'boy in 1850 they were dumb to judge Shakespeare through this lens' straight to 'here is the lens under which I feel the need to judge him'. Okay. There is a bottom line, and I think it is neither. I haven't finished yet, though. I really like what he said about power and status and the main characters of the four primary "tragedies." And I'm learning a lot about this 'schoolroom stereotype' of Shakespeare -- I never paid attention in/went to English class so I guess I missed that. Nowadays it is required to teach edgy Vietnam memoirs and books which will influence how children think, rather than simply the best stories. (A separate conversation, but I have to say how scary this is. Treasure Island and Great Expectations encourage kids to imagine, dream and feel emotion. The modern curriculum puts thoughts into their heads, fully-formed.)
The Bin Ladens - An Arabian Family in the American Century. It's good. After the author gets through the early generations of the family the story is mostly told from the angle of Salem, the oldest son and head of the family and Osama. Salem could hardly have been more Western and secular oriented. The rest of the family seems to fall somewhere between the two brothers.
The first part of The Island of the Colorblind was an interesting and sometimes inspiring account of people overcoming a rare visual defect. The second part was overtly about Lytico-bodig, which is much more debilitating and degenerative, and therefore depressing. The good news is that the disease is dying out, but Dr. Sacks seemed a bit chagrined to think that the disease would disappear before its cause could be definitively identified. Part 2 was also a grim reminder of the consequences of conquest. Melville described the idyllic life of a Polynesian; Jack London visited 65 years later and found "some dozen wretched creatures, afflicted by leprosy, elephantiasis, and tuberculosis." But the second section was secretly a hymn in praise of the cycad, an ancient survivor, which inspired a visit to the Botanic Garden on Sunday. I mentioned earlier that the end notes (expanded in a later edition) in a Sacks book are wonderful. Here are two. Parkinson himself was a paleontologist, as well as a physician, and his 1804 book, Organic Remains of a Former World, is one of the great pioneer texts of paleontology. One wonders whether he may have partly regarded parkinsonism as an atavism, a reversion, the uncovering, through disease, of an ancestral, ‘antediluvian’ mode of function dating from the ancient past. Whether or not this is so of parkinsonism is arguable, but one can certainly see reversion to, or disclosure of, a variety of primitive behaviors in post-encephalitic syndromes on occasion, and in a rare condition, branchial myoclonus, arising from lesions in the brain stem. Here there occur rhythmic movements of the palate, middle-ear muscles, and certain muscles in the neck – an odd and unintelligible pattern, until one realizes that these are the only vestiges of the gill arches, the branchial musculature, in man. Branchial myoclonus is, in effect, a gill movement in man, a revelation of the fact that we still carry our fishy ancestors, our evolutionary precursors, within us. The eighteenth century, with its close attention to rocks and fossils and geologic processes, was to radically alter man’s sense of time as well (as Rossi, Gould, and McPhee, in particular, have emphasized). Evolutionary time, geologic time, deep time, was not a concept which came naturally or easily to the human mind, and once conceived, aroused fear and resistance. There was great comfort in the feeling that the earth was made for man and its history coeval with his, that the past was to be measured on a human scale, no more than a few score of generations back to the first man, Adam. But now the biblical chronology of the earth was vastly extended, into a period of eons. Thus while Archbishop Ussher had calculated that the world was created in 4004 B.C., when Buffon introduced his secular view of nature – with man appearing only in the latest of seven epochs – he suggested an unprecedented age of 75,000 years for the earth. Privately, he increased this time scale by forty – the original figure in his manuscripts was three million years – and he did this (as Rossi notes) because he felt that the larger figure would be incomprehensible to his contemporaries, would give them too fearful a sense of the ‘dark abyss’ of time. Less than fifty years later, Playfair was to write of how, gazing at an ancient geologic unconformity, ‘the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.’ When Kant, in 1755, published his Theory of the Heavens, his vision of evolving and emerging nebulae, he envisaged that ‘millions of years and centuries’ had been required to arrive at the present state, and saw creation as being eternal and immanent. With this, in Buffon’s words, ‘the hand of God’ was eliminated from cosmology, and the age of the universe enormously extended. ‘Men in Hooke’s time had a past of six thousand years,’ as Rossi writes, but ‘those of Kant’s times were conscious of a past of millions of years.’ Yet Kant’s millions were still very theoretical, not yet firmly grounded in geology, in any concrete knowledge of the earth. The sense of a vast geologic time filled with terrestrial events, was not to come until the next century, when Lyell, in his Principles of Geology, was able to bring into one vision both the immensity and the slowness of geologic change, forcing into consciousness a sense of older and older strata stretching back hundreds of millions of years. Lyell’s first volume was published in 1830, and Darwin took it with him on the Beagle. Lyell’s vision of deep time was a prerequisite for Darwin’s vision too, for the almost glacially slow processes of evolution from the animals of the Cambrian to the present day required, Darwin estimated, at least 300 million years. Stephen Jay Gould, writing about our concepts of time in Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, starts by quoting Freud’s famous statement about mankind having had to endure from science ‘two great outrages upon its naive self-love’ – the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. To these, Freud added (‘in one of history’s least modest pronouncements,’ as Gould puts it) his own revolution, the Freudian one. But he omits from his list, Gould observes, one of the greatest steps, the discovery of deep time, the needed link between the Copernican and the Darwinian revolutions. Gould speaks of our difficulty even now in ‘biting the fourth Freudian bullet,’ having any real, organic sense (beneath the conceptual or metaphoric one) of the reality of deep time. And yet this revolution, he feels, may have been the deepest of them all. It is deep time that makes possible the blind movement of evolution, the massing and honing of minute effects over eons. It is deep time that opens a new view of nature, which if it lacks the Divine fiat, the miraculous and providential, is no less sublime in its own way. ‘There is grandeur in this view of life,’ wrote Darwin, in the famous final sentence of the Origin, ‘that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.’
68 It is sometimes said (the term goes back to Charcot) that patients with Parkinson’s disease have a ‘reptilian’ stare. This is not just a picturesque (or pejorative) metaphor; normal access to the motor functions, which gives mammals their delicate motor flexibility, is impaired in parkinsonism; this leads to alternations of extreme immobility with sudden, almost explosive motion, which are reminiscent of some reptiles.
75 The Copernican revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its revelation of the immensity of space, dealt a profound blow to man’s sense of being at the center of the universe; this was voiced by no one more poignantly than Pascal: ‘The whole visible world is but an imperceptible speck,’ he lamented; man was now ‘lost in this remote corner of Nature,’ closed into ‘the tiny cell where he lodges.’ And Kepler spoke of a ‘hidden and secret horror,’ a sense of being ‘lost’ in the infinity of space.
Redwall books. I was addicted to them as a kid and have almost all of them. I re read Taggerung first, and Im starting another one this evening once I pick. Brian Jacques storytelling really holds up, although he does tend to go on and on about food for pages and pages at a time.
Come on, the food descriptions are rad. Those books turned me onto scones. One of my favorite memories is my mom reading me Redwall before bed. My oldest daughter has another year before she's ready, and then I plan on doing the same.
I read the first one sometime in 2015 and stopped around halfway into Deadhouse Gates. I really wanted to enjoy the hell out of it, but... it just didn't work for me at the time (neither did GRRM whom I also tried shortly before). Not sure why, really, perhaps fantasy worlds just aren't for me.
I have not read a ton of epic fantasy, sadly, other than the LotR (as well as other works of Tolkien). I find that in fantasy, my preferences lie more with the worlds like Terry Pratchett's Discworld and LeGuin's Earthsea rather than the huge stories with dozens of main characters and thick political plots. Outside of fantasy, lately I've been enjoying some autobiographies (or are they considered fiction?) of Knausgärd and Ferrante. Saw the latest translated Knausgärd book ("Some Rain Must Fall", I believe), in a bookshop near me a couple of days back, and I'll pick it up as soon as I finish Book 4 of Min Kamp. What about you?
It's my filler series! Whenever I've finished a book before choosing a new one, I'll read malazan until I find something else. Bit of a shit choice in retrospect, seeing as how it takes ages to get back into the myriad characters, but the series is pretty awesome.
Which translation? I was always happy with my Constance Garnett version, until I tried something different.
#hubskibookclub did 2666, you might enjoy some of the discussions there.2666 by Roberto Bolaño. I've enjoyed what I've read of the book so far. It goes off on tangents.
Still reading John Esquemeling's "Buccaneers of America" from 1649, which recounts the tales of a slave on pirate ships during the height of Caribbean piracy. Still fascinating. But it has been put aside for "Gilliamesque", Terry Gilliam's autobiography. Absolutely wonderful.
Blazed through Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull in three days. I liked it, it reminded me of Elon Musk's book mixed in with tips and advice on how to run a creative company. That's something I'll never do but the tips can be easily transferred to other creative work and to working in creative teams. Only big downsides were the not-so-subtle self-glorification and the very overdramatic narrator. The latter can be solved by 2x'ing the book, though.