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What are you reading?

 
 
 
A reprint edition of High Tide at Gettysburg (1958) by Glenn Tucker. I sought a Gettysburg history for a general readership, with anecdotes and incidentals along with the tactical side of the story, and that's what Tucker wrote. The style is concise and fluid, and the chapters are broken up into subsections, which are about three pages long -- perfect for the casual reader. I am in the early chapters, which provide reportage of encounters between Pennsylvania villagers and the invading Southerners. A Pennsylvania Dutch farmer, seeing his prize mare being requisitioned for the South, said, "I've been married, sir, t'ree times, and I vood not geef dot mare for all dose voomans." (He got his mare back.) Other scenes depict the Southern boys making light of the scowling looks they were getting from women staring at them from windows. One yelled back that if they would speak their names, he would write them down, throw the paper into a water jug, and make vinegar.
 
Premonition by Michael Lewis.

This is going to be about the covid pandemic. It's early days yet; we're only a few chapters in; but thus far it's riveting, like a great novel.

This may be Lewis's best book.
 
Just finished William Faulkner's Sanctuary. I've started (about 1/4th into) Apollo's Arrow by Nicholas Christakis. Very interesting, frightening and appalling - it is about covid and mostly the US response.
 
I picked up A History of Greece by John Bury yesterday (originally published in 1900). It covers Greece up until about 300 B.C., and the author intentionally made it a political history. For the price of a movie admission it'll be fun to poke around for a few hours.

I also picked up The Constitution of Society by Anthony Giddens from Weldon a few weeks ago. I've flipped through it and am not as impressed as I thought I'd be, but it's a decent book. So far I'm enjoying my Weber titles a bit more.

And related, as my shelving space fills up once again I'm debating getting some custom shelving units done in our basement, potentially filling a wall. A possible winter project.
 
I'm reading 6000 year old Sumerian religious hymns. Here's a good one. Religion has lost some of this old magic:

Inanna spoke:
"What I tell you
Let the singer weave into song.
What I tell you,
Let it flow from ear to mouth,
Let it pass from old to young:

My vulva, the horn,
The Boat of Heaven,
Is full of eagerness like the young moon.
My untilled land lies fallow.

As for me, Inanna,
Who will plow my vulva?
Who will plow my high field?
Who will plow my wet ground?

As for me, the young woman,
Who will plow my vulva?
Who will station the ox there?
Who will plow my vulva?"

Dumuzi replied:
"Great Lady, the king will plow your vulva.
I, Dumuzi the King, will plow your vulva."

Inanna:
"Then plow my vulva, man of my heart!
Plow my vulva!
 
I picked up A History of the Scottish People: 1560 - 1830 by T.C. Smout off of my shelf last night and am planning to give it a bit of time. It's an interesting one as it's one of the first history books I bought back around 2012. When I first read it I liked it but had no frame of reference. I picked it up a second time a few years ago to see if there were any references to the printing press (there weren't). This time I'm finding re-visiting some of the histories in my collection a lot of fun, ten years later they're taking on an entirely new complexion.

Smout is also a great historian and writer.
 
DrZoidberg said:
I'm reading 6000 year old Sumerian religious hymns. Here's a good one. Religion has lost some of this old magic:

Inanna spoke:
"What I tell you
Let the singer weave into song.
What I tell you,
Let it flow from ear to mouth,
Let it pass from old to young:

My vulva, the horn,
The Boat of Heaven,
Is full of eagerness like the young moon.
My untilled land lies fallow.

As for me, Inanna,
Who will plow my vulva?
Who will plow my high field?
Who will plow my wet ground?

As for me, the young woman,
Who will plow my vulva?
Who will station the ox there?
Who will plow my vulva?"

Dumuzi replied:
"Great Lady, the king will plow your vulva.
I, Dumuzi the King, will plow your vulva."

Inanna:
"Then plow my vulva, man of my heart!
Plow my vulva!
Click to expand...

Oh, I dunno, kinda yuck.

Yeah, yuck.
 
DrZoidberg said:
I'm reading 6000 year old Sumerian religious hymns. Here's a good one. Religion has lost some of this old magic:
Click to expand...

One of my favorite quotes from The Penguin Atlas of Ancient History:

"Stone penises and Venuses suggest religious practices of appealing simplicity."
 
Capitalism and Modern Social Theory by Anthony Giddens, where he interprets Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle translated by Michael Swanton, both from Western libraries.

I'm looking forward to Giddens' writing on Max Weber.
 
"The Cruelty of Free of Free Will" by Richard Oerton

I read this book a couple of years ago, but I enjoyed it enough to read it again. It's the follow up to his book: "The Nonsense of Free Will". It's a short, easy read, which is good for me since my attention span isn't what it used to be.



Does the idea that we have free will serve to foster our cruelty to one another? Richard Oerton has already dismissed the idea of free will as incoherent and illusory, doing so in The Nonsense of Free Will, a book described as "wonderfully clear - and very clever" by the New York Times bestselling author Sam Harris. The Cruelty of Free Will starts by recapitulating the theme of the earlier book, but then goes on to develop it in important ways. It asks two questions: why - and how - does free will belief persist so stubbornly? Philosophers and others who try to uphold free will are guided less by reason than by their own (probably unconscious) emotions. Blind to the fact that our everyday explanations of human behaviour are based, not on free will, but on an unacknowledged determinism, they try to preserve the idea of free will by means of sophistry and word-play. Their methods include a conjuring trick: that of replacing our common idea of free will with some other concept which, though they call it by the same name, actually involves no freedom of choice. Free will is thought to be a good thing and determinism a bad one, but Richard Oerton insists that we've got this the wrong way round because belief in free will fosters ignorance and cruelty. It allows us to think that those whose lives are bleak have only themselves to blame, and that criminals and other bad guys are embodiments of self-created wickedness deserving of retributive punishment - whereas in reality, we are all of us simply the products of biological and environmental luck. The Cruelty of Free Will asserts that human beings belong to what is still a savage species with few inhibitions against harming one another, and that we cling to the idea of free will mainly because it purports to justify the escape and expression of this savagery.
Click to expand...
 
I picked up The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology last weekend which is a surprisingly good read.. but it doesn't have an index and it's killing me.

I get that it was designed as a self-indexing reference book and not to be read cover-to-cover, but I really want a list of it's (short) articles, and not have to parse through three hundred pages to see what's in it.
 
The Day the Century Ended by Francis Irby Gwaltney (1955; filmed as Between Heaven and Hell and later republished under that title.)
The WWII generation, after returning from war, produced novels that depicted youth and first love or novels of war and the end of youth. Gwaltney's novel does both. He saw action in the Pacific theater, and his descriptions of jungle fighting are stark and unsparing. In flashbacks, he writes about adolescence, courtship, and marriage. Gwaltney is uncommonly honest -- for a book that came out mid-Eisenhower, the sexual frankness is a real surprise. And since GIs say fuck as commonly as hello, the book is full of f-bombs, but, in a strange concession to prevailing standards, they are spelled without the 'c'. The dialogue is crowded with fuks and fukens.
I forget where I heard about this book. It is nearly forgotten today, and, as far as I can tell from looking at Amazon, all of Gwaltney's books are out of print. He is referenced only in discussions of Arkansas authors, or, perhaps, in connection with Norman Mailer, whom Gwaltney knew in the service and with whom he did some collaborations. For any reader of WWII fiction or good, naturalistic writing, it is worth your time to find a copy of this novel.
 
DrZoidberg said:
I'm reading 6000 year old Sumerian religious hymns. Here's a good one. Religion has lost some of this old magic:

Inanna spoke:
"What I tell you
Let the singer weave into song.
What I tell you,
Let it flow from ear to mouth,
Let it pass from old to young:

My vulva, the horn,
The Boat of Heaven,
Is full of eagerness like the young moon.
My untilled land lies fallow.

As for me, Inanna,
Who will plow my vulva?
Who will plow my high field?
Who will plow my wet ground?

As for me, the young woman,
Who will plow my vulva?
Who will station the ox there?
Who will plow my vulva?"

Dumuzi replied:
"Great Lady, the king will plow your vulva.
I, Dumuzi the King, will plow your vulva."

Inanna:
"Then plow my vulva, man of my heart!
Plow my vulva!
Click to expand...

I dunno, Inanna. Do you really have to promote your cooter that much, to get some action? You can't just put it out on the street? Is there something broke in it? Around here, the women who are groaning and moaning about plowing have generally done so much meth and cheap whiskey that they're completely used up. You sound like one big Sumerian mess.
 
Books I'm not reading but that are coming in the mail:

The Penguin Dictionary of Physics for a nice juxtaposition with The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology. Robert Bringhurst's Selected Poems which I grit my teeth at as I paid 45 dollars from Amazon to buy. But the guy is a wonderful writer so I had to have it.

Books I'm actually reading:

Robert Bringhurst's The Beauty of the Weapons. This was a book of poetry released in a limited run in the early 80s that scarcely exists now, that I managed to buy for 15 dollars at the local hipster bookshop. Bringhurst is an interesting guy and worth reading about.
 
In another thread [MENTION=377]Jarhyn[/MENTION]; dropped a couple book titles but didn't mention the author(s). One was The Stranger. Wondering if I knew about it (thought maybe it was Dostoyevsky), I looked for it, and saw it was Camus. Alright, I said, I haven't read Camus yet - always avoided him for some reason, perhaps because I don't generally love transtations - so I figured I'd take a look.

Man am I glad I did. I'm only about thirty pages in but I love it, particularly the details of mundane things, the general dreariness of boredom and living in a way that seems almost pointless.

Thanks, Jarhyn, oh ye Grand Wizard, for the drop. I can now be glad I didn't die without checking out Camus! :joy:
 
WAB said:
In another thread [MENTION=377]Jarhyn[/MENTION]; dropped a couple book titles but didn't mention the author(s). One was The Stranger. Wondering if I knew about it (thought maybe it was Dostoyevsky), I looked for it, and saw it was Camus. Alright, I said, I haven't read Camus yet - always avoided him for some reason, perhaps because I don't generally love transtations - so I figured I'd take a look.

Man am I glad I did. I'm only about thirty pages in but I love it, particularly the details of mundane things, the general dreariness of boredom and living in a way that seems almost pointless.

Thanks, Jarhyn, oh ye Grand Wizard, for the drop. I can now be glad I didn't die without checking out Camus! :joy:
Click to expand...

I might recommend reading more of Camus, namely The Rebel. It's more academic, but it discusses a very interesting aspect of philosophy surrounding concepts of agency. It's right up there in my list with The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K LeGuin).

My current read though, as far as the last pages I scribed my eyeballs over, though, is Foundations of Mathematics. It's about five orders of magnitude more dense than Camus, whose text is roughly the density of neutronium.

Interestingly, I read The Stranger along with Voltaire's Candidae, which had very similar themes
 
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