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What are you reading?

Sociobiology: The Abridged Version by Edward Wilson. I accidentally checked this out of the library instead of the original text, but it does the job. I was a bit biased against a biology text published in 1975, but that ended up being unwarranted as it's pretty good.

The Triumph of Sociobiology by John Alcock. I also checked this one out, which looks like it reviews modern controversy surrounding Sociobiology. I haven't actually picked it up yet.

Travels of Ibn Battuta: Vol 1. I was looking to read about his travel along the East Coast of Africa in the 14th century but accidentally checked this one out, not realizing there are 5 volumes. Still a good read. I've since requested Ibn Battuta in Black Africa.
 
Jarhyn said:
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
Click to expand...

Hm?*

I finished The Stranger yesterday. Very engrossing, breezy read. Albeit a translation (Stuart Gilbert), the writing was top-notch, calling to mind a scrummy blend of voices, ie: John Dos Passos, Pio Baroja, Steinbeck (kinda), even Hemingway (the testosterone).

I was a wee tad disappointed when (rather abruptly I thought) I reached the end. I didn't know it was a novella (77pg via PDF doc).

Disappointed because I wanted to find out more about the guy. Why the hell did he....

Spoiler alert:


shoot the guy at all, let alone five times?? In fact, the more I thought about it, why the hell did he take the gun along, and why the hell take a walk on the beach by himself, right there, that place, that time????



But the more I thought about it, like right now, I thought: that's just the thing! Sometimes one finds oneself somewhere doing something automatically, and then wondering why one did it, or why they were even there, then. And then, aha!

ME!

The poet Rilke wrote, profoundly: You must change your life.

The poet James Wright, profoundly, wrote: I have wasted my life.

Now, which me did I apprehend?

I am entangled.





*For some reason Candide is not jibing with me. I have tried to read it twice, once many years ago, again about a year ago. Both times, stopped somewhere in the middle. :shrug:






Did you put a spell on me, Jarhyn, O ye Great Wizard?
 
Last edited:
WAB said:
Jarhyn said:
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
Click to expand...

Hm?*

I finished The Stranger yesterday. Very engrossing, breezy read. Albeit a translation (Stuart Gilbert), the writing was top-notch, calling to mind a scrummy blend of voices, ie: John Dos Passos, Pio Baroja, Steinbeck (kinda), even Hemingway (the testosterone).

I was a wee tad disappointed when (rather abruptly I thought) I reached the end. I didn't know it was a novella (77pg via PDF doc).

Disappointed because I wanted to find out more about the guy. Why the hell did he....

Spoiler alert:


shoot the guy at all, let alone five times?? In fact, the more I thought about it, why the hell did he take the gun along, and why the hell take a walk on the beach by himself, right there, that place, that time????



But the more I thought about it, like right now, I thought: that's just the thing! Sometimes one finds oneself somewhere doing something automatically, and then wondering why one did it, or why they were even there, then. And then, aha!

ME!

The poet Rilke wrote, profoundly: You must change your life.

The poet James Wright, profoundly, wrote: I have wasted my life.

Now, which me did I apprehend?

I am entangled.





*For some reason Candide is not jibing with me. I have tried to read it twice, once many years ago, again about a year ago. Both times, stopped somewhere in the middle. :shrug:






Did you put a spell on me, Jarhyn, O ye Great Wizard?
Click to expand...

So, that's the thing. I did put a spell on you, because at their core, a "spell", as may be cast upon another only ever takes that shape of an idea whose effects impact others in predictable ways.

Anyone saying different is selling something.

It's OK to not like Candidae. It's more bawdy and tongue-in-cheek, and admittedly I understood the theme by halfway and put it down for some years, then read to the end and was not surprised. It's really just an exhaustive list of ways determinists fuck up living properly, either by slipping into fatalism, or fatal optimism, or just living without control, when all these options rob someone of seeing their own fundamental agency.

As befalls The Stranger, this is a discussion of what thought process makes of someone "the stranger", the other who does not say "yes" nor "no" but lives the same fundamental flaw of Candidae: they do not accept that their decisions create agency, nor consider that they have choices and must spend some time thinking on them.

He took the gun and shot the person, fundamentally, because in that moment he wanted to and was not of a sort to care. This is more often the shape of evil in the world than the spectacular kind we are taught to fear.
 
I bought this boardgame. It's based on the Arabian Nights

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/34119/tales-arabian-nights

I realized that, while I know these stories quite well, I only know them as cultural artifacts. Through Disney, sketches, etc. I had read the stories, but bowdlerised as a child. So I decided to read the Thousand and One Nights.

I wanted to read the best translation. It turns out that that was more complicated than I first thought. I've now read a bunch of scholarly texts on it and listened to lectures.

There's numerous western translations and they're, pretty much all, terrible racist and exotist products. Produced to justify colonialism. With all manner of stuff added for effect. That's added layer one. The original core stories and frame is set in pre-Islamic Sassanian Persia. So has undergone filtering through a Persian lens hellbent on slandering anything pre-Islamic. That's layer two. It's popularity in the west in the 1700's led to a bunch of other stories added, like Sindbad, which was a completely different tradition and type of story. They added Indian stories, also completely different context. And in the desperation for oriental content French authors were asked to produce more. This brought us stuff like Ali Baba's forty thieves.

It then later made it's way to Egypt and India translated from French. And from there back into English by Richard Burton. He added a bunch of pornographic elements. He was an outright racist and thought brown people were debauched and immoral. His work was focused on colonial apologetism.

This explains why this is not a work famous in the Middle-East or India. They don't seem to have ever cared about any of these stories in particular. They have plenty of other, more famous, traditional stories more relevant to their historically accurate history.

Based on what I've read now I think Thousand and One Nights should be seen as a western racist work made to show how brown people need to be led by their moral superiors, with the original works as inspirational source material.

The story of how this work came to be, I think is more interesting than, the work itself.

I highly recommend reading up on Richard Burton. Truly the a kind of colourful character that could only have existed peak colonialism. Quite the man of his time. For good or for ill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton

Enjoy.
 
DrZoidberg said:
Based on what I've read now I think Thousand and One Nights should be seen as a western racist work made to show how brown people need to be led by their moral superiors, with the original works as inspirational source material.
Click to expand...

It portrays women as bad people too.

Thanks for the information. I read a translation without suspecting how it had been modified.
 
African Art by Frank Willett. I dropped in on a local this week and picked this up. It includes a brief history of African Art which I'm not completely through, but is pretty interesting so far. It breaks African Cave painting down into a number of periods, and describes stylistic change in sculpture over time.

A nice addition to my set of books on Africa.
 
rousseau said:
Still a good read. I've since requested Ibn Battuta in Black Africa.
Click to expand...

Also reading this. One thing I didn't anticipate was how prominent a place food played in his descriptions and experiences everywhere he went. It made me realize why agriculture was such a big thing for so long: in a harsh world the very least you can do is cultivate food for pleasure.
 
Persepolis Rising - Wow. I can see why Amazon doesn't want to go with Books 7 to 9 with individual seasons. It'd cost a fortune if 8 and 9 end anything like book 7.

Still pretty easy reading. I really don't know where the author is ultimately going which is a nice change of pace, but they clearly have a destination in mind. Have started Tiamet's Wrath, so I'll find out soonish. That'll easily be finished before the last book comes out and I can finish that before the last season of The Expanse, which I think will be borrowing a bit from books 7 to 9 to finish everything up.

I really do like how he manages to shift the plot around, making things contingent on other events. Not in an overly complicated way, but a sensical enough way.
 
Agrarian History of Western Europe, A.D. 500 - 1850 by Bath. This was a title I bought my father-in-law for Christmas two years ago, it was originally written in Dutch and so I had a Dutch copy shipped to me from Europe. I also went through it back then myself, but decided to pick it up again this week. Very interesting book and this time I noticed that it mentions the ideas of Henri Pirenne who Tharmas pointed me to some time ago. Although I still haven't read Pirenne or formed an opinion about him.

Wisdom Sits in Places by Keith Basso. This was a recommendation from Politesse earlier in this thread. I haven't gotten too deep into it but it looks like an interesting read.

Everywhere Being is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking by Robert Bringhurst. Same guy whose poetry I posted about earlier, but this is a work of philosophy. The guy is clearly clever and an interesting writer. I don't find his ideas revelatory but they make for an interesting read.

Most of my attention is going to the Agrarian History of Western Europe because it's a very good and well put together book.
 
Finished Tiamat's Wrath, and boy was Tiamat wrathful! Really a great title as it isn't quite obvious who the metaphor is for, the literal Tiamat like thing or the empire which has a Tiamat like presence compared to all else. So now I have a better idea where the final book is heading, though not entirely clear. Book 8 also does help explain Holden's opening thoughts on the angry protomolecule thing in Season Five.

I did have one question, spoiler.

Timothy. So was that supposed to be a surprise? Because when she was hiking out to meet Timothy, I knew at that point it had to be Amos, the author laid it out very clearly. In fact, I was then disappointed in myself that I hadn't figured it out when she first met Timothy because I then recalled that was his original name. But then when finally meets Timothy, the author doesn't try to hide anything. He talks, looks, acts like Amos. So when "It's a fake!!!" moment happens, I'm thinking, umm... yeah. A surprise for Teresa, but not me.



Feels like Season 6 will be Books 6 and 8 smooshed together (I don't think they have time to cover the events of Book 7), with dashes of Book 9 to close things up.
 
History of the Balkans from Mohammed the Conqueror to Stalin. It's a bit of a data dump with long, sprawling paragraphs that are difficult to read, but there didn't seem to be many other books on the region in Weldon. Still an interesting title.

Feminist Philosophies A - Z by Nancy McHugh. I bought this today (had been looking for something similar for a while). I'd always wanted to have all the strands of feminism pulled together in a single title, and this one is an encyclopedia of sorts, which works. I'm definitely sympathetic to feminism (or at least the plight of women), but while reading it I found myself deconstructing many of the ideas in it. But from the perspective of anthropology it's a great read.

Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean translated by James Legge. Also bought this today. It's a 19th century translation of the works of Confucius by a missionary who learned a bit of Chinese and travelled there. Mostly I'm starting to collect a nice set of Eastern philosophy and I thought the Analects would make a nice addition. But I am interested in the Analects themselves (also from the perspective of Anthropology). I don't have much of a sense of the book as a historical artifact, but might dig into that a bit soon.
 
I had three days off this week and decided to dive into my copy of Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. Mainly I wanted to trace the sociology I've been reading back through it's roots, ending at the Renaissance. I also bought a text on Ancient Greek philosophy and have been browsing through that a bit. Both titles not so much for their ideas, but to get a better sense of our history of ideas.

I ended up noticing that both Eastern and Western philosophy seemed to go through a similar progression away from dualism and toward materialism, which makes sense if we're trying to figure things out.

I also bought a trophy copy of Maps of Time by David Christian yesterday. I already own it on my e-reader but thought it'd be a nice addition to my physical collection, and that I'd enjoy being able to browse through it. It was a huge influence back in 2016.
 
The biography of Rhodes was exhaustive, and called him out on his villainy.

Have moved on now to Pup Fiction, a light mystery, and after that I'm going to read some Philo Vance novels.

Rob
 
I've just started in on Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. The title is lightly satirical; they are more critiquing than explicating the "dawn of everything", poking well-deserved holes in the artificial horizons European historians have tried to invoke between history and prehistory. So far it reminds me thematically of Europe and the People Without History, but their style and academic foundation are far superior to that of Eric Wolf's (rip!), and we also a lot more about the "Neolithic" world now than when the older work was published. It's a real door-stopper, so I'm looking forward to many more nights enjoying the volume. It's a pity we've lost Dave Graeber last year, before everyone had a chance to embarass themselves trying to critique this book to his face. As scholar, he was always fun to watch. I only met him in person once, but I will miss him. And his mentor Marshall Sahlins, one right after another. Too many lately.
 
Yesterday I offloaded a few library books and picked up How to Think Like an Anthropologist, another recommendation from Politesse. I brought back my Bringhurst philosophy, Wisdom Sits in Places, and Ibn Battuta in Black Africa. All three were solid books, but I wasn't feeling them at the moment.

I'm finding myself leaning back toward the heavily academic lately, dry and precise writing that says a lot in a small amount of space. How to Think Like an Anthropologist isn't quite that, but does look like it will offer a lot of unfamiliar perspective and novelty which I'm enjoying.
 
I can't figure out how I got to be 64 but had never run across Ion Idriess.

Did something I rarely do and put down Texas Hold 'em about 10% in.
 
Two separate copies of the Tao Te Ching, one translated by Stephen Mitchell and the other Ellen Chen. I'd owned Mitchell's version for a few months and finally picked it up off my shelf recently. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it so did some research into the Tao Te Ching in general, which led me to Chen's translation.

She produced more of a scholarly work with a history of Lao Tzu and the text, a truer translation, and quite a bit of commentary on the passages themselves. Where Mitchell's is a straight translation that seems more sympathetic to the Zen side of things.

Both great books, but I'm enjoying Chen's history and analysis. Information that really can't be found online.
 
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