What swanky things are you reading?

[€uroMeinke]

I won't catch up entirely - but I recently finished a couple noteworthy titles:

The Flash of LIghtening Behind the Mountains: New Poems by Charles Bukowski - I've always been a bukowski fan, but when I picked up this "new" book, I was pleased to discover that while Bukowski was alive, he'd sit with his editor selecting his best poems - only to put them away to publish only after his death. Apparently, Bukowski was more prolific than imagined as there apparently is several books worth waiting to be published - and in many ways this really is some of his best stuff and perfect reading for riding the LA Metro.

Magical Thinking: True Stories by Agusten Burroughs - cool little twisted vingnets a la David Sedaris, only a bit darker and sometimes cring-inducing. also made for a quick fun read especially if you like this genre.

At the moment I took on another Murakami - this time Kafka on the Shore, which had me a bit suspicious to begin with, but now that I'm dealing with Picnic at Hanging Rock type experiences and a man who talks to cats, I am once again possessed.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Well, having finally finished reading Goedel, Escher, Bach (yeah it took like 8 months. In my defense I did read several other books long the way, but mostly I'm slow and it's a dense book), I wanted to stay in the realm of discussing AI/human though. I considered picking up a collection of writings by the same author, but a quick glance showed that, while updated by a few decades, it covered the same basic themes and would probably be pretty repetative.

So instead I grabbed The Cambridge Quintet by John Casti. It's a work of what he calls "scientific fiction." It's in the style of Plato's Symposium. It's an account of an imagined dinner party attended by very real scientists, mathemeticians, philosophers. A "what would happen if..." The 5 players are C.P. Snow (physcist who worked to unite the humanities and the sciences), J.B.S. Holdane (genetecist), Ludwig Wittgenstein (philosopher who within his lifetime fathered 2 completely conflicting philosophies regarding human thought), Alan Turing (father of computing as we know it and a pioneer in the theoretical side of AI), and Erwin Schrödinger (yes, that Schrödinger).

It's short, at seems to not probe particularly deeply, especially considering the thurough dismantling of many of these concepts I just got through with GEB. But it is entertaining so far.

[blueerica]

Due to my coursework this year, I'm being afforded the opportunity to read a lot of books I've either read before, or have had some interest in reading.

Just read Conquest of America, by Tzevetan Todorov, a compelling case for the sense of otherness, in terms of ethnicity and actually, racism, and what role communication (and definition of communication) played for Columbus, Cortez and Las Casas in the discovery and conquest of the Americas..

I just started reading Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy (the guy who wrote All The Pretty Horses, a book I never read, but remember something about a movie made after it...). Only a chapter in, and there are countless acts of brutal violence, though it seems intriguing, this tale of the Kid, and what I know is to come in the book, a tale of Americas' westward expansion.

I'm pretty stoked about the other books for my Ethnic Literature in America class, though they're all super heavy.

In another class, the Comic Spirit, I'm reading Lysistrata, Aristophanes comedy of acheiving peace for warring Greece through the women's movement to not give the warriors any nookie. Nookie for the win!

I'll also soon be reading Waiting for Godot, and Candide...

Such a happy girl, am I! However, it has made me stop reading the Wind Up Bird Chronicle. I'll have to pick that back up over Spring Break, or after the semester's over...

[Not Afraid]

After Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, I sped through the latest collection of short stories by favorite T. C. Boyle and now I'm on to the latest Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel - his first work of fiction in over 10 years. I so love his writing, but it makes me want to read One Hundred Years of Sollitude for the umteenth time.

[The Shadoe]

I'm reading a few books simultaneously:

Ethan Frome - A classic. I don't think anything has to be said.

The Prince - The end justifies the means. What Macchiavelli meant by this is that it is a "Prince's" (or ruler's) job to keep a nation together, no matter what.

Hand in hand with the Prince, I am reading The Compleated Autobiography by Bengamin Franklin. I really like reading books about American history, especially ones like this which are his own words and provide lots of insight into why things are the way they are, yet be able to see that our country was set up by regular people. It goes hand-in-hand with The Prince because I am writing a paper and delivering a speech for extra credit about the level of Machiavellian politics/attitudes thatBenjamin Franklin has.

Norton Anthology of African-American Literature - A huge book full of short stories that gives you a completely different perspective on what living in the United States as an African-American is like.

[Eliza Hodgkins 1812]

Wodehouse's Life With Jeeves.

Impossible to feel sad when you read his stories. Impossible.

[wendybeth]

Reader's Digest.


No! Just kidding- really! I'm reading the collected letters of Gustave Flaubert, which I've read many times before but felt like reading again.

[lindyhop]

After I saw the 4th Harry Potter movie last Thanksgiving I decided to re-read all the books before finally reading the 6th for the first time. I'm really enjoying reading one book after another but there have been so many distractions in my life that I just finished book 5 this past week. Half Blood Prince, here I come!

Someday I'll complete this project and get to read a non-HP book again. On Beauty by Zadie Smith has been tempting me since I received it at Christmas.

[Ghoulish Delight]

I'm back to Hofstadter. I'm about a third of the way through Metamagical Themas: Questioning for the Essence of Mind and Pattern.

It's a compendium of columns he wrote for Scientific American over the span of a couple of years plus some commentary he added when he compiled them. While each column stands more or loss on its own, he's reordered them into several conceptual groups, all of which work to build on an overall discussion on the structure of human thought and the nature of creativity (which is Hofstadter's constant obsession, and what he feels is the key concept to pin down if we're ever to create true human-like artificial intelligence). Being a collection of columns, it's far less penetrating than Goedel, Escher, Bach (dispite the comparable lenght), which is both good and bad. And he gets a tad preachy at points.

But what I'm really loving about this book so far is that it's a total product of its time. The columns were written between '81 and '82. he compiled them and wrote his post-scripta in '85. Here are a few of the more amusing things that have popped up:

* "Did you know that in some city centers, a single family home can sell for as much as a quarter of a million dollars?!"

* "A really fancy single-user computer costs approximately $75,000"

* A column devoted to the inequity of sexist language. Including his pleasure that the term "flight attendant" is beginning to be used, and the resistance to the use of "Ms." as opposed to "Miss" or "Mrs."

* Mention of computers that can do an astounding 1 Million operations per second!

* A wholly unnatural obsession with Rubik's Cube, or "the Cube" as he often refers to it.

[Capt Jack]

re reading
SUN TZU ON THE ART OF WAR
Translated from the Chinese
By LIONEL GILES, M.A. (1910)

not sure how it ranks on the swankage scale, but its great stuff.