#560

For all the Murakami fans out there, there’s potentially lots of surrealist (magical realism?) fiction that might also appeal, if you haven’t gone down that road before. Also, not many Murakami fans I’ve met have read Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which is personally my favorite novel of his.

For other fiction that has similar bent (although with different writing styles and cultural contexts), check out Italo Calvino & Jorge Luis Borges. There’s a ton of stuff to dive into with just those two authors, but Cosmicomics by Calvino is my all-time favorite book.

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#561

Yeah, I’d definitely recommend Italo Calvino too. It’s been a while since I read his books (mostly from the time when I was really into OuLiPo and went to their monthly lectures in Paris) but I only have good memories of them.

The Baron in the Trees, The Nonexistent Knight, etc.

Also, depending on the quality of the translations from French, I’d really recommend some Raymond Queneau (Le Chiendent, Les Fleurs Bleues for example) and Georges Perec (La Vie Mode d’Emploi is great book but anything by Perec is pure gold).

Sorry, I don’t have the titles in English or other languages for these but there should be a number of translations…

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#562

This was great. Capitalist Realism is required reading.

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#563

I absolutely loved “The Baron in the Trees” :slight_smile:

#564

“Magic, produces the most hidden secrets of all music, and it contains a physiology of consonance and dissonance, furthermore a musical-medical magic, sound reflection or a perfect doctrine concerning what measures and constitutes an echo, the nerves of the little tubal bones or the fabric of the ears, also it teaches how to use the structure of statues and sympathetic vibrations and other automatic musical instruments (or sounding by themselves) with curious and new experiments.” -Athanasius Kircher

from

Brewer, Charles E… The Instrumental Music of Schmeltzer, Biber, Muffat and their Contemporaries, Taylor and Francis, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncsu/detail.action?docID=655458.
Created from ncsu on 2018-03-06 12:48:42.

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#565

just got this in the mail & enjoying so far. i came across it via holly herndon.

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#566

I just finished reading The Kalevala, and was honestly quite disappointed by the ending. The first half was full of fairly wacky creation myth and interesting shamanic magic. Then in the middle it started to focus on a series of fairly uninteresting and violent characters, before returning to the previous characters but in quite a different style. The last chapter was a pretty cringeworthy euphemism for the Christianisation of Finland, which was frankly annoying to read.

I would definitely recommend to to the first half to anyone who enjoys creation myth and weird shamanic magic!

#567

Through this thread I’ve discovered Murakami and ambitiously started my first book of his, 1Q84.

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#568

Autonomous was fun, and it contains my favourite explanation of HTTPS/TLS (in how the bots talk to one another).

#569

That’s an intense place to start. Let us know how you like it!

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#570

obligatory image

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#571

Small Is Beautiful - Economics as if People Mattered
by E. F. Schumacher 1973
https://web.archive.org/web/20141014171926/http://www.ditext.com/schumacher/small/small.html

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#572

I took a little break from reading on my commute since I finished the whole Hyperion series about a month ago, and I’ve been playing my Switch instead. However, my partner and I rented an A-frame cabin in the mountains last weekend to get out of the city and chill out, and I knew she and I would spend a bunch of time reading. I ended up starting A Wizard Of Earthsea, which seems like an context-appropriate thing to share here. :smiley: I can’t believe this is the first Ursula Le Guin I’ve read!

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#573

That was the first Murakami book I read as well, and I loved it. I’ve actually been slightly disappointed by the other books of his so far, but I’m not sure if it’s because 1Q84 (which until this very moment I thought was iq84) was especially great, or because it was my first Murakami.

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#574

I am reading Wycliffe’s Bible because it is 100% pure medieval drugs.

1 In the bigynnyng God made of nouyt heuene and erthe. 2 Forsothe the erthe was idel and voide, and derknessis weren on the face of depthe; and the Spiryt of the Lord was borun on the watris.

3 And God seide, Liyt be maad, and liyt was maad. 4 And God seiy the liyt, that it was good, and he departide the liyt fro derknessis; and he clepide the liyt, 5 dai, and the derknessis, nyyt. And the euentid and morwetid was maad, o daie.

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#575

currently reading this great collection spanning many fields (fiction, critical theory, ecology, biology, etc) roughly centered around two themes- ghosts & monsters. not as bleak as you might think. I’ve learned something fascinating in every essay, like microchimerism: cells(!) pass through the placenta from fetus to mother and vice-versa. younger children have cells of older siblings + mom.

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#576

So I finished A Wizard Of Earthsea… Quick, but I enjoyed it. Can anyone recommend the other Earthsea books? I guess if they’re as quick to read as the first one I don’t have much to lose, but I figured I’d ask first.

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#577

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laura brought this back from sacramento
'they still have bookstores there!
she says :slightly_smiling_face:

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#578

I think I would feel the same if I’d started with 1Q84 (my first Murakami was The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle). I’m re-reading Kafka on the Shore at the moment and I still love it, but it’s not grabbing me in the same way as it did before I read 1Q84 and Hard Boiled Wonderland.

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#579

Just finished Silence in the Age of Noise by Erling Kagge, a series of short reflections on the meaning of silence in the modern world.

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