#121

I’ve been working my way through Marcuse’s collected papers.

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#122

Add Godel:Escher:Bach to that list.

I loved both ‘Thinking’ and ‘Society’ in their own ways. GEB pushed my brain in a different way. Not sure I’d bounce between them, but certainly contrasting them by reading them in close order would be awesome.

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#123

Reading Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau (translated by Barbara Wright) from New York Review Books Classics. This publisher is doing a magnificent job of bringing under-appreciated classics to light.

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#124

Finished Madeleine Ashby’s Company Town this evening. Almost done with Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence.

#125

Just finished “The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness” by Michael Marder and Anaïs Tondeur. Beautiful and terrifying…

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/the-chernobyl-herbarium/

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#126

Slowly reading and enjoying the Karl Hyde autobiography/diaries – i am dogboy. Kind of like an atmosphere in a book. Rough Trade had signed copies so I couldn’t help but Underworld fanboy it onto the bookshelf.

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#127

Finished Norwegian Wood. Not entirely sure I liked the very end, but really enjoyable nonetheless. For all it’s international appeal, it’s still a very Japanese book.

Need to choose a new book for this evening… has anyone made it through all the sequels to “The Three-Body Problem”? Worth reading them?

I once wrote in orbital simulator in PyGame, but it was only using 1st order fixed step approximations so it completely freaked out at close approaches of bodies.

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#128

I’ve found a decent recommendation for the the Three-body Problem…

And then there’s been the occasion where I just want to get out of my own head. [Laughter] Sometimes you read fiction just because you want to be someplace else.

What are some of those books?

It’s interesting, the stuff I read just to escape ends up being a mix of things — some science fiction. For a while, there was a three-volume science-fiction novel, the “Three-Body Problem” series —

Oh, Liu Cixin, who won the Hugo Award.

— which was just wildly imaginative, really interesting. It wasn’t so much sort of character studies as it was just this sweeping —

It’s really about the fate of the universe.

Exactly. The scope of it was immense. So that was fun to read, partly because my day-to-day problems with Congress seem fairly petty — not something to worry about. Aliens are about to invade. [Laughter]

Transcript: President Obama on What Books Mean to Him

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#129

Would say Norwegian Wood is Murakami’s odd one. Very different to his normal aesthetic. Go for Kafka on the Shore next! :slight_smile:

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#130

Yes, ironically it’s his least odd book (that I’ve read so far).

Still, I think it’s one of his most popular books.

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#131

I don’t want to raise any allegations here, but…

I come here. I read about Murakami, we all talk about Murakami, and…

… suddenly Murakami is a major target for thieves.

Who knew we were a den of criminal masterminds. At $3 a copy on the hot book market we’ll be … rich?

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#132

About two weeks have passed since I wrote my first post, and today I just realised that reading the three books I mentioned is part of a personal interest in the relationship between tradition and novelty in arts in general. Here are pieces of evidence :

“Concerning the Spiritual in Art” by Wassily Kandinsky :
When this book was published (1912), abstract art was relatively recent. Kandinsky states how abstraction is a need for him as an artist, and how a new language has to be learnt and new marks have to be found. Now, more than a hundred years later, the reader can still witness the excitement of a pioneer who is only beginning to discover his own way of painting.

“The Artist’s Reality” by Mark Rothko :
Most works of the american painters that were later called “abstract expressionists” may have seemed revolutionary to the spectators of that time ; nevertheless, Rothko had a strong feeling that his work was part of a long tradition. This tradition includes a lot of the painters that came before him, and his love for their work can easily be felt while reading the book.

“Sculpting in Time” by Andrei Tarkovski :
The author draws our attention to the fact that filmmaking is an extremely young art, by comparison with arts like music, painting, or literature. He keeps saying that filmmakers still have to find the specificities of this art. As a filmmaker himself, he explains what he believes to be the essence of film, and introduces us to his processes to make movies in respect to this belief.

Could this interest of mine be the motivation for a dedicated thread ?
I need a little more time to think about it before committing…

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#133

Almost done with Kim Gordon’s Girl in a Band.

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#134

today i finished murakami 1Q84.
i had been reading it for like 6 years or something ridiculous. lots of other stuff in between. book 4 of dune series is next or some more heinlein. probably should have been focused on gabriel garcia marquez.

#135

not currently reading and not just finished, but i really enjoyed reading Vladimir Nabokov’s work. especially:

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#136

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#137

ooo, just copped this. seems lovely.

i’d been on a mini murakami tear, reading “norwegian wood” and “the wind-up bird chronicle”. i adored both! thought the translations were lovely and the prose incredibly crisp. “norwegian wood” in particular was one of those works where the tension builds slowly enough that you don’t notice it 'til it’s gone.

catching up on some fantasy stuff i’d missed, too. sanderson’s “elantris”. it’s not shocking that this is his earliest work, but it’s still enjoyable (and colors his cosmere a bit for me, which is why i dug in.)

eager to start a good sci-fi novel soon. was thinking of “rendezvous with rama” but i’d love to hear suggestions from folks here. i absolutely adore ursula le guin’s work and have read most if not all of her hainish cycle.

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#138

I loved The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and can also recommend his “Trilogy of the Rat”: Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973, and A Wild Sheep Chase (the last of which was wonderful). I also recently read Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage which was a bittersweet, lovely book that still lingers with me.

eager to start a good sci-fi novel soon. was thinking of “rendezvous with rama” but i’d love to hear suggestions from folks here. i absolutely adore ursula le guin’s work and have read most if not all of her hainish cycle.

If you want a recommendation on a good scifi romp, why not Gateway? The last book I finished was a bit of an urban fantasy, but it sounds like you’re not headed there.

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#139

lovely, thanks! will check all of these :slight_smile:

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#140