The Pledge Drive continues! If you enjoy this blog, and can afford it, please click on the “donate” button below! Thanks!
I gotta skip the misogyny/alt-right crap today. So here’s a question for you all: what are you reading?
I’ll start: in addition to reading way too many news stories about Donald Trump, I’ve been reading about meditation. Here are a couple of books I especially like:
Mindfulness in Plain English, by Henepola Gunaratana (An older version is available for free online!)
The Mind Illuminated, by Culadasa (John Yates). Website here.
How about you?
As an added bonus, here are some words of wisdom from my unconscious mind:
"Pickles don't just CAUSE hippies. Pickles ARE hippies." — Someone said this in a dream of mine last night. #PicklesAreHippies #TrumpTail
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) September 30, 2016
It didn’t make any more sense in the dream than it does in the real world.
And a Pledge Drive capybara reading a goddamn book!
Hello.
Do you mean that “Maïs” is a metal group ?
Ah, no, sorry, it was Korn, my bad.
Have a nice day.
@EJ (The Orphic Lizard) –
That’s what I thought, too, but I saw the satire as aimed more at scholarship than at civilization in general. It could be both.
By SF I meant speculative fiction as a broader category (sci fi, fantasy, and things that don’t fit exactly into either, such as 1984 or The Dodecahedron); sorry for the confusion. I guess I was too lazy to spell it out!
@occasional reader – 😛
Notes From The Underground is one of the few books that I have ever failed to read. There are others I started and never finished but twice I started that book and it horrified me worse than anything in the actual horror genre. As a lifelong misfit, it was just too painful watching someone rushing towards destroying themselves like that.
IMPORTANT NEWS I HAVE JUST LEARNED OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE FLYING LEMUR WHY DIDN’T ANYONE TELL ME
http://fat.gfycat.com/SameDefiantIbisbill.gif
http://cdn.c.photoshelter.com/img-get/I0000FGR5uxwpUVo/s/880/880/Colugo-Flying-Lemur-gliding-feeding-0995.jpg
Look, it’s self-hammocking!
Flying with baby:
http://image.vtc.vn/files/f1/2016/05/10/bi-an-loai-vat-lai-giua-khi-va-doi-14.cache
http://www.nedhardy.com/wp-content/uploads/images/2015/july/animals_exist/IFrHXIo.jpg
OMG THEY’RE SO CUTE IN AN ALIEN KIND OF WAY
Here ends this VERY SPECIAL REPORT
@LindsayIrene
Wow, love the coloration of those critters! So cool!
@MPG
Hugo is famous for his habit of digressing about things like that for chapters at a time (Les Miserables devotes upwards of 50 pages to the Parisian Sewers, for instance), but keeping it interesting anyway.
I’m so disgusted that Elena Ferrante has been doxxed! What is wrong with people?
I had to take a break before diving into the last of the Neapolitan novels. I wish I had finished it before this for some reason.
http://lithub.com/leave-elena-ferrante-alone/
[link does not publish her name or link the New York Review of Books blog post]
Thanks for the recommendations from those who gave them, I’m not a particularly well read reader, so those are all new to me, and now I’ve got a little list to get going on when I get the time. 😀
Margaret Atwood’s “Maddaddam” trilogy. We’re on the 2nd book, “The Year of the Flood”. The first book, “Oryx & Crake” was fantastic. The second is shaping up to be equally as good. It’s a distopian sci-fi future where genetic engineering gets entirely out of hand and ethics in science runs completely off the rails.
….so basically America in like…5 years. Or now. Or since the Tuskegee experiments. Yea. (._. )
I’m trying to locate broken brakes. I want to know their nature.
Secretagogin expression delineates functionally-specialized populations of striatal parvalbumin-containing interneurons.
Striatal cholinergic interneuron regulation and circuit effects.
Parcellation of the human substantia nigra based on anatomical connectivity to the striatum.
I started diagramming circuits and keep running out of room on the paper so I’m trying make my symbols more efficient somehow. I found a really cool way to symbolically represent the cortex though. I never quite realized that each main lobe has one sensory input until I did that. Some other weird things too.
Thanks Dalillama, I’ll have to check it out.
@Itsabeast
You might also have a go at Charles Stross’ Halting State, and probably Accelerando, Saturn’s Children, and Neptune’s Brood. Possibly Barnes and Niven’s Saturn’s Race , which is not at all the same. If you’re also into fantasy, try Gladstone’s Craft Cycle too.
@NelC
On that topic, I recommend Tobias Buckell’s Arctic Rising and Hurricane Fever, interlinked espionage novels set in a near future where blimps watch the Northwest Passage for illegal dumping and the Caribbean has lost a few of the smaller islands entirely. Also Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather and Distraction, about chasing tornadoes and political machinations respectively.
I’m currently re – reading Sir Terry Pratchett’s ‘Going Postal.’ I was a postman at the time it came out and back then Royal Mail was undergoing a huge reorganization while people were speculating about its future in world dominated by faster communications. That’s only one reason I enjoyed the book. Moist Von Lipwig’s character contains some Classical allusions, and the book can be read as a parody of Trollope’s ‘The Way We Live Now.’ As a side issue, I’ve seen TV adaptations of both books with David Suchet playing both villains, the Trollope book’s Augustus Melmotte and the Pratchett story’s Reacher Gilt, the latter character coming across as ‘Melmotte, with the brakes off.’ I’m sure Pratchett would have been aware of Anthony Trollope’s connection to the Post Office as well and I suspect ‘Going Postal’ to be a tribute to the earlier work as well as a parody of it.
Thinking Fast and Slow, The Canterbury Tales, and Lojban: The Crash Course.
I finally got Ancillary Justice from the library. I’ve only just started, but I really like it so far. Before that I had All the Birds in the Sky, which I absolutely loved (as in staying up til 2 in the morning because I couldn’t stop reading.)
I’m rereading All Quiet on the Western Front and working my way through a dictionary of mob slang and terminology. There’s this one part that really bugs me in the entry “Air Conditioner Repairmen”, which it says is a humorous term for hitmen “because we put holes in them”.
The punchline is supposed to be “because we ventilate them”. Joke ruined. RUINED!
I’m reading “Poosy Paradise” by Roosh V.
Did a troll really just necro a thread to make the exact same comment he already made way back when the thread was fresh?
Haha, I get it! “Necro” with photo of Brittany Murphy. Good one!
You were banned, Rogark. Stay banned.
Oh wow, guys. Roger is sooooo edgy.
Ahaha, really, Roger? Exactly the same comment? Nothing else clever rattling around in there? My goodness. There’s a wealth of alty-righty books out there to choose from, why don’t you broaden your library a little bit?
Apparently not.
@WWTH @Scildfreja
Not the exact same comment. I finished “Free Speech Isn’t Free”, now I’m reading “Poosy Paradise”.
Wow, just wow.