Books I've read so far in the past 5 months that I would recommend to others:
- Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners by Michael Erard
- The Enneagram by Helen Palmer
- The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane
- Love as a Way of Life by Gary Chapman
- The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
- The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D.
Emotional Alchemy - How the Mind Can Heal the Heart by Tara Bennett-Goleman
The Duchess of Malfi - John Webster
Hadn't read any plays from this period before (apart from the obligatory Shakespearean stuff). Really dark and visceral - felt almost gothic. Sex, murder, incest, revenge, lycanthropy and more murder. Unff, as they say.
I'll have to check that out. Right now I'm on a Shakespeare binge, making my way through all of his works, but I've made a slight detour into John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1630ish). It's pretty wild stuff, also featuring murder, sex and incest. Something must have been going around in the water at the time, lol.
Yeah, I think it's one of Kafka's more boring books. It's like a one-joke song that just never goes anywhere beyond the initial conceit. It's about isolation and alienation (of artists? of depressives? or diasporic communities? of modern man? something like that) like a lot of his works, but it doesn't have the pervasive and sometimes funny bizarreness that fills his other books. Amerika was his most memorable for me. It's about a young man who is banished by his family to America for sexual indiscretion.
"How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
-- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius ~ Pierre Hadot (again)
I have my eye on The Possessed by Dostoyevsky and Man's Search for Meaning by Frankl
ἀταραξία
finished the handmaids tale by margaret atwood.
i liked it quite a bit. my only complaint is that i didn't really buy the plot as "realistic" enough to be actually scary, maybe because i'm not in an area where i'm surrounded by many christian fundamentalists but i think mostly because of the speed in which the events happened in the book - like overnight, kaboom, dystopia. but i was still really invested in what happened with the protaganist, and the prose was lovely, and overall the book kept me engaged. it wasn't exactly what i was expecting - more enthralling fiction, less thought-provoking feminist statement - but i liked it. maybe even better than i would have otherwise.
now i've just started sartre's existentialism and human emotions which so far kind of reads like a wordy advertising pamphlet for existentialism but its kinda fleshing out some of the basics of the the philosophy to me that i haven't been familiar with.
@lungs, I taught the film a few weeks ago, just in case you are interested in checking it out:
I just finished reading Moth Smoke again (Mohsin Hamid).
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
― Anais Nin
i saw that it was made into a movie when i googled it and i was kind of disenheartened and just kind of assumed it would be trashy, lol...like i can just see it going bad with hollywood getting its hands on the whole "group sex" thing. but since you mentioned it and even teach it, i think i'll check it out.
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
― Anais Nin
I'm reading a few books on life coaching now.
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Dual type (as per tcaudilllg)
Enneagram 5 (wings either 4 or 6)?
I'm constantly looking to align the real with the ideal.I've been more oriented toward being overly idealistic by expecting the real to match the ideal. My thinking side is dominent. The result is that sometimes I can be overly impersonal or self-centered in my approach, not being understanding of others in the process and simply thinking "you should do this" or "everyone should follor this rule"..."regardless of how they feel or where they're coming from"which just isn't a good attitude to have. It is a way, though, to give oneself an artificial sense of self-justification. LSE
Best description of functions:
http://socionicsstudy.blogspot.com/2...functions.html
Recently reread.
Slaughterhouse-Five
By Kurt Vonnegut
Last edited by Aylen; 01-27-2014 at 10:56 PM.
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF PLATO (over one year in small parts)
ἀταραξία
Last ones :
The Story of A Marriage - Andrew Sean Greer http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/bo...rf-t.html?_r=0
Summer Crossing - Truman Capote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Crossing
Now mid-reading James Baldwin , Giovanni's Room
Recently finished Kafka on the Shore by Murakami, which I loved.
The Stand, again.
I am currently reading Lanark.
Apparently it was critically acclaimed but it reads a bit like the late night sexually frustrated ramblings of a depressed ILE who is bad at editing down his thoughts and blames all of his women troubles on the women.
Last book I read that I really liked was Alice Munro's "Dear Life."
Last book I read that really disturbed me was Tao Lin's "Taipei."
Last poetry book I read that made me wish that the poet was a happier person by now (after all those years of self-medicating through writing poetry!) was Frank Bidart's "Metaphysical Dog."
um, right now i'm reading james patterson along came a spider because i read a different one of his alex cross books awhile back and i liked it a lot. but either i was in a weird frame of mind or his writing improved a lot after this one because i'm not really impressed. the killer was already caught awhile ago and the book still keeps going and the cheesy ebony & ivory romance plotline makes me want to barf.
Have just finished The Reader by Bernard Schlink. Watched the movie as well - not so good , unless you wanna see Ralph Fiennes in one performance more.
I´d type Hanna Schmitz LSI and Michael as ILI.
i just finished the hunger games this morning on the bus. it was a fast, engaging read. not a masterpiece but still worth reading. the main thing i didn't like was that katniss always makes the right decisions. she gets stuck in these morally ambiguous situations but she works with them the best she can and never gets pulled into self-preservational corruption. its unrealistic, especially considering she's in an urgent, life-or-death situation. also theres the moral irony of enjoying a book where children slaughter eachother while being disgusted by the antagonists partly because they get off on watching children slaughter eachother. but i'm complaining too much. i still plan on buying the 2nd book when i go to the store over lunch today.
Lungs' book club. Like Oprah's book club, only better.
So Nassim Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes.
Diluted , amateur. I liked the idea of striving to eliminate preconceived notions into which people can "squeeze" what is actually there or new or unknown to them, but not much other than that. It can all be reduced to this basically : "we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences." I don´t want to misjudge him, so I´ll go on with Antifragile.
This book is for those seeking that which is absent in their lives and for those looking for true happiness, inner peace and love.
There are no hidden secrets, rituals or rites – the key is and always has been in our hands.
Those who are genuinely seeking to comprehend the true meaning of life and acquire an understanding of the reason behind their individual circumstances will find plain and simple answers from the distilled essence of knowledge passed on to us by Saints and Holy Men spanning some 2,000 years.
Writer: Igor Bondar.
mobi: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-Q...it?usp=sharing
fb2: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-Q...it?usp=sharing
epub: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-Q...it?usp=sharing
doc: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-Q...it?usp=sharing
so ive been reading a lot of conspiracy-ish things lately. first trance formation of america which is written buy a woman who claims to be a former mind-controlled cia sex slave. lots of horrible but juicy stories about politicians and famous people, like dick cheney's huge schlong and robert byrd's extreme sadism. ultimately not very believable and i never finished it because it was basically one story of brutality after another repeatedly to the point where it actually became tedious.
then i started the men who stare at goats, about secret military operations (like people staring at goats trying to make their hearts explode), and it seemed promising but it was given to me by my boyfriend who had torn out pages for his art projects so i'll have to finish it some other time when i have a decent copy. it was sort of funny. i haven't seen the movie.
now i'm reading the secret history of the world as laid down by the secret societies and i absolutely LOVE it so far. its hard for me to find a book these days that i regret having to put down but this is one of those. the author talks about schools intended for initiates of secret societies like the freemasons and the illuminati and how they all learn a history of the world that is different from the mainstream version. he claims that he was almost initiated himself but chose not to join because he would have had to swear an oath of secrecy and wouldn't be able to write the book. which is obviously pretty hard to believe and i can't take all of his claims TOO seriously, but the truly fascinating thing about the book is that he ties together common threads from various myths and religions, as well as from science, and threads them all together into a single coherent narrative. telling a story that can be "true" in all cultures throughout the world. its highly speculative (in an ancient aliens sort of way?) but whatever, its interesting as hell. so far i'm not far past genesis in the bible/the battle between jupiter and the titans/etc. and its a long book with a ways to go. based on what i've read so far i highly recommend it to @Hitta because it seems up his alley and incorporates a lot of planetary and astrological shit...how its referenced in the bible and stuff like that.
hmm dang this review really slays it http://www.salon.com/2008/01/28/secret_societies/
@leckysupport @Animal @Solaris what are you reading?
just finished kafka on the shore by haruki murakami. i dont think it will linger with me but it was solid and had some really good spots. it reminded me of dreams.
now reading annie liebovitz at work.
recently finished Heidegger's Elucidations of Holderlin's poetry, which I definitely recommend for anyone not averse to his style, now onto Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death. probably going to read The Brothers Karamazov next.
4w3-5w6-8w7
The House of the Spirits.
SO.so.so.good.
Everything interests me but nothing holds me.
Several going on at the moment:
- AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame by Dr. Paul Farmer -- I actually had to read this book for a course in epidemiology and liked it so much that I decided to read it again. I love medical anthropology because you get a palpable sense of epidemiological issues from the ground-up and get some really intimate stories from the people directly affected that you don't really get from white papers. Farmer writes beautifully and he is someone who has actually contributed an immeasurable amount to global health worldwide, it's mind-boggling. I'm going to read his Haiti After the Earthquake next.
- Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow -- highly influential novel that is a really interesting melding of history and fiction about New York City at the turn of the 20th century; Doctorow has a wry style that makes for somewhat dry, but entertaining reading. I love this period of history.
- Relational Frame Theory:A Post-Skinnerian Account of Human Language and Cognition by Steven C. Hayes, et al. -- I've been really fascinated by Hayes's work for the last few years, and it's had a huge impact on the way I view the world and anxiety/depression. It's a bit dense, lots of behaviorist jargon, but once you get the basics, it's easy to pick up the gist of what is meant.
- On Human Finery by Quentin Bell -- I've been on a fashion kick lately and picked this up after reading Bonnie English's (excellent) A Cultural History of Fashion in the 20th and 21st Centuries; Bell was Virginia Woolf's nephew, and he approaches fashion with an anthropological eye -- as the most visible, though often most opaque, manifestation of cultural semiotics. Beautifully-written, and very insightful if you want to understand the cultural undercurrents of fashion, although it's limited by the time it was written (1947), and really pre-dates what we would consider globalized prêt-à-porter fashion that English's book covers so well. Also good (but not really as edifying as English's) is Christopher Breward's Fashion in the Oxford History of Art series. Breward's book as many more, and better illustrations, though.
"How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
-- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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Last edited by Skepsis; 09-05-2015 at 03:49 AM.
about to finish the final book of the Amber series by Roger Zelazny, started power reading the series through a week or so ago. (it's my 2nd time reading it)
if you don't mind ebooks, here's the whole thing in multiple formats... (the second series has quite a few scanning errors, but nothing that can't be read around pretty easily (I actually had fun with this trying to figure out some of the messed up words )
https://app.box.com/s/y7arhfb7ijzgig9lskcr