Current Reading - Books best thread
Today I started Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America by Jeff Wiltse.
Today I started Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America by Jeff Wiltse.
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Current Reading - Books best thread
I'm reading 'Titanic: The Last Great Images' by Robert Ballard which arrived yesterday from Amazon.
Great price too, only $16 US for a lovely 200 page hardcover book with tons and tons of images that I'd never seen before.
I'm fascinated with the Titanic sinking and its really a treat for people like myself who are interested in this sort of thing. Some of the images are truly haunting...Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Is it because you've sunk so many threads by haplessly sailing into rhetorical icebergs?Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Coming a bit late to this, but on the subject of Unweaving the Rainbow, I have to agree with PG; I think it's a fantastic book.
Almost by its very nature it's a bit variable in quality, being more or less a collection of essays on different subjects, albeit mostly connected by a common theme - but when it's good, it's very good indeed, and I can certainly think of great chunks of it that I agree ought to be compulsory reading for school kids. It does indubitably go off the boil a bit in places, and it's easy to pick out isolated sections that are questionable, but I think overall it's a book with an entirely laudable purpose and that contains some superb, illuminating writing.
If I recall correctly, Wyatt's on Toro's side on this one, however.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Just finished Guns, Germs And Steel by Jared Diamond, which I found relentlessly fascinating and would recommend to anyone. Loads of information and lucid reasoning in an exceptionally easy-to-read style.
Think I might look for more Simon Mawer after so thoroughly enjoying The Glass Room.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Having finished The Bell Jar I'm now on a Folio Society collection of the best of Saki's short stories. I've never read anything by him before. The person writing the introduction is quite sure that, had he survived the war, he'd have become a fascist shortly afterwards, and now and then some thoroughly disagreeable views are detectable just below the surface. It's hard to tell though because so much of the writing is taken up with taking the piss out of narrow-minded characters.
Even so they're fucking funny.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Thirded on "The Secret History", I love that book, every fantasy I could have had about university life is in it...Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America was interesting, but the points it made were a little belaboured. This morning I started Open Sky: Sonny Rollins and His World of Improvisation by Eric Nisenson.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
... which turned out to be part-interview, part hagiography. Time now for Portnoy's Complaint.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Bruno Schulz's second one, The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (a title translated as The Hourglass Sanatorium for the incredible Wojciech Has film it inspired) turned out to be even better than his first. Everyone should read it, then watch the film, then read it, then watch the film, then. . . .Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Just read Banks's The Player Of Games and enjoyed it a lot. Inevitably, it reminded me of The Glass Bead Game, which is one of my favourite books. Any recommendations for what Banks to read next?Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Doesn't matter really now. For proper horrors-of- -war-in-space, Consider Phlebas & Look to Windward. Very good. Broader picture of the Culture and some of its less savoury aspects. For more of a personal account of savagery & treachery, Use of Weapons. Personally I'd save Excession for after a couple more, but it too is fantastic.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
I didn't like Consider Phlebas very much. I think the Culture novels have got better as they go along. The three most recent: Look to Windward, Matter and Use of Weapons are all fantastic.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
I think I enjoy the superficial stuff the most: as the series goes on, the ship names get more whimsical and the drones get bitchier. Makes me giggle.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Just finished Norman (father of Nik) Cohn's stunning The Pursuit of the Milennium, a history of apocalyptic heretic cults int eh Middle Ages. I would absolutely recommend it to everybody - people who liked Q by Luther Blissett especially.
Also a few books on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome - less fun.
Am now reading Berger and Luckmann's classic The Social Construction of Reality which so far requires a little more sociology than I possess,and A.T. Hatto's translation of the Nibelungenlied.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
They're pretty bitchy in the one I read. Well, Mawhrin-Skel is. Anyway, I'm particularly intrigued by the position of drones in theI think I enjoy the superficial stuff the most: as the series goes on, the ship names get more whimsical and the drones get bitchier.
Culture. Characters in TPOG were at pains to point out that they're people who can't be ordered around, and yet there most of them are, constantly serving humans (well, not necessarily humans, but you know what I mean). I get the that Minds seem to be dominant, to the extent that anything is, but there still seems to be a kind of caste/class system operating with drones and non-drones. Is there a book which explores this aspect in more detail?Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Not that I recall. A good chunk of Excession is about Minds, though.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Consider has a bit about how some drones are rated below human intelligence and are not much more than robots that can speak while anything equal or above a human is a full citizen. minds then to have masses of drones and avatars that just slaved to the ship rather than having their own personality.
One on the critiscisms of the Culture by other cultures in a couple of books is that while everyone may be equal and are free to do whatever they want. When it comes down to it the Minds actually run everything (orbital, ships etc.) and if they don't want to do what everyone else wants them to then tough.
People in Contact and SC volunteer to act in that odd way of 'following orders' it's part of what sets them apart.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
I think you kind of do want to read Consider Phlebas before Look to Windward, though, although it's a pretty loose connection. Maybe GY should go with Use of Weapons. It's not like you can really go wrong, but. I don't think there is a specific consideration of the social position of drones; the position of Minds is just as much about service to individuals as it is about being exponentially superior in intelligence, etc, and I think this kind of paradoxical 'equality' applies across the board. Just like the paradox of individual 'freedom' in the Culture.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Finished Paul Offit's Autism's False Prophets, which debunks the autism/vaccine scare here in the US. Very good job of explaining the scientific process and the need for additional studies, and puts the scientific issues in an easily comprehensible form for the lay reader. My one complaint about the book is that when he criticized the Lancet for their handling of the Wakefield article, he mentioned the epidemiological study published in the Lancet on casualties in Iraq as another embarrassment to the journal (something along the lines of "their editor even published an article on casualties caused by the war in Iraq that were much higher than any other studies done"). Then in the next chapter he talks about the purpose that epidemiological studies serve in looking at large populations when other trials aren't possible.
I'm not reading Gang Leader for a Day, by Sudhir Venkhatesh.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Why aren't you reading it? It's enjoyable, and you can spend the time figuring out which character in The Wire everyone is.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Damn, what's my problem today? Now reading, I'm now reading Gang Leader for a Day.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
You gonna let him bully you into reading it, just like that?Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Back off, buddy. I can get anyone to read anything, anytime.
Mind you, getting them to return the books I've lent them...Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Kapuscinski's Shadow of the Sun. Mostly brilliant and fascinating, although every now and again he does the "Africans are like this", "Africans think that" thing, although it's not quite like that legendary article from Granta.Comment
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