What are you reading right now?

Finished Clarke's Childhood's End. Very nice read, liked it a lot better than Rendezvous with Rama solely because I didn't get bogged down by hard SF details AND wooden characters.

Thinking about my next reads. Roadside Picnic's the next serious SF novel. I've also got the Retief! Omnibus if I want to dip into that. Thinking about something light-hearted. Maybe it's time to go read the second Dying Earth book.
 
A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
Paradise Lost
The Portable Nietzsche
Road to Reality, Roger Penrose
Frankenstein
Family Happiness, Tolstoy
Emerson Essential Writings

(This is not tsundoku, this is just how I read things)
 
A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
Paradise Lost
The Portable Nietzsche
Road to Reality, Roger Penrose
Frankenstein
Family Happiness, Tolstoy
Emerson Essential Writings

(This is not tsundoku, this is just how I read things)
I mean, I also rotate through a batch of stuff, but jeez.

I, the Jury
Roadside Picnic
Retief! (collection of all of the Retief stories)
He Rules Who Can (historical pulp fiction by Arthur Brodeur)
 
I mean, I also rotate through a batch of stuff, but jeez.
When I see a book I want to read, especially when it's non-fiction, I usually want it in my brain ASAP, not after I finish reading some other long book. So I read a lot of books at once, but each at a few chapters at a time. It also makes it easier to read a lot, because I would start to get bored reading one thing through, personally. Jumping around helps keep me fresh.
 
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When I see a book I want to read, especially when it's non-fiction, I usually want it in my brain ASAP, not after I finish reading some other long book. So I read a lot of books at once, but each at a few chapters at a time. It also makes it easier to read a lot, because I would start to get bored reading one thing through, personally. Jumping around helps keep me fresh.
Yeah I try to fill quotas per book too.

The pattern is usually mixing in different genres and types of books. I'm determined to read as many science fiction classics as possible, which means Roadside Picnic. But I also wanna go through my other genres I own, so I am Jury and He Rules Who Can are here. Then I want variety of format, so the Retief! collection is here. If I want to dip into even more short fiction variety, I've also got Pangborn's Good Neighbors and Other Stories and Walter M. Miller Jr.'s Beyond Armageddon.

Or, for non-fiction, I've got The Lost City of Z.

I burned myself out on conventional philosophy books when I was younger. I understand them, but I just don't feel motivated to go read them any more. Probably because I had to read shitloads for University.

Anyways, I'll probably throw up a Graham Greene book to replace the SPillane one. Still gotta finish the Vance Dying Earth series, The Foundation Trilogy, The rest of the Black Company trilogy, and The rest of the Stainless Steel Rat's first trio. Then it's off to reading a Whodunnit like Rex Stout and some fantasy like Leiber's.

There's so many good books that I rarely buy new authors if at all.
 
A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
Paradise Lost
The Portable Nietzsche
Road to Reality, Roger Penrose
Frankenstein
Family Happiness, Tolstoy
Emerson Essential Writings

(This is not tsundoku, this is just how I read things)
I read a lot of D&G, is Anti-Oedipus your first of their works?
 
It is! The only other French postmodernism I've read is Simulacra and Simulation
I haven't read that yet. Anti-Oedipus is really great, the idea that Freud didn't go far enough, it's not just the family that shapes our subconscious but also the socioeconomic state of the world, this letter that Deleuze sent to Guattari before they started writing together is really illuminating:

"The forms of psychosis do not evolve in an Oedipal triangulation, or at least not necessarily and not in the way that is claimed. That's essentially it, it seems.... It's hard to get beyond the 'familialism' of psychoanalysis with its daddy-mommy (the text of mine that you are still reading adopts this approach). So the issue is to show how, in psychosis, for example, socioeconomic mechanisms can bear directly on the unconscious. I don't mean the mechanisms per se - profit margin, benefit - it's much more complicated and you addressed this once when you said that madmen don't simply create a world, they also create a political economy, or when you and Muyard were discussing the relationship between capitalist crisis and schizophrenic break."
- Gilles Deleuze, letter to Felix Guattari (July 16, 1969)
 
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I haven't read that yet. Anti-Oedipus is really great, the idea that Freud didn't go far enough, it's not just the family that shapes our subconscious but also the socioeconomic state of the world, this letter that Deleuze sent to Guattari before they started writing together is really illuminating:

"The forms of psychosis do not evolve in an Oedipal triangulation, or at least not necessarily and not in the way that is claimed. That's essentially it, it seems.... It's hard to get beyond the 'familialism' of psychoanalysis with its daddy-mommy (the text of mine that you are still reading adopts this approach). So the issue is to show how, in psychosis, for example, socioeconomic mechanisms can bear directly on the unconscious. I don't mean the mechanisms per se - profit margin, benefit - it's much more complicated and you addressed this once when you said that madmen don't simply create a world, they also create a political economy, or when you and Muyard were discussing the relationship between capitalist crisis and schizophrenic break."
- Gilles Deleuze, letter to Felix Guattari (July 16, 1969)
I'll come back once I finish it (should be about a week or so) and dig it into it with you. You should definitely check out Simulacra, it's only become more relevant since it was written
 
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I'll come back once I finish it (should be about a week or so) and dig it into it with you. You should definitely check out Simulacra, it's only become more relevant since it was written
Great, I do own a copy of that book but haven't gotten around to it yet, maybe that will be my next read. :slayer:
 
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How far into it are you?
Disclaimer: I cheat by using audiobooks, but I have been doing it for a decade now so it's not changing anytime soon.

I'm just past the intro where they escape the shop agents and find a motel after hitchhiking out of the city. I can see the skeletons of Carrie and The Dead Zone in Firestarter, and I can feel the lessening of the quality inherent in repeating yourself. Perhaps that sounds a bit too vague and retarded of a criticism but I've read enough King now to know when he's phoning it in. I've read 20 of his books at various random points and now I'm simply reading them chronologically.
 
Disclaimer: I cheat by using audiobooks, but I have been doing it for a decade now so it's not changing anytime soon.

I'm just past the intro where they escape the shop agents and find a motel after hitchhiking out of the city. I can see the skeletons of Carrie and The Dead Zone in Firestarter, and I can feel the lessening of the quality inherent in repeating yourself. Perhaps that sounds a bit too vague and retarded of a criticism but I've read enough King now to know when he's phoning it in. I've read 20 of his books at various random points and now I'm simply reading them chronologically.
I've never read it, so I have no idea where that is lol, but I've heard good things about the book, so hopefully it improves. I've read a little bit of King, people will make fun of anyone who reads him because he's too normie or whatever, but I've found that he's been consistent enough in quality for me to where I know I'll find enough enjoyment in whatever book of his I pick up to justify reading it, even if it's not a 10/10 mind blower. To be fair, though, I've mostly read his modern stuff (The Mr Mercedes Trilogy and the solo Holly Gibney stuff for example) but I've also read some of his older stuff like Rage. I also read his essay on gun control, which I thought was pretty good. I'm not American, so it's not exactly something that affects me, but I still enjoyed it. From what I remember about it, he's actually far less liberal on gun control than you'd think.

https://daretobebetternow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/guns-king-stephen-copy.pdf <--- You can read it there, it's not long.
 
I've never read it, so I have no idea where that is lol, but I've heard good things about the book, so hopefully it improves. I've read a little bit of King, people will make fun of anyone who reads him because he's too normie or whatever, but I've found that he's been consistent enough in quality for me to where I know I'll find enough enjoyment in whatever book of his I pick up to justify reading it, even if it's not a 10/10 mind blower. To be fair, though, I've mostly read his modern stuff (The Mr Mercedes Trilogy and the solo Holly Gibney stuff for example) but I've also read some of his older stuff like Rage.
I just get the feeling like I know exactly what's going to happen in a by the numbers fashion. Unless the shop is part of some lovecraft shit. I recommend Misery, Revival and The Long Walk. And yeah it's just more telekinesis shit. Much like Brady in End of Watch (I hecking love psychics).
I also read his essay on gun control, which I thought was pretty good. I'm not American, so it's not exactly something that affects me, but I still enjoyed it. From what I remember about it, he's actually far less liberal on gun control than you'd think.

https://daretobebetternow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/guns-king-stephen-copy.pdf <--- You can read it there, it's not long.
Sorry to say but you are wrong about this. It may have been a decent read ten years aago, or even five, but much of it rings hollow now. Even without the benefit of hindsight, there is something particularly retarded about bemoaning the lack of dialogue between the political factions in an essay, while at the same time making fun of paranoid gun toting conservatives repeatedly in the same essay. If you goal is to persuade, this is not the way to do it. Rage was great, Guns was not.
Also he doesn't know the difference between automatic, and semi automatic. He literally wrote that the Bushmaster AR-15 has "anything other than single shot mode". Read a more detailed and autistic summary here in the King thread:
Then he blames the NRA for giving good ratings to politicians who won't do anything to fund "mental health services". As if mental illness is merely a disease that can be cured like any other, by throwing money at research until you figure out how antibiotics work against physical disease.
 
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Sorry to say but you are wrong about this.
Hey, I'm fine with being wrong. Like I said, I'm not American, and it's been a little bit since I read it, so this was bound to be the case. Thanks for the summary, I'll check it out.

(I hecking love psychics).
I've not delved much into psychics in pop culture. Do you have any movie or book recommendations with some cool psychics? You've probably already seen it if you like psychics, but have you seen Scanners by Cronenberg? I'm not a big Cronenberg guy and I need to rewatch it, but I remember enjoying it.
 
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