I am currently reading a book called "Philosophy of the Common Task" by Nikolai Fyodorov. It's a very obscure book that I spent too much on (I really regret it now). But the book is really interesting, and the guy who wrote it (Fyodorov) had some really interesting thoughts. Pretty much he was into cosmism and transhumanism, and how we humans need to unite (even the dead, as in the resurrection of humans) to ascend into the higher reaches of space and achieve physical immortality. I don't remember much of it as I still haven't finished the book. But the guy had some really strange and interesting ideas, I mean he was alive during the 1800s and he was respected by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and many more and was even called the "Socrates of Moscow." What's also funny is that he was a Christian and he influenced the Russian space program. So yeah, really interesting guy. But you will never find his book, why? Cause it was only translated once into English and was never translated again, it does exist in Russian and it's quite cheap in Russian. So if you can read Russian might as well buy it.
i sure am glad nothing like that happens in our modern world.
anyway i got into reading when i got sick this winter and am still pushing through grapes of wrath. as if i needed more reminders of how messed up things can get. but i really like the writing style.
Was looking thru my little collection of books & found I still had a copy of The Color Purple by Alice Walker from when it was required reading in highschool. It’s on the shorter side but I stopped reading at the last couple chapters the first time & was determined to find out how it ended. glad I did, really good read with a satisfying ending!
I've been slacking off but I've got a chapter left of Inherent Vice which has been pretty good, and I plan on watch the PTA film afterwards. My only other Pynchon experience has been the Crying of Lot 49 (some excellent prose but anticlimactic -- which I get is kind of the 'point' but ehhh) andthe first half of Gravity's Rainbow (which was great but I got lost in it because I wasn't taking notes or keeping a list of characters etc.) On the non-fiction front I've been going through a book about China's Belt and Road Initiative and volume 2 of Caro's LBJ biography (which has been excellent).
Finished Inherent Vice and then Kairos (Jenn Erpenbeck). Now I'm moving on to Plato's the Republic while I wait for Extinction (Bernhard) to come in the mail. On track for 52 books this year but I'd really like to hit 70.
I've finished Treasure Island and the first part of 1984 by the way.
I don't know what to read next and if I want to continue the later...
Either Forrest Gump, Alice in Wonderland (and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (and the Great Glass Elevator) or any other books I got in my stash.
Re-reading The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk. Great book, great movie starring Bogart if you haven't seen it. Got a copy signed by Wouk for pretty cheap on Ebay recently
Love reading books about WW2 or any other period drama written during or around the era (this book was written in 52 or so I believe) because they still have period-correct language and social mores intact. And no, I don't mean that in a political way at all lol; I mean that the author actually lived through the times and can accurately depict the way characters spoke and behaved, as well as other details about everyday life (technology, etc.) that are otherwise lost to history. I've learned more about how people lived back then from period fiction (books or movies) than any other way. The Caine Mutiny is a font of interesting tidbits about life in America just after the attack on Pearl, as well as being a junior officer in the US Navy back in the day, in addition to being a great courtroom drama with well-written characters that illustrate what an amazing grasp Wouk had on the human condition and how to describe it in words.
Currently reading the complete works of Khalil Gibran. Almost at the end as I am Secrets of the Heart, and the last two books are kind of small (only 50 pages each it seems)
I've finished Treasure Island and the first part of 1984 by the way.
I don't know what to read next and if I want to continue the later...
Either Forrest Gump, Alice in Wonderland (and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (and the Great Glass Elevator) or any other books I got in my stash.
I've randomly started reading Die Hard as I really like the movie.
Since I've been to a garage sale I got many more books to read (like Robinson Crusoe, the LoTR trilogy and the novelization of the first Back to the Future movie).
Currently finishing Kings of the Wyld, but I've had the book on standby for more than a year because I randomly lost my reading habit (once again), but I'm trying to get it back. I have like 4 books I bought throughout the year already waiting to be read.
About Kings of the Wyld, it had been a really long time since I last read a fantasy book, and even if its not the most complex or best written book it's still been a really entertaining read, a classic exciting adventure quest with a good dose of humour and good characters and lots of cool fantasy tropes. It's been a welcome change of pace from all the dense or depressing books I had been reading
Reading On the Edge of Reason by Miroslav Krleza after browsing New Directions' catalog of foreign lit. It's fine so far but I'm not really "feeling it".
I am currently reading "A Canticle for Leibowitz" by Walter M. Miller, Jr. It came out in the early 1960s, and it is about humanity several centuries after an atomic war presses the reset button on human knowledge and scientific progress. It opens up with a post-apoc Albertian monastery finding documents written 600 years in the past by an inventor and someone nominated for sainthood, a man named Leibowitz. There's a couple of time jumps and with it a certain amount of scientific progress.
It's been an interesting read and I can see the influence that it has had on video games and other pop culture items, namely Fallout (I can't be certain but I think this is something Josh Sawyer would cite as a clear influence given the way New Vegas and Pentiment both seem to have direct inspiration from this). I'm about 3/4 of the way through and just devouring it.
Currently I just pick and poke View attachment 39480
Usually at this. I listened to the beginning of The Scarlet Gospels a week or two ago, and it seemed promising.
I loved The Name of the Rose, and it was the most surprising thing to me because everything surrounding it *seemed* so boring and not like a genre I would ordinarily partake in. I originally picked it up because of an interview about the inspiration for the video game Pentiment. But the first moment I found myself engrossed in it was the theological debate about whether laughter was a sin or not. When I realized that I had enjoyed that, I knew that it was a book for me.
I've randomly started reading Die Hard as I really like the movie.
Since I've been to a garage sale I got many more books to read (like Robinson Crusoe, the LoTR trilogy and the novelization of the first Back to the Future movie).
If you like Die Hard, you should read the novel that it was adapted from, "Nothing Lasts Forever" by Roderick Thorpe. The movie was originally meant to be based on that and star Frank Sinatra, then Schwarzenegger, then Sly Stallone before they finally landed on Bruce Willis. The book has a radically different premise and ending but it's really enjoyable!
If you like Die Hard, you should read the novel that it was adapted from, "Nothing Lasts Forever" by Roderick Thorpe. The movie was originally meant to be based on that and star Frank Sinatra, then Schwarzenegger, then Sly Stallone before they finally landed on Bruce Willis. The book has a radically different premise and ending but it's really enjoyable!
My bad, it's that book but in my language they gave it the movie's name (and cover art) as the translation was made around the time the movie came out (as usual for many books it seems). I liked reading First Blood after watching Rambo.
I didn't know about Frank Sinatra. But I knew that somehow the movie was meant to be a sequel to Commando with Schwarzy. I could've seen Stallone as the main actor as it's not too far from what he was doing in his other movies.
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