What are you Reading?

[T-6005]

Well, shit - your post reminded me of a book by Ronald Wright called a Short History of Progress that I wanted to reread. I just tore apart the house looking for it with no luck.

I found it! I started reading it on the way to school this morning, and it's every bit as good as I remember. I particularly like his idea of a progress trap - fighting the idea that all technological advancement is a positive. For example, technological advancement in explosives has led us to create the atomic bomb, a weapon that could kill us all.

Paleolithic hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 - by driving a whole herd over a cliff - had made too much. They lived high for a while, then starved.

Generally, he makes the argument that civilization is an experiment, and that the experiment's scale has become too large for the locale it's been happening in (the planet). That it needs to be controlled and that our naive view of progress as a unidirectional positive force for change needs to be changed.

It's entirely up to us. If we fail - if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us - nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea.

[Apathy]

A Separate Peace

not sure what to think yet. Quick read, i'll probably get around to finishing it in a day or two. Does anyone else have any opinions on it?

[RageAndLov]

I am reading A Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I like it so far.

[darea]

I've just finished reading "strange fruit" by Lillian Smith.
It was good. But it keeps reminded me how awful people used to be in the south and how hard it must still me nowadays for African Americans to trust white people...

[Mota Boy]

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

I've been meaning to read this for a while, ever since I read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. At first I fought it - it'd been a while since I had read fiction and I seemed to resist being sucked in to another world. But damn, Kesey could write. Utterly fantastic job at character and world creation - if that is the endpoint of taking massive amounts of psychosomatic drugs, he's got a helluva selling point (though I suppose one could argue the actual endpoint would be pursued and ultimately arrested by the FBI and seeing your career deteriorate into obscurity - still, perhaps a small price to pay for leaving behind an indelible mark upon culture and a universally-acclaimed work upon American literature). The endpoint of the novel itself has been revealed unto me some time ago, which at times didn't propel me on as it otherwise may have, and colored my perception of it, but the final few pages were such a joyous reclamation of life that it made me want to go out and take on the world. Good stuff. Classic. Read this mother.

Now on to Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct

[wheelchairman]

One Flew is fantastic. I'm also not another great reader of fiction but I just really enjoyed it. Sometimes a Great Notion is also good, but in a completely different way, certainly a good novel if you want to know how environmentalists destroyed the Oregonian economy. (Not that it discusses that at all, but I'm on an anti-environmentalist binge right now).

Currently I'm reading some book by Noam Chomsky. I remember I used to like him. I still like him. He's obviously very smart. But some part of me what's my intellectuals to be more cynical. Like employ more of Neo-realism when talking about international relations. Less idealism please.

I'm so drunk I could barely spell international

[Vikica]

just noticed this thread...
Therese Raquin by Emile Zola
it's fascinating how much patience one has to have to read this book.
Spirits of the Dead: Tales and Poems by Edgar Alan Poe
morbid I know, but it makes me shiver when the night becomes too long. =0)

[renato piquette]

horacio quiroga´s animal tales.this guy´s crázy,they´re about cutting little girls´ heads

[Alison]

This morning I finally finished The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. It was good, but it would have been a lot better had i not known what was going to happen

I am now reading She May Not Leave by Fay Weldon. I so far like it a lot

[Alison]

The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway. I like the way it's told, but thinking, maybe it's a bit overrated...maybe.