It's your mind pal.

As he says in ATD: Good Luck.

:victory:

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, which I just finished, is stunningly good.

Now...

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

A great challenge to many past and current views of human prehistory. In addition to the scientific research, the book specifically discusses elements of 'Enlightenment' political thinkers that made me glad I had accidentally read them in the past.

I really liked this book, especially the exploration of the wisdom and depths of the indigenous world-view.

Cartesian Meditations
by Edmund Husserl

Swann's Way
(À la recherche du temps perdu #1)
by Marcel Proust

ISO...lost time. Thanks Amazon!
Boxed Set

I, too, was greatly impressed by the influence of indigenous voices, both as a competing vision of social order and how the thinking in Europe was changed through the encounters.

What I find most interesting is the challenge to the 'stages of development' framework often used to link human capacity to particular levels of organization. The presentation reveals a bias that I did not realize that I was keeping alive.

On the Problem of Empathy: The Collected Works of Edith Stein (vol. 3), Edith Stein

ISO...lost time — Pantagruel

Awesome box set.

Years ago I read the first two volumes but faltered in the third, which means I may have to begin at the beginning again if I want to read the whole thing (which I do). That's no bad thing, because those first two are excellent.

Yes, I have been wanting to tackle this for some time. I'm transitioning to semi-retirement in the new year so I can make the time to do it justice. First impression, it is pleasantly readable.

Yes, it does demand commitment, though as you say it's not all that difficult to read (if you don't mind long sentences).

Enjoy the journey.

Hah! I will say, that opening quote is probably my favorite of all time.

I really hope you enjoy it. I stopped at pg. 910 - no joke. Yes, I am that stupid.

:victory:

I really hope you enjoy it. I stopped at pg. 910 - no joke. Yes, I am that stupid — Manuel

300 pages in and loving it.

Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought
by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson

I've seen this book mentioned a few times on TPF. Looks really good.

The Glorious Revolution by Edward Vallance

The above will most likely be my last book of the year so time again for my annual reading list. Sadly will be missing @Streetlight's list and recommended readings this year. In 2022 I read:

• Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality, and Advertising in Capitalist Society by W.F Haug
• Time, Capitalism and Alienation. A Socio-Historical Inquiry into the Making of Modern Time by Jonathan Martineau
• The Ego and The Id by Freud (reread)
• Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Freud (reread)
• Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud
• Écrits by Jacques Lacan
• On the Reproduction of Capitalism by Louis Althusser
• Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Vladimir Lenin
• Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory by Enzo Traverso
• The Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Žižek
• Distinction by Pierre Bourdieu
• Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis by John Smith
• Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism by Intan Suwandi
• Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primative Accumulation by Silvia Federici
• Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James McPherson
• The Making of Bourgeois Europe: Absolutism, Revolution and the Rise of Capitalism in England, France and Germany by Colin Mooers
• Empire of Capital by Ellen Wood
• The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 by Christopher Wickham
• Medieval Europe by Chris Wickham
• Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval Social History by Rodney Hilton
• Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory
• Landscapes: John Berger on Art by John Berger
• Cultures of Uneven and Combined Development: From International Relations to World Literature edited by James Christie and Nesrin Degirmencioglu
• Art History as Social Praxis: The Collected Writings of David Craven edited by Brian Winkenweder
• Nietzche, The Aristocratic Rebel by Domenico Losurdo
• Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism by Peter Hudis
• The Civil War in the Unites States, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels edited by Andrew Zimmerman
• Old Gods, New Engimas: Marx's Lost Theory by Mike Davis
• Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517-1648 by Mark Greengrass
• The Glorious Revolution by Edward Vallance

Killing Commendatore Part I and II, Haruki Murakami.

My 2022 list of Japanese books I read:

Yukio Mishima:

Confessions of a Mask.
Thirst for Love
The Age of Blue
The Sound of Waves
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
After the Banquet
Runaway Horses
The Decay of the Angel.

Yasunari Kawabata:

The Dancing Girl of Izu
The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa
Snow Country
Thousand Cranes
The Lake
The House of the Sleeping Beauties
The Old Capital
Beauty and Sadness
Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki:

Some Prefer Nettles
In Praise of Shadows
Seven Japanese Tales

Haruki Murakami:

Hear the Wind Sing
Pinball, 1973
A Wild Sheep Chase
Sputnik Sweetheart

Kenzaburo Oē:

A Personal Matter
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!

Seicho Matsumoto:

Far Approach

Shintaro Ishihara:

Season of the Sun
The Eclipse of Yukio Mishima,

Teru Miyamoto:

Muddy River

Looking for reading even more Japanese works in 2023.

2022 Summary. My favourite fictions this year were The Glass Bead Game and Jude the Obscure. For non-fiction, I really enjoyed The Dawn of Everything.

• Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault
• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault
• Foundations Of Cognitive Science by Michael I. Posner
• The Forever War (The Forever War, #1) by Joe Haldeman
• The Future of the Mind by Michio Kaku
• Conceptual Issues in Psychology by Elizabeth R. Valentine
• Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
• The Sociology of Knowledge by Werner Stark
• The Mantle of Kendis-Dai (Starshield, #1) by Margaret Weis
• The Quintessence of Socialism (Classic Reprint) by Albert Schaffle
• Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber by Anthony Giddens
• Foundation (Foundation, #1) by Isaac Asimov
• Foundation and Empire (Foundation, #2) by Isaac Asimov
• Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov
• Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov
• Foundation and Earth by Isaac Asimov
• Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asimov
• Forward the Foundation by Isaac Asimov
• The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber
• The Immortal Mind by Ervin Laszlo
• A Theory of Justice by John Rawls
• Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos by Peter E. Gordon
• On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle
• Political Liberalism by John Rawls
• Desperate Remedies by Thomas Hardy
• Jonathan Wild by Henry Fielding
• Lectures on Ideology and Utopia by Paul Ricoeur
• Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Maryanne Wolf
• The Intelligence of the Cosmos: Why Are We Here? by Ervin Laszlo
• Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
• Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell
• The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Classic Editions) by Ernst Cassirer
• The Warden by Anthony Trollope
• Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe by George Eliot
• Critique of Instrumental Reason by Max Horkheimer
• Knowledge and Human Interests by Jurgen Habermas
• The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
• Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy 1796-99 by Johann Gottlieb Fichte
• Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, and Effects by Michael D. Jackson
• Reconstruction in Philosophy by John Dewey
• Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective by Karl-Otto Apel
• Lord Foul's Bane (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, #1) by Stephen R. Donaldson
• The Illearth War (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, #2) by Stephen R. Donaldson
• The Power That Preserves (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, #3) by Stephen R. Donaldson
• The Wounded Land (The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, #1) by Stephen R. Donaldson
• The One Tree (The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, #2) by Stephen R. Donaldson
• White Gold Wielder (The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, #3) by Stephen R. Donaldson
• Introduction to Systems Theory by Niklas Luhmann
• Oneself as Another by Paul Ricoeur
• Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology by Edmund Husserl

Within a Budding Grove (À la recherche du temps perdu #2)
by Marcel Proust

Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from the Renaissance to Enlightenment by Ellen Wood (rereading)

I really hope you enjoy it [Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon]. I stopped at pg. 910 - no joke. Yes, I am that stupid — Manuel

I’m at around page 750 and while I do love it and think I’ll probably read it again, it’s so overwhelmingly maximalist and sometimes repetitive (almost repetitive in its endless inventiveness if that makes sense) that I’m getting tempted to skip sentences. And I’m forgetting some of the characters or getting them mixed up, maybe because they haven’t been fully drawn.

But it’s far too early to assess it. When I finished Inherent Vice my thoughts were not entirely positive but I’ve come to see it as top class, so I think these things take a while to digest. Although I get the feeling that AtD is indigestible first time around.

I shall plough on.

It was just lazy on my part not to force myself to read the last 100 or so pages, but I kept putting off till' it was way too late to read it, I forgot so many characters and plot that I have to start from zero.

Strangely, his prose in ATD is probably his easiest to read. I also thought quite well of Inherent Vice, the movie was shit though.

Nearing the end of Pynchon’s Against the Day. The mining tycoon Scarsdale Vibe, at the climax of the Colorado Coalfield War in 1914, gives a speech about workers:

“So of course we use them,” Scarsdale well into what by now was his customary stemwinder, “we harness and sodomize them, photograph their degradation, send them up onto the high iron and down into mines and sewers and killing floors, we set them beneath inhuman loads, we harvest from them their muscle and eyesight and health, leaving them in our kindness a few miserable years of broken gleanings. Of course we do. Why not? They are good for little else. How likely are they to grow to their full manhood, become educated, engender families, further the culture or the race? We take what we can while we may. Look at them—they carry the mark of their absurd fate in plain sight. Their foolish music is about to stop, and it is they who will be caught out, awkwardly, most of them tone-deaf and never to be fully aware, few if any with the sense to leave the game early and seek refuge before it is too late. Perhaps there will not, even by then, be refuge.

“We will buy it all up,” making the expected arm gesture, “all this country. Money speaks, the land listens, where the Anarchist skulked, where the horsethief plied his trade, we fishers of Americans will cast our nets of perfect ten-acre mesh, leveled and varmint-proofed, ready to build on. Where alien muckers and jackers went creeping after their miserable communistic dreams, the good lowland townsfolk will come up by the netful into these hills, clean, industrious, Christian, while we, gazing out over their little vacation bungalows, will dwell in top-dollar palazzos befitting our station, which their mortgage money will be paying to build for us. When the scars of these battles have long faded, and the tailings are covered in bunch-grass and wildflowers, and the coming of the snows is no longer the year’s curse but its promise, awaited eagerly for its influx of moneyed seekers after wintertime recreation, when the shining strands of telpherage have subdued every mountainside, and all is festival and wholesome sport and eugenically-chosen stock, who will be left anymore to remember the jabbering Union scum, the frozen corpses whose names, false in any case, have gone forever unrecorded? who will care that once men fought as if an eight-hour day, a few coins more at the end of the week, were everything, were worth the merciless wind beneath the shabby roof, the tears freezing on a woman’s face worn to dark Indian stupor before its time, the whining of children whose maws were never satisfied, whose future, those who survived, was always to toil for us, to fetch and feed and nurse, to ride the far fences of our properties, to stand watch between us and those who would intrude or question?” He might usefully have taken a look at Foley, attentive back in the shadows. But Scarsdale did not seek out the eyes of his old faithful sidekick. He seldom did anymore. “Anarchism will pass, its race will degenerate into silence, but money will beget money, grow like the bluebells in the meadow, spread and brighten and gather force, and bring low all before it. It is simple. It is inevitable. It has begun.” — Thomas Pynchon

This is the final flourish reminding us that Vibe is the arch-villain, and it’s also a concentrated outpouring of Pynchon’s anger towards capitalism. I’ve found the stuff on US labour conflicts in the book really interesting, because I didn’t know much about it. I’m guessing this history is covered in Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States, a book I haven’t read.

Nearing the end of Pynchon’s Against the Day. — Jamal

Finished it. A big fat mess. Recommended.

Next: Stephen Gregory, The Cormorant.

This is an old union song sung to the melody of an Appalachian spiritual.

C'mon all you working people
Good news to you I'll tell
All about how the good old union
is coming here to dwell

Which side are you on? (sung four times)

Rich man say he's gotta put us down
and educate his child.
His children live in luxury
and ours are almost wild.

Which side are you on? (sung four times)

Now we got the good fight
I know we're bound to win.
Cause we got those gun thugs
looking mighty thin.

Which side are you on? (sung four times)

:up:

That took. a. long. time.

Should've been finished much sooner, but attention issues and all. Just finished Locke's Essay for a second time. Majestic and a true classic. I will forever be a fan.

Now onto Leibniz' New Essays.

As for novels, finished reading Higashino's latest novel am now reading Tales from the Gas Station by Jack Townsend.

The Birth of Tragedy: from the Spirit of Music
by Friedrich Nietzsche

Just finished Locke's Essay for a second time. Majestic and a true classic. I will forever be a fan. — Manuel

I've just started reading that!

It is well worth the effort, there is a treasure trove of useful and insightful stuff in it. And even in areas in which one might disagree with him, there is food for thought.

If you're stuck or need help in one section, let me know, I'm happy to help.