thanks! I'll try the short stories i think. Crash never appealed to me a concept.

The Tunnel, Ernesto Sábato. — javi2541997

10/10.Excellent. I really enjoyed this book. Sábato had a great talent at developing the psychological behaviour of the characters. Juan Pablo Castel is the name of the main character. He is an artist, and well... he suffers from his own fantasies, dreams and the heavy sense of hopelessness.

Currently reading: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce.

Sonetos by Camões, in both French and original Portuguese. Both are hard.
Then I will read Pero Vaz de Caminha's letter to King Manuel.

In memory of Vernor Vinge, d. 2024 I'm rereading

• A Fire Upon The Deep — 180 Proof

Have you also read A Deepness in the Sky?

I had greatly enjoyed A Fire Upon the Deep and then I had enjoyed A Deepness in the Sky even more. Now that I'm older the neoliberal/libertarian overtones in both book would annoy me but I was politically naïve when I read those books and they had struck me only as being anti-totalitarian. Purely from the sci-fi/narrative perspective, Vinge's novels are outstanding. The Peace War is pretty good as well.

Have you also read A Deepness in the Sky? — Pierre-Normand

Yes. I usually reread only the first book (or, alternately, just one other book) in a series. I'll probably reread Peace War too. Overall Vinge's novels are quite good, especially his more speculative ideas.

Sonetos by Camões, in both French and original Portuguese. Both are hard. — Lionino

A Portuguese poet of the Renaissance. Interesting. I think he also wrote in Castilian.

You will tell me you don't know who the writer of The Lusíadas is? :sweat:

It's quite good. It's nice to dip into from time to time. You have to really sit with each aphorism. I find it similar to my Rumi's collected works in a lot of ways — a lot of short, deep poems.

I am not totally sure where they come from though. I have read The Book of Divine Consolation and most of the Penguin collected works, and it seems like the aphorisms are being pulled from various places. This is good and bad. On the one hand, I really do appreciate them this way. On the other, you do lose some context.

I've seen New Age Eckharts, Perennialist Eckharts, Gnostic Eckharts, and even Buddhist Eckharts in many cases. But I do think these take him out of context. The sermons all focus on the Bible. Often the aphorisms don't seem to be trying to challenge Christian orthodoxy at all, but rather they try to get you to look at their simple principles in a new and deeper light. So, there is a sense where it seems easy for people to "invent their own Eckhart," if this is all they read. And that would be a shame because he is a pretty unique thinker, and in many ways a philosopher with a deep systematic view alongside being a mystagogue.

Tales and Fantasies
by Robert Louis Stevenson

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden role of Chance in LIfe and in the Markets -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"This book is the synthesis of, on the one hand, the no-nonsense practitioner of uncertainty who spent his professional life trying to resist being fooled by randomness and trick the emotions associated with probabilistic outcomes and, on the other, the aesthetically obsessed, literature-loving human being willing to be fooled by any form of nonsense that is polished, refined, original, and tasteful. I am not capable of avoiding being the fool of randomness; what I can do is confine it to where it brings some aesthetic gratification."

The Construction of Social Reality
by John Rogers Searle

Beginning a foray into social ontology for the next few books....

Some foreshadowing of Kant 1,200 years earlier in St. Maximus the Confessor's Ambigua:

We will say nothing here about the fact that the being of every thing necessarily includes a "whatness' [that is, is qualified in some way] and is not simply being; that is the first kind of limitations and a strong indication that there is a beginning to the being of things and of their coming to be. But who would deny that every conceivable being-except for the unique Divine Being, which lies beyond being itself-presupposes the concept of "where" in order even to be thought of and that necessarily the concept of "when" is always and in every manner identified with it... . They belong to those concepts that are always included with others, because the others cannot be thought without them.

But then his ultimate view of extension and motion is quite different. Extension in time and space is finitude. God, rather than being boundless extension, sublates extension — the Myriad (all number/multiplicity) returns to and rests in the Monad (one/unity). Von Balthasar's book on Maximus is quite good and gets into some interesting philosophy of number/multiplicity in Gregory of Nysa, Pseudo-Dionysus, and Maximus.

All created things have their motion in a passive way, since it is not a motion or a dynamic that comes from the creature's own being. If, then, intellects are also created, they, too, will necessarily be set in motion,
because they are naturally led away from their source, simply by existing, and towards a goal, by the activity of their wills, for the sake of an existence fulfilled by value, of well-being. For the goal of movement in what is moved is, generally speaking, eternal well-being , just as its origin is being in general, which is God. He is the giver of being and the bestower of the grace of well-being, because he is origin and goal. Only motion in general comes from him, insofar as he is its origin; motion of a particular kind is directed toward him, insofar as he is its goal. And if an intellectual being will only move in an intellectual way, as befits its nature, it will necessarily become a knowing intellect; but if it knows, it will necessarily also love what it knows; and ifit loves, it must expand itself in longing and live in longing expansion and so intensify and greatly accelerate its motion.... Nor will it rest until it comes, in its fullness, to enter int o the fullness of what it loves, and is fully embraced by it, and accepts, in the utter freedom of its own choice, a state of saving possession, so that it belongs completely to what possess es it completely.

This reminds me of Whitehead's distinction between the drive to "live/survive" and to "live well" in "The Function of Reason."

Children of the Lens (Lensman, #6)
by E.E. "Doc" Smith

Royal Robbins, The American Climber
by David Smart (2023)

Re-reading The Doomed City by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky — Paine

I just started that too. First time for me. — Jamal

Just finished it. It’s fascinating but difficult. I have a feeling that some of the difficulty is down to what seems to me like a not-so-great translation. The novel is very Russian and I think there’s a lot being lost; I could see the sharp sardonic force of the book only dimly through the clunky English rendering. Certain idioms and styles of humour are rendered awkwardly.

The result is that much of the time it’s difficult to get what the brothers are doing and saying. I’m comfortable with anti-mimetic modernism, with the surreal, the psychologically internal, and the inconclusive; the trouble here was that given the context of SF world-building, I was never quite sure of the status of the irruptions of surrealism, such as the chess game in the Building and Andrei’s speech to the statues. I didn’t know how to take it—were these in fact irruptions, or were they mere intensifications of an already unreal reality?

Anyway, it’s a rich and brilliant novel and I could be wrong about the translation. Reflection is allowing me to develop an understanding of it, but I’ll have to reread it.

I agree completely about the English rendering. I have been wishing I could read Russian from the first chapter. It is difficult to access the purely objective descriptions but the dialogues, both inner and outer, are very stilted, like translating one generation's slang into another.

I didn’t know how to take it—were these in fact irruptions, or were they mere intensifications of an already unreal reality? — Jamal

I am still underway in the novel. I will think about that element before commenting.

I think some passages are translated beautifully, like Katzman’s monologue about the temple of culture near the end, but yeah, the dialogue is really stilted sometimes.

I am still underway in the novel. I will think about that element before commenting. — Paine

:up:

Humiliated and Insulted also known in English as The Insulted and Humiliated, The Insulted and the Injured or Injury and Insult… (also known in Spanish as Humillados y Ofendidos) by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Униженные и оскорблённые, Unizhennye i oskorblyonnye

Jesus! Why is the Russian language that difficult?

Solaris by Stanisław Lem
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (RIP)

About Aging, Cicero

Solaris by Stanisław Lem — Jamal

Pretty much the center of imaginary intellects. I love the book and the Tarkovsky movie.

This excludes the error of the ancients who completely removed the final cause from things and held that everything comes about from the necessity of matter.

Aquinas commenting on the silly ideas of a bygone error in the Summa Contra Gentiles. Funny how ideas go in and out of fashion.

About Aging, Cicero — Lionino

Flows like honey.

Lelio, or Friendship, also by Cicero.

Reading The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan. Strongly recommend.

Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology
by Alexander Wendt

A Fighting Man of Mars (Barsoom #7)
by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Barry Humphries' two memoirs - More Please and My Life As Me.

The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (RIP) — Jamal

How did you get on with it? It's an extraordinary book, I thought, but hard going in all its self-reflexive cleverness. It's like someone on the spectrum, with a gift for wordplay, has just let rip.

Curiously when I read TC Boyles' Water Music (the only one of his I like... really like) I was reminded of Barth. This is a ball tearer of a book (as they used to say in Aussie journalism).

How did you get on with it? It's an extraordinary book, I thought, but hard going in all its self-reflexive cleverness. It's like someone on the spectrum, with a gift for wordplay, has just let rip. — Tom Storm

It’s lined up and ready to go; I’ll report back when I get around to reading it. I tried a few pages and liked it. A bit like Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon but easier to get into.

Flowers for Algernon - very insightful about how emotions are conceptualised. Some brutally incisive depictions of growing up a working class guy in a poor family - with added learning disability. This book is heartrending from start to finish.

O man I read that in highschool and loved it. so so good.