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[side_show]

I just finished reading The Orenda by Joseph Boyden.  If a lady with a 3-4 month old baby reads a 500 page book in just over a month, you know it's good.  I'm not usually one for historical novels, but this one is visceral. It's up for several serious awards here and Boyden is my favorite contemporary Canadian author. 

I am one degree of separation from Boyden due to my past work in theatre, so I FB friended him on a whim, and I tagged in him recently in a post about his book, and to my utter delight he responded.  I felt like the cutest boy in school asked me to dance!

[wombat]

The new chapter about the dogs is one of the funniest things about dogs that I've ever read.

[Arachno-capitalist]

I highly recommend the book "S". I'm not a mystery reader but this thing has me caught up. There's the story itself, the margin notes of the two readers, and various side puzzles to solve with the provided props stuck in the pages.

[Choop]

I highly recommend the book "S". I'm not a mystery reader but this thing has me caught up. There's the story itself, the margin notes of the two readers, and various side puzzles to solve with the provided props stuck in the pages.

author? link maybe? i'm intrigued.

[ianmalcolm2]

Bill Bryson.

I wasn't really big on the guy. His writing was interesting, but 'The Mother Tongue' was kind of a cock-up, and his science writing is goofy to the point that it wears on me.

I got 'The Lost Continent' from my pops for Christmas, though, and shit is funny. I was at a gathering today, reading it to ignore screaming babies, and I was laughing my ass off at some of the turns of phrases he gets in there. N.B. that I'm only like 40 pages in, but thus far, it comes with recommendations.

[miles]

author? link maybe? i'm intrigued.

Looks like you can find it here.

That does look interesting.

[wombat]

Bill Bryson.

I wasn't really big on the guy. His writing was interesting, but 'The Mother Tongue' was kind of a cock-up, and his science writing is goofy to the point that it wears on me.

I got 'The Lost Continent' from my pops for Christmas, though, and shit is funny. I was at a gathering today, reading it to ignore screaming babies, and I was laughing my ass off at some of the turns of phrases he gets in there. N.B. that I'm only like 40 pages in, but thus far, it comes with recommendations.

If you like this one you should read the one where he walks the Appalacian Trail, I think it's called A Walk in the Woods. I've also given up on his later books - I feel like he's one of those people who's become so successful that they will publish anything he writes even if it's stupid - but the early ones are good. There's also one where he walks around England. I guess basically, he should have stuck to travel writing.

[Arachno-capitalist]

Mom and I are trading the book now. The reviews are mixed but it is fun. If you like puzzles and riddles you'll like the book.

[theinevitable]

How has anyone, ever, read enough to have an opinion on anything?

The more I read, the more I learn, the more I think that no one I know can possibly have read enough to ever tell me anything.

Lately I think I should read Kierkegaard, and understanding him relies on knowing a lot more about Christianity than I do, and also older philosophers (classical, german, french), and his contemporaries (Hegel?) and of course 20th century people who expanded on his thought (Camus? I don't know?). And that's just one thing. One topic. Albeit the topic is "the relatively recent history of abstract human thought."
To understand the urban planning stuff I want to understand I need to know finance and economics, in-depth details about the local political system where I am working (plus the history of that city, cultural/political/economic). Oh, would it help to know about poverty, transit, utilities, racism, political philosophy? What about architecture, building technologies, information technologies? Do I also have enough time in life to learn new recipes, and keep up with music, and read literature so that I don't go insane? No matter how many times I learn them I forget what ontology/epistemology/metaphysics are, and i forget why the Chinese Room is a bad thought-experiment, and I forget who came up with the big anthropological theories and which theories are stupid and which are clever.

What is extra frustrating is that there are a lot of people I know Making Waves in St Louis who don't know any of that stuff. They just talk like they do and shake hands and smile and get handed jobs. Or, not handed. But instead of the work that I do (reading and learning and thinking) they do the social/interpersonal "work" of schmoozing and making connections. Which ironically gets them into the position of actually being able to do things and accomplish things, while I am sitting here applying to expensive graduate programs.

(the Chinese Room is a bad thought experiment because it uses a homunculus, which short-circuits your intuitions about the workings of the imaginary system. It also relies on using Chinese and our racist ideas of Chinese as incomprehensible symbols. If it were The Spanish Room nobody would fall for it.)

[pmcd9]

It takes a lifetime to learn it all, I guess.

[jaydub]

More practically, it's why we team up to do Big Things.  I'm not saying it's always successful, or that the odds of it succeeding aren't inversely proportional to the number of leaders, but the expertise necessary for success really can only be brought to bear by several minds working toward a common goal.

p.s. A committee is an organism with six or more legs and no brain.
-Heinlein

[theinevitable]

I had to take a break from reading Infinite Jest because the narrator (??) said that black people never have tattoos "for obvious reasons." What?? The black people I know have lots of tattoos. What.

But also I took a break because I went to a party and got drunk and danced near pretty ladies. And maybe flubbed a few interesting inter-sex-interaction situations. But such is life.

"do you live around here?"
"what? no, I live down the street."
"do you... is your apartment close?"
"no, no, this is Mike's apartment."
"..."

Let's be honest, I always exaggerate these situations to make them more entertaining. Maybe that lady was just interested in how close every person at the party lived to the party, and was doing a Project with that information.

[theinevitable]

I am really excited to eventually finish Infinite Jest so that I can read what people think is going on in this book. So far what I am getting out of it is something about the limits of rationality, or people approaching a problem with a "rational" mindset that will get them nowhere. You can keep tenaciously attacking a problem with the same framework and keep on failing, sometimes without realizing why. In attempting to modify your system to explain reality you will get more and more baroque, rather than realizing that the system is flawed from the start. Now that I am trying to type this out of course I am failing to recall all of the ways that this is instantiated.

One exterior example of this behavior is grammatical prescriptivism. Is that ironic?

[Carlos del Vaca]

Mentions of Cracked elsewhere made me think to post: I am reading "This Book Is Full of Spiders" by David Wong. The sequel to "John Dies at the End." It was OK for the first half but really kicked into gear in the second. I must have read 75 pages of it last night.

[AugustWest]

I just finished John Dies at the End yesterday.  I liked it, but I'm not sure I understood the end.

I was psyched to see that the guy who made Phantasm is making the (inevitable?) movie version.