I've recently made -- more or less -- a survey of Chuck Palahniuk's books: Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Choke, Survivor, and I'm currently reading Haunted.

Edited by author 07-11-2007 02:17 PM
Posting about what I just finished reading...

The Gene Wolfe series 'Shadow of the Torturer' and it's additional volume 'The Urth of the New Sun'.

I think that people need to escape sometimes, we shouldn't always have to feel that we're reading for social status or for some weird concept of immediate educational betterment. Serious books are pleasing enough, but every now and then a little of the old classic sci-fi draws us out of the current age of helplessness and back into a time when technology wasn't the enemy and our future was one of hope instead of just a blindly rushing new dark age.

They're good books.
Read 'em!

"Upside Down" by Eduardo Galeano is notable!

The Anthropocentric Approach to Computing and Reactive Machines by Stoyan O. Kableshkov -- surprisingly, copyright 1983.
Begins:
It is logical to assume that the future belongs to a more human-like computer philosophy. Therefore the Functional Model provides a solid base for an alternative to the procedural machine. There are several reasons to prefer the label 'anthropocentric' to the less general 'functional'.

As would be expected from someone who can speak four languages and think in three, the english of this book has an unusual and interesting style.

Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov.
A view from the inside of the USSR by someone who lived through the terror of communist dictatorship.

"Finding Darwin's God," by Ken Miller.

Excellent book about the intersections of evolution and religion, without denying either evolution or religious belief in the slightest. Only work of its kind I've ever found - everything else goes soft one way or the other.

I'm reading Pier Giorgio di Cicco's the Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City (Mansfield Press, 2007). Di Cicco, the Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto, challenges us to invigorate the "urban motive", beyond amenities, conveniences and obvious revitalizing, to get at the real reason people live together, because if they don't have a real reason, they won't have community. The cohering of citizen stake-holders, groups, interests is crucual to livable cities and communities. To Di Cicco, the city’s vitality is measured not in the plans and accountings which impose structure and quantify value but in the spontaneous, authentic eruptions of creativity that give expression to joy. In the creative city, art happens not because it has been programmed but because it cannot help itself. And, averring that “this book is not about what can be done better, but what we cannot do without”, it is into this breach that Di Cicco launches his manifestos, prescriptions for the rehabilitation of a “civic aesthetic” that recognizes “the desire of the citizen for elements one no longer dares to ask for – conviviality, joy, delight in wonder, the shared forum of imagining and play, of unreserved laughter and serenity .... [and] all the playful and ecstatic registers that justify city life, without which the city becomes a place of business, or indentured servitude.”

I would recommend The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle to any and everyone.

Graham Hancock - Supernatural and Daniel Pinchbeck - 2012.
I'd also recommend Life After Death by Deepak Chopra and Far Journies by Robert Monroe.

"Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion" by Jeffery Kripal. I've never been to Esalen but have always heard about it, especially growing up and living in northern California. This book explain how influential Esalen was in seeding the culture with "new" ideas, from Alan Watts and Timothy Leary to Fritz Perls and his encounter groups, to Fritjof Capra and the uniting of science and spirit, etc. Sort of a think tank for the counterculture.

Tracy Kidder - Soul of a New Machine
Won the Pulitzer in '82 I believe. Not the best writer in the world (or more accurately doesn't seem to have had the best editor in the world), so I'm still a little put off that it won a Pulitzer, but the subject matter at the time must have been especially compelling.
It's ostensibly about the process of building a cutting-edge computer, but it's really about the intimate relationship between the engineers and the machine. Since I'm reading this in connection with a class about cyborgs and cybernetics in art, this really drives home the idea that we've all been cyborgs ever since we became dependent on fire, and that the mere fact that humans designed and built a machine makes that machine (any machine) a stupendously intricate cyborg with functional components that reach through time and space back to the childhoods of engineers and arguably beyond to encompass the whole of human experience and the whole of the universe.

Edited by author 10-26-2007 04:17 PM
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A Heinlein. Excellent tale of the unfettered potential of humanity, using the vehicle of a man born on Mars seeing Earth from a naive perspective. Some great characters (especially Jubal who reminded me of Robert Anton Wilson at times) and some great language such as the humble 'I am but an egg'. I was interested to find that this book was the origin of the term to 'grok'. Packed with intriguing concepts such as being 'water brothers'. Parallels with the saviour archetype and an interesting take on the paranormal... Truely deserving of it's cult status and a highly enjoyable read.

For all of the literature geeks out there I highly recommend Jasper Foorde. His imagination seems to have no bounds. From his pulp fiction-like Nursery Crimes to the Thursday Next series. If you are well-read you will enjoy all of the inside humor.

2012. the return of quetzalcouatl...

this book looks at the idea of a conciousness shift in 2012... and things that may be linked to that.

Sex, Drugs, Einstein and Elves
it's the reason i'm here