I feel like a dope next to you guys...I just finished the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyers. My 14 year old female students recommended them to me. Lots of sexual tension, but no actual sex. Very addictive books. What can I say? I teach middle school.

dolores cannon's 'the convoluted universe 1,2,3
doris lessings's "shikasta" & "the sirian experiments"

"Accelerondo" by Charles Stross. Heady book about a future where constant access to ever increasing computing power creates "post humanity" and digitized conciousness allows space travel and reintegration of various "selves".

"Not by Fire but by Ice" A different view (why I like this site) on what is really happening to the weather.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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

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

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.”