Great Books by Men
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled by Randomness was labeled by Fortune magazine as "one of the smartest books of all time." But I wouldn't hold that against Taleb, who writes brilliantly on the way we attempt to impose logic or causality onto stuff that's coincidental or mere luck. It's more relevant and less unnecessarily provocative than Dawkins' God Delusion - and by avoiding religion (something I should have learned to do) manages to communicate more healing to its intended audience.
Mark Kingwell's Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City is the Canadian social theorist's most engaging read to date. Although ostensibly about the urban terrain, the book is less Mike Davis (City of Quartz) or even Jane Jacobs (Death and Life of Great American Cities) than it is like Robert Venturi's Learning from Las Vegas: Kingwell uses the physical city as a launching point for an extended meditation on the nature of local and non-local consciousness.
The Threat to Reason, by Dan Hind, is an entertaining and fast-paced book-length essay on the abuse of Enlightenment rhetoric and reasoning - by both ends of the political and social spectrum. Hind conducts an equally sharp deconstruction of the logic and language employed creationists/brights, right/left, globalists/environmentalists in an effort to liberate what worked about the Enlightenment from the way it has been worked over.
the latest
latest episodes
"Henderson, The Rain King" by Saul Bellow.
"The Razor's Edge" by Somerset Maugham.
"The Devil's Dictionary" by Ambrose Bierce.
"Goat Song" by Frank Yerby.
"A Garden of Sand" by Earl Thompson.
hmmm, i had one of those extremely odd coincidences happen to me this morning that leaves one questioning the randomness of the universe. i'm a rational guy, always looking for the "reason" to everything, but the big Wow seems to be undermining my reason, especially with her humor. coincidences are so over the top at times as to require laughter. so, i thought it was a pretty good punchline when, just as i was wondering about randomness, i opened boingboing and saw this review of Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness". random?
OH books? Yeah I generally read a few a week. No biggie. My latest:
Salamandastron (Jacques) - A serious, fearless work from literary heavyweight Brian Jacques. Highly reccomended for the more intelligent reader.
The Overcoat (Gogol) - Overrated.
The Gods Themselves (Asimov) - Fantastic SF from this great underground author. Brought me to fucking tears.
Hunger (Hamsun) - Boring. Read this on a whim, think I'll stick with "real" literature (i.e. SF).
Wild Boys (Burroughs) - Post-apocalyptic SF interspersed with long boring sections of repetitive nonlinear gay pederast erotica.
The Heart of a Dog (Bulgakov) - I don't know what this idiot was thinking. Disgusting and very unrealistic in my opinion.
The Pilgrim's Progress (Bunyan) - I suppose this was ok. I found Tam Lin (Dean) to be superior, however.
Teatro Grottesco, Thomas Ligotti.
Another recent, and awesome, book by a man.
I don't think I'd like to be in the same room as Mr. P-Orridge. That dude has always creeped me out.
:)
Well, I don't want to see a book thread die so soon, so I'll speak up. My favorite books from a male point of view would include the following:
Everything by T.C. Boyle
Tom Perotta- Little Children and The Abstinance Teacher
George Saunders
Christopher Buckley
Most everything by Philip Roth, including, "My Life as a Man."
Most everything by John Updike
I'm not sure I totally want to get drunk with these men, but I would eagerly await anything any of they wrote.
Can anyone explain the use of the terms "brights" -as in "creationism/brights" to me ? I've never heard it before. It sounds like some kind of Wall Street Cabbala term...
Soon I hope to be able to comment on Great Books by Those of Deliberately Ambiguous Gender.
Fooled by Randomness sits half-read on my shelf. Not because it was bad, but because I was just nodding my head at every paragraph. People need to think like that. Life's a lot easier when you realize that it very well might not mean anything.
Same thing with the God Delusion. I didn't see a reason to continue, because I agreed with Dawkins' ideas, and I wasn't getting anything out of it. Oh, and because he's a superior prick about everything. I believe he's right, but there's no reason to be mean about it. Forceful, yes; resolute, yes; but I really think he crosses the line into "pedantic asshole."