Do any of you actually read? If so post last reading. What did you think?
>>24116468I'll start. I'm currently reading Madame Bovary and Spinoza. I like them both a lot. I like Madame Bovary, very beautiful. I like how Spinoza destroys Judaism
>>24116468I read Kipling's The Bull that Thought today. It's classic genius Kipling, which means no-one here has read it.
>>24116488just read it, I liked it!
>>24116468today I've read Agamemnon, about 30 pages of The Savage Detectives, and some poems from a collection called 'The Book of Bird Poems.'
>>24116556what did you think?
>>24116686ah man... I thought a lot. fate and prophesy, poetry and helplessness, sweet delicate birds... I walked to a sanctuary and saw an owl and a kestrel. The owl was raised in captivity and 'never learned to be an owl.' Aeschylus and his drama, the old men in the chorus... young poets running around Mexico... the birds... mysterious delightful birds. I thought a lot.
>>24116468Demons by Dosto. Was good but was a bit of a slog at times and the ending felt a little unsatisfactory. Might revisit again sometime. I enjoyed how it portrayed radical times and makes me think we're living in a similar time of political turmoil. The quote about how it's always the lowlives and scum who become very important in times of strife struck me as very relevant.>>24116692Sounds like you're living the dream... I think my brain is too over-stimulated all the time and too stressed to really appreciate things as I once did.
>>24116468Moby Dick, second readJust finished the Town-Ho's story (gee what a slog)
>>24116692that sounds nice
>>24116468The last book I finished was The Disappearance of Ritual by Byung-Chul Han, which was ok. Chapters 1-3 were fine, I think chapter 4 called Festivals of Religion was genius, and then most of the book after that was alternatingly insane or slightly interesting. I'm reading Vita Contemplativa right now, it's significantly better consistently (same author).I also reread the Euthyphro for a natural theology class, and that was pretty interesting. I was struck this time how it seemed like it was written as a refutation of Miletus after the fact. The first few pages are set up where Euthyphro mocks Miletus, and Socrates establishes that in every important way they share the same religious opinions. It seems like Plato wrote it to refute the popular Athenian idea of religion that it used to justify Socrates' condemnation. Finally, for a Phil of Language class, I read Sense and Reference by Frege. I was pleased by the quality of most of the arguments. Frege's insistence on the publicity of sense and the distinction of sense from perceptions/mental images of an object was fascinating. I won't lie though, a lot of the stuff about subordinate clauses in the last third of the paper went over my head. I needed the professor to explain that stuff.
I'm reading Russell's History of Philosophy, which is enjoyable. He doesn't pretend not to be biased, so I'm making sure to take it all with a grain of salt.I'm also reading The Sot-Weed Factor which is all kinds of awesome. In between the satire and the political and philosophical discourse everyone's just farting and shitting and raping and scamming and stealing all the time.
Remains of the Day, Ishiguro
>>24116758Excellent book, I liked how autistic the main character is
>>24116468The last thing I finished was a Bolaño a short story just yesterday.Oddly prescient, though I did not quite get much out of it. Interesting.Also the Stirner meme book.
>>24116707is moby dick really worth it?>>24116730pretty cool.
>>24116468Finished The Emigrants by Sebald a bit ago and now working through Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance. I hardly ever dislike anything I read, so it might not mean much, but both are some of the best things I've read in a while. I also need to read more non-fiction, so I've been slowly going through The Evolution of Medieval Thought by David Knowles and find it interesting. I'm more wired for fiction I think, but one of my goals this year is to build a habit of reading philosophy. I know there are tons of phil nerds on this board, so I'll ask: should I just find the complete works of plato and aristotle, work through the most important ones, and then keep on going forward in time?
>>24116799yes, I think that's a good approach. take your time with plato i say. pick a dialogue to read twice
>>24116785Actually, I will elaborate. The story is Last Evenings On Earth.It struck too close to home. I had a similar trip with my father, once, also in México.I feel like I understand the tale, and I don't at the same time.
>>24116880would you like to say more about the trip anon?
>>24116880The scenarios and everything were also horribly real. As if perfectly summoned up from the void of time, the grime, the prices, the characters, the emotions, it's all oddly familiar.It almost feels like I was there.>>24116892Sure. It wasn't from Mexico City to the Coast, but from the Coast to Mexico City, which is funny. It was a recent one, too, last year. I was a bit younger than B, and my father was twenty years older than the father of B. The dynamics were roughly the same. B brought a surrealist anthology, I brought my phone and the complete works of Jorge Luis Borges.It just struck me how similar the father of B was to mine. Although I did chuckle at B's idea that such a man would find a woman "too old" to fuck. The only reason mine didn't go at it during the trip was because HE was too old, and his prospective partner was young.The odd placidity and rising tension, too, was deadly accurate. The strange ruminations, naïve imaginings, paranoid suspicions, too.Maybe I'm just projecting that trip into the story. But that just felt like a completely open dimension to me. Everything else, however, felt like I wasn't understanding much, like a color blind person who can only see two colors.
>>24116468Last books I have recently read was:Don Quixote - Cervantes [Motteux translation]Notes from Underground - Dostoevsky [Garnett translation]No Longer Human - DazaiAmerican Psycho - EllisPlanning to read and buy next:Lord of the Rings - TolkienThe Bible [Norton translation or the Penguin Classics version]
>>24116468I read lovecraft’s complete works and now I can’t get my takeout from the front step until sunrise because some retard in my building left the door to the basement open.
Finished this month:Dialogue and Dialectics by Donald Davidson - some interesting perspectives on Socrates and his elenctic method viewed from the perspective of a semantical externalist. Presupposes much knowledge of Davidson's work on semantics in order to truly"get it", but is quite deceptive in the respect because it is an easy read. Fulda's Laudation is gay and filtered continental cope.Thesen Über Feuerbach Marxism is evil and postmodern.Horkheimer: traditionelle und kritische Theorie Starts good, Horkheimer was familiär with Popper, Kuhn etc. but draws all the wrong conclusions. Bishop Barron: ideas have consequencesI agree with everything he says, but it is still not a good "book"Ephesians - absolute kino, especially the armour of God chapter Jesus Sirach - my first time enjoying aphoristic wisdom literature, something to which I have been allergic to almost my entire life. (I liked the book of wisdom as a maybe ten year old) Acts of the Apostles - read with my children, absolute fire.Still re-reading:Donald Davidson: enquiries into truth and Interpretation (reading most essays for the second time, some for the first time)Essays on Actions and Events Anscombe: intention (reading forth time)Human Life, Actions and Ethics (reading first time)Kritik der reinen Vernunft (4th or 5th time, hard to tell)Phaidros (1st) Jesus Von Nazareth (vol. I) by Benedikt XVI (2nd time after many, many years)Davidson: Truth and Predication (constantly reading it)De Interpretatione (constantly reading it)Romans - philosophically challenging, especially on akrasia and the law of the heart. Not everything St. Paul writes makes sense.All current reads are absolutely great. (I don't read slop)Soon reading:GalatiansAll books written by John the Apostle Philippa Foot: Natural goodness (will read for the second time)How to be Trustworthy by K. Hawley (read some of her papers already, very good)Theology of the body by JPIIJesus von Nazareth (vol II)Dummett: Truth and other Enigmas Wolfgang Künne: Conceptions of truth (started reading once, but didn't finish, this time I will!)Paolo Crivelli: Aristotle on Truth (same as with Künne, but got filtered even harder, see picrel)
>>24117405I finally forced myself to run to close the door and get everything as fast as possible.Everything’s pretty much frozen.I hate lovecraft.
>>24117498First of all: Lovecraft's monsters aren't even the type to hide in basements waiting to eat neckbeards.Second, count yourself lucky the god of the homeless did not accept your generous offer to his children and your take out was still there after an hour. What did you order?
