Homicidal_Squirrel
Adventurer
Woke up this morning and read All Tomorrows, by C. M. Kesemen. I've read it a few times. It's pretty short at 112 pages, and a good amount of illustrations, but it is just such a fascinating book.
What are you reading in 2023?
- Thread starter Ralif Redhammer
- Start date
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
After reading one to two essays per day, I've finally finished this one.While I usually prefer to power through one book at a time, a recent trip to the library (which has a section with a permanent sale of books that people have donated or which they've elected to cull from their stacks) resulted in my picking up a copy of Paul Krugman's Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future.
The book is a collection of essays that Krugman wrote for the New York Times, specifically from 2004 through 2016, in which he confronts the vicious mendacity that certain pundits and politicians put forward with regard to things such as Social Security, Obamacare, etc. Given that I was reading Krugman's column fairly religiously for much of that period (and still would be, if the Times hadn't elected to put it behind their paywall), many of these are pieces which I've read before, but have forgotten. Given that each article is only three to four pages long, I'm finding it a very pleasant way to quickly refresh my memory.
It was quite good, though there were a few parts that didn't quite sit right with me. While Krugman is a trustworthy authority on anything related to economics (i.e. reasons to be skeptical of cryptocurrency, why austerity during a recession doesn't work, the failures of tariffs, etc.), and related areas of economic policy for governments, he's slightly more stern on social/moral issues than I think is helpful. When you take a major political party, including all of the people who vote for them, and say that they are "necessarily, at this point, bad people," I'm simply not willing to go so far in condemning so many people, especially since I think that reinforces ideological entrenchment, which is something which needs to be overcome rather than written off as an unsolvable problem the way Krugman seems to. But that's an overall minor point, and I still think the book has a lot of useful lessons to impart.
I'm now reading Dead Certain by Mariah Stewart, the second in the series and in which the second of the three criminals is released and is on his way towards killing off the three people one of his "partners in crime only long enough to swap victims" wants dead. He's already killed the first two and the police have twigged to the fact that this one woman, who was involved with both of them (one was her business partner and another her business neighbor) may be next, but they haven't quite figured out what's going on just yet. An enjoyable read, even though I could do without the impending romance between the third potential victim and the chief of police protecting her, which is being telegraphed from a mile away. (That's probably to be expected when the author of your murder mystery/thriller has won romance author awards....)
Johnathan
Johnathan
Eyes of Nine
Everything's Fine
Finished:
- Atomic Habits it was good. I'd like to get an actual copy, and really try to be systematic implementing all the ideas in it
- Mapping of Love and Death vol 7 in the Maisie Dobbs series. Good stuff, she's in the heart of the Depression now. It happens that the prologue of the book takes place about 50km from where I live, so that was cool (apparently for a while the author lived nearby)
- Nightmare Country graphic novel, in the Sandman universe. Good stuff from James Tynion! Mysteries exposed, solutions not provided. I look forward to vol 2
- Kingdoms & Warfare. I was really looking forward to this when I backed the Kickstarter. The kingdom mini-game was pretty good, although I'd like to try it. In my reading, it felt a bit more complicated than I think most of my groups would want to deal with. And then the Warfare part - oh my gosh. They tried to abstract a tactical miniatures game into just 5 ranks. There's a lot more to it - 4-5 more stats for units. I get it, it's Warfare. What I did like is that in any given "War", you have all your units, but meanwhile the PC party is fighting the leaders in a traditional D&D (could be used for any variety of D&D like games) tactical individual person/monster level combat. And while the unit-level war and the PC-party level combat are happening simultaneously, the PC-party level combat will impact the unit-level war. If I needed it right away - I could see using it.
Atomic habits is very good. I need to read it again.
I'm selling both of my complex mcdm books. While filled with cool ideas, I'll never use them.
Third book in the four-book series, Dead Even by Mariah Stewart. Now the third criminal in the "switch our kill lists" pact is out of jail, but he has no desire to fulfill his side of the bargain. Plot twist: one of the other two (whose exploits were detailed in a previous book), is back in jail with a life sentence and has hired a friend - who just got out of jail himself - to strong-arm the third pact member into doing the jobs he signed up to do.
Johnathan
Johnathan
Ralif Redhammer
Legend
I finished George MacDonald's Phantastes. It starts off strong with a picaresque adventure through Faerie, but meandered too much in the middle (including my dreaded "here's a story that the main character is reading that goes on for way too many pages" plot device). It ended strong, at the least.
I read a couple REH short stories, including Shadow of the Vulture, the appearance of Red Sonya.
I read Lin Carter's The Quest of Kadji. Lin Carter has risen in my ranking of Appendix N authors over the years. Certainly not to the top, but I think his influence is bigger than people credit and I enjoy the heck out of his tales.
Now I'm reading Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsong.
I read a couple REH short stories, including Shadow of the Vulture, the appearance of Red Sonya.
I read Lin Carter's The Quest of Kadji. Lin Carter has risen in my ranking of Appendix N authors over the years. Certainly not to the top, but I think his influence is bigger than people credit and I enjoy the heck out of his tales.
Now I'm reading Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsong.
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
So, I thought I'd mentioned before in this thread that I'd been reading Lisa Zunshine's Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (which I came across when reading an essay several years ago as to why so many adult men were ardent fans of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic), but looking over the last several pages of the thread, I apparently neglected to mention it (along with one or two other books that I've been working my way through lately). An oversight on my part, there.
That said, I had some free time this morning and finished the last few sections of Zunshine's book. It was, overall, extremely insightful, but very much not what I was expecting.
To wit, I had thought this book would focus very much on the emotional aspects and responses that fiction (attempts to) evoke in us, and how works of fiction attempt to do so. Instead, the book was very much focused on the "theory of mind" mentioned in the title, which is an aspect of what the author refers to as cognitive literary theory. More specifically, "theory of mind" is our evolved tendency to attribute actions to the emotions (i.e. state of mind) being experienced by someone else (be that person real or fictional). The example the author uses at the beginning of the book is how, at the beginning of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, we automatically assume that Peter Walsh's trembling when he greets Clarissa Dalloway is due to what he's (emotionally) feeling when he sees her, rather than his having some sort of disease, being cold, etc.?
This forms the basis for what the book discusses at length, building on it to discuss ideas of "metarepresentational tags" (i.e. that our brains "tag" information with notes about when/how/from whom we learned that information, and in what regard we hold it, i.e. as a belief, a fact, something someone else believes, etc., and that these tags in conjunction with the information in question can inform us about those sources so tagged as much as about the information itself...for instance, we can tag "that coffee shop across the street is a health hazard" with "Jane says that," and that can tell us about Jane more than anything else is we know that she's a hypochondriac who is always wiping down her desk), episodic and semantic memory (the former being memories with strong metarepresentational tags, such as the anecdote about Jane and the coffee shop, while the latter have either weak tags or no tags at all, i.e. "the Earth is round," as we don't usually bother tagging that with when we learned it, who we learned it from, or even a tag about "I believe that"), and several related ideas.
Utilizing these, the book's core theory is that one of the reasons we read fiction (and the author goes out of her way to make sure that we understand that she's not saying that this is the only reason) is that doing so exercises our theory of mind (ToM) ability to attribute characters' actions to their personal dispositions. We might be wrong about what a character's disposition is, but even when we are the challenge is entertaining in and of itself (which is why quite a few types of fiction set out to deliberately play with our ToM in this regard: unreliable narrators are discussed at length, as are detective novels).
The takeaway here, at least as I understood it, is that reading fiction is itself a creative act on the part of the reader(s), in that we're "filling in the blanks" behind what the characters are doing. It's a fascinating idea, and one that I don't think is without merit. It's certainly something worth considering, and in that regard Zunshine's book is one that I'd recommend to others (though certainly not as light reading!).
Having finished that, I'm also preparing to wrap up Benjamin Franklin's The Art of Virtue (which is a book that Franklin titled but never actually wrote; this book's editor, George L. Rogers, has instead taken selected writings of Franklin's – personal correspondence, newspaper articles, speeches, quotes from Poor Richard's Almanac, etc. – and put them together to demonstrate various virtues that Franklin both lived and championed).
That said, I had some free time this morning and finished the last few sections of Zunshine's book. It was, overall, extremely insightful, but very much not what I was expecting.
To wit, I had thought this book would focus very much on the emotional aspects and responses that fiction (attempts to) evoke in us, and how works of fiction attempt to do so. Instead, the book was very much focused on the "theory of mind" mentioned in the title, which is an aspect of what the author refers to as cognitive literary theory. More specifically, "theory of mind" is our evolved tendency to attribute actions to the emotions (i.e. state of mind) being experienced by someone else (be that person real or fictional). The example the author uses at the beginning of the book is how, at the beginning of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, we automatically assume that Peter Walsh's trembling when he greets Clarissa Dalloway is due to what he's (emotionally) feeling when he sees her, rather than his having some sort of disease, being cold, etc.?
This forms the basis for what the book discusses at length, building on it to discuss ideas of "metarepresentational tags" (i.e. that our brains "tag" information with notes about when/how/from whom we learned that information, and in what regard we hold it, i.e. as a belief, a fact, something someone else believes, etc., and that these tags in conjunction with the information in question can inform us about those sources so tagged as much as about the information itself...for instance, we can tag "that coffee shop across the street is a health hazard" with "Jane says that," and that can tell us about Jane more than anything else is we know that she's a hypochondriac who is always wiping down her desk), episodic and semantic memory (the former being memories with strong metarepresentational tags, such as the anecdote about Jane and the coffee shop, while the latter have either weak tags or no tags at all, i.e. "the Earth is round," as we don't usually bother tagging that with when we learned it, who we learned it from, or even a tag about "I believe that"), and several related ideas.
Utilizing these, the book's core theory is that one of the reasons we read fiction (and the author goes out of her way to make sure that we understand that she's not saying that this is the only reason) is that doing so exercises our theory of mind (ToM) ability to attribute characters' actions to their personal dispositions. We might be wrong about what a character's disposition is, but even when we are the challenge is entertaining in and of itself (which is why quite a few types of fiction set out to deliberately play with our ToM in this regard: unreliable narrators are discussed at length, as are detective novels).
The takeaway here, at least as I understood it, is that reading fiction is itself a creative act on the part of the reader(s), in that we're "filling in the blanks" behind what the characters are doing. It's a fascinating idea, and one that I don't think is without merit. It's certainly something worth considering, and in that regard Zunshine's book is one that I'd recommend to others (though certainly not as light reading!).
Having finished that, I'm also preparing to wrap up Benjamin Franklin's The Art of Virtue (which is a book that Franklin titled but never actually wrote; this book's editor, George L. Rogers, has instead taken selected writings of Franklin's – personal correspondence, newspaper articles, speeches, quotes from Poor Richard's Almanac, etc. – and put them together to demonstrate various virtues that Franklin both lived and championed).
R_J_K75
Legend
TV Land does a 7AM-11AM block of the M*A*s*H TV series, so Ive been watching it last few weeks. Its good. So I watched the 1970 movie with Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould. so different, yet so great, Scene when he drops the olives in the martini is classic. So I just cracked the book
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