Which book are you reading now? Volume XI

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Marcus Aurelius Meditations. Fascinating introduction and especially notes. Text itself fairly repetitive, but then, it wasn't meant for publication.
 
Narz said:
Yeah, I didn't find it ughhh as much as simply dull.
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Dull is a perfect word. There was perhaps something more to it but dull sums it up pretty well.
 
A Course in Miracles

Allegedly dictated by Jesus (!) to an American Jewish psychologist and her colleague in the 60s, I can't make head nor tail of the thing at the moment.

The "Textbook" presents a thought system about truth and illusion on two levels:
The metaphysical level, which in this case is "strictly non-dualistic". In strict nondualism, everything involving time, space, and perception is regarded as illusory. This nondualism states that God is the only truth and reality: perfect, unchanging, unchangeable, extending only love, though not in time and space, which can not really be comprehended from a dualistic perspective. The theory further states that all life as we perceive it is actually one life (because God has only one son, sometimes called the collective sonship), dreaming of separation and fragmentation. Since eternity is outside time and space, this dream never occurred in reality and is "already over", though not in our (illusory) perception. When addressing the question of how such an illusory dream could arise from a perfect and unchanging God, the Course merely states that to ask that question is to presume that the time-space dream is real, which it states is not. A Course in Miracles states that to think we exist as individuals is the fundamental error. However, since we experience ourselves in time and space, reading these pages, the course presents its thought system on a second level:
The time-space level, or perceptory level, which is referred to as "the dream". A Course in Miracles states that this level was "made" by the "sleeping Son" as an attack on God, implying that God did not create time, space, the Cosmos, and Homo sapiens. Furthermore, the "Son" is regarded as not just Jesus, but as all collective life. On these points A Course in Miracles diverges fundamentally from Christianity. In this time-space dream, perception is continuously fueled by what it originated from: separation, judgment and attack. This results in what the Course calls the "sin-guilt-fear" cycle: we sinned by rejecting God and making a universe of time-space (the Big Bang); this results in guilt over our rejection of our Creator, and subsequent fear of God's wrath. The "sin-guilt-fear" is described as too horrendous to face, and therefore subsequently projected out, so that to Homo sapiens it seems that evil is everywhere except in himself. The world becomes a threatening place, in which we are born only to fear, fight, and die. The thought that keeps this process going is referred to as "ego", or "the wrong mind". A Course in Miracles concludes that happiness cannot be found in earthly time-space life, and urges the reader not to commit suicide but rather to make a fundamental mindshift from "condemnation-out-of-fear" (mindlessness) to "forgiveness-out-of-love" (mindfulness), since our "right mind" is outside time-space and cannot be harmed by worldly attacks. According to the course, seeing "the Face of Christ" in all living things is the way to "accept the Atonement" and ultimately awaken from the dream and return to the eternity of God. Ultimately, this means the end of individuality and of the ego. In this respect, there are parallels with the Indian concept of karma and the Bhagavad Gita scriptures, which Helen Schucman was not familiar with, though William Thetford was.
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It's not a trivial thing, though. Apparently.
 
Well, I finished Zen and I'm inclined to agree - it's essentially divided, like Walden, into chunks of 'story' interspersed with long discussions of philosophy. The latter were definitely 'good in parts', but towards the end became rather tedious, especially when he got onto Greek philosophy. The narrator (separating him charitably from the author) has a distinctly sketchy grasp of that - and a major part of the characterisation, that 'Phaedrus' means 'wolf', is based on a mistranslation! Mind you, it actually means 'shining', and having read it through I think the story is actually better if the reader but not the narrator knows that. Overall, though, a good read, though I think it could have benefited from less overt philosophy.
 
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. I'm only 10% in but so far it's telling mostly stuff I already knew.
 
I've read that Short History of nearly everything. And profound, it isn't. He writes OK, but his target audience probably isn't the educated reader.

Zkribbler said:
I'm maybe the only American who got through high school without reading Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck. Now that I've retired to a distant tropical isle, I got to feeling guilty, and so I sent away for it. It just arrived today. :popcorn:
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Great book! I loved it. But I loathe the rest of Steinbeck with a passion.
 
I think you are right, but he still manages to fit in interesting digressions or side facts about things. I use it as a lighter read when I'm not working through Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Yudkowsky. You can get it for free and I recommend it, if for nothing else but to realize how humans are bad at thinking straight.
 
Mouthwash said:
He's never quite grasped the whole "less is more" thing.
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Which is probably doing his own ideas a disservice. I won't even bother to crack open a book so big. I'll just have to hope he didn't write anything that I would have found life-altering.
 
Finished Inversions by Ian Banks. For a long time the story, or rather two stories, missed a direction, which did not make them terribly suspenseful. But the characters were still reasonably interesting and as always Banks knows how to write. The more or less open ending of the one story was unforeseen and fantastic, however, and produced a marvelous chill in my bones and was perfectly prepared for as the plot developed and even had a well-crafted commentary on an aspect of the nature of men.

Have almost finished The Secret of the Delivery Nurse by Sabine Ebert (Die Hebamme in German, if there is an English version the title is probably different than what I just said), a historical novel taking place in the 12th century.
A great book because it taught me a lot about how not to write. I find it grotesquely bad in all the ways that matter. Uninspired predictable plot, totally uninteresting bland and woodcut-like characters, lacy stale and transparent plot elements, tired cliches as a substitute for figurative language, bad immersion-straining narrator perspective changes, not a single line with an original and good way to phrase something let alone an idea. In general an utterly linear superficial unengaging storytelling style.
And on top of all that the main character is another embodiment of the oh so innocent and good-hearted girl who needs to be saved, coming together with the perfect honorable and strong men to do so, who of course is a knight.

And this book produced 4 sequels and I believe a TV adaptation. I don't find it hard to believe that 50 shades of gray is as bad as some say when thinking of that.


Also about to finish a short story collection by Mark Twain. Not everything works, some ideas are repetitive, but a lot of gems of humor are in there. A great book for the toilet (which is where I read it exclusively)

What I noticed was how Twain just as Poe liked to write his stories like accounts rather than unassuming straight novels. This gave way to a theory of mine, which is that in their time it was still sort of seen that stories were for children, bums and women, so making them appear like factual accounts made them more palatable. No idea weather this is true, but I think it is a great theory. It is inspired by another novel I read taking place in the early 20th century and where a husband patronizes his wife while saying that she should go back to her romance novels and not worry about the real world.
 
We'd say "midwife" if we were going for the historical/rustic feel.
 
Well, I think the 'factual account' style of storytelling was spawned by some early 19th Century periodical publications which mixed stories and literary reviews with factual news. Someone had the great idea to subvert the scheme by manufacturing a story as if it were a factual account and that was it. I recall my lit prof mentioning that review inspired Poe (it was mostly gothic stories, if I remember correctly).
 
Terxpahseyton said:
Also about to finish a short story collection by Mark Twain. Not everything works, some ideas are repetitive, but a lot of gems of humor are in there. A great book for the toilet (which is where I read it exclusively)

What I noticed was how Twain just as Poe liked to write his stories like accounts rather than unassuming straight novels. This gave way to a theory of mine, which is that in their time it was still sort of seen that stories were for children, bums and women, so making them appear like factual accounts made them more palatable. No idea weather this is true, but I think it is a great theory. It is inspired by another novel I read taking place in the early 20th century and where a husband patronizes his wife while saying that she should go back to her romance novels and not worry about the real world.
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Nah, there were plenty of Serious White Dude novels in the nineteenth century; this is the age of Scott, Hugo and Tolstoy, after all. It was just a stylistic convention; a lot of popular fiction was initially published in magazines or newspapers, whole or in instalments, so presenting them as true events gave them a sense of verisimilitude, and after a while this became popular in its own right.
 
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