What are you reading now?

[apophenia]

I fully intend to sort the pile and establish priorities tonight.

Anne Hecht's Doubt - required reading for a December book club.
Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamov - I figure it's time, and I want to reread Ursula K Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, but I want the original paperbacks with their delightful cover art, but I only found books II and III locally, so I'll have to order out. Dostoyevsky should satisfy the fiction itch for a while.


Possibilities:

I still want to get started on Gadamer's Truth and Method if I can do so without overloading wrt book clubs pending.

I picked up an Encyclopedia of Hinduism and intend to acquire The Oxford Dictionary Of Hinduism at half price this weekend; that combined with a new book on shri Kali devi will keep me sipping and sampling for some time to come.

The rest, I don't know. Possibles are Religion Explained, a book on Hanuman (the Hindu Monkey God) which I'd dearly love to curl up with, A Daoist Theory Of Chinese Thought, and I have a stack of books on epistemology and free will, which if I ever intend to read them will need to see some continuous attention paid to the project.

Not a book, but my favorite half-price bookstore is having a coupon sale, and they have sets of DVDs of the PBS Battlefield Series, which I like a lot as it prefaces the battles with overviews of the relevant strategic and tactical details; I picked up one tonight, 3 DVDs covering the build up to the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the offensive itself, and the aftermath. I intend to pick up more while the sale continues.

And just as side effects, I picked up a Koi pond screensaver for $2, which is a pleasing sight on the monitor by the file server. And tonight, in the clearance rack they had a blu-ray disc of roaring fireplaces, which I can play on my TV, nearby, while I read.

So this winter I expect much of my time will be spent curled up by the fire, reading a good book and drinking tea.

I think this will work.

[Ronja]

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - for about the twelfth time. Because the kids have managed to hide the fourth HP "somewhere" in the house... so I had to hop from nr 3 to nr 5 this time around.

. That's how I usually react to a lot of school and/or paid work (i.e. stress): re-read light enough books by the dozen (or raid all close enough libraries for detective stories yet unread). This kind of reading actually helps against stress, especially with the falling asleep part.

[Tero]

Åsa Larsson mystery. A bit too spiritual for me but I like the Lapland scenery. All Finnish or Lapp names. Same place as the Vittula book.

Don't know if you can get them in Finnish, you can get them for Kindle. Which Amazon site do Finns use? Plus you can get the Swedish books at least from Sweden.

I'm on my 4th book
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85sa_Larsson

[apophenia]

My "light" reading tends to be anything but. If it doesn't have a lot of meat on the bone, it just bores and annoys me. That's anything but relaxing. (For a time, my chosen 'relaxer' was to throw on Aliens and watch Ripley tear it up.) One time I was in the hospital for depression and suicidal ideation so my lover asked if she could bring me something to read. Given the stress of the situation, I wanted comfort food, intellectually. So I asked her to loan me her copy of Goodwin and Jamieson's "Manic-Depressive Illness" which is a massive tome, a survey of the scientific literature and studies done on manic depression. She refused. She brought me some sophomoric "feel-good" introductory philosophy book which I never read. Why do people refuse to accept your choices simply because they aren't theirs? Dunno. Frustrating time.


Ooh, the Larson mystery reminds me. I've got a Nancy Drew mystery computer game with a Japanese theme (Shadow At The Water's Edge) that I just bought and keep forgetting is there. I so seldom play computer games anymore so I just forget I have them.

[leo-rcc]

Hounded, the first book of the Iron Druid series.

[Svartalf]

Just started Swords in the Mists, vol3 of the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser series by Fritz Leiber.

[Schneibster]

I haven't read Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser in a long, long time. Have to pick them up soon.

Up to book 15 of O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin novels, The Wine-Dark Sea.

[Svartalf]

I put them back on the do do list when I realised it took me days to remember the Silver Eel.

[Callan]

Just finished The Help by Kathryn Stockett.

The blurb said it was unputdownable, and it was!

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Just finished The Help by Kathryn Stockett.

The blurb said it was unputdownable, and it was!

If you wear gloves, your skin doesn't adhere. You can slide your hands out easily.

[klr]

Just finished The Help by Kathryn Stockett.

The blurb said it was unputdownable, and it was!

If enough books say that on the cover, then eventually one or two of them will be right.

[apophenia]

A woman perpetually falling...

Cheryl Schiltz feels like she's perpetually falling. And because she feels like she's falling, she falls…

When she stands up without support, she looks, within moments, as if she were standing on a precipice, about to plummet. First her head wobbles and tilts to one side, and her arms reach out to try to stabilize her stance. Soon her whole body is moving chaotically back and forth, and she looks like a person walking a tightrope in that frantic seesaw moment before losing his balance — except that both her feet are firmly planted on the ground, wide apart. She doesn't look like she is only afraid of falling, more like she's afraid of being pushed.

“You look like a person teetering on a bridge," I say.
"Yeah, I feel I am going to jump, even though I don't want to." Watching her more closely, I can see that as she tries to stand still, she jerks, as though an invisible gang of hoodlums were pushing and shoving her, first from one side, then from another, cruelly trying to knock her over. Only this gang is actually inside her and has been doing this to her for five years. When she tries to walk, she has to hold on to a wall, and still she staggers like a drunk.

For Cheryl there is no peace, even after she's fallen to the floor. "What do you feel when you've fallen?" I ask her. "Does the sense of falling go away once you've landed?"

"There have been times," says Cheryl, "when I literally lose the sense of the feeling of the floor ... and an imaginary trapdoor opens up and swallows me." Even when she has fallen, she feels she is still falling, perpetually, into an infinite abyss.

Cheryl's problem is that her vestibular apparatus, the sensory organ for the balance system, isn't working. She is very tired, and her sense that she is in free fall is driving her crazy because she can't think about anything else. She fears the future. Soon after her problem began, she lost her job as an international sales representative and now lives on a disability check of $1 ,000 a month. She has a new-found fear of growing old. And she has a rare form of anxiety that has no name.

An unspoken and yet profound aspect of our well-being is based on having a normally functioning sense of balance. In the 1930s the psychiatrist Paul Schilder studied how a healthy sense of being and a "stable" body image are related to the vestibular sense. When we talk of "feeling settled" or "unsettled," "balanced" or "unbalanced," "rooted" or "rootless," "grounded" or "ungrounded," we are speaking a vestibular language, the truth of which is fully apparent only in people like Cheryl. Not surprisingly, people with her disorder often fall to pieces psychologically, and many have committed suicide.

from The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M.D.

Reading for a book club on the 22nd.


Run my baby run my baby run
Run from the noise of the street and the loaded gun
Too late for solutions to solve in the setting sun
So run my baby run my baby run

— Garbage, Run Baby Run

[Gawdzilla Sama]

A manual on the operation of the 105mm howitzer.

[Schneibster]

Just picking up Slan.

[Svartalf]

haven't reread that one in over a decade... What's weird is that this one seems to be the only Van Vogt I can digest. (then again, the only other Van Vogt I've tried reading in the original yet is Weapon Shops of Isher)