Now Reading

  On 6/9/2011 at 11:32 PM, KY said:

oh yeah, and i just ordered on amazon:

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House of Leaves is really an amazing book. Once it gets into your head, you can check out the web, there's tons of amazing crazy theories and kooks still discussing the book.

Finally caught a few hours with nothing much to do and I finished the last couple hundred pages of Underworld: 9.83/10

We're all gonna die!

  On 6/13/2011 at 7:45 AM, baph said:

Finally caught a few hours with nothing much to do and I finished the last couple hundred pages of Underworld: 9.83/10

 

We're all gonna die!

Nice one congrats. Remember you wrestling with it last time I was in here which was ages ago. I finished White Noise in the meantime. The darkness is well disguised from the point of view of this cosy family dad and his family (seems like it's taken from the authors own family life) amazing little observations here and there. And then the gun comes into the picture....

Now halfway through

Detailed yet concise chronicle beginning at around the mid 1600s. Well researched, very heavy on name and date dropping throughout. Think I'm gonna need to balance this out with some fiction reading.

  On 6/14/2011 at 1:59 PM, AJW said:

  On 6/13/2011 at 7:45 AM, baph said:

Finally caught a few hours with nothing much to do and I finished the last couple hundred pages of Underworld: 9.83/10

 

We're all gonna die!

 

 

Nice one congrats. Remember you wrestling with it last time I was in here which was ages ago. I finished White Noise in the meantime. The darkness is well disguised from the point of view of this cosy family dad and his family (seems like it's taken from the authors own family life) amazing little observations here and there. And then the gun comes into the picture....

 

Now halfway through

 

Detailed yet concise chronicle beginning at around the mid 1600s. Well researched, very heavy on name and date dropping throughout. Think I'm gonna need to balance this out with some fiction reading.

White Noise is still one of my favorites, despite Underworld being on a whole other plane of literary brilliance. Underworld wasn't a particularly tough read aside from the time commitment: despite being rather episodic and broken into digestible character-focused segments it works much better as a continuous read-through. And it goes fast when you commit to it. I read the first half in short order and then tried to catch up with it here and there for a few months, reading a couple pages before falling asleep, and that just wasn't cutting it.

Falling Man for me was the continuity to Underworld

Michiko Kakutani didn't like Falling Man, so that means it's probably great.

Saw the movie, figured I'd give the book a try.

Finally getting around to

holy fuck i just finished truant's epilogue and i am fucking pumped for house of leaves.

Neuromancer is a fuck to read... also Umberto Eco's Focoault pendulum

can anyone recommend any interesting psychology books? not academic books or at least books that make it interesting

  On 6/20/2011 at 5:10 PM, Benedict Cumberbatch said:

can anyone recommend any interesting psychology books? not academic books or at least books that make it interesting

I would read "Social Cognition" by Ziva Kunda.

"How do we make sense of other people and of ourselves? What do we know about the people we encounter in our daily lives and about the situations in which we encounter them, and how do we use this knowledge in our attempt to understand, predict, or recall their behavior? Are our social judgments fully determined by our social knowledge, or are they also influenced by our feelings and desires?

Social cognition researchers look at how we make sense of other people and of ourselves. In this book Ziva Kunda provides a comprehensive and accessible survey of research and theory about social cognition at a level appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as researchers in the field.

The first part of the book reviews basic processes in social cognition, including the representation of social concepts, rules of inference, memory, "hot" cognition driven by motivation or affect, and automatic processing. The second part reviews three basic topics in social cognition: group stereotypes, knowledge of other individuals, and the self. A final chapter revisits many of these issues from a cross-cultural perspective."

http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/view?isbn=0262611430

very interesting book.... one that I refer to at least once per week.

  On 6/14/2011 at 6:17 PM, verticalhold said:

:sup:

The One-Straw Revolution... By Masanobu Fukuoka

Finished up "Not a Good Day to Die" by Sean Naylor a week or so ago and proceeded to start "Delta Force" by Col. Charlie Beckwith right afterwards.

At the core of the two books is, essentially, more branches = more problems. The former has to do with Operation Anaconda, the first major operation fought in Afghanistan after the initial invasion. The forces requisitioned by the commanders on the ground consist of a hodgepodge mix of units that were stretched to their limit in peacekeeping operations, a skeleton crew of Apache and Chinook forces and, for the kicker, the main force that would spearhead the action was to be an Afghan force trained by American Special Forces with only a months lead time. It ends up how you would expect, communication is stretched to its maximum, and it all culminates in this. In a nutshell, due to piss poor communications, the helicopters assigned to take in a SEAL recon team figure that the best place to land the recon team is right where their site is. Turns out it's a Taliban gun emplacement and shit goes to hell. At the end of the day though, the operation, at a conservative estimate, killed around 500 insurgents.

The latter book is written by the guy who founded Delta Force, it goes through his exchange to the SAS for a year of which leads him to writing a paper on what the US was lacking at the time, a proper counter terrorism unit. he jumps through a lot of hoops over the course of a dozen years until he is finally authorized to found a unit that is based on the base principles that he jotted down in his paper years prior. The first operation Delta is assigned is the Iran hostage crisis, and, just like Not a Good Day to Die, "jointness" ends up playing a factor. The pilots of the helicopters that were required for this mission were ill prepared for flying through a desert, and the ground crews assigned to the helicopters - which were based off an aircraft carrier for Operation Eagle Claw - were unaware of the dangers faced by the helicopters due to operation security concerns, which, more than likely, factored into why the choppers went down in Iran. The problems with Eagle Claw end up giving Beckwith the idea for SOCOM and JSOC.

It's true enough though, that the majority of military operations that are highly publicized - special operations in particular - are the ones that tend to fail, so it's certainly not the rule, but, when tight, highly contained forces are required to work with big military, shit tends to go wrong fast as neither are very well attenuated to how the other operates.

Anyway, my next venture is Robert Baer's "Sleeping With the Devil", about Washington, Saudi Arabia, and glorious crude. I kind of have a man crush on him Bob Baer, so it should be a fun read.

I am currently reading The Hastur Cycle, a Cthulhu mythos book. Ive never read any Cthulhu stuff before, I picked it up from a charity shop. Pretty good so far, just loads of short stories about the king in yellow.

Might read some more of these as they as they are not too heavy going...

Going through a phase of rereading Vonnnegut at the moment. These short stories are charming but fall short of the power of his novels. But they're still full of that strange mixture of cynicism, empathy and humanity.

I think everyone should return to Vonnegut at least once a year. It's good for the soul.

  On 6/19/2011 at 8:41 AM, logakght said:

Neuromancer is a fuck to read... also Umberto Eco's Focoault pendulum

I know, I'm currently dragging myself throught Foucault's Pendulum

I'm not going to mention spoilers (haven't even finished the book yet) but i'll put my frustrations in spoiler tags anyway

I recommend this book if you are really, REALLY interested in the Templars n shit.

  On 6/28/2011 at 2:42 PM, Iain C said:

I think everyone should return to Vonnegut at least once a year. It's good for the soul.

so i'm somewhere between one and two hundred pages into house of leaves—not worth highlighting "house"—and it's alright. am i the only one who gets utterly annoyed with johnny truant almost all the time?

  On 6/28/2011 at 10:37 PM, KY said:

so i'm somewhere between one and two hundred pages into house of leaves—not worth highlighting "house"—and it's alright. am i the only one who gets utterly annoyed with johnny truant almost all the time?

you are not

excellent, 500 pages to go

He doesn't get any better.

"blah blah blah i was on ecstasy blah blah blah the darkness is getting more darkly blah blah blah tits"

-johnny truant

continue reading man, you will understand