271–280 of 282 posts
My two favorites that stand out this year: Earth Abides by George Stewart 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
Oh wow. Didn’t expect to see this here. Earth Abides is one of my favorites, too. Must have read it over five times. I even visited Berkley and the Indian Rock Park close to where the author lived, which is a central location in the book.
Read 34 books (and audiobooks, I guess that counts) so far this year. Best have been Fiction: - Revolutionary road by Richard Yates - Anathem by Neal Stephenson - Silence by Shusaku Endo Non fiction: - Atomic Habits by James Clear - Man’s search for Meaning by Viktor E Frankl
Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun series. As someone who read a lot of sci-fi, I'm surprised I've discovered it only now. It's considered the Dostoevsky of scifi, very different from golden age hard scifi. Already started books of the Long Sun. Disappointment of the year - The three body problem. Feels like buying on amazon a product with thousand of rave reviews only to realize its all fake Chinese reviews.
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Onwards to Jordan Maxwell, then? If so, also check Michael Tsarion. Keep in mind, all this stuff is fiction, sort of magic realism in the garb of documentary exposition, and scholarly dubious research. But much more enjoyable than hollow earth or flat earth stuff! My favorite bit of it is the presaging of the Dyson sphere in the “energy grid” that surrounds the earth, limiting life form travel. Even better than their…
i have noticed a lot of bs attached to anunnaki when i wanted to research more on this. a bunch of ufo, lizard-people... crap. i am interested in facts, not fiction.
But to be fair, mythical accounts of deities, and the impetus for such accounts, is a very difficult subject to approach.
E.g., in the end of the first rhapsody of Odyssey, the goddess Athena is described having "the splendour of the sun" and departing from her meeting with Telemachus by ascending in the sky like an eagle.
I'll accept (and do accept, I'm not mad, I tell ya) all the reasonable explanations - poetic liberty, theatrical engineering with cranes and ropes, and whatnot.
At the same time, it's very interesting (and useful) to try and recreate the mental model that allows for such a metaphor to emerge, to be thought up in the first place, and to identify the cultural and technological triggers that might have caused such a dea ex machina description.
But Graham Hancock-style "research" (read up, smoke up, come up) really doesn't cut it, and I'd rather accept that there's no reachable answer with the currently available archaeological and textual evidence, than try and force one.
So (to close the digression), I think your only avenue is to learn Sumerian and Akkadian and go to the tablets. Shouldn't be too hard, really - I'm not being sarcastic - go for it, they are well-researched languages, grammatical and lexicographical resources are available, and the absolutely best reason to start learning a language is to have a specific question in mind or a specific text that you want to read, it'll push you onward.
Not to mention that by coming into contact with the original texts is the only way to approach whatever of the original meanings is still accessible.
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Oh wow. Didn’t expect to see this here. Earth Abides is one of my favorites, too. Must have read it over five times. I even visited Berkley and the Indian Rock Park close to where the author lived, which is a central location in the book.
I don't know if it's because of Covid or I'm a parent but it really affected me. The ending was one of the best.
I’ve read many books with a similar extinction event story line, but none quite compares. And it seems Stewart himself didn’t write many more books (I only found one about settlers crossing into California, which I didn’t like as much).
- Conquest: Cortes, Montezuma, and the Fall of Old Mexico by Hugh Thomas , because he brings history to life and the story of the Spanish and the Mexica is stranger than fiction, more subtle and terrible than you might think, and has many lessons on human behavior applicable to today. - Ecclesiastes by Qoheleth: In my opinion, superior to Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. "Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink you…
TOC by Sipser is incorrect at some points, especially in Push Down Automata. I will instead recommend the `Automata Theory Language & Computation` by Ullman et al.
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Time spent reading books is time not spent deploying. The only thing that matters is deploying.
I am deeply saddened to hear this Pēteri... Hopefully your state is transitory and you will find balance again.
× The Cyberiad (English translation) by Stanisław Lem. It's the most hilarious science fiction I've read. It hits a special note with me, I actually immediately started reading it again from the start as soon as I finished it. × The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David Wengrow. An amazing rethinking of archeology, a denunciation of social orthogenesis and an invitation to dream of a better world Other mentions…