Books

[Giles]

@mclaincausey said in Books:

@Giles I am so glad you and P enjoyed / will definitely enjoy it. Hannibal was a badass. What wild times those were!

Yeah thanks. I've been thinking about it a lot. I actually said out loud last night, that I think what we were like back then, was probably a truer reflection on what humans are like. This "civilised", polite, woke facade we have is just that, a facade. And it does not take a lot to dislodge it.

The human race did not get to the top of the food chain/dominant race by being nice......

[mclaincausey]

@Giles could be. Another book I mentioned here (the Dawn of everything) challenges that though and highlights a lot of archaeological evidence that humans have formed all sorts of ways to live before we invented the state 12,000 or so years ago, some authoritarian and brutal and others more egalitarian.

[SKT]

I finally got to read this wonderful book and I cannot thank @Giles enough for bringing it into my life. I had no knowledge of Antarctic exploration and the history surrounding it, so this world was truly alien to me and I was immediately captivated. I’ll say this…the metaphor of the Endurance stuck in the ice and sinking hit me personally in ways I’ll have to write about in another thread on another day…but it was very powerful. And then there was this passage which echos many artists and creators I admire…

I want to record Orde-Lees recording of his sunset, because it is like a hand-print on a cave wall. We give beauty to the world by seeing it and loving it and saying
'this is beautiful. The world doesn't need us in order to exist, but it needs us in order to be beautiful, just as we need it in order to be purveyors of beauty. Through loving the world, we love ourselves into finer being. Neither of us, neither us nor the world, must be lost.

This book has instantly become one of my favorites and I will read it often, continuing to play the infinite game. What an inspiration.

[Giles]

Thank you. Funnily enough, we had friends around for dinner. Richard loves books, so I told him about Finding Endurance, and how much it had affected me and how much I loved it. I used the example of the finite and infinite game, as one of fundamental things I had learned from the book.

He took my copy home with him.

[endo]

My personal Mumbai/India trilogy. Only if anyone is interested and wants to read about 2000 pages of exquisite literature.

[goosehd]

@endo I enjoyed Shantaram and found it a good recreational read. Well written and hard to discern reality from embellishments. I have thought about picking up the following book, but have heard mixed reviews.

[endo]

@goosehd I wouldn't call Shantaram the strongest of the three, but I just read it and enjoyed it. It took me back to the 90s when I read the other two and then spent some time in Mumbai on a trip from Istanbul to Goa, especially at 'Leopold's Cafe'.

[Karol]

Another read of this awesome diary. But finally first time in paper form.

[nurunuru]

Anyone else subjected themselves to this? It is, for the most part, competently written. The unpleasantness is so unrelenting that one becomes pretty much inured to it by the last third or so. I don't regret reading it, per se, but it is a miserable bloody thing that I am glad to be done with. I don't know why it exists and couldn't really recommend it.

Now I'm reading some Jeeves and Wooster. Way better

[Karol]

I finally got my hands on probably the only copy available is Sweden. I was searching online in vain for years. Libraries rule!