What are you reading?

[Asparagus]

1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed -- Eric Cline

Oh boy!

[Serpent]

Sense of Humour by Stephen Potter, (fireside)
The First Fabians by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, (fireside)
Canadian Food Words by Bill Casselman (lunch/tea time)
and The casual Vacancy by J.K. Rawling (bedside)

[Braininvat]

The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine - Lindsey Fitzharris

(Some parts are best read on an empty stomach)

[BadgerJelly]

Watchmen - Alan Moore

[BadgerJelly]

Currently going through three anthropological books.

The Sacred and The Profane - Eliade (nearly finished)
The Interpretation of Culture - Geertz (Quarter done)
Structural Anthropology - Levi-Strauss (Half done)

ALL are superb! Eliaade is mainly focused on religion and offers some great insights. I am still waiting to see how much force he'll finish this with.

Just bought 6 more books:

The Cave and The Light - Herman; about influence of Plato and Aristotle on Western thought. Easy reading and easy to churn through, but not particularly technical up to now.

The Language of Instinct - Pinker; simply because LANGUAGE is an ongoing trend of mind and hoping this read will help me frame the field of argumentation out there (even though it was written in 1994.)

Art and Rhetoric - Aristotle; reading it in bits and pieces before, but now relevant to my goals so going to get into this latter on in the year.

The Interpretation od Dreams - Freud; because I better start up a counter position to Jung considering I am very much "Jungian" in my outlook. Hope to get into this in combination with reading Aion.

Mythology of The Celtic People - Squire; generally trying to collect mythologies and categorise them. Not planning to read this cover to cover anytime soon (more for reference at the moment.)

And to top it off just bought this before I left for the airport ...

Maxims and Reflections - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; simply because he's a well known name and I'd like to get a gist of his ideas and thoughts before thinking about jumping further in. No immediate plan to read this because I already have Tolstoy's "What is Art?" looming at me!

btw ... I've been inspired to start sketching and making some comic strips after reading Moore.

ONE week off work so hope to get the three Anthropology books read by then and start going over my notes and setting out essay with ideas about "religion" and "myth."

note: If anyone is interested in reading and offering critique once I've written it it would be VERY much appreciated. Hopefully I'll be able to feed the forums here with some of what I've been reading more selectively and in manageable pieces.

Oh! Just finished reading "Discourse on Inequality" too. Interesting stuff.

[Forest_Dump]

I am slowly making my way through Dennett's "Dawin's Dangerous Idea" (again but can't really say why) but next is M. J. Benton's "When Life Nearly Died" which is about the Permian extinctions and I am looking forward to that. A few other things on the go as well including, believe or not, Plato's Republic, some stuff on social work and an old sociology study on ethnic conflicts but these are more time fillers. I think I am just one of those who needs at least five books on the go at a time.

[BadgerJelly]

Forest -

My problem is reading too many. It is taking some force of will to stop myself from reading Husserl's Logical Investigations, but I'm reaping the rewards of reading those three complimentary books.

Already started looking at other titles by Levi-Strauss and Eliade.

[doogles]

Books are generally passe to me now. I prefer to read the basic research on which books are based (non-fiction).

But just to prove that I'm a hypocrite, I'm intensively re-editing a book of my own called Cure It or Shoot It, a narrative real life report of my own 25 years as a practicing country veterinarian from 1955 to 1980, with a view to having it published online as a printed book and as an e-book. It describes a bygone era when a person had to be willing to come at the beck and call of hundreds of people, 24/7 for years, who cared for their animals financially or emotionally.

Otherwise, I'm currently checking the available literature on the therapeutic value of local or systemic injections of Stem Cells or a multitude of diseases.

[Forest_Dump]

As to Levi-Strauss, the two I would recommend are "The Savage Mind", although it has an unfortunate title and can be misunderstood, and one called "Myth and Meaning" (I think). That was a printing of his Massey lectures on CBC radio and definitely it was worth it (I have a number of these and they always are).

[BadgerJelly]

Books are generally passe to me now. I prefer to read the basic research on which books are based (non-fiction).

Any particular area of interest? Do you order them through journals or what? How do you come across them?

[Lomax]

I think I am just one of those who needs at least five books on the go at a time.

I've allowed myself to get carried away lately. From the canon I have Go Tell It On The Mountain, and for lighter reading I have Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. I read a page a day of Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed because teaching me physics is a painstaking endeavour. Before bed I read one story from the Humorous Stories of Henry Lawson. On my phone I have an audiobook of Mein Kampf and, when I want something a little lighter, Tropic of Cancer. To check out Neri's sources on another thread I have Plato's Phaedrus open on my computer browser; over meals I read a PDF of Kim Jong Il's On the Art of the Cinema. In the bathroom I keep Thomas Hardy's Collected Poems. Tony Blair's autobiography is knocking about somewhere but it's mostly just a compendium of inner-circle congratulation so I started finding excuses not to pick it up.

[BadgerJelly]

Lomax -

I'm gonna have a look at my copy. I do remember Socrates commenting about young boys.

Mein Kampf? Typical vegetarian! haha!

[doogles]

Books are generally passe to me now. I prefer to read the basic research on which books are based (non-fiction).

Any particular area of interest? Do you order them through journals or what? How do you come across them?

I find that I'm curious about chronic human disease more than anything else. Personal interest of course, because of my age. I just type the best key words I can imagine into Google Scholar or PubMed and go from there. Abstracts are good enough to get an idea of subject matter. Sometimes the full articles are free and contain decent lists of citations.

For example, when I was heading for a wheelchair because of osteoarthritis of an ankle five years ago (coupled with deficits in the other ankle from old injuries), I decided a club foot (arthrodesis) would be better for locomotion. But a vascular surgeon had to ensure there was enough circulation in the foot for the surgery to heal). When ultrasounds revealed advanced atherosclerosis of both limbs from the lower abdominal aorta to the feet (many arteries were occluded and the very best arteries were 50% occluded), I began to check the literature commencing with the keywords - CALCIFICATION OF ARTERIES.

I could have looked at dozens of books on osteoarthritis and cardiovascular disease, but they all contain the best of peoples' imaginations and the best of modern Pharma-Medicine which at the moment can promise maybe a 1% regression in atherosclerosis or even a slowing-down of progression of atherosclerosis. I just have to check these things for myself.

I'm fully aware that one case history does not make a story or a convincing argument.

Nevertheless, as a byproduct of the material I read, I am now convinced that Vitamin K is our most important vitamin, that it not only REGULATES blood clotting, REGULATES where calcium is deposited in the body (soft or hard tissue), but most importantly is a REGULATOR of the health of artery endothelium.

The more I read, the more I'm convinced that a deficiency of vitamin K is manifest as atherosclerosis, which in turn manifests as poor circulation to all organs and manifests as Osteoarthritis, Cardiac anginas, poor Kidney function, loss of Skeletal Muscle function (affecting balance and performance). All of these have reversed in my case. I've had no personal cognitive deficits or strokes, so can't speak personally on those matters, but there is evidence that atherosclosis is associated with strokes and may be asociated with dementis.

I did post a thread on my own experience a year or two back.

Apart from beating my own Australian Plank best time last year (61 minutes) I'm still doing personal bests at the gym on most exercise stations. I should have well and truly reached my 'brick wall' and be going backwards by now.

Apart from my own immediate interest, I do research subjects that come up in this forum if they arouse my curiosity.

As an added comment, I find it extremely hard watching videos where speakers have a point or two to make. I feel myself writhing and muttering for them to get to the point. I much prefer written material.