Book Recommendations

Does anyone have any book recommendations to pass along?  I got an Amazon coupon for my birthday, and I'm looking for a good book to purchase.  I looked for Levin's Opening of Vision, but it's too pricey ($84), at least for the coupon.  I recall several interesting titles being mentioned in recent threads, but they're not coming to mind at the moment. 

So…recommendations are welcome!

Re: Book Recommendations

Bruce, it's possible you might enjoy Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway.  The book is about representationalism as it affects scientific and gender studies.  The book focuses particularly on how Bohr's view of quantum physics undermined representationalist thinking.  Barad is a quantum physicist turned feminist professor.  It is the one clear presentation of Bohr's view I've read, and is consistent with Bohm's view of Bohr; none other IMO compare.

Re: Book Recommendations

Psyche's Veil: Psychotherapy, Fractals and Complexity

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Tom, thank you, that sounds very interesting.  I will check it out!

And Tely, thanks, too.  I actually looked for that book as soon as I got the coupon, but it costs more than the coupon is for ($30).  So, it's on my list for a future purchase, when I spend me own moolah!  That and the Opening of Vision, too.

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Hey Brother!
It occurred to me that you might have a book or two to recommend.  About a month ago we were discussing something and you suggested a book you use in one of your classes, ”The Spell of the Sensuous”, by David Abram.  I've really enjoyed it.  Any others you care to share???
Best, David

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Have all of you read, ”Rupa's Tale”, a short story?

Truly, a must-read…

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LOL!

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Back @ ya!

Re: Book Recommendations

Take a break from all of that serious, academic reading and enjoy some excellent fiction. William Gibson is one of my fav fiction writers. He coined the term “cyberspace” with his groundbreaking book Neuromancer back in the 80s. The one I recommend though is Pattern Recognition (2003). It contains many of the themes we’ve explored in this pod but through character, plot, narrative drama and excellent writing. As the title suggests a main theme is about how we create a pattern out of any given phenomena, i.e., how we enact it. A very fun summer read. Here’s a blurb: 

The first of William Gibson's usually futuristic novels to be set in the present, Pattern Recognition is a masterful snapshot of modern consumer culture and hipster esoterica. Set in London, Tokyo, and Moscow, Pattern Recognition takes the reader on a tour of a global village inhabited by power-hungry marketeers, industrial saboteurs, high-end hackers, Russian mob bosses, Internet fan-boys, techno archeologists, washed-out spies, cultural documentarians, and our heroine Cayce Pollard–a soothsaying “cool hunter” with an allergy to brand names.  

Pollard is among a cult-like group of Internet obsessives that strives to find meaning and patterns within a mysterious collection of video moments, merely called “the footage,” let loose onto the Internet by an unknown source. Her hobby and work collide when a megalomaniac client hires her to track down whoever is behind the footage. Cayce's quest will take her in and out of harm's way in a high-stakes game that ultimately coincides with her desire to reconcile her father’s disappearance during the September 11 attacks in New York.
 
Although he forgoes his usual future-think tactics, this is very much a William Gibson novel, more so for fans who realize that Gibson's brilliance lies not in constructing new futures but in using astute observations of present-day cultural flotsam to create those futures. With Pattern Recognition, Gibson skips the extrapolation and focuses his acumen on our confusing contemporary world, using the precocious Pollard to personify and humanize the uncertain anxiety, optimistic hope, and downright fear many feel when looking to the future. The novel is filled with Gibson's lyric descriptions and astute observations of modern life, making it worth the read for both cool hunters and their prey.

Re: Book Recommendations

Sounds like a great read, Locutus of Borg.

I don't really read much sci-fi myself as I find that life is stranger than fiction. But as you pointed out, one can't really assimilate this until they have a deep understanding of what fiction is…

Re: Book Recommendations

Neuromancer is a book that keeps coming up in several lists I've seen of late. I completely agree with you, Ed, that we should be reading more literature. Literature has a capacity to explore existential… (my god, an ice cream truck just drove by, complete with silly music. they still make those? a sign my music studio is in the right place — a bedroom community with lots of kids & yuppies)… themes that cannot adquately explored through literal, expository philolosophy. I myself am reading at this time Irish Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea,

Hey Ed, and Jimbob, and whoever else might be interested, I saw a killer documentary on Harlan Ellison recently. It's called Dreams with Sharp Teeth. Ellison has written some of the best episodes of the original Star Trek, and (my all time favorite) the original Outer Limits. At the same time, he's a brilliant, outspoken critic of the type I admire, eg. Zappa, Lenny Bruce. I love the fact that some of the speculative fiction I most admired most growing up, was written by such a reflective asshole, which is another trait I admire. :-)

Over his desk Ellison has a post-it (I forget where he got it from): “You cannot be afraid to go there.”

Re: Book Recommendations

Neuromancer is the one Gibson novel I've read; it was good.

I recently read the English translation of the Swedish novel, Lat den ratte komma in (Let the Right One In), by John Ajvide Lindqvist. It's the only vampire novel I've ever read, and I read it after watching the DVD of the Swedish indie film based on the novel. I'm not into vampire movies (other than the original Dracula with Lugosi) any more than I'm into vampire novels, but the reviews for the film were so glowing I was willing give it a try. I'm glad I did and I'm thoroughly enjoyed the novel. It's about the relationship between a 12 year old boy, a real outsider, and a 12 year old going on 200 year old vampire of “indeterminate gender” (as Wikipedia puts it, i't's not entirely accurate but to say more would be a spoiler), who is the quintessential outsider. When reading it I kept wondering how the author knew me so well, as I could identify so much with both the boy and the vampire child characters.

I once took a creative writing course at Marquette (I had to write an entire novel for the course), and one of the teachers strongly hinted that she'd had a fling with Harlan Ellison after meeting him at a convention. (Every time she hinted at this, which was at least once in every class, it seemed, one or more gals in the class would egg her on to just come out and say if she had sex with Ellison, but she would only beam and promise to divulge more at a later date.) I did enjoy reading a book of Ellison's short stories.

Some time before reading Let the Right One In I read a novel by Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country for Old Men (the novel the film is based on). The novel by him I read is Blood Meridian. He's been compared to Faulkner. McCarthy's prose and imagery is good but I like Faulkner more. McCarthy's also been compared to Melville, and since I never read Billy Budd and love the opera by Britten that's based on it, that novella is next on my fiction reading list.

Re: Book Recommendations

“I love the fact that some of the speculative fiction I most admired most growing up, was written by such a reflective asshole, which is another trait I admire.”

I identify with being a reflective asshole myself. In January, I walked away from a job that was paying me $120,000/year. I left the company because it was being run by several assholes and I got sick and tired with putting up with it. Can't go back into this industry either as it is full of assholes.

My savings are gone, my wife doesn't understand me (we're talking about a divorce) and there are no jobs around for reflective assholes.

So as much as I enjoy hangin' out with you here and other places, I need to focus my energy on earning a living again. Guess I'll go pump gas somewhere or whatever.

As Ellison said though, “You cannot be afraid to go there.” In spite of the personal hardships we go through in life, sometimes it requires a boldness to go where no else has gone before…

…I don't know where this is going, but it's turning out to be quite a journey.

All the best to you all,
Mark

Re: Book Recommendations

I'm sorry to hear about your life circumstances Mark. I understand about losing tolerance for working in a hopeless situation. I have similar feelings but don't, like you, have the guts to go unemployed to correct my situation. Good luck to you in this trying time.

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Has anyone here read Theory U, by Otto Scharmer?  (David, this is a possible recommendation – given its concern with time, for instance).  I've been hearing about it here and there, and looking over the index, it appears Scharmer also deals with some of the topics we've discussed in this forum.

Edward, thanks for the fiction recommendation.  Pattern Recognition looks interesting – and, yes, I could do with more literature in my life!  It used to be a centerpiece, but it has been a few years now since I read a novel. 

Mark, best wishes for the next step of your journey.

Re: Book Recommendations

Bruce, here's one from left field: Charles Hartshorne's Creative Synthesis and Philosophical Method, or The Zero Fallacy.  They both discuss questions about the meaning of polar-opposite language, like relative/absolute, etc.  Opened a form of investigation, for me, in quite a nice way.  His earlier The Divine Relativity also goes into these questions.

Re: Book Recommendations

If you want a fun science read, Frank Wilczek's The Lightness of Being is perhaps the most recent comment on larger scientific questions from a Nobel prize winning founder of modern quark theory (QCD).  Wilczek's primary contribution in this book is to demonstrate that space is a somethingness, at least at the level of the quark and one below.  He interestingly demonstrates that that universal given of givens in Newtonian theory—mass—the “essential quality” of matter, arises from something virtually massless.  This is further strong scientific demonstration that even our most fundamental concepts hold only within a relative domain, and illustrates in perhaps the deepest way ever demonstrated how one thing is explainable by another.  Further death of thing-in-itselfness.

Re: Book Recommendations

Thanks, Tom.  I've added all of them to my growing list!

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Thanks to all of you for your contributions and best wishes!

All of you collectively told me to write my own book! Everything is already in place too, my own website, background in e-commerce, yada, yada…

Of course, you're all going to be the characters in it along with others too!

All the best,
Mark