ThunderPeel2001

Books, books, books...

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Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near would be a good way to get transhumanism as explained by its most popular adherent. Critiques are easy enough that no one's really done it book-length, outside of persistent treatment in sci-fi. (Really, you can just think about the poor while reading Kurzweil and that'll do it.)

Every few months, I'll pick up The Singularity Is Near and read a hundred more pages before putting it down because Kurzweil's wide-eyed idealism is freaking me out. I've read hundreds upon hundreds of academic and popular articles in the course of my life, but never found an author so unswervingly committed to his thesis. If he showed just a little doubt, I'd probably tear through the book in a couple days and love every moment.

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I assume you are looking for non-fiction? Can't help you there.

As for fiction. The only books on transhumanism that I have read are the first two thirds of the William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. I can highly recommend checking out Neuromancer.

Oh crud, I guess I didn't specify... I'd prefer non-fiction but I'll take fiction too. Tell me more about Sprawl though.

Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near would be a good way to get transhumanism as explained by its most popular adherent. Critiques are easy enough that no one's really done it book-length, outside of persistent treatment in sci-fi. (Really, you can just think about the poor while reading Kurzweil and that'll do it.)

There are also some great treatments of specific post-human futures in sci-fi, and my personal fave is the Dune series. (AVOID BRIAN HERBERT'S PREQUELS AND SEQUELS.)

Dune I know of but know nothing about; I didn't know it had any posthumanism in it though. It's about time I look into that, I may start there with all this.

The singularity is something that actually terrifies me as a concept, because individuality is important to me.

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Oh crud, I guess I didn't specify... I'd prefer non-fiction but I'll take fiction too. Tell me more about Sprawl though.

I don't remember the details all that well anymore, maybe someone else can elaborate. Most of the characters were definitely augmented in one way or another. As I recall there wasn't much debate whether this was right/wrong or good/bad; people already took it for granted. The augmentations of course caused a great divide between those who could afford augmentations and those who could not. Augmented people were also highly specialized.

By far the most fascinating part of Neuromancer, however, is its depiction of the internet / world wide web / hacking in 1984. Some of the aspects of the cyberspace (a term which Gibson himself coined, as far as I know) are eerily similar to what we have now, while others are simply laughable in retrospect. I can heartily recommend the book for that aspect alone, even if it's not the best introduction to the subject of posthumanism.

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I agree, Nappi. Cyberpunk and singularity culture is much better experienced as a historical artifact than an ideology.

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Neuromancer is interesting in that it's a depiction of a culture transitioning to transhumanism/posthumanism. While technically the protagonists are augmented, Case and Molly are both very "normal" people by our standards, with their augmentations assisting standard functioning rather than actual changing them very much--Molly has embedded glasses with a HUD and embedded weapons, for example, but she's still recogniziably human (and her and Case together form a fairly traditional white American heterosexual couple). There are a lot more "alien" entities at the fringes of the book, all viewed with hostility, moving from the Panther Moderns (at the boundary of human/alien) all the way out to the Tessier-Ashpools with their clones, hive intelligence, and AI overseers (who are literally at the fringes of civilization, in Straylight). And yet, at the same time all that is going on, there's also a more subtle depiction of corporations themselves as alien, posthuman entities that have already replaced human beings as the primary actors of society--most notably the run on SenseNet and the (bordering on satirical) treatment of its employees but also throughout, such as the way the geography of cyberspace is determined by corporations. And while the text seems terrified or at least very disturbed by the Tessier-Ashpools and their ilk (to a point you can almost make a radically conservative reading of it), it also suggests they're misguided and not actually the future--the future lies with the already-extant aliens, the corporations, and to a lesser degree groups like the Panther Moderns (one of the most fascinatingly obscured factions in the novel).

Erm. Anyway.

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Hey, has anyone read Pulphead? After waffling on reading it for the past few months, I finally broke down and just bought it on sale from Powells (along with next month's bookcast book, because I lack good fiscal judgement when it comes to literature).

I generally enjoy these types of non fiction, pop culture essays, but I'm afraid that Sullivan will just be a watered down version of Klosterman or Bissell. Thoughts from those who've read it?

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Hey, has anyone read Pulphead? After waffling on reading it for the past few months, I finally broke down and just bought it on sale from Powells (along with next month's bookcast book, because I lack good fiscal judgement when it comes to literature).

I generally enjoy these types of non fiction, pop culture essays, but I'm afraid that Sullivan will just be a watered down version of Klosterman or Bissell. Thoughts from those who've read it?

There's one essay that is D'Agata-level bullshit, and I don't want to spoil which one because I want you to be as disappointed as I was. The rest? At his best he can be wonderful at empathizing with his subjects while still stepping occasionally into little DFW-esque interpolations and mini-arguments for a specific point. But he can also be kind of meandering in a way that doesn't really go anywhere. Probably one of the better general essayists coming up through the system on a prose-level, but I'm not sure if he'll be able to get to the next level. He's not there yet for most of his essays.

I squawked about it for about an hour with my wife once (with spoilers we call out), back before she got sucked into Grad School and my free time went down the toilet.

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Well, I'm glad that I bought the book on sale! There's nothing I love more than getting mad at books (my poor, suffering boyfriend is dealing with a lot of this as I read Telegraph Ave).

I squawked about it for about an hour with my wife once (with spoilers we call out), back before she got sucked into Grad School and my free time went down the toilet.

I didn't listen to the one about Pulphead, but I did start listening to the YA episode. I'm really enjoying it, it's exactly what you'd expect a podcast made by significant others to be like (that's meant as a compliment).

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Philip Roth announced his retirement, so I'm going to read American Pastoral again in his honour. Honestly, it might be one of the best works of postmodern fiction I've ever encountered.

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Kind of? It's part of his series of novels that are written by his "alter-ego" Nathan Zuckerman. And I guess that the next two books (I Married a Communist and the Human Stain) deal with the same issues, namely that post-war America kind of blows.

I like American Pastoral well enough and intellectually I can appreciate Roth's importance in American literature, but honestly, I have a hard time caring about his retirement. I just get the impression that he's been writing that same book for the past 30 years, about an America that doesn't really exist anymore. With his retirement, maybe we can finally stop pretending that the great male authors of the 1950s are still relevant.

(I do think it's kind of hilarious that his retirement announcement came right on the heels of a presidential election that has everyone making dire pronouncements about the changing American demographics. Seems fitting.)

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(I do think it's kind of hilarious that his retirement announcement came right on the heels of a presidential election that has everyone making dire pronouncements about the changing American demographics. Seems fitting.)

What makes that astute observation even stranger is that American Pastoral deals with the idea that each generation feels that they lived through the highest point of American culture, and in their latter years feel that the country is in a decline. American Pastoral just works on so many different levels for me. The prose is particular, the characters are incredibly multidimensional, and each theme is elegantly tied to another. I love how he explores the limits of human perception and understanding, and how we management of identities to protect us from others and ourselves. I would argue that it is his last great work, and up there with The Ghost Writer as my favourite.

I love Philip Roth, yet I'm not too sad about his retirement. I would argue that the last ten years of his career has provided interesting works, yet nothing particularly profound. He's had a good run, he deserves a rest.

When or if Don DeLillo retires, I'm going to be just as sad. Already looking for my copy of White Noise​ in preparation.

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Since posting last I've read Paul Auster's Invisible which I thought was strong. I'm a pretty big Auster fan in general and found this one to be pretty engaging with a number of solid undercurrents to keep the whole thing interesting as a work.

I also read (as a part of a book club I'm involved in) J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy. Not all that good really, it was engaging enough and moved along but I just found the characters a little two dimensional and some of the writing here is really sub standard.

Currently reading Louis de Bernieres' The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmann, I'm about 100 pages through and it is great so far.

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I'm reading Music for Chameleons. Some entries are better than others. I wonder if Truman Capote will be remembered in two hundred years, though.

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Also, I just blew through Justin Torres' brilliant novel We The Animals, and I think I've spent longer thinking about the book than I did reading it. It's a really great look at gender dynamics and roles in a very small, poor, insulated family. It has a tremendous undercurrent of sadness buried under the ignorance of children's laughter, which gives the book a really strange tone. Incredibly affecting. It's short and you should buy it and read it and then thank me later.

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I just finished, and really liked The Vanishing Act by Mette Jakobsen.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=sIm-chxwOO8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

It's an enigmatic, dream-like story of a girl, Minou, living on a tiny island with her father and 2 other eccentric neighbours, and of her mother, who walked out of the door a year ago and vanished.

It's quirky and sad and beautiful, with a great sense of the loneliness and isolation of this island.

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I was very pleasantly surprised by Hugh Laurie's The Gun Seller. Not by the humour, mind. To anyone familiar with his career in British comedy, it's no surprise the man has a knack for funny moments, with plenty of brilliant Raymond Chandleresque similes, and clever turns of phrase that hold up admirably to the alarmingly high standard of English comedy writing.

No, the surprise came from just how credible it was as a spy novel. A very funny and self-aware one, yes, but it can be cynical, sweet, thrilling and gutting whenever it needs to be. The overall story and resolution might not hold up to intense scrutiny, but it's really quite heartfelt in the moment-to-moment telling.

Bonus fact: Laurie got this accepted by a publisher under a pseudonym, not wanting this to be seen as a lazy celebrity cash-in, and had to be persuaded to attach his own name. Well done, that man.

Now he's conquered the sitcom, drama, stage, jazz album and novel, I'm selfishly half-hoping he proves dreadful at something. Maybe he's only a mediocre taxidermist.

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Yeah, a very enjoyable read, that. I seem to remember it getting a bit action movie towards the end, though. At least it's better than what Stephen Fry did in one of his novels (Making History, I think) which was essentially "sometimes in life when exciting things happen it feels like you're in a movie" followed by the final action scene actually written in screenplay format.

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Has anyone recommended anything by Guy Gavriel Kay? I've only just started reading his stuff (just finished The Lion of Al Rassan) but it's quite good.

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Has anyone recommended anything by Guy Gavriel Kay? I've only just started reading his stuff (just finished The Lion of Al Rassan) but it's quite good.

It's my go-to author for when women ask me to recommend a fantasy novel. His flowery romantic writing sits well with them, or so I find. Not to say that I don't enjoy his books myself but it's a bit much at times for me. Especially the 'both sides are good in some ways therefore the inevitable confrontation that kills them will be super-dramatic' thing that he likes so much can grate on my nerves. Basically, the kind of writer one needs to be in the mood for.

I've probably enjoyed his novel Tigana the most because it's as far as I recall the most self-contained and efficient of his works. A song for Narbonne was also quite good I thought because I'm a sucker for stories that are in the troubadour milieu.

Kay got his start with the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy which is an interesting blend of Tolkien and alternate-reality fantasy, doing a good job of blending common folktales and more personal-level tragedy into your classic type of fantasy epic a la Donaldson and Tolkien. That series' similarity to Tolkien isn't coincidental by the way, he collaborated with Christopher Tolkien quite a lot, working on the posthumous editing and publication of JRR's material.

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I just churned through Don DeLillo's White Noise. It is still as fantastic as I remember. It draws upon themes of living in a risk society, technological determinism, and widespread misinformation through an ever present media, all of which are part of my honours thesis, so that works out nicely. The book employs a powerful, ultra descriptive style, allowing DeLillo to create a variety of interesting scenes that would work even if they were isolated from the novel. Also, the book makes you think a lot about your eventual death, which bums you the fuck out.

I'm now one hundred pages into Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, which is also really great. The book bounces through multiple characters, multiple time settings and changes vernacular often, but has a core story that runs throughout. So far, what is jumping out for me is the way in which all of our lives start at a relatively similar place, yet misfortune and bad decision making ultimately ruin us and turn us into bitter, jaded adults.

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I'm currently reading Hilary Mantel's Bring up the Bodies. I loved Wolf Hall, and her follow up to the first Thomas Cromwell book is fantastic (and I'm hard to please because I usually hate historical fiction). I think it's a testament to Mantel's talent as a writer that her novel actually contains suspense, even though all the historical events are already forgone conclusions. There's a scene where Henry VIII has a joust accident and is unconscious for a few hours and all the characters are running around yelling about the king being dead with no male heir, and it made me feel stupid, because for about five seconds I actually thought 'holy shit, he's dead, she's killed him,' even though, historically, I know that Henry lived for much longer. Mantel's writing made me temporarily forget reality and be completely drawn into what was happening on the page. Great book, Mantel deserves all the prizes she's been given for this and Wolf Hall.

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I've paused Clash of Kings for for AKIRA, the Japanese manga. It's absolutely mind blowing that one person did all this work.

I'm on volume five now and it's very good. I do wonder about the quality of the translation, though. There's a huge chase sequence in book three among characters that still haven't been fully explained to the reader. It's hard to get emotionally involved if all you know about a person in a chase is their name :-/

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Just one third into Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, I'm taken aback at just how darn clever it is. This is what happens when a very, very smart person applies his powers to storytelling.

I've come to return to the book every day like an old friend, but I still have no idea what I'm getting into. One chapter it's an unusually literate thriller; the next, a beautiful and intimate journal fragment of a supporting character; the next, a pretentious word game; the next, quick-witted bar conversation worthy of a stage play; the next, a sincere historical lecture; the next, an on-the-nose parody of the lunacy of conspiracy theorists.

Even when Eco halts the narrative momentum for a history lesson, part of my brain (a part only ever exercised by books like this; books that truly make you work for the payoff) finds it gripping stuff.

Wherever this is going, Professor Eco, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

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