The Requisite "What are you reading now?" Thread

Ok, folks, every LT Group seems to have the old, "what are you reading now?" thread. How 'bout us? There are some interesting, eloquent, primitive pagans here, and I for one am very interested in what they are reading.

Tell us what you're reading! If you want to limit this to titles of heathen interest, that is perfectly fine. After all, there are plenty of other places to brag about finishing the latest by Suzanne Collins.

As for me, I've just started Mythology. It's a tad dry and redundant, but sometimes the obvious can be interesting. For example, she states the ancient Greeks were one of the first to design the gods in their own image; warts, and caricatures and all. The antics of Zeus, Hera and the others are oh so comically human.

Finally getting around to reading The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins.

I'm reading Erasmus' In Praise of Folly. It had been on the shelf for years, but I was reading Jacques Barzun's from Dawn to Decadence where he mentioned how much Martin Luther considered a humanist like Erasmus to be a hell bound sinner. So, I decided I'd better give it a read.

James Tiptree Jr.'s The Starry Rift. In case you're unfamiliar, James Tiptree Jr. (her pen name) has a very fascinating life story, and her stories are full of great ideas and feminist themes.

Well, they don't have much to do with being Heathen, but I'm currently reading Seth Godin's The Icarus Deception and Dave Kerpen's Likeable Social Media.

I'm currently reading Sailing the Wine dark Sea by that flowery writer Cahill. I'm enjoying this critique of Ancient Greek mythology, or religion, or mythology, or religion....

I've just started Lawrence Krauss's A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing.

I always enjoy books like this, and at the same time I always feel sorry to know that they'll mostly be read by people who already agree with them. I can't help thinking of a character in The Golem and the Jinni (very good book), in which a character is described thus:

"Arbeely's faith rested on uncertain ground. Worse, the argument was forcing him to scrutinize his own shaky beliefs when all he wanted was the comfort of the familiar." (page 193)

That phrase, "the comfort of the familiar," reminded me in strikingly simple language of something I think I do wrong to forget, namely, that for a great many people that's enough reason to cling to what they believe. No rational argument is likely to present a more attractive face than that.

I am reading two books relevant only to Australians, Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files is moderately boring, Diary of a Foreign Minister by Bob Carr, very boring - I think that he collared the market in Normison and grizzled constantly about jetlag, and The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales which is interesting but it would be helpful to have a copy of the original before it was sanitised for kiddies.

I'm currently reading Sailing the Wine dark Sea by that flowery writer Cahill. I'm enjoying this critique of Ancient Greek mythology, or religion, or mythology, or religion....

And I just ran across the phrase "Wine-dark sea" for the first time in Three Junes last night.

I'm pretty certain it came from that long, ancient rap song, The Illiad

I'm pretty sure I got that when I read the reference in Three Junes, especially as it was explicitly stated.

I've just received my printed copy of The Skeptic's Annotated Bible.
(Though I'm in the UK, I found it much cheaper ordering it through Amazon.com than through Amazon.uk, by the way.)

>11 Jesse_wiedinmyer: Just call me "Captain Obvious". Next I'll describe the etiology of the "Rosy fingers of dawn..."

>12 EricJT:
And The Skeptic's Annotated Bible was just hurled high atop my virtual TBR pile.

Intuition Pumps by Daniel Dennett. I expected a lot from this acclaimed philosopher and thinker but so far I'm disappointed. He is a master at stating the obvious in complicated ways. I'm more than half way through and haven't learned a damn thing.

14
I just bought the book too because I like Dennett and started into it. I must say I have to agree with you.

I guess it depends on the maturity of the reader. You and I are probably more familiar with the arguments, etc. But those new to philosophy may benefit. I sometimes assume others are at my level and have to back track and explain simple things so they understand the argument and issues...not that I am so smart. I am 57 and have read a lot, so I have a broad background that others who are younger don't have. I have a deeper database to draw from. It is probably similar with you.

What I don't like is Dennett's dismissiveness towards phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty. Sometimes I think he just doesn't get it. I have a love/hate relationship with Dennett.

Anyway, my latest reading is Peter Sloterdijk and Pascal Quignard.

Sloterdijk:

You must change your life http://www.amazon.com/You-Must-Change-Your-Life/dp/0745649211/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8...

Bubbles http://www.amazon.com/Bubbles-Spheres-Microspherology-Semiotext-Foreign/dp/15843...

In the World Interior of Capital: Towards a Philosophical Theory of Globalization http://www.amazon.com/World-Interior-Capital-Philosophical-Globalization/dp/0745...

Critique of Cynical Reason http://www.amazon.com/Critique-Cynical-Reason-History-Literature/dp/0816615861/r...

Quignard:

The Roving Shadows http://www.amazon.com/The-Roving-Shadows-Seagull-Books/dp/0857420097/ref=sr_1_2?...

The Silent Crossing http://www.amazon.com/The-Silent-Crossing-Seagull-Books/dp/0857420771/ref=sr_1_1...

Sex and Terror http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Terror-Seagull-Books-French/dp/1906497869/ref=sr_1_7?i...

I'm currently reading The Idiot. This one took ol' Fyodor several hundred pages before he brought up God...

At the moment I really struggle to find time to read. On holiday I re-read Dracula as we stayed in Whitby and it seemed appropriate.

I mostly read short stories, especially detective stories. At present I`ve been dipping into an anthology compiled by Bill Pronzini and Martin H Greenberg.

I`ve also acquired a bunch of old pamphlets by organisations like the Union of Democratic Control, including titles by Fenner Brockway, Basil Davidson and Kay Beauchamp .

I liike the pamphlet format as it obliges the writer to make his/her point succinctly and then shut up.

When I have time I still like people like V Gordon Childe and H G Wells.

Happy belated solstice!

After finishing Dostoeyevsky ("Catholoics are worse than atheists"), I've finally begun another "religious" tome, Gilead.

But this one's a real yawner...

Re-reading Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth, the long uncensored version. Brilliant stuff.

Nearing the end of Lawrence Krauss's A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing.

> 19
Letters from Earth just moved a few vertical meters, up the ol' TBR pile!

Oh, my glorious god, LfE is available in audio, from a library just a few klicks from me!

'Finished Gilead. Spiritual, pastoral, peaceful, eloquent, elegant,,,,and boring.

Tomorrow I dive into Letters from Earth, like a starving canid on a deer carcass.

I'm reading The Hidden Child by Camilla Lackberg and The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales by Maria Tatar.

I am also listening, while I spin, to an audio book which I have already read on paper, The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer. It is one of my favourite books and I deeply mourn the fact that the author died before she could write any more books.

I am a woman - I multitask.

My current fast-track read is Huston Smith's autobiography, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine. Huston Smith, now 95, is a lifelong student of religious beliefs and practices around the world. He made it his mission to learn by doing, following the practices and teachings of various religions in his own life, and then to teach others what he learned. He's the author of the classic The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions.

Even though I don't subscribe to any system of religious beliefs, I remain interested in what believers believe and why, and I find Smith's balanced accounts much easier to take in than those of someone who's proselytizing.

Just finished the obviously brief, choppy and brilliant, Mortality.

I'm reading Clergy Malpractice in America (really!), some excellent sf Empty Space: A Haunting, and Hesse's Magister Ludi.

I've been reading Infinitesimal, which besides being a very accessible book about math, is a good overview of the kinds of conflicts that can occur if one requires that the physical world be understood according to a particular philosophical (or religious) construct.

>27 southernbooklady: I had to go and look at the book, and some of the reviews mentioned things similar to the following: "... If I had purchased the book and found it did not cover Newton and Leibniz, I, too, would have been disappointed. " It seems to be more a history of math, than a discussion of it. Not to say that a historical view is not useful, but I'll be very interested to see your final review when you finish it.

So far, (I'm about halfway through) it's not a history of the concept so much as it is a history of why the concept was controversial and evoked such implacable resistance among people who lived by the gospel according to Euclid.

There's a long section on Thomas Hobbes, though, that is really fascinating.

Just finished Desert Solitaire. Abbey mentioned Hobbes a couple times. The curmudgeonly conservationist and self-proclaimed "eartheist" also wrote about degradation of national parks, lyrical and sometimes deadly times in the Utah desert and great descriptions of some of the eccentric desert folk.

One book I just started is called "Gay Pride and Prejudice" -- basically the original with a few characters slightly rewritten as gay. I was surprised how easily Mr. Bennett fit into that role. It's a good bit of a hoot.

Belatedly finished The Stupidest Angel. Compared to The Corrections, "Bad Santa"and "Friday Part 3" it has become my 4th most inspiring Xmas entertainment.

The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science.

https://archive.org/stream/lifeofmarybakerg00milmuoft#page/n9/mode/2up

I'm about half way through this. Mary Baker Eddy was undoubtedly one of the craziest people who ever lived.

I'm almost done with Nature's God -- a book with the rather amusing premise that the founding fathers and most of the lesser lights of the American Revolution were all practical atheists, and that the revolution itself was the summation of the philosophy of Epicurious and Spinoza enacted in the real world...the "word made flesh," so to speak, of De rerum natura.

It's actually a pretty fascinating book, especially the parts that feature Ethan Allen.

> 34

Of course some per cent of our more important founding fathers (and I suppose mothers) were conventionally religious. The difference is that many if not most of our most important founding fathers were deists, or at least had deist personality non-disorder. lol.

Deists believe a god is necessity for first cause (as they were pre-Darwin) and also as the original source of the human social tendency to be what we might call morally normal. They certainly supported the golden rule and the good Samaritan type of morality, which they associated with "true religion" and the good god of deism.

Many of them were anti-clerical or anti-ecclesiastical, some being more overt about this while others kept this opinion closer to the breast.

So, in practical terms, most atheists today should see the founding fathers as close kin - even thought they did use words like god and religion a lot - they just did not mean the ordinary really bad things atheists generally associate with those words.

So, IOW, deists are - from a pragmatic viewpoint - essentially atheists, or at least from that end of the philosophical spectrum. (IOW, I'm pretty sure T. Jefferson was closer to me in general attitude than he was to, say, Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham, or the pope. I'm pretty fucking sure of that.)

Both fundie and liberal christians will always claim the founding fathers as their own. One understands this. But nothing could be farther from the "religious" ideas and convictions of Paine, Jefferson and Allen than the beliefs of something like 90 per cent or so of that of christian believers today - and also back then.

Not being a stickler for perfection I am cool with the founding fathers. I would really hope most atheists are too.

I'm not sure about Spinoza but the f.f. certainly were influenced at the time by Voltaire and his ilk in Europe. Basically their attitude was very close to the 20th century "Great Agnostic" Robert Ingersoll - the difference being they more so were convinced of an afterlife (rather than just desiring it) and thought that being a good person was the way to ensure the best outcome in a supposed afterlife. I see such stripped-down "religion" as being pragmatically beneficial/useful to society at large - even though I myself see things differently, as do a growing majority (here in the U.S. fer sure).

Finally got around to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Young Christopher is now my favorite atheist and humanist. We could learn a lot from him.

busy with Llewellyn's 2015 Witches' Companion: An Almanac for Contemporary Living

While I've been done reading it for a while, I figured I'd put in a plug for The Common Book of Witchcraft & Wicca, which I've been helping the Witch School guys get into print ... it's currently available in a free .PDF edition, and a paperback through Amazon's CreateSpace, and will be showing up in a limited-edition hardcover in the next month or so.

Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot. Been meaning to get to it for some time, and it's at least as good as I expected it to be. What's great is that he writes with the same cadence that he spoke, so you can hear it in his voice in your mind's ear. :)

Just finished Unbroken.

Loving the variety of books on this list -- reminding me of how much ground I have to cover in science, philosophy, history, etc. Particularly want to get around to Barzun sometime between this year and my death. :D Currently am reading The Iliad and Punished by Rewards.

I'm currently juggling The Baphomet by Klossowski (a rare re-read for me), Naudon's Secret History of Freemasonry, and The Dweller in the Deep.

Finally opened Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller. It's only been sitting in my TBR pile since September of '09.

>43 OldSarge:
A shame it wasn't one of her novels - even as a re-read! I assume you've already read at least The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. She may well be the finest - and least appreciated - mind of the twentieth century. But who these days reads books of length 700 - 1200 pages!

Revisited Sam Harris' galvanizing polemic, Letter to a Christian Nation. Maybe it's a monograph I should read every few years on a regular basis.

>44 CliffordDorset:

Is that an April's Fool joke? Just wondering...

Just finished Go Tell it on the Mountain. Reminded me of a spiritual version of Naked Lunch.

Probably reading about more gods than is healthy for a 'Happy Heathen'. Having decided last year to read through the Discworld series as and when the fancy struck, I've just finished Interesting times, with its game between Luck and Fate, and moved on to Maskerade.

Pratchett starts so many hares runnng at the start of each book, it takes me ages to work out which ones are (ahem) red herrings. Is it mirror magic or music with soul, like Witches abroad and Soul music? Does Nanny Ogg's hilarious-sounding The Joye of Snacks have legs? It's almost certainly something else that's already been touched on (Magrat's pregnancy? The spy in the coach?) and hidden in plain sight. Please gods, not Greebo!

Julian Baggini's What's it all about? : philosophy and the meaning of life and In the Spirit of Banjo: the recent adventures of Tim the Yowie Man.

Currently reading Love and Hate in Asatru by Bryan D. Wilton. A good perspective of the divine feminine in Germanic/Nordic Heathenry.

Not only is the author a personal friend, but he writes in a way that's easy to follow instead of esoteric psycho-babble.

I finally bulled through the incredible pain and suffering of the first 2/3rds, and finished The Jungle. A serious polemic about Socialism, and thoughts of religion, didn't materialize until towards the end...

I just finished the outrageously funny and learned Love in a Dead Language: an original translation of The Kama Sutra from Sanskrit, plus ancient and modern commentaries, embedded in a novel constructed as the journal of the fictitious translator.

I've also launched into The Woman Between the Worlds: weird horror set in 1898 and featuring the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as central characters in a tale of invading aliens from another dimension. The portrayals of Aleister Crowley, Macgregor Mathers, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and others are rendered with near-parodic broadness, so that the book definitely leans toward camp. But I like it much better than the highly comparable novel The Arcanum (set in a slightly later period).

>53 paradoxosalpha: Love in a Dead Language sounds intriguing. I looked at the book page and noticed--this is weird, isn't it?--that all three posted reviews were dated May 18: one in 2006, one in 2011, and one this year. Does that date have any special relevance to the text, I wonder?

>54 Meredy:

Hm. I'll have to look at my copy and see. Since part of the text is in the form of a personal journal, the date might appear. My review will almost certainly be dated in August, though.

I just finished my review of Love in a Dead Language and posted it to LT.

>56 paradoxosalpha: Your lovely, tantalizing review got a thumbs-up from me.

>57 Meredy:
Thanks!

I'm reading and enjoying The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern for my book club.

I'm with Thomas Jefferson in 1805, who finds himself surrounded by idiots when he decides to take on the Barbary Pirates in The Pirate Coast.

I just finished Mortality, mentioned a ways above. In its short few pages the prose does many things. One of them is to counter the claim that "there are no atheists in foxholes". Hitchens writes as one not only in a foxhole, but having been hit by a bullet.

I'm galloping to the end of some scholarship on Christian heresy (The Tree of Gnosis) and savoring a couple of novels: The Sea Priestess and Newton's Wake.

I'm reading The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck for the first time. I love it!

Just finished Archangel by Andrea Barrett. A collection of 5 loosely related short stories about people involved in science and exploration at the turn of the last century. I love her work, I swear I learn just as much reading it as reading non-fiction.

I just finished The Rise and Fall of Alexandria. Fascinating and almost mind-blowing. These ancients built that giant lighthouse and that enormous library. They invented braille and odometers and steam engines and siege engines, and laid the groundwork for Christian philosophy, and made huge advancements in anatomy/physiology/medicine and mathematics. They did so much, and then early Christians succeeded in pounding the Pagans into the dirt. The end of an amazing run of worldwide intellectual growth. This was a good one, perhaps my best for this year. **** 1/2