What are you currently reading?

[kishnevi]

And just plain old PDFs of pretty much every canonized classic.
Oxford World's Classics (OUP), Penguin & al. have very reasonably priced editions of pretty much everything I want to read in English. Plenty of RW Emerson on Penguin, Dover, Everyman's Library, for example.

RWE online
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/search?author=Ralph+Waldo+Emerson&amode=words

[Karl Henning]

RWE online
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/search?author=Ralph+Waldo+Emerson&amode=words

You are the man, Jeffrey.

[kishnevi]

You are the man, Jeffrey.

The Online Books Page is perhaps the first website I ever bookmarked when first I Interneted.

[Henk]

Seems, then, that the book is expensive, because one pays for the copyrighted chit-chat.

The essays are as well rewritten in more simpler form, so I can actually understand them..

Nice to have the book, as I said, printing them you don't have a nice book in your hands.

[Henk]

RWE online
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/search?author=Ralph+Waldo+Emerson&amode=words

Thanks!

[Henk]

To make my point clear, I would rather buy this book...



...then read the texts in plain format on the internet or print all that stuff. I wonder how much people on earth do that??

Maybe indeed, if you don't have any money. But then yet, one probably ends up watching tv or something..

[Henk]

This one is probably better.

[Wakefield]

Other highly recommendable websites are:

Internet Archive: https://archive.org

World Public Library: http://worldlibrary.org/Home

The last one requires a small incorporation fee.

[Karl Henning]

Cosby's legal situation seems to be getting exponentially worse, as the number of women claiming he sexually abused them now could fill a school bus. The number of accusers is now reportedly more than 40 women, according to various media accounts.

[Drasko]

Some Icelandic writing in Belgrade's Saharan heat.

This turned out to be quite decent. I can easily recommend it to fans of Wallander type detective novels.

[Henk]

Dutch book. Philosopical work which shows the meaning of three Godesses and translate it to our current world. Gives rise to imagination and reflection, making this more complex than easier, which is good but also confusing. I haven't sort out yet what's its practical value. IJsseling said that some polytheism make life more imaginative and interesting. He holds it as a kind of valid thinking. I'm curious.. so I read further.

[Henk]

A book by Dutch philosopher and scientist Frits Staal. Title: "Three mountains and seven rivers". I only read the essay Postrelativism so far. Staal gives a critique on relativism. Though philosophy isn't universal, and religion doesn't know common ground as well, science is universal and progressive.

[ZauberdrachenNr.7]

I'm taking a well-deserved break from the Gesualdo book for this, a visually astounding history in comic form (Disney influence readily apparent) of WWII in which the French are rabbits, frogs & squirrels, the Germans wolves, the British dogs, and Americans are bison.

[asin]2070590739[/asin]

[Ten thumbs]

Have you come across this one?

CHAPTER I.

    I.    No, I am willing as usual to testify that you are a charming woman, but this I will not do, though a sweeter creature never sat on a donkey which was rather small for her weight, or wore a blue veil twisted round her neck, where it was of no use in the world. — You are looking rather well to-day.

    She.    I am glad you think so.  I like you to appreciate me.

    I.    Of course you do.  We all like to be appreciated.  I consider it probable that even an oyster, a good oyster, if he could know that he was to be eaten, would wish that it should be by one who could appreciate him.  I am quite capable of sympathizing with him so far as to be certain that he would feel hurt if, when he was swallowed, it was said that he was stale.  I lately read some acrostics of yours so neat and regular that I thought they must have been "machine made."  Now will that compliment satisfy you, and induce you to leave me alone?

    She.    Certainly not.  You ought to do something for the world.  It has always been agreed among us that you were far the cleverest member of our family.

    I.    You will allow that that is not saying much!  Why do you laugh?  This I assure you is a very serious matter.

    She.    I told you it was: then will you write me this book?

    I.    A minute ago it was a book, now it is this book.

    She.    Yes, I see it already.  I think it has a blue cover.

    I.    You shall repent this!  Well, if I do, as I never could write a formal opening, may I begin in the middle?

    She [after a pause].  You may if you can.

    I.    Of course I can.

    She.    I should have said not.  I should have said that, wherever you commenced, there would be the beginning, and that you would not attain to the middle till afterwards.

    I.    We shall see.

    She.    O, "we shall see."  Now you have promised, and you know we must not disappoint expectations which we have raised ourselves.

    I.    No, it would be a cruel thing to promise a hungry man a dinner, and then set before him a lump of raw blubber.

    She [with gravity].  It would indeed.

    I.    Unless he was a Greenlander.  No man could have been more energetic, more industrious (with a butterfly net) than I.  And now I have promised to idle away my time in writing a book.  I fear that, when I have once joined the dangerous classes, I shall often look back with regret on these unpublished days of comparative innocence.

    She.    The dangerous classes?

    I.    The dangerous classes!  So surely as the race invents a new sort of villany, the authors hasten (by way of warning) to spread it abroad, and all our most ridiculous mistakes they first make and then disseminate.  Dangerous?  Yes indeed, I wonder, author as you are, that I ever ventured to sit in-doors with you.  It must be use.

    She.    Why do you call me an author?  Ridiculous!

    I.    Because you copied the manuscript of your grandmother's little book for her, and put mottoes to all the chapters.  Yes, it must be use.  I have become callous.  Indeed, it has long been well known that you may dare the most dangerous things, such as London crossings, and tough pie-crust, if you are but used to them, and yet you may be startled out of all propriety if a few Gatling guns go off when you think you are standing in their way.

    Observing that I was roused, she said no more, but turned her donkey's head and proceeded up the lane, while I took up my butterfly net and went on.  "It will have to be done!" I thought, and as I walked I cogitated as follows.

    I was told a strange legend lately which bore upon this point.  A certain angel was sent to collect stones in the moon and distribute them down here where fords were going to be wanted over the rivers.  A sufficiently difficult enterprise; but he went on with it well, till, drawing near the earth, he saw, as I understood, a lot of pterodactyls fluttering about in a bog, and was so much startled and astonished that he accidently upset the bag containing the stones, and they came clattering down all over New England.

    He was accustomed, no doubt, to get out of the way of a speeding planet as she came rolling up in her oval; a volcano seen below spreading mushroom-shaped smoke over its mouth did not put him out; but pterodactyls heaving their long necks out of the swamp he had not been used to, he could not stand.

    It was a Yankee who told me this story.

    I wish to state, without any mental reservation, that I do not believe it.  It does not appear to me to account in a satisfactory manner for the stones which plague the New England farmer.

[ZauberdrachenNr.7]

Have you come across this one?

Yes!  John Jerome : His thoughts and ways from the 1880s!

[Karl Henning]

Started re-reading this, this morning:

[asin]1595943587[/asin]

When I was younger than a young adult (and arguably precocious as a reader), I read Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.  That book and its sequels are generally regarded as YA books which even unqualified adults (so to speak) may enjoy, and that is an evaluation I endorse.  However, I think that the author of The Time Capsule Murders does the talented Madame L'Engle even one better.

[Karl Henning]

Hey, it's a while since I visited that Amazon page, and it is worth noting that all seven reviewers give this book five stars! Huzzah!

[Cato]

Started re-reading this, this morning:

[asin]1595943587[/asin]

When I was younger than a young adult (and arguably precocious as a reader), I read Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.  That book and its sequels are generally regarded as YA books which even unqualified adults (so to speak) may enjoy, and that is an evaluation I endorse.  However, I think that the author of The Time Capsule Murders does the talented Madame L'Engle even one better.

Hey, it's a while since I visited that Amazon page, and it is worth noting that all seven reviewers give this book five stars! Huzzah!

Many thanks for the high praise!  I am hoping to get a few more reviews for the other parts of the trilogy, again preferably 5-star!   0:)

[SimonNZ]

Some recent bookchat from Clive James:



...and still have his Dante translations to get to at some point

[Drasko]