What are you currently reading?

[hopefullytrusting]

This reminded me of Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg, still worth reading for the recounting of methods used by both Hess and Stoll ( some of which are probably still employed today).

I think these kind of manuals are more useful than ever because their knowledge has largely been forgotten, but, let us also be honest - this was available in a public library - it only went so far (it does teach you how to do "illegal" things like 1990s phreaking, if I am recalling correctly).

[SimonNZ]

Started:

[Fëanor]

'War and Peace' by Leon Tolstoy

I read it once before ... about 60 years ago.



By the way, the 2016 British TV series was pretty good.  I watched it more recently. 

[Henk]

Neil Selwyn - Digital Degrowth

'We are fast approaching the point of "peak digital", with the continued mass production and excessive consumption of digital technologies set to become a key driver of climate crisis, ecological breakdown and ongoing societal instability.

Digital Degrowth is a call to completely rethink our digital futures in these fast-changing times. It explores how degrowth thinking and alternate forms of "radically sustainable computing" might support ambitions of sustainable, scaled-down and equitable ways of living with digital technologies. Neil Selwyn proposes a rebalancing of digital technology use: digital degrowth is not a call for simply making reduced use of the digital technologies that we already have - rather it is an argument to reimagine digital practices that maximise societal benefits with minimal environmental and social impact. Drawing on illustrative examples from across computer science, hacker and environmental activist communities, this book examines how core degrowth principles of conviviality, autonomy and care are already being used to reimagine alternate forms of digital technology.

Original and stimulating, this is essential reading for students and scholars of media and communication, sustainability studies, political ecology, computer/data sciences, and across the social sciences.'


Hard to do a search on the internet to get to a decent site with a display of this book. All commercial crap.

Also the reason probably why I have purchased so many books the last 20 years. Bearing the brunt now when I try to find a book, making my way through all those books and titles and being disturbingly confronted with them. 😪

It's double though. As Nietzsche writes: 'What and how little must one read?'

So many books. Too many books was already noticed to being a problem in antiquity.

A quote from the book:
'Anyone attempting to fight against this perpetual cycle of digital expansion is facing an uphill struggle.'

[hopefullytrusting]

Just picked this up for work:

[AnotherSpin]

Just finished Pierre Lemaitre's Alex in English translation. Bloody hell, what a ride. This isn't your standard thriller with a cop chasing clues and a tidy twist at the end. It's dark, clever, completely unpredictable, and honestly one of the scariest books I've read in years.

Alex herself is nothing like the usual female characters you get in crime fiction. She's victim, villain, and survivor all rolled into one, and you never quite know where you stand with her. The book keeps pulling the rug out from under you, and every time you think you've got it sussed, it hits you with something worse.

It's not a book that relies on flashy action scenes. Instead, it digs right into questions of revenge, trauma, and identity. That's what makes it feel so much more literary than the average thriller - it's properly French in that way, existential and deeply psychological.

And the ending... well, it floored me. Lemaitre gives you not one but two climaxes, and they're both as shocking as they are thought-provoking. You're left rattled, not just by the story, but by the way it forces you to rethink what justice and truth even mean.

If you want a thriller that messes with your head and leaves you rattled, Alex is the one.

[Henk]

[LKB]

'War and Peace' by Leon Tolstoy

I've only read it once before ... about 60 years ago.



By the way, the 2016 British TV series was pretty good.  I watched it more recently. 

Never read the novel, nor have I seen the 2016 adaptation. But I did see nearly all of the old miniseries back in the '70's with Anthony Hopkins et. al. ( I hoped to post a clip from that one, but apparently none are to be found... )

[Ganondorf]

Just finished Thomas Mann's short story Wälsungenblut. From moral perspective it's quite repugnant. It says a lot that even back when it was published it was condemned as anti-Semitic. Having studied Mann's character through several biographies there were several severe character flaws Mann had and reading that Mann waited three whole years before making any condemning comments about Nazi Germany (a country he did not even live in for the vast majority of time) so that he would not lose income from sales doesnt surprise me after reading this tale. Purely as art this short story is something quite different, at least as outer aesthetics are concerned. Mann uses beautiful evocative prose to narrate this morally wretched story that manages to be both very much on the nose and extremely subtle at the same time. Depending on the perspective this could count both as one of Mann's best short stories and as one of his worst. The quest to find a work by Mann that I truly dont enjoy reading in any way still continues...

[Mandryka]

[AnotherSpin]

A good book, I read it many years ago and don't remember anything. But the aftertaste lingers to this day.

[AnotherSpin]

Just finished Thomas Mann's short story Wälsungenblut. From moral perspective it's quite repugnant. It says a lot that even back when it was published it was condemned as anti-Semitic. Having studied Mann's character through several biographies there were several severe character flaws Mann had and reading that Mann waited three whole years before making any condemning comments about Nazi Germany (a country he did not even live in for the vast majority of time) so that he would not lose income from sales doesnt surprise me after reading this tale. Purely as art this short story is something quite different, at least as outer aesthetics are concerned. Mann uses beautiful evocative prose to narrate this morally wretched story that manages to be both very much on the nose and extremely subtle at the same time. Depending on the perspective this could count both as one of Mann's best short stories and as one of his worst. The quest to find a work by Mann that I truly dont enjoy reading in any way still continues...

The story of how Thomas Mann came to write his novella Wälsungenblut is at least as fascinating as the work itself, and perhaps even more so. The main characters, the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde, were modelled on the family of Mann's wife, Katia Pringsheim, who came from an assimilated Jewish bourgeois background. Mann transferred to them, with a touch of irony, the refinement, aestheticism and intellectual arrogance he observed. The shocking scene of incest can be read as a metaphor for cultural isolation, narcissism and self-absorption, but also as an echo of Mann's unease about the mixing of "foreign blood." In the figure of the father, a Jewish businessman striving for assimilation, one may also detect antisemitic stereotypes, which reveal the writer's inner conflict, caught between his marriage to Katia and his anxieties about purity and artistic vocation. Although written in 1905, the novella was published only in 1921, delayed because of the too-obvious parallels with his wife's family. This shows just how personal and potentially explosive the work was, and how biography, family tensions, private fears and prejudice could become entangled with Mann's art.

[Mandryka]

A good book, I read it many years ago and don't remember anything. But the aftertaste lingers to this day.

I have just met Moosbrugger. Chapter 18, p 67 here

https://archive.org/details/the-man-without-qualities-volume-1-by-musil-robe-3759344-z-lib.org/page/66/mode/2up?q=Moosbrugger+

[Iota]

'War and Peace' by Leon Tolstoy

... By the way, the 2016 British TV series was pretty good.  I watched it more recently. 

I thought it was okay too but got better towards the end. Lily James and Jim Broadbent were the standout stars for me.

When I read War and Peace in my early twenties I always envisaged Pierre Bezukhov as looking like the well-known Rieder painting of Schubert, and I guess Paul Dano's incarnation of him here is not a million miles off either.

[Ganondorf]

The story of how Thomas Mann came to write his novella Wälsungenblut is at least as fascinating as the work itself, and perhaps even more so. The main characters, the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde, were modelled on the family of Mann's wife, Katia Pringsheim, who came from an assimilated Jewish bourgeois background. Mann transferred to them, with a touch of irony, the refinement, aestheticism and intellectual arrogance he observed. The shocking scene of incest can be read as a metaphor for cultural isolation, narcissism and self-absorption, but also as an echo of Mann's unease about the mixing of "foreign blood." In the figure of the father, a Jewish businessman striving for assimilation, one may also detect antisemitic stereotypes, which reveal the writer's inner conflict, caught between his marriage to Katia and his anxieties about purity and artistic vocation. Although written in 1905, the novella was published only in 1921, delayed because of the too-obvious parallels with his wife's family. This shows just how personal and potentially explosive the work was, and how biography, family tensions, private fears and prejudice could become entangled with Mann's art.

I was in fact aware that Mann modelled Wälsungenblut characters on his wife's family (and Royal Highness in some way too although in a somewhat more positive light) but these points are indeed interesting. IIRC, Mann had received an extraordinary amount of money from his father-in-law as a dowry (paralleled in Royal Highness as even more astronomical proportions-reaching dowry from Mr. Spoelmann whose family had struck it rich with gold findings, steel trusts etc. though Spoelmann is not Jewish) and Mann actually directly read Wälsungenblut to his wife's family who didn't even object to it, but he read it after it was, to him, "safe" without risking the loss of dowry anymore. Which is honestly kind of shitty. Even the shady conman from Mann's very own Buddenbrooks, Grünlich, didn't go that far.

[JBS]

I thought it was okay too but got better towards the end. Lily James and Jim Broadbent were the standout stars for me.

When I read War and Peace in my early twenties I always envisaged Pierre Bezukhov as looking like the well-known Rieder painting of Schubert, and I guess Paul Dano's incarnation of him here is not a million miles off either.

It's rather similar to how Anthony Hopkins appeared at the start of the BBC series (he did age/roughen up by the end, of course).

[SimonNZ]

Finished:

[Valentino]

Keith Richards: Life

I read the Norwegian translation as a library loan when it was released, but re-reading it now in English from my own library is more satisfying. I'm sure Keef would approve.

My wife approves the approval of the 2016 War and Peace series. I don't disagree. 

[AnotherSpin]

Keith Richards: Life

I read the Norwegian translation as a library loan when it was released, but re-reading it now in English from my own library is more satisfying. I'm sure Keef would approve.

My wife approves the approval of the 2016 War and Peace series. I don't disagree. 

I really enjoyed Keith Richards's book, especially the second half. It's full of marvellous anecdotes, like his encounter with Paul McCartney on a Caribbean beach. You might also give Pete Townshend's book a try, it's a thoroughly engaging read as well. Who I Am is the title.

[AnotherSpin]

I have just met Moosbrugger. Chapter 18, p 67 here

https://archive.org/details/the-man-without-qualities-volume-1-by-musil-robe-3759344-z-lib.org/page/66/mode/2up?q=Moosbrugger+

Regrettably, I remember little from Musil's book. It seems he uses Moosbrugger to explore the blurry line between madness and reason, reflecting society's own folly. I spent a lot of time in Vienna in the early nineties and clearly remember the deep, rotten insanity beneath the lacquered surface.

It's a pity I've lost the ability to read long, serious texts; it would be interesting to refresh my memory. Perhaps I'll try someday.