The Book Thread - What You're Reading & Everything Book Related

[Max Headroom]

T.C. Lethbridge - The Power of the Pendulum (1976)

very interesting stuff... i have this vision of people being able to sex plants with a pendulum. would be a great time saver

currently reading:

The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies (2011)

very interesting so far.

 

[SeaMaiden]

Uh oh... I hope my family's name doesn't come up in that sugar book. We closed down the family plantation back in the 70s, though.

 

[Max Headroom]

Uh oh... I hope my family's name doesn't come up in that sugar book. We closed down the family plantation back in the 70s, though.

LOL - interesting!

dunno what time frame the book covers, but so far i'm still in the 1600's...
guess you're safe

 

[StickyHands]

finished one of my books, onto another:

They Came Before Columbus
-The African Presence In Ancient America
By Ivan Van Sertima

Anyone heard of it? Any good?

 

[Princess Vahall]

A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore

 

[SeaMaiden]

A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore

But Someone's Got To Do It!
By Mrs. Moore

 

[Princess Vahall]

Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

 

[Harry Gypsna]

The Blind watchmaker by Professor Richard Dawkins, soon to be followed by The enemy within(the secret war against the miners) by Seumas Milne.
Online I am reading some Proudhon--the man who said "Property is theft", wrongly attributed to Marx. He also said "Property is freedom", but for some strange reason I can't figure out people never mention that part.

 

[theclearspot]

The Blind watchmaker by Professor Richard Dawkins, soon to be followed by The enemy within(the secret war against the miners) by Seumas Milne.
Online I am reading some Proudhon--the man who said "Property is theft", wrongly attributed to Marx. He also said "Property is freedom", but for some strange reason I can't figure out people never mention that part.

Excellent -I would like to read that Miners book (in my youth I used to collect for the miners during the Miners strike 84 -85 in London-radical student and all that jazz..)
Proudhon is definitely the 'property is theft' quote. A good book is still George Woodcock's 'Anarchism' if its still available..

I am reading 'Chickenhawk' about a US Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam...

 

[Capt.Ahab]

Just started Ada Blackjack by Jennifer Niven. Great read, so far.

"In September 1923, a diminutive twenty-five-year-old Eskimo woman named Ada Blackjack emerged as the lone survivor of an ambitious polar expedition. She was a young and unskilled woman who headed into the Arctic in search of money and a husband. What she found instead was a nightmare rivaling even the most horrific folktales she had grown up hearing from the storytellers in her village. After Ada’s triumphant return to civilization, the international press called her the female Robinson Crusoe. But Ada never considered herself a hero. As far as she was concerned, she did what she had to do when she found herself in a life and death situation."

 

[Scottish Research]

Porter, Horace. Campaigning With Grant. New York: The Century Co., 1897

Very well written. A must read.

R.Fortune

 

[Max Headroom]

i've finished
The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies (2011)
and it was excellent. must have been a bitch to research.
i read this because i am interested in how slavery evolved from its brutal beginnings to today's refined (but still brutal) grades of slavery that exist all over the planet.

here is a passage i found very interesting.

[Robert Charles] Dallas and [William] Beckford [of Somerly], both educated in England at a time when slavery was being questioned, no doubt discussed their views on the matter. Dallas described his shock on seeing, on his first day on the island, a slave given a severe punch on the face for allowing a fly to land on his master’s butter. ‘My blood rebelled against the blow’, he wrote. ‘I felt an affection for the poor negro, and an instant detestation for his master.’
Later, he detailed the callous treatment of slave women by the white overseers, and various cruel tortures inflicted on even the youngest slaves. Slavery, he concluded, was ‘tyranny, cruelty, murder’, and he started to worry that he was getting used to it. The mind, he wrote, underwent ‘a total change’ from the state in which it arrived in the West Indies. ‘There is a kind of intoxication’, he continued. ‘I have not lost my natural abhorrence to cruelty, yet I see it practised with much less impatience than I did, and I have only to pray, that I may not feel an inclination to turn driver myself.’ Before this could happen, Dallas left the island, explaining later that he ‘daily sicken’d at the ills around me’.
[...]
Robert Dallas’s book about Jamaica was published anonymously, to avoid offence to people he knew on the island. He did, however, return to Jamaica after marrying in England, and left the island again only because of his wife’s health. Ten years after his first book, he wrote a history of the maroons, in which he backed away from his earlier anti-slavery sentiments. By the time he was in his forties, he was regretting ever having published his first book. It was ridiculous of him, he wrote, ‘as a West Indian, to argue against that system upon which the prosperity of every West Indian is built. My answer is that I was young and intoxicated with the Utopian ideas of liberty, which I had imbibed in the course of my education in England.’

and so it goes...
sad.

 

[Max Headroom]

finished "Jack Herer - The Emperor Wears No Clothes".
good stuff.

also finished the last Carlos Castaneda book "The Active Side of Infinity".
i love all his books, but this one contains the most important chapter of them all IMHO.

its content rings very true, even though the implications are horrendous.

if you're at all interested, i highly recommend reading the chapter "Mud Shadows"

https://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/the_active_side_of_infinity.pdf#page=108

excerpt:

"...The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were the first ones to see those fleeting shadows, so they followed them around. They saw them as you're seeing them, and they saw them as energy that flows in the universe. And they did discover something transcendental." He stopped talking and looked at me. His pauses were perfectly placed. He always stopped talking when I was hanging by a thread.
"What did they discover, don Juan?" I asked.
"They discovered that we have a companion for life," he said, as clearly as he could. "We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don't do so."
It was very dark around us, and that seemed to curtail any expression on my part. If it had been daylight, I would have laughed my head off. In the dark, I felt quite inhibited.
"It's pitch black around us," don Juan said, "but if you look out of the corner of your eye, you will still see fleeting shadows jumping all around you."
He was right. I could still see them. Their movement made me dizzy. Don Juan turned on the light, and that seemed to dissipate everything.
"You have arrived, by your effort alone, to what the shamans of ancient Mexico called the topic of topics," don Juan said. "I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico."
"Why has this predator taken over in the fashion that you're describing, don Juan?" I asked. "There must be a logical explanation."
"There is an explanation," don Juan replied, "which is the simplest explanation in the world. They took over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. Just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, gallineros, the predators rear us in human coops, humaneros. Therefore, their food is always available to them."
I felt that my head was shaking violently from side to side. I could not express my profound sense of unease and discontentment, but my body moved to bring it to the surface. I shook from head to toe without any volition on my part.
"No, no, no, no," I heard myself saying. "This is absurd, don Juan. What you're saying is something monstrous. It simply can't be true, for sorcerers or for average men, or for anyone."
"Why not?" don Juan asked calmly. "Why not? Because it infuriates you?"
"Yes, it infuriates me," I retorted. "Those claims are monstrous!"

 

[Scottish Research]

Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome by Anthony Everitt.

Good read.


R.Fortune

 

[ghostmade]

im reading behold a pale horse by william cooper.cool but scary shit if true

 

[Max Headroom]

im reading behold a pale horse by william cooper.cool but scary shit if true

as with all these kinds of books - some shit true, some is just bullshit.

but enough shit is true to be scary.

 

[SetHeh]

A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin
It's the book 5 of A Song of Ice and Fire saga that was adopted to TV series Game of Thrones.

 

[Harry Gypsna]

I'm just about to dig out all my James Herbert novels and have a Herbert fest for the next couple of weeks, in memory of the author, who has just died.

 

[lost in a sea]

an amazing follow up to the first book i posted in this thread by Mae Wan Ho..

not light reading though,, it is at the forefront of the real science in our time,, real truth if you will, not the mainstream establishment's simpleminded hypotheses..

 

[Harry Gypsna]

I am currently reading the original Dune trilogy. I read them about 20 years ago, but saw the 3 original books in one volume at the library, so decided to read em again.