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I am heavily cutting down on my cinema time to enjoy time in the garden with a book. Tan-wise is an improvement too.

Sounds great and remembers me how badly I need a garden.

After 60 pages in I gave up because whatever the author was saying just wasn't getting to me. So I finally picked this up and it's going to be a long, long read.

My father was a math teacher; he would have loved this book.

Exploring and explaining a litany of glitches, near misses, and mathematical mishaps involving the internet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman Empire, and an Olympic team, Matt Parker uncovers the bizarre ways math trips us up, and what this reveals about its essential place in our world.

A very interesting look at the history and science of psychotropic drugs. It always fascinates me that we don't know how so many drugs actually work.

More science history.

Blue Dreams sounds good.

The author tries a little too hard to be funny, but it is still an interesting read.

An Italian classic I've somehow waited too much to read. Thankfully enough I can now use the local library again and this was the first book I went there to get.

Which is The Roots of Romanticism, but they only have it translated in Italian at the public library.

radici...radish... root, yeah ok :D
At least you can read italian :D

Reporting from the cave:

- Infinite Jest is one hell of a ride. Dense, hard, intense, unique, unforgettable.
- The Berlin's book from above is splendid, and it sure made me want to explore Goethe beyond The Sorrows of Young Werther.
- Tender Is the Night from Fitzgerald is basically as beautiful as The Great Gatsby, which for me is saying a lot considering how much I love the latter.

My reading has slowed down a bit because Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel entered my studies and he has been monopolising my time. I am deep into his The Phenomenology of Spirit, which will be exam material soon, but I also ordered my copies of both Science of Logic and Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (alongside Kant's Critique of Pure Reason which I've come to love). Despite the enormous difficulty, Hegel is a challenge I am willing to accept and the more he challenges me, the more I'm going in.

GekkoP wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 28, 2020 12:48 pm

My reading has slowed down a bit because Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel entered my studies and he has been monopolising my time. I am deep into his The Phenomenology of Spirit, which will be exam material soon, but I also ordered my copies of both Science of Logic and Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (alongside Kant's Critique of Pure Reason which I've come to love). Despite the enormous difficulty, Hegel is a challenge I am willing to accept and the more he challenges me, the more I'm going in.

Really cool. Had to study the same stuff 12 or 13 years ago. I specialized in social geography and even better later I gave some of the lectures with above material.

See that's something I'd really, really hope to be doing someday. Actually, not sure. I don't know if pursuing a career in teaching would be ideal for me, and not just because living with an actual teacher I get to understand how hard it is. I'm still at the very beginning of my studies, so I cannot plan it all out already, but if I had to wish for something right now it would be research. Some PhD, maybe a book of my own. Who knows. Dreaming doesn't hurt.

Back on topic, I am looking forward to this for a lighter summer read:

Not as cool as Gekko (I am still trying to get into some ebooks I have on the early utilitarian philosophers, but they are slow going for me) I just finished this:



A strange but very interesting man I knew nothing about.

GekkoP wrote: ↑

Tue Jun 30, 2020 8:36 am

Back on topic, I am looking forward to this for a lighter summer read:


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This was a great read.

Other recent reads:

- The Last Days of Immanuel Kant (Thomas De Quincey): fun, but less interesting than I was expecting.
- Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide (Stephen S. Burn): I was hoping for a more in depth analysis, but it doesn't go that deep.
- Hamlet (Shakespeare): tracing the connections to Wallace.
- The Swallows (Lisa Lutz): pair it with the film Luce for a nice psychological combination on sexism and cyber-bullying.
- Short Stories (Herman Melville): three novels, three masterpieces. What a man.
- How to Do Nothing (Jenny Odell): I did learn about bio-regionalism through this, but eventually I wasn't entirely convinced about her thesis.

Birthday presents:

Oh yeah. You are really diving deep Manu. Those are classics I had to read.

I am loving it. Next exam is Ontology, so the books above are not entirely related, but who cares. I would spend the rest of my days among philosophy books.