What are you reading Chapter 4

[slobake]

Any fans of Homer here? Not Homer Simpson (doh!) but Homer the Ancient Greek writer. Trying to determine what is the best translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Suggestions? Looking for clarity but also a translation that does a decent job of capturing the feel of he original poems. Is that possible?

 

[slobake]

 

[Tom Bomb]

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Fifty years down the track, I'm taking another stroll across Treasure Island.
Lots of fond memories there. This story had a big impact on me, when I was
a boy. Bet I'm not Robinson Crusoe — there's another one, just quietly

 

[928cat]

I've been reading a lot of Boileau-Narcejac lately. I'm current reading La mort a dit peut-être. All their stuff is great!

 

[slobake]

Love "Treasure Island", always have a copy on my bookshelf. Sadly, my grandson didn't like it. Ah well, he did like "The Hobbit" and the Narnia books.
Tried to read Robinson Crusoe, hated it. There are thing in that book that I wouldn't have noticed when I was a child. Maybe it is good I found out about it.

 

[Funky Ghost]

I'm on the 2nd book of Caverns and Creatures series. It's low brow pen and paper gamer centric (sic). It has caused more legitimate laugh out loud moments in recent memory from a book. It's not breaking new ground and a lot of people would find it unnecessarily crude but that's exactly what's scratching that itch I didn't know I had.

 

[Tom Bomb]

Love "Treasure Island", always have a copy on my bookshelf. Sadly, my grandson didn't like it. Ah well, he did like "The Hobbit" and the Narnia books.
Tried to read Robinson Crusoe, hated it. There are thing in that book that I wouldn't have noticed when I was a child. Maybe it is good I found out about it.

I really enjoyed Robinson Crusoe — another bedtime story that got me in — my old man was a gem Invalid Link Removed, from a descendant of the sailor who inspired the novel, puts it nicely in perspective,

… Daniel Defoe, a well-known British political activist and author, grew intrigued by Selkirk’s story. Historians have debated whether he and Selkirk actually met—Defoe would have had everything to gain by saying they had, which he never did—but Defoe did meet with Woodes Rogers, and few dispute that the Fife sailor inspired what would become Defoe’s literary sensation, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.

Published in April 1719 when Defoe was 59 and Selkirk 43, Crusoe captivated readers unlike anything in its time (and is now considered by many the first true English novel). Laced with politics and social theory, it was part adventure, part Christian allegory, part utopianist attack on British society. The first printing, of a thousand copies, quickly went to a second, third and fourth. The book was translated into French, Dutch, German, Spanish and Russian, making Crusoe one of the world’s most recognized fictional characters. But the author, who had been repeatedly imprisoned for his opposition to the British government, remained anonymous.

“It wasn’t a comfortable time for controversial writers,” says Maximillian Novak, author of Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions— His Life and Ideas. “One British bookseller had already been hanged. Defoe had attacked corporate power and the high Church of England. Crusoe definitely made him some money, but he sold the copyright and ultimately only made a fraction of what he deserved.” …

One reason it gained such a huge audience was that nothing like this had ever been possible before. It was the Age of Expansion and this was the period's equivalent of today's science fiction. Selkirk's story literally broke new ground and we were all captivated, transported.

Another one back then that got me in was The Swiss Family Robinson, with its unmistakable exotic parallels, clearly and unashamedly riding on the coattails of Defoe's genius. There are echoes still of that ancient Cast Away

 

[Polfuste]

I read this book for the second time. Excellent book that every musician SHOULD read...

 

[928cat]

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I read this book for the second time. Excellent book that every musician SHOULD read...

Thanks for the recommendation, I need some Zen in my life. . The book is on its way.

 

[Polfuste]

Thanks for the recommendation, I need some Zen in my life. . The book is on its way.

You're welcome..

 

[Tom Bomb]

Imagine if we didn't fear the machines of our own making | Aeon Essays​

The game of Go, which has a 3,000-year history in China, is played by two people on a board with counters, or stones, in black and white. The aim is to defeat one’s opponent by surrounding his territory. Metaphorically, the loser is choked into submission by the winner. At a match held in Seoul in South Korea, on 12 March 2016, the world Go champion Lee Sedol, observed by hundreds of supporters, and millions of spectators on television, slumped in apparent despair on being defeated by his opponent: a machine.

Go is a boardgame like no other. It is said to reflect the meaning of life. There are a prodigious number of potential moves – more, it is said, than all the particles in the known Universe. Serious Go players train virtually full-time from the age of five; they think of the game as an art form, and a philosophy, demanding the highest levels of intelligence, intuition and imagination. The champions are revered celebrities. They speak of the game as teaching them ‘an understanding of understanding’, and refer to original winning moves as ‘God’s touch.’

Lee’s face, as he lost the third of five games, and hence the match, was a picture of sorrow. It was as if he had failed the entire human race. He was beaten by AlphaGo, a machine that works on deeply layered neural nets that mimic the human brain and nervous system. The engineers and artificial intelligence (AI) experts who created AlphaGo admit that they do not understand how the machine’s intuition works. If melancholy is a consequence of loss, what was mourned that day was the demise of something uniquely special about human nature.

AlphaGo was designed at the AI research lab DeepMind, a subsidiary of the powerful Google corporation. DeepMind’s spokespeople say that this is just the beginning: they liken their research programmes to the Apollo Moon shot, or the Hubble telescope. The company has recruited 700 technicians, of whom 400 are post-doc computer scientists. They look ahead to the day when AI machines will be employed to solve the most impenetrable and recalcitrant problems in science, health, the environment … the Universe. […]

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[Oddly]

"They look ahead to the day when AI machines will be employed to solve the most impenetrable and recalcitrant problems in science, health, the environment … the Universe."

Well that's humanity screwed then. The obvious solution is getting rid of us.


Slight de-rail there, sorry.
Currently reading a compilation of Chester Himes' Harlem Detective books. Politically correct it ain't...

 

[Gaolee]

I am almost finished with A Study of History, Volume V. Arnold Tonynbee is not an easy read. Reading the footnotes carefully is part of reading that book, and so is reading all of the appendices at the end of each volume. There are eleven volumes, plus a separate volume of maps and alphabetical gazetteer. Volume V alone is over 700 pages. So, why am I doing this? Because TB isn't sufficient by itself to keep my musical mediocrity out of harm's way.

 

[Basshappi]

I'm on the 2nd book of Caverns and Creatures series. It's low brow pen and paper gamer centric (sic). It has caused more legitimate laugh out loud moments in recent memory from a book. It's not breaking new ground and a lot of people would find it unnecessarily crude but that's exactly what's scratching that itch I didn't know I had.

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I will have to give that a read.
Right now I am half way through "Counterattack" the 3rd book of The Great Martian War series by Scott Washburn. I have really enjoyed this series. If you are a fan of the original "War Of The Worlds" by H.G. Wells, you will probably like this.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077SDQ2DR/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i2

 

[slobake]

I am almost finished with A Study of History, Volume V. Arnold Tonynbee is not an easy read. Reading the footnotes carefully is part of reading that book, and so is reading all of the appendices at the end of each volume. There are eleven volumes, plus a separate volume of maps and alphabetical gazetteer. Volume V alone is over 700 pages. So, why am I doing this? Because TB isn't sufficient by itself to keep my musical mediocrity out of harm's way.

WOW! What are doing wasting time here? You best get to reading son.

 

[Gaolee]

WOW! What are doing wasting time here? You best get to reading son.

Preserving musical mediocrity requires a two part strategy - TB AND Toynbee.

TB and Toynbee. That should be something. Probably not a band name.

 

[Fat Freddy]

Preserving musical mediocrity requires a two part strategy - TB AND Toynbee.

TB and Toynbee. That should be something. Probably not a band name.

Ice dancers...

 

[48thStreetCustom]

A little light bedtime reading.

 

[ryco]

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History - Kurt Andersen.

From Puritan and Protestant Christians, to medicine shows, to industry and flim-flam con men, to playlands and travelling shows, to advertising, to radio and then television and now everything is geared towards the illusory and what people are selling or want you to think, up and now into politics starting in the 60s. And now with the internet and instant information and streaming movies and X-Box.
Ok book. Reads well. Everybody has an opinion on why things are as they are now. Having lived through and witnessing since the 50s and 60s can kind of figure all this stuff for myself. Worth reading along with Zinn's People's History one gets another perspective on US history not presented in public school education.

I try balancing out reading natter between old fiction, new fiction, and non fiction. Political diatribes get hard to read, because everybody knows everything and everyboy's right. Like anything: have to dig through a lot of muck to get to diamonds. peace

 

[DirtDog]

Currently reading this:

About halfway through and can't wait for the post 1968 to be written and published. It's as much about Kissinger as it is about US hegemony and foreign affairs. Compelling reading.

I've read also read Isaacson's books on Leonardo Da Vinci and Einstein. Both very good as well if biographies are your thing. Like Kissinger, Da Vinci was also a good lesson in art history and Einstein in the history of scientific thought.