What are you reading?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Holmes is great fun. I first read all the stories one summer in high school. Took a summer lit class that used detective fiction to emphasize close, critical reading and several of the Holmes stories (Scandal in Bohemia, Study in Scarlet, Five Orange Pips, Speckled Band....) were examples we covered. That was about 1991 or so.

I picked them up again around when my daughter was born - 2012 - and they were as fresh as day once again. I lost myself in it.

Here we are a decade hence and I think I'll do it again. It reminds me of The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins - There's an unreliable narrator who reveres Robinson Crusoe and returns to it for wisdom. The Holmes stories are like that.

I have to wonder why Holmes’ exploits were included in detective ‘fiction’.

Boru

[Nanny]

I have to wonder why Holmes’ exploits were included in detective ‘fiction’.

Boru

The course started with Murders in the Rue Morgue, which set out a lot of the tropes of the genre - locked room, red herrings, sly investigator, plot twists. Purloined letter was next, followed by The Moonstone. Then some Holmes before getting into the hard boiled Hammett/Spade tropes and ended with the Drowning Pool and Barbarous Coast in the Archer series by MacDonald. Fun course. 

Mosely's style is more an ensemble cast of characters that flow in and out of the stories. The stories examine the culture of LA in the post WWII era (Little Green is set in 1967 and looks at the hippie/biker subcultures). Michael Boatman performs several of the audiobooks and is excellent at changing from character to character.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footfall

[Istvan]

I recently picked up an old paperback copy of The Dissertation by R.M. Koster in a Little Free Library. This book is an exuberant epic from the 70s about a fictional Central American dictatorship called Tinieblas, and is a satire on everything from politics to magical realism. Equal parts Vonnegut and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the book tells the story of one of Tinieblas's late dictators, Leon Fuertes, in the form of a writing project by his not particularly reliable son Camilo. I've been having fits of the giggles reading the vast historical saga of poor little Tinieblas as well as Camilo's copious endnotes concerning his neuroses and failing marriage. Camilo has to defend the integrity of his work against critics who point out that much of his "research" consists of séances to summon his forebears, and is interrupted throughout his labors by civil unrest in Tinieblas caused by a crusading priest. Koster juggles all the storylines with admirable skill and terrific wit.

[MR. Macabre 666]

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman.

[arewethereyet]

I am in the middle of "The Two Towers" on audiobook. I did take a break and listened to something else after "The Fellowship of the Ring". Each audiobook in the LOTR series is around 20 hours long as was "The Hobbit". I am enjoying them but may take a break before starting the last one.

[Angrboda]

I switched to a 6-month Audible plan with 6 credits up front for $50. If I'd waited a week or so, I could have gotten a year for $75. That bites. Anyway, I'm trying not to use all my credits at once and so I picked up The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich this morning. I haven't been doing much reading lately, my morning routine is a mess. But I grabbed a bunch of For Dummies books on Youtube from the library. I have half a thought to start a Youtube channel on philosophical problems that are of interest to me.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Anyway, I'm trying not to use all my credits at once and so I picked up The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich this morning.  

I reread that not too long ago. It's remarkably relevant even today.

[EvolucijaSvesti]

I am currently listening audio book "Tim Whitmarsh - Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World", and reading text version also.



Description:

How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities.

Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata.

Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries.

As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes. 

-------

Long before the European Enlightenment and the Darwinian revolution, which we often take to mark the birth of the modern revolt against religious explanations of the world, brave people doubted the power of the gods. Religion provoked skepticism in ancient Greece, and heretics argued that history must be understood as a result of human action rather than divine intervention. They devised theories of the cosmos based on matter and notions of matter based on atoms. They developed mathematical tools that could be applied to the world around them and tried to understand that world in material terms. Their skepticism left a rich legacy of literature, philosophy, and science and was defended by great writers like Epicurus, Lucretius, Cicero, and Lucian.

Tim Whitmarsh tells the story of the tension between orthodoxy and heresy with great panache, a story that ended - for the moment - with the imposition of Christianity on the Roman Empire in 313 CE.

#battlingthegods #atheismancientworld #atheismhistory #timwhitmarsh #audiobooks #textbooks #atheism #dibelief #history #ancientworld #milošsomborac

[The Grand Nudger]

Springer Praxis Handbook of Salmon Farming by Stead and Laird.