Currently I am reading

[underruler]

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.

[Lord Lanair]

Cat's Cradle by Vonnegut.

I can see rug enjoying it!  LOL

[ns33]

We just finished Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Marquez, and we began The Sound and the Fury. After reading Intruder in the Dust last year, I'm beginning to wish Faulkner was never born.  <_<  

[Perdition]

Yeah, faulkner was a cocky little shit that should've been put into an institution by the age of 12.

Every Dead Thing by John Connolly.  Graphic violence and sex splashed about in a very tasteful matter.  Quality!

[Lord Lanair]

Didn't that guy (Connolly) write something about the Vietnam war?  :unsure:

[Perdition]

possibly  I've only read a few of his books.

[underruler]

We just finished Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Marquez, and we began The Sound and the Fury. After reading Intruder in the Dust last year, I'm beginning to wish Faulkner was never born.  <_<

I kind of have to write report on him, but I'm kind of regretting picking him.

[ns33]

Catch-22 by Heller. I'm sure all you Euros have heard of this one before  

Blindness by Saramago is also a good book.

"We were blind the moment we became blind, fear struck us blind, fear will keep us blind." (117)
"Inside us there is something that ha sno name, that something is what we are." (248)
"images see with the eyes of those who see them..." (317)
"God does not deserve to see." (318)
"I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see." (326)

I highly suggest Blindness and these quotes while reading...

"Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch." Matthew 15:14
"Men... would rather believe than know." Edward O. Wilson
"eyes were like a flame of fire... whose face was like the sun shining in full strength... I fell at [God's] feet as though dead." Revelation 1:12-7

[SS]

I think I've heard of Catch-22, but never read it. The reviews make it sound interesting though, so I'll add it to my list of books to read. Likewise with Blindness ...the reviews describe a very interesting book.


As for what I'm currently on, I'm re-reading the WoT series, just started A Crown of Swords a couple of nights ago.

[Arkanor]

Catch-22 is pretty good, if you can get past the quasi-unreality of Yossarian's predicaments.  

At the moment, I'm chewing my way through The History of Air Power, which is proving more interesting than the exceptionally dry title would indicate.  However, unless you have an interest in the Air Force it might prove somewhat less enthralling than I indicate.

[ns33]

I need a book of literary merit that has been turned into a movie. No Pride and Prejudice, no Eyes Were Watching God... Recommendations?

[mole]

read jurassic park? good fiction

or are you being subjected to something 19th century-ish?

[Perdition]

Currently reading Obedience To Authority, an interesting book based on an amusing study that took place at Yale in 1961 and 1962. Too lazy to really get into it, but if you're bored you can always read the blurb on amazon about it.

[smi256]

ah no book report?

[Perdition]

Although the studies that are contained in this book are a little over 40 years old, they are as relevant as ever. Although Milgram wrote with his eye to the past - he looked back to the Holocaust and to My Lai (he finally wrote the book in 1972, 10 years after the studies were completed) - his voice has proven to be not only prophetic, but of continuing insight and relevance for understanding group dynamics of power and violence.

Milgram's studies were done between 1961 and 1962 while he was at Yale; they were all variations on a theme: a unknowing participant (the subject-teacher) was brought to believe that s/he was participating in a learning study. The other two main participants were a man who posed as the student (the learner) and one who posed as the principal investigator (the authority figure).

The subject-teacher was told that the learning would occur in this way: the student would be hooked up to an electric shock generator while the teacher would read a set of word pairs, which the student would repeat back. When the student missed one of the word pairs, he would be shocked by the "teacher" in increasingly higher shocks (the shocks increased in 15 volt increments), up to 450 volts (which was marked, along with the 435 volt mark, with XXX).

The basic goal of the study was to find out how far the "teachers" would go despite the cries, pounding and eventual silence on the part of the students. The frightening finding was that more often than not, the vast majority of teachers followed through with the command to continue the experiment, which was given by the man acting as the principal investigator every time one of the "teachers" wanted to quit. [It should be noted, however, that the experiment was designed such that the "student" was never shocked, as the student was an actor, typically in a connected room and could only be heard via microphone.

One of the things that makes reading Milgram's studies so chilling is the scientific exactness of Milgram's own writing style as he describes the studies. The moral and ethical issues raised in these studies, although addressed by Milgram in his narrating the book, are also expressed in this same mathematically cold style. It's almost like a bad science fiction movie where our whole human story is narrated - moral failures and all - with robotic precision. It's unsettling.

Of course, it *should* be: any experiment that deals with human interaction on such a violent and perversely authoritarian level ought to get us a bit uncomfortable. Of course, Milgram also notes that when the subjects were confronted with their own complicitness, they often blamed others or excused themselves in some way. It really does give a tremendous insight into the psychology of human beings: when faced with our own evil, we try to excuse it rather than deal with it.

If, at the end of reading Milgram's book, we aren't questioning ourselves and our ability to be violent and to promote the spread of violence by being passive, we have missed the entire point of the book. Milgram's goal is to not simply report the collection and analysis of data, but to engage the reader on a fundamentally moral level. He cites Hannah Arendt's work Eichman in Jerusalem and notes that evil is not necessarily expressed in a pro-active way; indeed, it can be far more subtle but no less dangerous.

Milgram's book is one well worth the effort. It reveals an element of human being that is so easy to forget, especially given that our culture is so bent on *denying* any element of - or at least any potential for - evil within ourselves. Of course, such blindness to the reality of evil and tragedy is what makes *letting it happen* so easy.

I <3 copy and paste