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It keeps saying I'm logged in, then it goes and pulls this crap on me....

The Eye of the World!

my bad......it was so confusing to read that i can't begin to describe what happened

How are we going to convert people to WoT if you say things like that! :hmmm:

o dear

:miffed:  i cant read any book twice its never the same

A Song of Ice and Fire series, these are some absolutly amazing books if you havent read them yet. id reccomend them to anyone, they are written by George R.R. Martin if anyone wants to check em out

Auron, no i dont, it doesnt have a release date, on his site George R.R. Martin says that though his publishers may try to put a release date on it, its impossible to do, and that it will come out when it's ready, and when he feels it is fit to go out.  The only other thing like a release date i found was on i think amazon.com, and they had it set for like May :P

*spoiler if not read The Dragon Reborn*
<spoiler>
is Ba'alzamon suppossed to be Ishamael?
</spoiler>

I went through: The Dark Elf Trilogy, Icewinddale Trilogy, and Legacy of the Drow this summer.  I've never read so much in my life.  I want to know other books like that.  character development, yay.
but right now I'm reading The Reivers (it's for school though)

The Chocolate War

 

thats a good book

you on a first name basis with mr.graham?

whoah! you underlined the title. and gave the authors(ers? ors?) names

what a pooey spoiler it spoils nothing more than the chapter index does!

The Eye of the World

would you like me to read the last page for you?

destroys the rest of the book

I hear Tom Clancy sucks, but I don't necessarily trust the person who said that.

I started on Terry Goodkind's Naked Empire last night. :)

1 wearing no clothes. 2 without fur, feathers or foliage.

I started on Terry Goodkind's Naked Empire last night.

currently plowing through a winters heart like no ones business and some up the characters are putting me on edge  :hmmm:

And that reading list makes me look like one helluva communist.

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.  <_<

"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)

"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

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

I suggest All Quiet On the Western Front.  :)

Bah, no-one else reading anything?

Not sure what I'll read after that - I've got so many unread books, which is both good and bad. :wacko:

I finished Knife of Dreams at the weekend.

I didn't like the ending. Or much of the book, really. There were some bits I liked, but too much dithering and.... argh the bloody words in some parts of it were just ridiculously obscure. Like 'widdershins' - WTF!?! (of course I know what it means now, its a Scottish word for anticlockwise, but that just makes its use more baffling - stating the direction of the spiral staircase is really unnecessary.)

Anyhow, been wondering what to read next and I'm still not sure. I think I'll go start a vote and let people here decide. :)

the direction of spiral stair cases in castles and such is very important

Sorta glad he's dying, in a way... puts a limit on how much longer he can draw it out.

Stick with it, there's no point starting another trilogy until you've finished the current one.

Stick with it, there's no point starting another trilogy until you've finished the current one.