Books - What are you reading?

I have. It's brilliant.

"We are all completely beside ourselves."

Four chapters in, and you just know theres some big twist.

I'm not sure I can be arsed to wait to find out about it - it's all a bit Prozac Nation / Merkin "classic".

Anyone who has read it - is it worth the grind, or shall I just Google the ending?

OK, now I'm just annoyed that I didn't work it out myself.

Back to Ayoade On Ayoade.

It's like reading my sometime internal monologue.

You got further than me, I gave up after the first chapter.

I am trying to read all the books I was supposed to read during my (English lit) degree. Currently on Gulliver's Travels. It is lolsome.

After London and Wild England. Very very (arguably first) apocalyptical novel. Good little read.

Currently reading Gone Girl. The writer has done a good job of making me love the wife and hate the husband so far, but I suspect there is a twist coming at some point.

I'm starting to get into A Wild Sheep Chase, it'd taken me since before Christmas to read 100 pages and I did another 100 last night. I'm still not entirely sure what's going on but the use of language has really grown on me.

Do audio books count?
Just finished listening to The Stand which is a pretty good apocalyptic story about a super-flu. It kind of crosses over with The Shining which was a strange surprise.

The only thing I thought was a bit off was the way characters, particularly young ones, spoke. Its set in 1990 but was written in the 70's and they speak as if they're from then. I just kind of mentally auto-corrected the era back a couple of decades.

Next up is an actual book to read with my eyeballs. Either The Cosmic Serpant or Gödel, Escher, Bach: Eternal Golden Braid.

Read the Stand over christmas, didn't feel too dated to me but the ending was a bit meh.

You might like the Passage if you liked The Stand, think it borrowed quite a lot from Stephen King. Government made, world ending virus that leaves some weird creatures behind. Massive scope though, really enjoyed it

I've got The Stand to read next, been meaning to for years.

It's like a fucking infomercial. Should've known.. poxy bloody triathlete.

Almost finish this:

Just about to start this:

Yeah, the end did leave me a bit wanting something more.

I couldn't take Douglas Hofstadter seriously. I read I Am A Strange Loop instead of GED, which was supposed to expand on what he wrote in GED but he just comes across as a very confused, very woo-woo, very insecure man. It's a shame because he seems so highly-regarded in the Computer Science and maths world, but there's only so much crazy I can take.

He seems to have this idea that if you don't find the existence of recursion to be an almost religious experience then it's because you're first too stupid to understand it, and secondly you're afraid of it. It's mental. I know what recursion is, and I don't have this deep-seated dread of it. I just don't really think it's any more significant than a lack of recursion.

The reviews for GED don't seem to suggest anything like that in that book, though, so maybe he saved it all up for I Am A Strange Loop.

I thought GED was brilliant. I loved being able to walk through a proof of the Incompleteness Theorem whilst also pondering music and the notion of consciousness.

It does seem to me that the notion that consciousness is analogous in some way to recursion is quite profound. "We are conscious because we can reason about ourselves." is a recursive statement.

One thing that annoyed me about it: he uses the concept of a quine (a self referential statement) a lot, but when I tried to use it a game of scrabble it was disallowed. Gutted.

Rep.

'Miles Davis' by Ian Carr - a surprisingly good read.

^^ Yeah, it does seem to be an incredibly well-liked book, but after my experiences of reading I Am A Strange Loop, GED is probably ruined for me now - I'll always be noting his "dear reader"s and his insistence that you must understand things in precisely the way he understands them or everything you think is completely wrong. He called Bertrand Russell a "coward" for his work on logicism (because it didn't take into account Godel's theory of incompleteness, published in 1931, something like 30 years after Russell published The Principles of Mathematics) which is frankly bananas.

I've always had difficulty with philosophers in general, though, which probably doesn't help.

I've seen that bloke and cat. Used to work in the same building as a publisher.

Was put onto Roland Topor by my other half and finished The Tenant the other day, really really enjoyed it - a very quick read too. Immediately ordered Joko's Anniversary - just a shame there's so few of his titles translated into English.

Do you mean for the Big Issue in Oval or you saw him around Covent Garden?

I saw him in an office building, visiting a publishing company.

I thought you saw him before that, when he was on the streets.

Nope. Had no clue who he was until someone pointed out the cat he had in the lift.

I read that years ago and had completely forgotten about it. Thanks for reminding me. It's brilliant! Shall read again.