Reading List 2005

Quite a few spiritual titles in this year. Books on Animal Rights and Deep Ecology also coming to the fore. As usual, fiction takes a back seat, although I did manage to read "Revolutionary Road" a couple of years before they filmed it.

7/1/05 Deep Ecology Bill Devall & George Sessions
29/1/05 The Aristos John Fowles
15/2/05 A Path With Heart Jack Kornfield
16/2/05 Spinoza Richard H. Popkin
24/2/05 A Light That Is Shining Harvey Gillman
2/3/05 Becoming A Writer Dorothea Brande
3/3/05 All Families Are Psychotic Douglas Coupland
11/3/05 Simone Weil As We Knew Her J. M. Perrin & G. Thibon
22/3/05 NLP for Lazy Learning Diana Beaver
11/4/05 Socialism and Religion (2nd Edition 1911) SPGB
20/4/05 The Long Rain Peter Gadol
29/4/05 Revolutionary Road Richard Yates
4/5/05 The Power Book Jeannette Winterson
15/5/05 Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf
21/5/05 The Hours Michael Cunningham
6/6/05 To The Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
8/6/05 The Courage To Teach Parker J. Palmer
28/7/05 Writing Down the Bones Natalie Goldberg
6/8/05 Wise Children Angela Carter
10/8/05 The Crossing Cormac McCarthy
28/8/05 The Atrocity Exhibition J.G. Ballard
23/10/05 The Power of Positive Thinking Norman Vincent Peale
6/11/05 Animal Warfare David Henshaw
17/11/05 Bodies Jed Mercurio
4/12/05 Holiness Donald Nicholl
8/12/05 Animal Liberation Peter Singer
12/12/05 Autobiography of a Saint Thérèse of Lisieux
17/12/05 The Seven Storey Mountain Thomas Merton
24/12/05 How to Grow a Lotus Blossom Roshi Jiyu Kennett
28/12/05 Alone with Others Stephen Batchelor

Reading List 2004

In this year I joined the Socialist Party of Great Britain. So quite a few pamphlets and other short works appear on the list.


6/1/04 Selected Poems S. Mallarme
19/1/04 Quantum Jim Al-Khalili
28/1/04 Wittgenstein, Grammar and God Alan Keightley
14/2/04 Shadowmancer G. P. Taylor
17/2/04 You Don’t Know Me David Klass
19/2/04 Stargirl Jerry Spinelli
28/2/04 Martyn Pig Kevin Brooks
31/3/04 Teach Yourself Islam Ruqaiyyah Maqsood
3/4/04 Zapatista Stories Subcomandante Marcos
7/4/04 Socialism as a Practical Alternative SPGB
Marxism and Darwinism Anton Pannekoek
Socialist Principles Explained SPGB
From Capitalism to Socialism SPGB
Marxism Revisited SPGB
7/4/04 Che Guevara Andrew Sinclair
9/4/04 Some Aspects of Marxian Economics SPGB
9/4/04 How We Live and How We Might Live William Morris
12/4/04 The Market System Must Go SPGB
13/4/04 Ecology and Socialism SPGB
19/4/04 Chasing Che Patrick Symmes
22/4/04 The Next Learning System Roland Meighan
25/4/04 Guerrilla Warfare Che Guevara
8/5/04 How The Gods Were Made John Keracher
9/5/04 The Right to be Lazy Paul Lafargue
27/5/04 The Fermata Nicholson Baker
9/6/04 Island Aldous Huxley
9/6/04 Marx in his Own Words Ernst Fischer
11/6/04 Nothingness or the Unbearable Absence of Being Jack Keelan
17/6/04 All the Pretty Horses Cormac McCarthy
18/6/04 Damage Limitation Roland Meighan
5/7/04 The SCUM Manifesto Valerie Solonas
8/7/04 The Unabomber Manifesto
10/7/04 Are We Prisoners of Our Genes? SPGB
4/8/04 Selected Poems (ed. Colin Falck) Robinson Jeffers
16/8/04 Refusing to be a Man John Stoltenberg
3/9/04 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger
13/9/04 Engels and the Origins of Human Society Chris Harman
20/9/04 A Mind for Murder Alston Chase
25/10/04 And Now You Can Go Vendela Vida
31/10/04 Bolshevism (Redline pamphlet) Rudolf Sprenger
6/11/04 Fifty Strong (Anthology) various
11/12/04 Socialism in the 21st Century (Socialist / Militant) Hannah Sell
22/12/04 The Fifth Discipline Peter M. Senge
26/12/04 The Story of V Catherine Blackledge
31/12/04 Spiritual Intelligence Danah Zohar & Ian Marshall

Reading List 2003

After a really slow start (no books completed until April!) this turned into a good reading year for me.

21/4/03 Night Elie Wiesel
9/5/03 Building Learning Power Guy Claxton
20/5/03 Main Currents of Marxism (I) Leszek Kolakowski
24/5/03 number9dream David Mitchell
2/6/03 Transform Your Life Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
8/6/03 Tiger! Tiger! Alfred Bester
20/6/03 The Life of Milarepa Lobsang P. Lhalungpa
26/6/03 Dark Sun Richard Rhodes
5/7/03 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Alan Moore
18/7/03 Native Tongue Suzette Haden Elgin
18/7/03 The Vagina Monologues Eve Ensler
22/7/03 Neutron Star Larry Niven
23/7/03 Deconstruction Derrida Julian Wolfreys
26/7/03 Lucky Alice Sebold
4/8/03 The Female Man Joanna Russ
7/8/03 The Color Purple Alice Walker
13/8/03 Invisible Man Ralph Ellison
17/8/03 The Shrinking Man Richard Matheson
20/8/03 The Perfect Storm Sebastian Junger
22/8/03 World of Ptavvs Larry Niven
26/8/03 The Hungry Ocean Linda Greenlaw
30/8/03 The Lovely Bones Alice Sebold
28/9/03 False Memory Dean Koontz
30/10/03 The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Improving Your Memory Michael Kurland Richard Lupoff
30/10/03 Mapping Inner Space Nancy Margulies
1/11/03 Use Your Memory Tony Buzan
1/11/03 Making Dreams Come True Vicki Bennett
9/11/03 Creative Visualisation Shakti Gawain
25/11/03 Emotional Intelligence Daniel Goleman
2/12/03 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time Mark Haddon
6/12/03 Introducing NLP Joseph O’Connor John Seymour
8/12/03 Achieving Emotional Intelligence Claude Steiner
12/12/03 The Christmas Mystery Jostein Gaarder
15/12/03 Jacques Derrida Nicholas Royle
19/12/03 Giacomo Joyce James Joyce
20/12/03 Real Presences George Steiner

Reading List 2002

Here's 2002. Our second child, Daisy, joined the ranks on 5.12.01. Maybe that explains why I didn't read much this year.
Some clear patterns emerge. Sci-fi classics. Simone Weil and the Spiritual Life. Some teen fiction and some literary fiction, Holocaust memoir. Funny how I keep circling certain areas.

10/2/02 Monkey Planet Pierre Boulle
Feb. 02 The Mother; The Yes-sayer; The No-sayer Bertold Brecht
7/3/02 Oppression and Liberty Simone Weil
23/6/02 A Beautiful Mind Sylvia Nasar
26/7/02 The Football Factory John King
10/8/02 Song Quest Katherine Roberts
10/8/02 Holes Louis Sachar
12/8/02 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Hunter S. Thompson
20/8/02 Regeneration Pat Barker
24/8/02 Cave in the Snow Viki Mackenzie
3/11/02 The Child in Time Ian McEwan
28/9/02 Snow Falling on Cedars David Guterson
11/12/02 Globalization Wayne Ellwood
15/12/02 If This Is A Man Primo Levi

Reading List 2001

Well, I had been maintaining a reading list over on a Tripod account. But I've realised that Blogger is just so much easier. And it looks nicer. So here's 2001.
I don't know what made me start it.
My "rules" are simple. I only list books that I read the whole of. So there will have been some things that are not on here that I did read a lot of (especially non-fiction books that I skimmed or part-read). The date is when I finished reading the book. Sometimes I am reading more than one book at a time, so I haven't necessarily read a whole book in the time between its date and the previous book's date.

11/9/01 On Writing Stephen King
1/10/01 The Weight of Water Anita Shreve
3/10/01 I am Legend Richard Matheson
12/10/01 Different for Girls Joan Smith
23/10/01 In the Cut Suzanna Moore
25/10/01 Drunkard’s Walk Frederik Pohl
24/11/01 Teach Your Child How to Think Edward de Bono
26/11/01 Becoming a Writer Dorothea Brande
4/12/01 Being Nobody, Going Nowhere Ayya Khema
7/12/01 How to Win Friends and Influence People Dale Carnegie
9/12/01 The Wise Wound Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove
27/12/01 Simone Weil David Anderson
31/12/01 The Art of Mental Prayer Bede Frost

Interdivinity

This is something I wrote last summer, somewhat under the influence of Philip K. Dick.

Interdivinity

§ 1: It is infinite. It is real.

§2: It (the whole, the superorganism, the bioverse) is God.

§3: One cannot explain what it is by means of a neat numbered series of simple propositions.

§4: Some things cannot be proved. This doesn't mean they are not true.

§5: Can I “prove” that I would drown if I were to attach concrete blocks of a certain weight (say 50kg) to my feet with chains and allow myself to sink into deep water when no-one was there to intervene​? “Proving” this hypothesis would be unhelpful.

§6: “Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for – to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.” (Aldous Huxley)

§7: Spiders' webs are not perfect fly-traps. If they were, all the flies in an area would be caught and the spiders, after an initial glut, would die out. Human symbol-systems are not perfect maps of reality. Like the webs, they work just about well enough – they make human life possible, but they are not the truth. To know the truth would be like the spider trapping all the flies. Impossible, but also too much and self-destructive. If you see God, you die.

§8: “Absolute reality is chaos and anarchy, from our relative human standpoint; and our poets are our ultimate corps of defence.” John Fowles

§9: “A map can never be completely accurate, otherwise it would be the same as the ground it covers.” (Joseph O'Connor).

§10: If you tried to make this type of map, what would you make it out of? Where would you put it? How would you represent yourself, the map-maker, within it? How would you represent the map itself? With another infinite map? Oh dear!

§11: If you prefer to think of it as in some way separate from God (as a creation), then perhaps you see it it as God's mind-map. But it is an infinite web. A map which is identical with the territory (which is confusing – see §10). I don't find this dualism helps me, but it is one way to trap flies and will work fine for lots of people.

§12: “The human brain works best with information presented not in the form of isolated data bits but in patterns of meaningful connection, in a community of data, as it were.” (Parker J. Palmer)

§13: “[...] the growth of learning [is] the growth of a flexible network of ideas and knowledge – the cognitive structure. It suggests that when something new is learned, the idea links into the network wherever the learner considers that it fits and this might be in more than one place. Fitting new ideas into the cognitive structure and thereby making greater sense of the meaning is the process of coming to know something.” (Jennifer Moon)

§14: “The fundamental nature of reality is relationships, not things.” (Peter Senge)

§15: “Looking deeper I see the interconnectedness of all things.” (Buddha).

§16: Since it is infinite: we find it tricky to see the interconnectedness of all things. Perhaps it is sufficient to see the interconnectedness of a significant number of things and to try to accept this (not just intellectually, but with the whole of awareness).

§17: The human brain, learning, the universe, DNA, life, reality, God, it – these things are similar (in the mathematical sense: think similar triangles).

§18: “David Bohm has suggested that physical reality, much like the human genome, is made up of an invisible web of information, an incredibly complex community of coded messages, a holistic underlying implicate order whose information unfolds into the explicate order of particular fields and particles. One analogy ... is a holographic photograph, of which every part has three-dimensional information about the whole object photographed. If you cut the hologram into small pieces, you can unfold the whole image by illuminating any piece of it with laser light.” (Parker J. Palmer)

§19: “Fat later developed a theory that the universe is made out of information.” (Philip K. Dick)

§20: It is not merely “information”; love is mixed into every part of it.

§21: Holographic love in To the Lighthouse: “What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably?” (Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse) Whatever piece of it you look at closely enough reveals itself to be “Hers indisputably”.

§22: You illuminate a hologram with laser light to see the whole in the fragment. If you look at it in ordinary light, the fragment will just look like a damaged part of something. You feel it might once have been part of a beautiful image, but now it just looks like rubbish.

§23: It is only visible as it is when looked at illuminated by love. Illuminated by other types of light, it looks the broken, damaged remains of something that was not a very good idea in the first place.

Solitary Vice

I haven't been on this blog for a seriously long time. I have done some writing and some reading since I last posted. Actually, make that a lot of reading and a little writing.
Anyway ... I have been reading a really good book called "The Solitary Vice" by Mikita Brottman (I'll post more about this later). I've also been reading quite a bit of Nicholson Baker recently. I re-read "The Fermata" (which is excellent). I restarted and finished "The Mezzanine" which is really good, but not quite so much fun (that was why I gave up last time, I suppose). And I have just read "Double Fold" - his book about the destruction of books in libraries as a result of programs of microfilming etc. For me, that's quite a "spree". I normally like to read a bit more chaotically than that. Well, maybe it isn't chaotic. In fact I have a bit of a theory. I call it "Reading Trajectories", although (now I think about it again) I should perhaps have called it "reading webs". Here it is anyway (it was part of a document I wrote at work (a school) about learning).

4. Making Connections – Reading (Learning?) Trajectories

Being able to make links between different areas of knowledge or expertise is an essential aspect of learning. For me this manifests itself mainly through the patterns I see (or deliberately create) in my reading. There is often a link between the book I am currently reading and something I have previously read. This “trajectory” also extends beyond the current book to something I will read in the future. On the simplest level I may be reading a book by an author I’ve read before and whose other books I intend to read. Such simple “trajectories” also include reading within a particular genre or subject area. But the patterns we create in our reading can be more complex and interesting.

For example: I recently read the travel book Chasing Che (Patrick Symmes). In this book he visits Pumalin Park – a wilderness reserve set up by a radical environmentalist. This fired my interest and I am now reading Deep Ecology (Bill Devall and George Sessions); this was a book that inspired the founder of Pumalin Park (I found this out on the Pumalin website). In the course of reading about ecology I heard about a novel A Friend of the Earth by T.C. Boyle (I’ve read one of his before) which is about an aging radical environmentalist. The web of interconnections goes further. Deep Ecology mentions the poems of Robinson Jeffers, someone I already liked; reading the book has led me to read more of his work. My interest in radical groups has lead me to find out about Earth First! and to get a journal called Do or Die! which features articles about EF! and other groups. I also want to read some of the writings of Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring was very influential in the early days of the environmental movement. All of this also reminded me of some of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, especially “Binsey Poplars”, which (perhaps surprisingly) has much in common with the perspective of Earth First!ers. This strand in my learning was greatly encouraged by my visit to The Eden Project in the summer. It’s linked in my mind with other important (for me) cultural objects such as the film Silent Running and the song “Woodstock”.

Clearly, the connections ramify on and on.

I think that reading the Brottman book has just "reminded" me that I do write about reading quite often. For instance, some of the other posts here are relevant (Reader's Block, Book Crossing, Unputdownable, Writers, Preface and Prefaces).

Well, it feels good to have written something on here again. Maybe I will try to add some more "content".