The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins.

In the opening remarks for a debate, Christopher Hitchens called Dawkins a representative of atheism's "moderate" wing. This book supports that assessment. Dawkins doesn't so much use cannon to sink the vessel as systematically describe why it's already going down. Like a patient and passionate docent he leads a thorough tour, making the rounds through the various arguments in the ?-theist debates, conversationally debunking as he rebuffs. For enjoyment, it doesn't compare to The Ancestor's Tale, since he's a better natural history writer than whatever this format is called. That said, it's an easy and informative read occasionally drifting toward redundancy, but the tour is always sure to move on shortly.

It's a deceptively simple book. One might think he wasn't taking his opponents particularly seriously for how superficial his dismissals sometimes appear, and he addresses that at he introduces the book. His parries to the onslaught are apparently facile because however vigorous his opponents' attacks are, their footing is bad. In effect, the battle is forfeit because it cannot be properly fought. It is impossible to argue sufficiently if one's premise is bad. No logic holds up if its givens are fallacious, ergo theology is not something he need concern himself with. Thereafter, little is left but human interaction, socio-cultural memes, and clearing up some misunderstandings of natural selection. After a good deal of supporting material the point is again in Dawkins's column.

The rational side of the debate is handled capably, if not tersely. Dawkins' "moderate's compassion" shows when he reminds his reader that he is, in fact, a humanist not immune to sympathy. By the same token, he also reminds his reader to undertake the personal distinction between truth and feelings. Feelings, he admits, are a far more fraught subject. Looked at through Dawkins' rationale, it's easy to see how religion falls to rational scrutiny and, perhaps because of this very aspect, can do severe disservice and discredit to both adult society and to the children reared in its field (he introduced me to the fact that there are support and therapy groups for thousands of people who are living with the PTSD of their terror of hell).

Looked at emotionally, it's far more complex. Depending on the circumstances, individual comfort and consolations can eclipse all reasonable refutations, and an intractable rift is caused when feelings are wounded when the burka is ripped away too quickly (to borrow from the author). Dawkins is, as he admits, attempting to achieve conversions: to relieve the suffering brought about by false claims, cultural manipulations, and a general lack of clear critical thinking being adopted as the signature of brand loyalty. He knows that ignorance of the trove of science, or exposure to the crane of natural selection is a major factor in the problem. He addresses this accessibly.

Looked at in a general scale, the followers of religion who are peaceful and good-natured folk, though numerous, are in the minority. The clumps of good-hearted and tolerant individuals, congregations, and sects are vastly outnumbered by the prejudiced and the vitriolic camps of the self-same religions. Generalizations about "the religious" are, understandably, taken personally by this minority and their defenders. Dawkins makes it clear that in order to have this conversation be productive, the privilege of religion to enjoy undeserved deferential sensitivities will have to be postponed. (If it is so frail as to not be able to withstand rough handling, one questions its dependability.) He does very well at debunking the position at the heart of the standard arguments for/of belief, as well as questioning the emotional investment with which a follower imbues his belief, but nowhere does he directly insult the believer. The closest he comes (a bit like holding the flat of the blade to the throat when it could have been a death stroke) is in explaining quite reasonably how religious indoctrination can be a form of child abuse.

Dawkins is not a crass and callous rationalist. He is a humanistic scientist. The two cannot be conflated if a proper discussion is expected to occur. But that conversation, as many times as it's slogged through, rarely occurs with good sportsmanship. The game is unfair and biased by hurt feelings and majority rules. It's a bit like playing at soldiers against a side which outright refuses to crumple when they've been legitimately shot -- the ones playing in God mode.

Can't go wrong with ''Salem's Lot'. Also, 'Pet Sematary' and 'The Dead Zone'.

I'd also recommend some of the Richard Bachman books, if you want something more fast-paced. 'Roadwork', 'The Running Man', 'Blaze' are all real good.

I'm reading Christine right now for the first time since I was a kid; bit of a nostalgia trip. It's really, really good surprisingly...a few silly writing bits here and there, some stupid wordings, but as a metaphoric story about a loner teen it's very well done. Bonus points for somehow making an evil car actually kind of intimidating. The Dead Zone rules too. And his recent books are all quality, from Full Dark No Stars to Dr. Sleep.

After this I'm moving onto Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Should be a trip, yeah?

Yes! The Road is fantastic.

I'm actually reading King's 11/22/63 at the moment. I like it overall, though I'm about halfway through and the story is just plodding along at this point. Sappy love story and irrelevant detail after irrelevant detail. I'm hoping it picks up again. I think this is the last Stephen King work I'll read for some time. I'd finished the Dark Tower series several months ago, wasn't big on the ending, and that left a bad taste in mouth.

The Road was good but sometimes it did feel like he was trying a bit too hard with his really minimalist prose.

I am currently reading The Ark - Stephen Baxter This is the follow up to his Novel Flood and both books are set in a near future where the Earth is flooding with dire consequences for humanity and the usual responses from politicians / military. Both books come in at 540 pages so quite a long story but the pace is fairly fast moving and the pages seem to dwindle quickly. Mixture of sci-fi and disaster movie type scenario works well and has kept me entertained for the last week. 4/5

I would suggest reading It, From a Buck 8, Firestarter, Different Seasons (4 novellas, 3 of which are fantastic) The Shining and Hearts in Atlantis. Duma Key is okay though he has written a lot better. It really suffers from one of Stephen Kings great downfalls; the anticlimactic deus ex machine conclusion. I think he should have kept writing endings ala Pet Semetary. Harsh as fuck, horrifying as hell.



It certainly is. Really moving story, very bleak and the sometimes bizarre style with which McCarthy writes takes some getting used to, but once you find his rhythm, its incredible.

I'm reading A Disobedient Girl by Ru Freeman these days. Has anyone heard of it?

I haven't touched it yet But I surely will in the coming days. I got sidetracked a bit with a couple of other books. This past month, I read Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm. Long overdue and I enjoyed them both. I loved the latter more for its hilarious setting. Then onto Gaiman's latest 'Ocean at the end of the lane'. He intended it to be a short story but it was expanded to a novella. It was a quick read but it certainly lacked character depth. Things seemed rushed too. Then I recently finished Khaled Hosseini's 'And the mountains echoed'. If you're familiar with his previous work, you wouldn't feel out of place reading this. I think he's a good storyteller if one doesn't find stores from Afghanistan tiresome. It kinda loses focus with too many characters and interwoven stories but the major thing going for this book would be the ability of striking your feels! Slightly predictable but a good read nonetheless.

Speaking of Bulgakov, I just started Heart of a Dog. I too love Master and Margarita so I figured it was time to give an other of his novels a try. SO far it's pretty hilarious, while also seeming like a work of social commentary...maybe a bit broader than Master, though. It's really fun and tragic being inside this dog's head. Some bits had me bursting out laughing in the middle of the night. As usual I have questions about the translation which I can't find easy answers to, but I think it'll do!

Someone a couple of pages back was asking about Dashiell Hammet. I have read a lot of his short work and it's pretty exciting stuff, told in spare prose and with that kind of snappy tough dialogue that you just have to love. Not as deep as Chandler maybe and without his existential leanings but very exciting and hard-edged all the same. Haven't read Maltese Falcon or the Glass Key but I can tell you that Red Harvest was a great little novel with an unpredictable structure...the "case" having apparently been solved less than halfway through before the shit really hits the fan and the whole thing suddenly erupts into violence and murder. Definitely recommend that one.

Almost finished Dr Sleep by Stephen King. Must say, I am pretty underwhelmed. It just hasn't grabbed me; definitely not one of his best novels. I find the AA stuff quite tiresome and the Star Wars style twist pretty unlikely, though it is explained adequately.

Just finished "Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust" by Richard Rhodes. Pretty intense stuff. Also finished "The Lucky Culture And The Rise Of An Australian Ruling Class" By Nick Cater. It has a few decent points to make, but overall it's just symptomatic of the Murdoch press' artificially generated "culture war".

I actually dislike Heart of a Dog. Picked it up after reading Master and Margarita, but the social commentary is really too thick for me yo enjoy it. I've read some different stuff of late, am reading Journey to the End of the Night by Céline now... Not as gripping as I thought, but I'm only 100 pages in or so. Have a lot of stuff in the mail that I'm looking forward to though; Cryptonomicon, The Stand, Mason & Dixon, Tours of the Black Clock, Weaveworld, Glamorama and finally A Short History of Decay.

Big fan of Céline. Such a hateful man haha.

I'm reading 'The Ginger Man' by JP Donleavy and am blown away by the superb blend of genres. It's funny, it's sick, it's unnerving, it's touching, and it makes me want to read more. Came across this man via Hunter S. Thompson and am glad of it.

Yeah, he's not a happy man! Sometimes he writes wonderfully, too, like when he describes his travels by boat to Africa from France more 'like a sickness than a voyage'.

one of the things I like most about Wolfe is that he pulls off the kind of grandiose prose I've always wanted to be able to pull off. You have to be good to do that kind of shit. If you aren't good, it just looks pathetic. The bigger you try to make it the smaller it can look if you just don't have the tools to build it well.

Okay, no no no. Dr Sleep by Stephen King. Finished it and I truly think it was really bad, probably the first book of Kings about which I can say this. So many problems with it; the unlikely wisdom of 13 year old Abra, the pretty indecipherable ending sequence (wtf actually happened) and the previously mentioned Empire Strikes back moment. I just don't understand why Dan didn't use a gun on the True Knot folks. Really disappointing and written uncharacteristically.

That said, I'm re-reading Cell by King and have really enjoyed it. I'm very partial to post-apocalyptic stories and this one conjures a really fraught atmosphere, intense and believable. Deus ex machina and all, its a great novel...

Just discovered that there's a pretty rad used bookstore (for a charity that supports the library, no less!) just down the street from me that I've never known was there because it's in this obscure back area of a strip mall. Got a nice haul of books today including The Hobbit and the Silmarillion (can't seem to find my old copies anywhere so they may be forever lost), the first three books in Dan Simmons' Hyperion series, the 4th, 5th and 6th Elric books and Gene Wolfe's Knight. I'll definitely be visiting that place frequently. The prices weren't as good as your usual thrift store (paperbacks were $1.50-2, hardcovers seemed to be a universal $3) but are probably better than AbeBooks, especially taking shipping into consideration.

Just finished "the Pale horseman" by Bernard Cornwell. I never knew much about the king Alfred era in England, didn't realize England was just about lost to the danish if it wasn't for him...very interesting.
Reading Gene Wolfe's "the shadow of the torture" at the moment. It's ok, i think i read a lot of good comments about it on here and was a bit over expectant.

Ishtar Rising by Robert Anton Wilson was all about boobies and it was...utterly fascinating, as you'd probably expected.

Also read Valis, by Philip K. Dick, which fucked my mind-hole until I came spiritual revelations.

Cool, Cornwell's a great author - one of my go-to guys for long plane trips. The Alfred series is pretty cool, Uthred's a really well-drawn character. Have you read any of his other stuff?

I'm in the throes of moving house, so all my books are packed up in boxes. Had to pinch something to read from my brother - grabbed a couple of Terry Pratchett books - "snuff", "Thud" and "night watch". I cant help but notice that his themes are getting a bit heavier as he goes along, particularly the Sam Vimes books.

Yeah! I quite like Valis, it's one of my favorite PKD books. Trying to unravel it entirely, especially if you read more of what Dick was on about during that period in his life, is like trying to divide by zero.

I picked up The Sirens of Titan a couple days ago. I haven't started it yet but it's one of the only Kurt Vonnegut novels I haven't read yet so I'm really looking forward to it. I think I'm gonna save it for a day when I can sit down and read it through in one sitting.

Read "Stonehenge" that also was pretty good, made me appreciate stonehenge a lot more. I have "lords of the north" lined up next, that series is hard to stop reading.

Have you read the Exegesis? I received it as a gift this Christmas. I've leafed through it. Pretty heady stuff.

been going through Urth of the New Sun, a first-two-volumes-in-one thing. Like most failsafe recs it has some excellent moments amidst some supreme boredom, it's weird in that I rather enjoy reading it but by no means is it a hard out page turner. Like the writing style and Wolfe's habit (imo) of turning a really good bit of plot out of what initially sounds rather confused and unfocused. First book I've really enjoyed reading for a while... All the reading I did in uni kinda killed my enjoyment for a little bit.

Other than that, going through Augustine's Confessions and On Christian Doctrine, ideal material for the toilet, slowly chipping away at it while I drop a grogan. I can see why they're classics but I think most people here would be bored witless by them both. On Doctrine in particular is a very practical book but would be pretty pointless if you weren't a christian. Oh, and Sun Tsu's Art of War! Another quality toilet book, much lighter reading than Augustine, flows brilliantly in that enigmatic eastern way (every line/ is almost/ a haiku) and I reckon I've gotten a lot better at starcraft and RA2 by taking some of it on board, no bullshit.

I read most of Confessions years ago. He was a cool guy, I suppose, aside from all the moralizing and homo Jesus love.

Tolstoy's Confessions is also good.

I'm almost done with Urth...maybe another 100 pages not sure.

Just finished The Road last night while drinking a beer at about 2 a.m. - agonizingly tired and increasingly unable to concentrate just seemed like the best way to finish the book. I don't know if I liked all of it very much, but the effect it had was pretty rock-heavy. If there's any book that can get you to hate everything that's the one - a few days ago I had to actually put it down it was so unpleasant. But its emotional power was undeniable.

Now moving onto Double Down by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann - an account of the 2012 US presidential campaign. Pretty engrossing so far and gives me what I wanted, some insight into the inner-workings of the system.

My parents also got me the novel Wolf of Wall Street for my birthday. Can't wait to start that one. Looks amazing.

Anyone read any Robertson Davies? He's supposed to be one of the greatest Canadian writers ever. I found one of his trilogies-- 'The Cornish Trilogy': containing 'The Rebel Angels', 'What's Bred in the Bone', and 'The Lyre of Orpheus'-- at a local used bookstore, and bought the set for $8.40 in total. Thank you 20% off sale.

I love McCarthy, but unpleasant is not a bad way of describing him. Don't know if you've read Blood Meridian, his novel about scalphunters in (I think?) 1850s Mexico and the border states. Like The Road, his language use is stunning (though it's less stripped down minimalist poetry, and more biblical or Miltonic grandiosity), but it's frequently punctuated with outbursts of appalling savagery. It's certainly essential to the novel, but it can make it pretty hard going.


That may well have been me....? I certainly read Maltese Falcon back in December, and have since picked up The Thin Man, as well as Chandler's The Big Sleep. Excited to read both of them. I like your description of Red Harvest, having heard other good things about it, but I've not come across a copy myself yet.

I just finished Agatha Christie's The Pale Horse, having read another of her's (And Then There Were None) last year and wanting to read a few more. It has the occult as a main focus of the plot, I think because Dennis Wheatley's occult novels were so popular at the time, and I think she does a pretty good job. The denouement is nicely done, and there are a couple of well-played twists.

For a change of scenery, I've now moved onto The Stars My Destination. I read it back when I was a teenager, but don't remember much about it.

It isn't exactly "literature" per se but does anyone here have The Atlas of Middle-Earth?

^I don't own the atlas but used it when I read Lord of the Rings as a kid. Really bought more reality and understanding to my reading. Some of the elements depicted in the atlas don't exist in Tolkiens book (eg. I believe there is a river/stream feeding a swamp somewhere- this stream doesn't exist according to Tolkien, but physically and ecologically must exist for the swamp to). I really enjoyed using this atlas.



I thought The Road was brilliant. Utterly bleak, grey, drab but brilliant nonetheless. Kind of depressing, with a pretty sad final passage. Which seemed final and negative but in re-reading it I'm actually not sure.

I saw Blood Meridian mentioned, which I read last year. So weighty, it actually put me off reading in general for a few months. This book killed me.

I can't say I really like McCarthy, dspite being able to appreciate his genius. I watched The Counsellor last night (written by him) which, depsite the bad reviews, is actually good, and really reallyMcarthy...)

I'm looking forward to reading Blood Meridian. The most draining thing about The Road was the sheer isolation of it, just the lack of any relief from the abject misery of this post-apocalyptic world. I wouldn't say I disliked it either; just hard to read at times with how bleak it was. That was the point though. For that it succeeded...it had a very raw feel, a very unfiltered, bleeding kind of emotion to it, that I found very affecting. The ending was horrifically sad but the final scene was uplifting in a way.

The Counselor was a solid flick. Nothing great, but spunky, dark and fun. Not friendly for a mainstream audience though.

I don't currently own the Atlas but I did at some point. I do, however, have a bigass parchment map of Middle Earth on the wall behind me at this very moment.

I'm more interested in the other maps than the typical Middle Earth maps (ie, Ered Luin to Rhun west-east), though close-ups of some of the specific locales from Hobbit and LOTR would be interesting. It's the maps of other locations in Arda that interest me the most. Does it contain city maps of some of the really old cities, like from the Silmarillion? Gondolin, Menegroth, that sort of thing? Or at least big maps of Beleriand, Aman and some of the other prehistorical locales?


These are the sort of things I'm talking about in terms of time-period:



This looks cool though, climate zones...I could certainly dig lots of these: https://31.media.tumblr.com/e65e53f2c1f ... rnrk68.png


You might be able to espy my current location on one of those....

Yeah, there are loads of maps. It even has city maps and floor plans for locations that Tolkien bothered to describe in detail (which is a lot of them). The only real issue is that some of the pre-War of the Ring locations are done based only on stuff that had been published when the Atlas came out and as far as I know it hasn't been revised, so it doesn't reflect Tolkien's own revisions in later notes and stuff that Chris Tolkien published later on.

The Big Sleep is excellent, definitely a classic hard-boiled detective story with great characters, a great plot, excellent resolution. I've also read Farewell, My Lovely, which was stylistically better but had a much weaker plot. Apparently Chandler stitched it together from a few short stories, and explicitly said he didn't care much about the plot and worked harder on the individual scenes. And to be fair, some of the individual scenes are just fantastic - there's this one almost entirely irrelevant scene where Philip Marlowe interviews this older black hotel clerk about a murder that happened across the street, and plotwise the only thing that happens is he gets a small clue, but just the way Chandler describes the clerk and the way he interacts with Marlowe is incredibly memorable. Unfortunately, I have to say it's a step down from The Big Sleep overall. The plot just goes in too many directions and the resolution just feels cheap and like it doesn't really matter. It's really a shame that he couldn't have used those excellent scenes in service of a better plot.

Otherwise I've read a few of his short stories, which are entertaining enough, but I much prefer the novels, where he really has room to stretch out. The short stories are more action-oriented, which is fine, but it cuts back on Chandler's fantastic ability to set scenes and describe characters when he has the time to do so.

Sounds good! Once I'm done with Gulliver Foyle, I may well head back to The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep is a classic! It got a great film adaptation too.

Anyone here read any David Goodis? Most underrated noir writer of all time, imo.

Just finished Starfish by Peter Watts and about a third of the way through Maelstrom - This Rfiters trilogy is a damn good, damn surprising, and damn well written hard SF universe. I think any of you interested in SciFi would really dig. Mostly, because the whole idea behind it is based on deep ocean sciences, and the "alien" things are just sea lifeforms tucked away from evolution - it's a thrilling work on psychosexuality, biology, and politics. Neat stuff and available for free if you want.