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Bassist_Diver wrote:

To my fellow scientists, this will make you cringe and rage and hate this country (assuming you're American).

Oh man.
I don't even want to think about it.

Also, hello, fellow Texan scientist!

PetZounds wrote:

Bassist_Diver wrote:

To my fellow scientists, this will make you cringe and rage and hate this country (assuming you're American).

Oh man.
I don't even want to think about it.

Also, hello, fellow Texan scientist!

It's not as religion-heavy as most of the other books on the topic (although it still does touch on it) but rather why politics, the media, funding institutions, etc. ignore it and inadvertently drove American interest away from appreciating and loving the sciences.

And haaaiiii~

i thought this book put some stuff into perspective ..

Sparrow wrote:i thought this book put some stuff into perspective ..

I love that book. "At Home" takes the cake as my favorite Bill Bryson work though.

i just Googled " At Home " - i'm gonna check it out

on recommendation i am reading Neuromancer by William Gibson. i am about halfway and i must say that it is quite good!

magiclawnchair wrote:on recommendation i am reading Neuromancer by William Gibson. i am about halfway and i must say that it is quite good!

A buddy of mine is reading that.
It sounds really interesting, I'd love to give it a shot sometime.

Once I finish the other 9 books I'm in the middle of...

Yeah Neuromancer is great! Reading The Three Musketeers right now, it's entertaining enough but not really anything special.

Can anyone recommend some modern authors writing interesting books? I don't really know much about what's going on but I know there must be some great authors around.

I just read Rant by Chuck Palaniuk and am just starting Haunted.
I thoroughly enjoyed Rant and would definitely recommend it.
It's pretty weird though. Definitely a modern author writing interesting stuff.

I am reading Tom Robbins "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" again and Louise Erdrich's "The Round House" right now. Both are great.

I have a few Palaniuk around I need to get to. I'm re-reading Cats Cradle by Vonnegut currently and smiling the whole way through. I love his style so much!

Don't know how modern he'd be considered these days, but are you down with Paul Auster?

Leviathan, New York trilogy, are great. In the country of last things is probably my favorite novel.

Right now I'm at

Ross Thomas' Vodoo, Ltd.
and
Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness.

Both are quite good, Ursula starts a little slow, but is already growing on me. Ross is always awesome and I love the Arthur Wu & Quincy Durant novels.

'retromania' by simon reynolds.

exploring the fine art arguments-concepts-conceits of 'digi-modernism' and 'superhybridity' as they relate to developments (or lack of) in contemporary music, in order to understand why so much of the music produced by the ishuffle generation sounds like hopelessly derivative shit. argument coming down to 'an esotericism and nostalgia for past innovations replacing attempts at genuine innovation in the present'.

citing the 2000-2010 decade as a test case...
copycat 60s soul divas (aretha winehouse, adele springfield, etc), turgid 70s rock rip-offs (queens of the rolling stone zeppelins, etc), 80s electro revivalists (gagayazoolaroux, etc), 70s punk pretenders (the libertine jamclash, who in turn have become the palma libertines) and 60s garage revivalists (the white nugget hives).
the past-their-sell-by-date fruits of an entire culture on permanent 'best of' shuffle.

whether you accept, whole or in part, reynolds' argument doesn't really matter. but it's an argument well put and worth engaging with if you ever find yourself sitting at home listening to something retro and wondering why the present doesn't sound this good? perhaps it's because you are sitting at home listening to something retro and the culture you should be participating in (to give it life) is dying a death due to your lack of interest...

“At a certain point the sheer mass of past accumulating behind the music began to exert a kind of gravitational pull. The sensation of movement, of going somewhere, could be satisfied as easily (in fact, more easily) by going backwards within that vast past than by going forwards. It was still an exploratory impulse, but now it took the form of archaeology…”

(excerpt from ‘retromania’ by simon reynolds, 2011).

highly recommended.[/color]