Reading list for 2013

This year's reading list is going to be a little bit shorter (I think, but my memory is shoddy on this one. At least the individual books have a tiny bit less pages... maybe?) and you'd be within your rights to call foul since I've recycled some of last year's books on to this year because... well.. moving, new country, unemployment? Yeah I really have no excuses except that I have a lot of excuses and no real reasons for not having read some of them.
Except for Gustave Gilbert's Psychology Of A Dictatorship. This one I'll have to put on hold until I either move (back) to a country with a uni library that carries this, or have extra 200US dollars to spend on a copy on Amazon as this book is both largely out of print AND not online or in the collection of our regular or university libraries.
Apparently people find reading about the psychology of Nazi Germany uncomfortable here. Who knew.

But onwards!
So this year's list reads as follows:

The Story Of An African Farm by Olive Schreiner

This one is included in Project Gutenberg, so I could read this one right now if I wasn't so damn tired. Huzzah for the internets and awesome projects!

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Um.. I actually have a copy of this in my drawer. Maybe a good time to finally cork it?

The Gift by Marcel Mauss

An anthropology classic that was translated to Finnish from the original French in the early 1990s. Discusses the mechanics and meanings of gifting.

The Golden Bough by James Frazer

Also an anthropology classic. And I have this in my bag, but have so far managed to not read it for 2 months and instead have used it to train my left shoulder. Discusses magic and religious customs with colourful examples. Apparently Jim Morrison liked this book very muchly and thus it is hard to come by in libraries because Jim Morrison fangirls tend to cling to their copies.
Unlike me.
My reasons are completely different.

The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Currently reading this. Not entirely sure what it's about except that it has child abuse, death, it's beautifully written and is terribly depressing.

The Jew Of Malta by Christopher Marlowe

A Machiavellian play? This can also be found on the increasingly awesome Project Gutenberg and my mission is to finish it this year and not get distracted. Mostly reading this because it's by Christhopher Marlowe and includes the most favourite quote of all time.


And that's it for my reading list for this year. The reason the list is so short is because there are entrance exams I need to study for as the exams here are mainly composed of items directly lifted from the entrance exam books that you need to know verbatim to score points as opposed to understanding the concepts. That's one thing. The other are the book projects I'm "working" on that require quite a bit of reading themselves, so it's not like I'm not going to spend the entire year ruining my eyes and posture with my nose in books and on the computer screen anyhows.
So this is my list. What's yours?

Doing things in short sentences

There have been so many awesome things going on that updating anything has fallen by the wayside like a disoriented cyclist: my classes started. As you can see by the doodly doo on top, the brain does love a cup o' intellectual challenge. The classes provide. This has made it pretty clear that I'm going to be a scientist when I grow up. So there ya go.

Then I read a very interesting book on how the internet affects our brains and though I haven't read all the reference material (which I should), it has given me the impetus to do a few things: firstly I'll start linking to things not in the text, but after the text. This is to make things needlessly complicated for anyone reading. Actually, it's to allow whoever might read this to read in peace and let their brain relax into the process. Secondly, I'll be taking non-connected days. Haven't quite figured out which day of the week yet, but Wednesday or Thursday sounds like a good idea. I don't actually have to be logged on to anywhere these days, to post an update. This is why most sites provide "scheduled updates". It is nifty. I shall take advantage. This is to allow for my own brain to relax into reading and doing research for whatever I'm researching at the time. Or, like, go out. You know, into meat space.

I swear someone will create a social networking thing eventually and call it MeatSpace. "Tens of tables! In a single room! All new people! Come join us in MeatSpace!"

Thirdly, I'm sort of setting up a new blog here on Blogger, for reviews. It's still in pieces, so I'm not going to link to it before I get the thing going. If anyone is interested in seeing things from me more regularly, I suggest checking the Tumblr-blog. I'm trying to post there daily, or as close to that as I can manage. "But all that sounds like a whole lot of work and a lot of things to update!" you might say if you were either talking to me or talking to yourself while reading this. It sort of is and is not. Doodling doesn't take time. Doing an actual piece of work with recognizable people or backgrounds and colours and plot and things like that does take up more than a hour, but that's still not an overwhelming chore. The new blog.. well, if you look to the right side of this blog, you might notice that I've taken down one of the ads for my Zazzle stores. I went back and forth a long while with that and eventually came to the conclusion that there were more valid reasons for me to not keep up with the store I originally opened. It's still there, but I'm not going to be putting any effort into it. Haven't exactly decided if I might close it entirely, but for now, it'll just sit there on it's own. My time and energy are directed elsewhere. Hence some things get chucked out for not serving valuable purposes and other things are taken up.

Books. Books are taken up. Books are good. Also, being outside is good.



This is a good book. Go read it now. The Queen of Everything commands thee. I think it's pretty cool too. :D

Tumblr blog: http://boogybunny.tumblr.com/

On learning and dead people

This past Monday I finally started my classes. Just one course for now, but oh man does it feel good to be learning with an actual teacher again.
I could mention how Finns are not ones for joining in on class discussions (which sort of makes me the Loud And Obnoxious One.. you know, more than usual) and I could mention that the class so far isn't exactly what it said on the tin.
But all that's secondary.
It's learning. It's not-wasting-your-time. More specifically, it's minimizing-harm-and-maximizing-happiness. Our bodies and minds have this terrible desire to be used and to develop and if those needs (that were a biological necessity) are not met,  we are want to drown out their pleas with immediate gratifications in excess. And I say in excess because learning and moving and being connected and deriving pleasure from things that are not fashionably pleasurable are all things you can learn (narf) to enjoy and hard to do in excess, but things that are fashionably pleasurable, that is sex, food and similar, are very easy to over indulge in.

Yes, I've been reading about Epicurus. And Benjamin Franklin. And Hans Christian Andersen. And a whole bunch of other people. See, I started on this most awesome book called The Book Of The Dead by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson. It's basically cliffsnotes on all the people and biographies you ever wanted to read with a huge chunk of people you never knew about thought you should and a great big bucket load of happy for having discovered and learned about all of these people.
I did not know da Vinci was gay. It also never really entered my head that he used to be young and apparently very tall and incredibly handsome. Because you just don't think about famous masters in those terms. And the history books in school have this tendency to not mention when someone is gay or bisexual but just note that they had a "companion", like we're talking about puppets or cubes.

Getting back to Epicurus. There's an interpertation that when you tell someone to enjoy all worldly pleasures that you're telling them to stuff their face with cake (which is undeniably pleasurable when you're doing it) or to boink everything. Rarely if ever do people percieve wordly pleasure to mean ALL pleasures that you can take in this life. Not in western interpertations anyway. So how about reading and talking with friends or sitting by the lake listening to the birds and the breeze? I'd say these are pretty pleasurable things. Why I'm bringing up Epicurus is that he had some pretty good things to say: 1) necessities of life are food, water, warmth (I'll just understand this as clothing since most of us don't live on nudist colonies), shelter, freedom, thought and friendship. And now think honestly how many of those are you willingly giving up every day for the benefit of not doing anything at all because scary scary SCARY! 2) The things that are essential and good for you are surprisingly easy to come by. Looking at that list of necessities, do you think those things will cost you a lot of money? Do you think that having a lot of food/sex/money would increase the quality of these essentials and more so, make you enjoy them more?

There's a a phrase that gets uttered at all the wrong moments, by people who fail to understand timing or sympathising: "It's a question of attitude".
Once you get to the right state of mind, once you stop thinking in terms of "I fail at life because I'm not earning as much as my peers or have a house as big as they have and I'm ugly to boot and my pain is something that I need to keep to myself because surely it's a private thing that I wont uncosciouly take out on others once I get annoyed enough" and start believing that everyone has their soft spots and we all protect them the best we know how because scary scary SCARY!.. you'll notice that that phrase is dead on. Damn it.



Don't fear God
Don't worry about death;
What is good is easy to get, and
What is terrible is easy to endure.
           Tetrapharmakon according to Epicurus