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Guest The Vidiot

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oh yeah, and i just ordered on amazon:

house_of_leaves.jpg?w=460

 

as well as this book—although by the looks of it, this might be more of a coffeetable book than a bring-along-on-the-train-everyday deal.

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utdpaperback.jpg

 

started reading this last week, im about 180 pages in, it's been pretty interesting so far, and still only just begining... the whole books about 1000 or so pages

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oh yeah, and i just ordered on amazon:

house_of_leaves.jpg?w=460

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House of Leaves is really an amazing book. Once it gets into your head, you can check out the web, there's tons of amazing crazy theories and kooks still discussing the book.

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Finally caught a few hours with nothing much to do and I finished the last couple hundred pages of Underworld: 9.83/10

 

We're all gonna die!

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Finally caught a few hours with nothing much to do and I finished the last couple hundred pages of Underworld: 9.83/10

 

We're all gonna die!

 

 

Nice one congrats. Remember you wrestling with it last time I was in here which was ages ago. I finished White Noise in the meantime. The darkness is well disguised from the point of view of this cosy family dad and his family (seems like it's taken from the authors own family life) amazing little observations here and there. And then the gun comes into the picture....

 

Now halfway through

0393051897.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

 

Detailed yet concise chronicle beginning at around the mid 1600s. Well researched, very heavy on name and date dropping throughout. Think I'm gonna need to balance this out with some fiction reading.

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Finally caught a few hours with nothing much to do and I finished the last couple hundred pages of Underworld: 9.83/10

 

We're all gonna die!

 

 

Nice one congrats. Remember you wrestling with it last time I was in here which was ages ago. I finished White Noise in the meantime. The darkness is well disguised from the point of view of this cosy family dad and his family (seems like it's taken from the authors own family life) amazing little observations here and there. And then the gun comes into the picture....

 

Now halfway through

0393051897.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

 

Detailed yet concise chronicle beginning at around the mid 1600s. Well researched, very heavy on name and date dropping throughout. Think I'm gonna need to balance this out with some fiction reading.

 

White Noise is still one of my favorites, despite Underworld being on a whole other plane of literary brilliance. Underworld wasn't a particularly tough read aside from the time commitment: despite being rather episodic and broken into digestible character-focused segments it works much better as a continuous read-through. And it goes fast when you commit to it. I read the first half in short order and then tried to catch up with it here and there for a few months, reading a couple pages before falling asleep, and that just wasn't cutting it.

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Guest Benedict Cumberbatch

can anyone recommend any interesting psychology books? not academic books or at least books that make it interesting

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Guest Franklin

can anyone recommend any interesting psychology books? not academic books or at least books that make it interesting

 

I would read "Social Cognition" by Ziva Kunda.

"How do we make sense of other people and of ourselves? What do we know about the people we encounter in our daily lives and about the situations in which we encounter them, and how do we use this knowledge in our attempt to understand, predict, or recall their behavior? Are our social judgments fully determined by our social knowledge, or are they also influenced by our feelings and desires?

 

Social cognition researchers look at how we make sense of other people and of ourselves. In this book Ziva Kunda provides a comprehensive and accessible survey of research and theory about social cognition at a level appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as researchers in the field.

 

The first part of the book reviews basic processes in social cognition, including the representation of social concepts, rules of inference, memory, "hot" cognition driven by motivation or affect, and automatic processing. The second part reviews three basic topics in social cognition: group stereotypes, knowledge of other individuals, and the self. A final chapter revisits many of these issues from a cross-cultural perspective."

 

http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/view?isbn=0262611430

 

very interesting book.... one that I refer to at least once per week.

Edited by Franklin
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Guest Gbiscuit

Finished up "Not a Good Day to Die" by Sean Naylor a week or so ago and proceeded to start "Delta Force" by Col. Charlie Beckwith right afterwards.

 

At the core of the two books is, essentially, more branches = more problems. The former has to do with Operation Anaconda, the first major operation fought in Afghanistan after the initial invasion. The forces requisitioned by the commanders on the ground consist of a hodgepodge mix of units that were stretched to their limit in peacekeeping operations, a skeleton crew of Apache and Chinook forces and, for the kicker, the main force that would spearhead the action was to be an Afghan force trained by American Special Forces with only a months lead time. It ends up how you would expect, communication is stretched to its maximum, and it all culminates in this. In a nutshell, due to piss poor communications, the helicopters assigned to take in a SEAL recon team figure that the best place to land the recon team is right where their site is. Turns out it's a Taliban gun emplacement and shit goes to hell. At the end of the day though, the operation, at a conservative estimate, killed around 500 insurgents.

 

The latter book is written by the guy who founded Delta Force, it goes through his exchange to the SAS for a year of which leads him to writing a paper on what the US was lacking at the time, a proper counter terrorism unit. he jumps through a lot of hoops over the course of a dozen years until he is finally authorized to found a unit that is based on the base principles that he jotted down in his paper years prior. The first operation Delta is assigned is the Iran hostage crisis, and, just like Not a Good Day to Die, "jointness" ends up playing a factor. The pilots of the helicopters that were required for this mission were ill prepared for flying through a desert, and the ground crews assigned to the helicopters - which were based off an aircraft carrier for Operation Eagle Claw - were unaware of the dangers faced by the helicopters due to operation security concerns, which, more than likely, factored into why the choppers went down in Iran. The problems with Eagle Claw end up giving Beckwith the idea for SOCOM and JSOC.

 

It's true enough though, that the majority of military operations that are highly publicized - special operations in particular - are the ones that tend to fail, so it's certainly not the rule, but, when tight, highly contained forces are required to work with big military, shit tends to go wrong fast as neither are very well attenuated to how the other operates.

 

Anyway, my next venture is Robert Baer's "Sleeping With the Devil", about Washington, Saudi Arabia, and glorious crude. I kind of have a man crush on him Bob Baer, so it should be a fun read.

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I am currently reading The Hastur Cycle, a Cthulhu mythos book. Ive never read any Cthulhu stuff before, I picked it up from a charity shop. Pretty good so far, just loads of short stories about the king in yellow.

 

Might read some more of these as they as they are not too heavy going...

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Guest Iain C

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Going through a phase of rereading Vonnnegut at the moment. These short stories are charming but fall short of the power of his novels. But they're still full of that strange mixture of cynicism, empathy and humanity.

 

I think everyone should return to Vonnegut at least once a year. It's good for the soul.

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Neuromancer is a fuck to read... also Umberto Eco's Focoault pendulum

 

I know, I'm currently dragging myself throught Foucault's Pendulum

 

I'm not going to mention spoilers (haven't even finished the book yet) but i'll put my frustrations in spoiler tags anyway

 

 

In The Name Of The Rose might have taken about 100 pages before it really began, but almost the entirety of Focault's Pendulum is a big fuck of not much happening, constant talking about ancient texts about rosicrusians.

 

Very informative, he clearly did a lot of research, and the richness of words is very astounding and delightful to read. You can learn a lot of awesome words and interesting ancient historic thingies from an Umberto Eco book. Clearly a very talented, intelligent writer that deserves a spot among the great.

 

But fuck.

The back cover reads: "Three book editors, after reading too many crackpot manuscripts on the occult, start to have some fun with conspiracy theories told by a strange colonel. They start feeding random bits of information into a powerful computer capable of inventing connections between the entries, thinking they are creating nothing more than an amusing game, but then their game starts to take over, the deaths start mounting..." blabla

 

.... All that stuff starts happening around the 100th chapter (about 500 pages in).... There are 120 chapters (640 total pages).

Except the strange colonel, they meet him early in the book. The rest is lots of talk about manuscripts. The fun starts way back...

 

You can drag, but this is too much.

 

Also, I don't like the main character and his friends. Fuck 'em.

 

 

But i'm going to continue reading, because now it seems to pick up a bit, and i'm probably a masochist

 

 

 

 

I recommend this book if you are really, REALLY interested in the Templars n shit.

Edited by triachus
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I think everyone should return to Vonnegut at least once a year. It's good for the soul.

oprahbookclub2.jpg

 

 

so i'm somewhere between one and two hundred pages into house of leaves—not worth highlighting "house"—and it's alright. am i the only one who gets utterly annoyed with johnny truant almost all the time?

Edited by KY
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so i'm somewhere between one and two hundred pages into house of leaves—not worth highlighting "house"—and it's alright. am i the only one who gets utterly annoyed with johnny truant almost all the time?

 

you are not

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