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Age of Reason, The Definitive Edition by Thomas Paine

Re-reading this very good book.

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Auto-biographical manga about a lesbian women suffering from depression in contemporary Japan.

Finally finished reading this (I wasn't aware if was finished by 2015, winning the Kodansha manga award is a great achievement (usually only the best among the best win such award), so I had to finish reading it). The ending was too "happy" for me (they managed to make some dead characters come back using science fiction handwaving).

The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly



Wired guru and wonderful oddbod Kelly is in his element here, prognosticating the future via a cascade of questions, the compelling stats they turned up, and the wonderful flights of fancy that they lead him on. Although it's occasionally guilty of being too glancing on big subjects, or too caught up in verbose extrapolations from stumpy metaphors, the underpinnings and presentation are generally sublimely solid for such a speculative subject.

The stand-out elements are the eyebrow-raising statistics he uses to chart the recent growth of the silicon world, the journalistic truffling he's done into the plotted near-future for comparable techs, and his final joyful envisionings of how a normal day might play out in a few decades time.

The joy does need to be tempered a bit though. Maybe it's the old libertarian in him (he claims Wikipedia's success has spilled him over into a more collective perspective now...), but he skirts over obvious negative corollaries to advances in some key areas. (It's not that unusual for him - in his great article on Augmented Reality he saw only flowers being placed in the virtual vase in your home... more cynical net denizens might imagine less sweet-smelling possibilities ). It's not that he's without cynicism, and he does engage with downsides (especially on classics like behaviour tracking, decentralisation etc), often with comparable verve, and often making a good case for areas where utilitarian and personal gains may overcome the negative. It's just that in some chapters the negatives are skipped entirely, which starts to throb, and his final postscript explaining this narrative choice is pretty slight and unconvincing.

(It shouldn't matter that he can't always come up with a beautiful riposte or counter-balancing gain. It's cool that he forsees 'interactions' becoming our password, for example - with the individuality of our tracked behaviour, amplified between friends and family, being a safety net that could overcome the advantages that the same data brings to scammers, and counterbalancing privacy loss at the same time. A genuinely neat supposition. But as welcome as those delves are, some further dips into the dark side did feel like they were needed at points.)

Overall, aside from the odd missing citation (Is metadata really growing faster than actual data? Do people really push the 'privacy slider' over to personalised & transparent as a norm? I guess I'll have to get Googling ), and the odd excessive bit of prolix prose, this is a pretty wonderful collection of facts and conceits, which makes you think about the now as much as the next.

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Just finished this:


Think it's made Gibneys doc fall significantly down my favourites, not because i don't still think it's good but because i'd much rather read this again than watch the doc. It has alot more information particularly about Miscavige and is well written, crazy and funny.

Reading this right now:


It's a True Crime Book about the murder of a British woman in Tokyo in the year 2000. I'm about halfway through just as the killer has been caught, can tell it's going to get really disturbing. It already is though, it focuses on a seriously seedy and gross part of Tokyo that seems like the perfect breeding ground for a sicko like that.

Not an easy read but it's good if you like/can handle True Crime.

Good novel. British woman befriends a fox.

I'll have to look into the first book. If it has more info than the documentary I'm all for it. The second book would've been more my cup of tea a few years back when I had a weird obsession with crime stories. But now I can only handle certain types. Had a book called Kathy the Cannibal years ago, about Katherine Knight. That chick was bonkers. You might like it.

You have to read it if you like the Doc mate, trust me.

I'm only reading People Who Eat Darkness because my gf's friend suggested it when she found out i like True Crime. Still read about the Mafia and other Organized Crime but i've went off Serial Killer and horrific murderer books as they really depress me. I usually enjoy them but yeah they're depressing so i'm not really looking for any more True Crime books right now haha.

I know you're into Horror so if you have any good Horror recs those would be appreciated as i don't know where to start outside of Poe and M.R.James. Personally not a fan of Lovecraft or Stephen King. I blind bought Ghost Story by Peter Straub after hearing good things, will probably get to that soon.

As well as Ghost Story i've got The Crying of Lot 49 (first Pynchon) and Nixonland to read. So i'm not spoiled for choice but i'm reading more than i have been for the past two years or so.

I get it. I stopped with the serial killer books for the same reason. Now I mostly stick to mysterious disappearances and such.

You're not a fan of Lovecraft himself, or also anything Lovecraftian. Because I read a lot of cosmic horror, which would be influenced by Lovecraft. But if you want nothing to do with Lovecraft I'd say try...

Adam Nevill - The Ritual & Last Days
Josh Malerman - Bird Box
Paul Tremblay - A Head Full of Ghosts
Unseaming (anthology)
Michel Faber - Under The Skin (vastly different from the movie)
Dathan Auerbach - PenPal
Hunter Shea - Forest of Shadows
Daniel Quinn - Dreamer
Bentley Little - The Ignored
Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves

This was a lot harder than I thought.

The only (heavily/obviously at least) Lovecraftian stuff i've tried is from Lovecraft himself so i'm not sure. I'd guess it's most likely not for me though as it's not really my type of Horror Film either.

Thanks for the recs.

I was never bored with it or thought it was badly written but it wasn't a pleasant read; not that i need a book to be pleasant but i took much longer to get through it than i should have because for a few days at a time i just thought: "lets not read detailed descriptions of rapes and horrific yet perfectly legal cultures" today, that can be part of tomorrow's agenda.

Also started reading this and it's about a 1000 times worse than that True Crime book:


I mean the only reason i'm considering reading further is that i really like John Updike's writing and this is the first time i've tried to read him, i'm constantly thinking i should just read something else from him though. Rabbit is one of the worst characters i've ever came across in anything, the idea of 300 more pages of him is stomach churning. Thing is i can tell the series is going to be a slow character journey until the end when he's a redeemed person but there's no way i can further than this one book if i even make it with how vile he is. I'd be really happy if the twist was that he dies on the next page i read and the rest of the series is about bringing up Rabbit's son properly since he still has some of his vile influence on him.

Reading this and enjoying it, especially any differences from the Hulu series...



And I just finished this hilarious book and hope to start the sequel soon:

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I second the recommendation of House of Leaves. Crazy, fascinating fun (and typesetting).

I have enjoyed Updike, but I cannot stomach the Rabbit books. I tried to get through the first one, but it was very tedious. Pages & pages & I was bored stiff.

I don't think it's boring at all i just think it's gross. Rabbit deserves to die and i'm not interested in reading four books to elevate him to a human level. It's very well written and that's what is keeping me going, i personally haven't been bored yet.

Which other Updike books would you recommend since you're a fan?

Not certain that I have ever read a book of his (which does seem odd - will check later), but, when he was alive, he wrote prolifically for The New Yorker, which I enjoyed. He wrote a lot about his past, which I liked.

Okay, that's cool. Though you meant you were a fan of his novels.

Checked on Amazon & I don't think I've ever read his novels. But I read a lot of his short stories in The New Yorker. If you like reading, you could subscribe to the magazine, which I think you would like.

Yeah, i read their stories all the time. Thanks!

Who has read Pynchon? Going to go through Crying of Lot 49 in a night considering how short it is, his style of writing from a few pages is baffling though and i'm not a fan of the 'payoff at the end' coz it's almost never satisfying enough to justify you reading so many pages from someone you aren't enjoying.