I’ve always admired people who, in a pinch, are better than their principles
- I, Reader: A Nod to Asimov’s I, Robot
- Robots and Readers: A Tight Coupling of Container and Content
- Does Technology only Extend Thought? Does It also Supplant It?
- Machine Life: The Final Prejudice
- RB-34 Prefers Slushy Novels
- Creative Reading: A Golden String
- Creative Reading by anemone achtnich
- Creative Reading: The Art of Self
- Creative Reading: Thinking with Other Minds
- Creative Reading: The Art of Self, Take 2
- Creative Reading: The Discovery of Other (Thinking with the Minds of Others, Take 2)
- Creative Reading: The Mathematics of Self, Other and Extension
- What Books Changed You?
- I’ve always admired people who, in a pinch, are better than their principles
- Every Extension Breaks a Rule
- The Trajectory of Reading: Creative Contribution
- I Read, Therefore I Write
- What Readers Write May Not Be Literature, But It Might Become So
- “Narrow it down to … the upper left-hand brick”: Phaedrus
- “No one that he knew had ever written a whole metaphysics before”: Phaedrus
- Using a Blog to Draft a Book Idea: 9 Observations
- From Reading to Writing to Publishing with Digital Media
- Birth of the Reader-Writer
- To Read a Book is to Ignore 4000 Others
- Quantity has a Quality all its Own
- The Web is Re-Wiring My Brain
- How the Web Works for Readers: Thin Connections Lead to Rich Connections
- The Accidental Programmer
- Definitions of Hacking
- Ways of the Reader-Hacker
- Ways of the Reader-Hacker II: Breaking the Rules
- Ways of the Reader Hacker III: Two Bright Ideas
- A Hacker’s Reading List
- Ones and Zeros, On and Off Switches, All Sane Systems Require Downtime
- The Information Race and Pushing the Button
- How to Make an Elephant Statue
- Every Story Deserves a Good Ending
- Expressions of Offworld
- “Would I start to resemble a book myself?”
- Myth of the Reader-Hero
- Print is Digital
- Am I Still Chasing that First Reading High?
- Do Robots Read? Yes I Do (Conclusion to “I, Reader”)
- I, Reader: A Book Outline
- Reading List for Next Draft of I, Reader
50 Books that Changed Me, Pt. 2, Teen
The last post described books that influenced me in ways of which I was not aware of when I was reading them. Those books correspond to the blissful pre-conscious state described in the last theme. This post describes books from my teen years, in which I began to find my way through darker ideas, corresponding to the discovery of other.
I, Robot. The first time I watched Star Trek on TV, it was against my will; a friend wanted to watch it. After that, I was hooked on science fiction. Isaac Asimov was the king of scifi, and I, Robot was a classic. The stories posed clever paradoxes and resolutions that tickled a teen’s budding intellect. It was a good primer on the philosophy of technology.
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”. Huck was prepared to damn his soul because he knew it was right to save Jim. I’ve always admired people who, in a pinch, are better than their principles. Morality gets worked out locally not on high. A question is posed in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, does design justify the suffering of children? I say, no.
Heart of Darkness, the story by Joseph Conrad, later made into the movie Apocalypse Now. A journey past the thin veneer of civilization into the darkness of the unconscious. The horror, the horror. In The World According to Garp by John Irving, a publisher asks a cleaning lady to read Garp’s manuscript. The lady has never been so shocked by a novel, but she cries, It’s so true.
Macbeth, by William Shakespeare. Having killed the king and achieved the throne, Macbeth finds no satisfaction. Life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. Out, out, brief candle. This tragedy, like Heart of Darkness, provides symbols for traversing the dark zones of the psyche.
Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katz. Not everything in my teen years involved darkness. I travelled Canada with Katimavik, volunteering in communities, living a granola lifestyle. This cookbook taught me I could bake bread and enjoy really good vegetarian food. Wholesome living at its best.
7 books
I’m adding Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein to this list, following a post by Barbara: http://www.kittent.com/2009/11/something-wicked.html
Leave your response!