What books are you reading right now?

From the top of my list of last summer's books for the beach.

Not trashy, not Regency, but you will wallow in Venice at the Renaissance, palace intrigue, a secret society of chefs and food, glorious food!

The Chef's Apprentice (or The Book of Unholy Mischief) - same book, different prints.

Amazon has a cheap paperback of one and a Kindle version of the other.

 

Dante's The Divine Comedy...just finished Inferno, now moving into Purgatorio

 

Major +1. Turtledove is one of my guilty pleasures, but this one-off of his is so exceedingly cleverly written it was just a pleasure, no guilt at all attached. 1000% worth it.

 

a history of art forgery.
henri atlan's sparks of randomness (had to put it aside when the giant ball of furniture came)
a history of the collapse of pre-modern empires.

 

Finished Boy's Life. It was...interesting and odd. And I really liked it.

Started a fluffy beach read last night, Coastal Summons, by Katrina Thomas.

 

I'm afraid to confess the kind of stuff I read. People think I have a Cubist face... Fact is, I often don't understand what draws me—I mean, not only do I feel I don't I understand the book I'm drawn to, I ultimately don't understand the draw to difficulty. (Literary theorist George Steiner has a book titled On Difficulty, one of thousands in my library I haven't read—surely a sign of disease).

The Oxford Handbook of the Self, 2011 (I don't own it; library copy). Actually, it's too much to deal with soon, but there it is. I want to get familiar with the chapters, note the interesting ones for later reading, weave the items into my impossible desire to understand "the" self, return the tome to the library, then retrieve it intermittantly when a particular chapter is reached in my impossible pathway.

There are:
• "bodily selves"—plural? (5 chapters)
• "phenomenology and metaphysics of self"—a kind of conceptual fiction, I anticipate (4 chs.)
• "personal identity, narrative identity, and self-knowledge"—I was a teenage avatar, and got addicted to my narrative of that (4 chs.)
• "action and the moral dimensions of the self"—If everything's theater, can you blame me for really becoming multiple characters? (4 chs.)
• "self pathologies"—If creativity of self formation can make us genuinely plural, are pathogenic outcomes just failed artistries? (4 chs.)
• "the self in diverse contexts"—see, we're all avatars (personae), actors thrown into scenes, lame artists, or not. (4 chs.)

I should stay away from here, I guess.
.

 

Good Thief's Guide to Berlin (5th in the series following Guide to Amsterdam, Paris, Las Vegas, Venice) - humorous series about a writer of crime/suspense novels who tests his crime theories as a part-time thief.

 

This sounds interesting (though the writing style usually makes or breaks it on subjects like this). Philosophy of mind is a topic I tend to gravitate towards.

 

Great. I wonder how—and believe that—interest in philosophy of anything can be usefully pursued through a discussion platform. I think the way to this is to (1) focus on a particular reading (maybe an entire Forum called "Slow reading" or something, where each topic is a manageable portion of something: an article or chapter of something); and (2) have commitment to follow through. But we're all very busy (which is good). This would be like a little seminar online. It's a nice idea, but impractical, I believe.

My preference in "philosophy of anything" is philosophy of mind. But I don't expect to pursue that here. Here is fine as it is. The TFPers are wonderful folks. I just thought, seeing this topic, "Yeah, well, you don't want to know what I'm having trouble finding time to deal with," not meant to be vain, just: "...there it is." What am I to do? It's gotta go back to the library soon.

 

I just picked this up at the airport and pretty much finished it on the plane. Gaiman is a great storyteller, I am just not convinced he's a great writer.

 

Materialist, dualist, or idealist?

 

Emergentist: Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. The emergence of what we have in mind as "mind" as adults is a long-growing individuation of oneself from infancy. The philosophy of mind really should be basically understood as about how brain development becomes attentive infancy. Trying to understand adult mind in direct relation to nature is certain to seem dualist. But phenomenological dualism (neuroscience and introspective psychology) doesn't imply ontological dualism. Like John Searle said decades ago: Digestion is what the stomach does. Mind is what the brain does. But the doing is a genesis, so to speak—a long individuation to the adult interest in a concept of mind.

 

It took me all summer but I finally finished A Feast For Crows. It wasn't awful.
Picking up A Dance With Dragons in the next couple of days. I hate not finishing a series--or at least getting to the point where the writer left off.

 

Hmm. I believe I understand what you're saying but to comment more would - as you said - derail a thread about books.

So back on topic and somewhat related..... currently reading Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness - Bruce Rosenblum, Fred Kuttner
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Don't feel bad. It takes him years to write one.

 

Interesting, really. I want to comment on the book description you link to, but I'll resist because interest is like a tree: branching branches fractalically.

That point itself is an interesting aspect of discussion and thinking.