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nickthejag
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Fresh in from amazon - Heinrichs introduction to the three volumes of capital; Harveys - Limits of Capital; and Kliman's failure of capitalist production. Starting to look a bit biased in my book choices at the moment, maybe should read some hayek next for some balance :drink2:

 

Try some Roger Scruton

 

Scruton-I-Drink-Therefore-I-Am.jpg

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an excellent background to preparing me for tackling Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

 

Ah, the justification of synthetic a priori knowledge. Read it years ago and stil bear the psychological scars. It's bloody murder, as he makes up new terms as he goes along. My advice would be to hunt out one of the glossaries that can be found on the web. It'll prove invaluable, trust me. Capital is a breeze compared to this one. For me only Witgenstein and Hegel have proven more difficult than TCOPR. Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra was a pain too.

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Ah, the justification of synthetic a priori knowledge. Read it years ago and stil bear the psychological scars. It's bloody murder, as he makes up new terms as he goes along. My advice would be to hunt out one of the glossaries that can be found on the web. It'll prove invaluable, trust me. Capital is a breeze compared to this one. For me only Witgenstein and Hegel have proven more difficult than TCOPR. Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra was a pain too.

 

Agreed. have to confess to only getting about a fifth of the way through the book before giving up on it :( Yeah capital is pretty straightforward if read slowly enough and if its done with a reading guide too. It was actually after reading Lockes An Essay Concerning Human Understaning that i managed to get the strength to go through capital. had to do the locke book for a course i was taking, it wasnt that the ideas where so difficult to take in, it was more down to the turgid style and the fact he ceaselessly repeated himself in the text. IIRC, he actually apologies in advance to the reader in the introduction saying that it will likely be littered with repititions, owing to him not editing it, but begged the reader to bear with him. Way i look at it, if he couldn't be arsed to proof-read the manuscript, why does he think the reader should be arsed to read his text! ho hum...Hear you with wittgenstein, in fact, id say most analytic philosophy is brutal as **** to get through, the amount of times ive taken to go over deceptivly wee journal articles to end up with no comprehension at the end of the pain, is pretty staggering. thankfully i no longer do any philosophy anymore....

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I agree about Locke; 'nonsense on stilts' as Bentham put it (not that his felicific calculus was much better). Sadly not many philosophers are particularly readable. Plato is an enjoyable (The Last Days of Socrates) if at times frightening (The Republic) read and I have a soft spot for whiny old Rousseau.

 

Anyway, getting away from philosophy for a bit, I finally got round to reading Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars over the festive period. What an amazing imagination the man had. Thoroughly recommended, even for those not normally enamoured with science fiction.

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Yeah read it but years ago, can't remember except I think it was an OK read. Bit dated now but some interesting bits in it. (Not sure how reliable the last comment is as I don't remember it at all, just based on a 'feeling').

 

Read 2 vols of Churchill's History of World War II (out of 6) and quite readable. The first more so as in the 2nd he throws in lots of papers, tables to prove points. (If all you want is a good read skip these). Some interesting insights and info I didn't have before, though occasionally his own prejudices filter through.

 

Took a break by reading another (lighter) World War II book - Popski's Private Army. An odd kind of book though it does give some idea of the kind of odd guys who fought behind enemy lines. Might look at a book on David Stirling later for a more gung-ho version of this. Then later relax with a crime or fantasy novel: I've got several old-school 'tec books I haven't read yet and have recently bought a book by Avram Davidson, The Phoenix and the Mirror.

Edited by Mr Bunny
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Long time no posts but thought it worth adding a new one. Used to read kids author years ago called Henry Treece. Out of print long time but came across 2nd-hand copy of The Burning of Njal. It's a re-telling of one of the classic Icelandic Sagas. An odd title until you realise that the saga is about blood-feuds and at a key moment Njal and his family get trapped in a house and their enemies set it on fire. Quite bloodthirsty for what was then a book aimed at least partly at kids. There's a kind of grim humour in the book too. When a character has his arm sliced off by an axe he says "Ah well, that arm was getting old and craggy; perhaps it needed pruning." Given me an interest in digging up some of the other sagas.

 

Read a few books since last post but only ones that stand out much are The Master And Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (The Devil and witches in Communist Russia) and Templar. The latter is a proper graphic novel - as opposed to a collection of comic stories.

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I seem to be the only guy on this book thread these days but just finished reading Robin Jenkins' The Thistle and the Grail. No not our Thistle but a Junior team from an obscure Lanarkshire village which has a miracle year and makes its way to the Scottish Junior Cup final. It's really about the characters in the village but the football plays an important part in the story and you get the feeling the writer really had an interest in (and went to) football. Published 1954 by the way and reads sometimes like the story takes place some years earlier.

 

There's a mention in the book of a meeting at "the shell" in the middle of Central Station - anyone out there old enough to remember when that was a regular meeting point?

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Currently enjoying "Catching Fire," by Richard Wrangham. He argues that what really separates humans from other apes (and other animals) is that our anatomy, physiology and behaviour all went through rapid evolutionary changes after we discovered the energetic benefits of cooking food, as opposed to eating raw food.

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Just to stop this dying out. Nothing outstanding since last post but speaking of last post, this was an interesting book: The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain's Rush to War, 1914

 

Until recently the line had been pushed that there was no way we could have avoided the 1st World War and that we were obliged to join in anyway1. This is is one from a new generation of historians who argue the opposite case.

 

Only other book worth mentioning (and not really a book) is I came across a character I'd never heard of but who's been around for a couple of decades: Usagi Yojimbo (the Rabbit Ronin). No really. It's much better than it sounds. Comics book but proper stories. Not that I've any reason to be prejudiced in his favour of course.

 

 

1Yes I know in the immediate aftermath of WW1 many were critical of what had happened but later and especially after WW2 and the feeling that we had been heroic in that war, the attitudes of many historians changed.

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a suggested book for christmas (and a shameless exercise in self-promotion) for the sports fan in your family.

described by the daily mail as 'a fine collection of tributes, anecdotes and old stories brilliantly told...' - ahem! - may i offer 'scottish sporting legends'. words by me, foreward by sir alex ferguson and available on amazon.

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I finally got round after a good number of years to reading The Bruce. Not finished it yet and don't expect to for a bit as it's slow going since I'm trying to read it in original language not translation. Interesting read and I'm learning a lot re history (there is annotation which tells you where he - John Barbour - gets things wrong or is putting a spin on events) and the language of the time. For instance the rhymes can tell you that it wasn't yet full-blown Scots as we know it when it was written. Kind of middle English moving towards the Scots of the later centuries Won't bore you with detail, you can read it yourself if that kind of thing interests you. Among the various things I've learned is that folk used a primitive compass in these days and Bruce was pursued at one point by "sleuth-hunds". Think that's a great phrase.

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Lanark by Alisdair Gray. One of the greatest books by a Scottish Author.

I'll give it a go. I read a lot and do like Scottish aiuthors, I've read all Rankin, Brookmyre, Welsh and Lindsay, plus others like Alex Gray, Craig Robertson, James Oswald, Mark Wilson and even our own Willie McGuires effort as well as Robert Mitchell (The main character is a jag apparently but doesn't go much)

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Just finished "Fatal Passage," by Ken McGoogan. Highly interesting biography about John Rae, from Orkney, without doubt the most accomplished Arctic explorer of his generation, and undeniably the man who completed the charting of the Northwest Passage. It was also he who discovered that Sir John Franklin's earlier attempt had ended in tragedy, with everybody freezing or starving to death, and some of them resorting to cannibalism. But of course the latter revelation was totally hushed up/flatly denied by the British Establishment, led by by Lady Jane Franklin and aided and abetted by people like Charles Dickens; they relentlessly denigrated Rae; and maps were re-drawn deliberately to show that one of the Establishment naval men, and not Rae, had discovered the final stretch of the Passage. We now know that Rae was indeed the discoverer, and that his information about cannibalism was true; yet even today, some charts and books wrongly deny him his true place in history.

 

Highly recommended.

Edited by Jaggernaut
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Just finished "A Whisper of Espionage," about a famous German psychologist (Wolfgang Koehler) who spent most of his career in the USA, moving there when the nazis came to power in Germany. Famous for his studies of a group of chimpanzees in an enclosure in Tenerife during the First World War; made some pioneering discoveries about them. However, he was almost certainly spying on allied ship movements in the Canary Islands, and transmitting the information to Germany so that their submarines could sink the ships.... which they did, hundreds of them.

Fascinating, but could have been written in one or two chapters instead of an entire book.

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