Decided to go heavy and serious this month.
Wow. The word that describes this book is relentless. Given one basic idea: the world has been brutalized in an unspecified disaster and a man and this son are trying to get from point A to point B, nothing is unexamined. Everything about the book down to the level of punctuation illustrates a haunting, barren landscape full of hidden danger. Word is this is going to be a movie, which is idiotic, because it’s the language of the book that’s so important here.
I Am a Strange Loop — Douglas Hofstadter
I love Hofstadter’s magnum opus, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, though I admit it took me a couple tries to finally finish it. In this follow-up, he expands on his central idea there, which is figuring out the mystery of identity. When we say “I”, what do we mean? His theory is very intriguing and involves the idea that although he consider our identity to be housed inside our brain, it actually extends further, meshing with the brains of others. Would you be convinced of this by reading his book? I’m not, completely, but it’s a fascinating notion.
I started on my first book of February already but I don’t know if I’m going to finish it. I’m really having a hard time getting into it, which I think is going to upset some folks, including my wife.
interesting. I Am a Strange Loop is the next book I plan on reading and my B.F.F. started The Road the other night.
“I started on my first book of February already but I don’t know if I’m going to finish it. I’m really having a hard time getting into it, which I think is going to upset some folks, including my wife.”
You heretic.
(To clarify for Mr. Mancer’s readers: it’s _Pride and Prejudice_ he’s giving up on. But he was only reading it to do well on the Jane Austen P&P board game trivia questions, anyway. Mr. Darcy–call me.)
Wow, good stuff! I like Hofstadter as well, but haven’t picked up the latest. FWIW, when I read “The Road” I was thinking super-volcano, but an article in Rolling Stone talked about McCarthy’s role as writer-in-residence at some science research center, and mentioned that he had long talks with a paleontologist, grilling him about what the planet was like right after the dino-killing asteroid strike, so that’s probably what he had in mind.
Also, I’m reading Stephenson’s “Anathem”, which I heartily recommend to any fellow math-geeks.
Yeah, funny. I read Strange Loop a few months back… but I am almost finished with The Road and bugink just picked up Strange Loop yesterday. I picked up the Road because I thought that I might want to see the film when it came out and wanted to read the book beforehand. I would have read it eventually, but the film was due out in soon. I don’t want to see the film. What was I thinking anyhow?