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What books are you reading?

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kyrathaba:
Thanks for that excerpt, 40. I have the Hellraiser books (haven't read yet). Mental note: read "Tortured Souls: The Legend of Primordium" after the Hellraiser books.

skwire:
Just finished the first book of the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson.  Really slick magic system and a neatly developed world.  Onward with the second book...

kyrathaba:
Yep, it's a great series. He has a new one out called (IIRC) The Rithmatist.

skwire:
Yep, it's a great series. He has a new one out called (IIRC) The Rithmatist.-kyrathaba (June 14, 2013, 03:48 PM)
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Yep, and another one due out in September called Steelheart.

http://www.amazon.com/Steelheart-Brandon-Sanderson/dp/0385743564/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1371167437&sr=8-1

40hz:
Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin. - Hermann Hesse
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Almost finished rereading four books I originally read back in high school when I was on a Hermann Hesse kick:

Steppenwolf
Demian
Journey to the East
The Glass Bead Game

All excellent and (except for The Glass Bead Game) very fast reads. I still love this passage (especially the last two sentences) from the fictitious Treatise on the Steppenwolf found within the Steppenwolf story:

Now what we call "bourgeois," when regarded as an element always to be found in human life, is nothing else than the search for a balance. It is the striving after a mean between the countless extremes and opposites that arise in human conduct.

If we take any one of these coupled opposites, such as piety and profligacy, the analogy is immediately comprehensible. It is open to a man to give himself up wholly to spiritual views, to seeking after God, to the ideal of saintliness. On the other hand, he can equally give himself up entirely to the life of instinct, to the lusts of the flesh, and so direct all his efforts to the attainment of momentary pleasures. The one path leads to the saint, to the martyrdom of the spirit and surrender to God. The other path leads to the profligate, to the martyrdom of the flesh, the surrender to corruption.

Now it is between the two, in the middle of the road, that the bourgeois seeks to walk. He will never surrender himself either to lust or to asceticism. He will never be a martyr or agree to his own destruction. On the contrary, his ideal is not to give up but to maintain his own identity. He strives neither for the saintly nor its opposite. The absolute is his abhorrence. He may be ready to serve God, but not by giving up the fleshpots. He is ready to be virtuous, but likes to be easy and comfortable in this world as well. In short, his aim is to make a home for himself between two extremes in a temperate zone without violent storms and tempests; and in this he succeeds though it be at the cost of that intensity of life and feeling which an extreme life affords. A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self.

Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he does comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire. The bourgeois is consequently by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule. Therefore, he has substituted majority for power, law for force, and the polling booth for responsibility.  
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