Mind Expansion
- aderyn_du
- Posts: 2176
- Joined: Mon Dec 03, 2001 6:00 pm
- antispam: No
- Please enter the next number in sequence: 8
- Location: Atlanta
Mind Expansion
It's Ad, just wearing a new name. I'm popping in for some Chiffy help...
I've decided that I have been wasting away in front of my television, which is terribly unlike me, but between having been a wee bit depressed and working way too much, it was a good brainless activity. For a while. Now I am seriously in need of some mind expansion.
Post ONE title of a book that you think I should read-- doesn't matter what subject, genre, yadda yadda. Just something that you think is at the top of your Must Read list. Please no cheating... you can only post one.
My half of the brain thanks you!!
I've decided that I have been wasting away in front of my television, which is terribly unlike me, but between having been a wee bit depressed and working way too much, it was a good brainless activity. For a while. Now I am seriously in need of some mind expansion.
Post ONE title of a book that you think I should read-- doesn't matter what subject, genre, yadda yadda. Just something that you think is at the top of your Must Read list. Please no cheating... you can only post one.
My half of the brain thanks you!!
Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together. ~Anais Nin
- Walden
- Chiffmaster General
- Posts: 11030
- Joined: Thu May 09, 2002 6:00 pm
- antispam: No
- Location: Coal mining country in the Eastern Oklahoma hills.
- Contact:
The Pilgim's Progress by John Bunyan
Last edited by Walden on Sun Aug 07, 2005 9:50 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reasonable person
Walden
Walden
Towing Jehovah. . .by James Morrow
theological/political/philosophical satire/commentary couched in a tale of God's death (body found at zero latitute, zero longitude) and the towing of his body to an icy sarcophagus in the Arctic by a disgraced captain of an oil supertanker.
theological/political/philosophical satire/commentary couched in a tale of God's death (body found at zero latitute, zero longitude) and the towing of his body to an icy sarcophagus in the Arctic by a disgraced captain of an oil supertanker.
Remember, you didn't get the tiger so it would do what you wanted. You got the tiger to see what it wanted to do. -- Colin McEnroe
- peeplj
- Posts: 9029
- Joined: Mon Jan 21, 2002 6:00 pm
- Please enter the next number in sequence: 1
- Location: forever in the old hills of Arkansas
- Contact:
Hi there!
Top of the list, huh? For me, that'd be Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising" sequence.
On the surface, a set of children's books that feature a quest-related theme, magic, and time-travel, very loosely based on European mythology.
These books do have a deeper level, though, and they also include some images that have found their way into my nightmares from time to time.
I think you'd like 'em.
*BB*
--James
Top of the list, huh? For me, that'd be Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising" sequence.
On the surface, a set of children's books that feature a quest-related theme, magic, and time-travel, very loosely based on European mythology.
These books do have a deeper level, though, and they also include some images that have found their way into my nightmares from time to time.
I think you'd like 'em.
*BB*
--James
- Nanohedron
- Moderatorer
- Posts: 38239
- Joined: Wed Dec 18, 2002 6:00 pm
- antispam: No
- Please enter the next number in sequence: 8
- Tell us something.: Been a fluter, citternist, and uilleann piper; committed now to the way of the harp.
Oh, yeah: also a mod here, not a spammer. A matter of opinion, perhaps. - Location: Lefse country
Any decent dictionary. Seriously. No plot, alphabetic layout, a wealth of info. Where else can you come across words like "agogic" or "swarf" and not come away scratching your head? Aside from wondering who'd ever use such words in a normal conversation, of course...
Yes, I leaf thru one when I'm bored.
*sigh*
Yes, I leaf thru one when I'm bored.
*sigh*
- BigDavy
- Posts: 4883
- Joined: Sat Dec 11, 2004 5:50 am
- Please enter the next number in sequence: 1
- Location: Larkhall Scotland
Mind expanding
Hi ennyn (Ad that was)
Try the Golden Bough.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... 9?v=glance
I don't know if you would consider it mind expanding or mind numbing but it will keep you away from the tv for quite some time
The Dark is Rising sequence as suggested by peeplj is also very good.
David
Try the Golden Bough.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... 9?v=glance
I don't know if you would consider it mind expanding or mind numbing but it will keep you away from the tv for quite some time
The Dark is Rising sequence as suggested by peeplj is also very good.
David
Payday, Piping, Percussion and Poetry- the 4 best Ps
- Ann
- Posts: 83
- Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2005 3:37 pm
- Please enter the next number in sequence: 1
- Location: So Cal
- Contact:
I'm glad you mentioned Flann O'Brien. I read At Swim Two Birds and it has to be about one of my favorite books ever. I love his humor, silly yet somehow kind of deep.Wombat wrote:If you haven't already, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. Bizarre, wickedly funny, exploding with life.
I read Susan Cooper years ago when I was in my teens, great books and I still think of them from time to time.
Now I know I'm in the right forum. Two authors I love in one thread.
- s1m0n
- Posts: 10069
- Joined: Wed Oct 06, 2004 12:17 am
- antispam: No
- Please enter the next number in sequence: 10
- Location: The Inside Passage
Jan Yoors, The Gypsies.
http://www.waveland.com/Titles/Yoors.htm
When he was 12, Jan Yoors--the son of a bohemian belgian couple--befriended and eventually ran away with a family of gypsies, living with them for a summer and off and an again for years. This was in the thirties before the war, so the life he experienced was centuries old but only to last for another decade. His writing is vivid and perceptive. It's horrifying to think that many of the gypsies who people his memoire died at the hands of the nazis only a few years later. It's an extraordinary book.
I read his first book twenty years ago and and my battered copy is much the worse for wear, but it's been reprinted recently. The Crossing is still out of print, and I've recently ordered a used copy, although I haven't read it.
Yoors ended up as a successful painter/scultor/tapestry maker/photographer in NYC, and died a few years ago.
http://www.waveland.com/Titles/Yoors.htm
When he was 12, Jan Yoors--the son of a bohemian belgian couple--befriended and eventually ran away with a family of gypsies, living with them for a summer and off and an again for years. This was in the thirties before the war, so the life he experienced was centuries old but only to last for another decade. His writing is vivid and perceptive. It's horrifying to think that many of the gypsies who people his memoire died at the hands of the nazis only a few years later. It's an extraordinary book.
He wrote another book called The Crossing which recounts his experiences with the resistance during the war years, when he was engaged in trying to help gypsies and others get over the borders to safety.The Gypsies
Jan Yoors
At the age of twelve, Jan Yoors ran away from his cultural Belgian family to join a wandering band, a kumpania, of Gypsies. For ten years, he lived as one of them, traveled with them from country to country, shared both their pleasures and their hardships—and came to know them as no one, no outsider, ever has. Here, in this firsthand and highly personal account of an extraordinary people, Yoors tells the real story of the Gypsies’ fascinating customs and their never-ending struggle to survive as free nomads in a hostile world. He vividly describes the texture of their daily life: the Gypsies as lovers, spouses, parents, healers, and mourners; their loyalties and enmities; their moral and ethical beliefs and practices; their language and culture; and the history and traditions behind their fierce pride.
The exultant celebrations, the daring frontier crossings, the yearly horse fairs, the convoluted business deals in which Gypsy shrewdness combined with all the apparatus of modern technology are all brought to life in this memorable portrait of the most romanticized, yet most maligned and least-known people on earth. An insider’s story, The Gypsies lifts the veil of secrecy that for so long has enshrouded this race of strangers in our midst.
256 pages, $17.50 list; ISBN 0-88133-305-0
I read his first book twenty years ago and and my battered copy is much the worse for wear, but it's been reprinted recently. The Crossing is still out of print, and I've recently ordered a used copy, although I haven't read it.
Yoors ended up as a successful painter/scultor/tapestry maker/photographer in NYC, and died a few years ago.
And now there was no doubt that the trees were really moving - moving in and out through one another as if in a complicated country dance. ('And I suppose,' thought Lucy, 'when trees dance, it must be a very, very country dance indeed.')
C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis
- Martin Milner
- Posts: 4350
- Joined: Tue Oct 16, 2001 6:00 pm
- Please enter the next number in sequence: 1
- Location: London UK