Library Bookshelf

patricia19 · November 04, 2026, 11:23:56 AM

I was struck by two things: one, he was prescient, and two, Wallace was chain-smoking on air!

I read Point Counter Point in high school in my lit class. However, I couldn't tell you about it now. It's the same with Aristotle's "The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle."

The print was so small and dense on the large paperback page, and the ideas were presented in such a way that I often had to go back and re-read, not sure if I was fully taking it in. I had to put it aside.

I'm afraid my other book, "The Nicomachean Ethics," was easier for me to appreciate and understand. I may be a lightweight or simply unable to assimilate information unless it's been modernized.

MarsGal · November 05, 2026, 10:54:53 AM

Okay, new book. I didn't get far into the last one before I got a little bored(?) and impatient with it. I was not in the mood to plow through it to see if it improved.

My new read is a medical sci-fi called The Hospital at the End of the World by Justin C. Key. The protagonist is a young student who expected to ace his entrance exam but instead was rejected (twice). Someone had tampered with them. While he rather quickly finds out who did it, he also triggers an event that has him on the run. This is a story involving AI diagnosis and treatment vs traditional doctoring.

patricia19 · November 05, 2026, 12:14:35 PM

I looked it up on Amazon; it sounds intriguing, although I'm not really into thrillers.

MarsGal · Reply #3753 - Re: Library Bookshelf

After starting, and rejecting two more books, I think I have found my next library read. It is the first of a series, an old one that has been sitting in my wish list for quite a while, called Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow. I read a few of his essays and opinions advocating DRM free texts and liberalizing copyright laws years ago. Through his early writings, I learned of the Creative Commons organization and P2P (a distributed computing or networking architecture). Only three paragraphs in and Doctorow delights me with this: "Silicon Valley hates old people, but that was okay, because I hated Silicon Valley." The protagonist of this series is a sixty-seven year old accountant.

In Doctorow's latest book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (published this year), he does an analysis of who benefits, who ends up paying for it, how it can be used to exploit people and how we can gain back some control.

User

Shoutbox

Library Bookshelf

patricia19

MarsGal

patricia19

MarsGal