Monday, June 12, 2006

A Pile of Books

Feeling lazy some days ago I thought I would just list all the books in the pile next to my bed. Which really ought to be tidied away.

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Karl Shaw, The World Encyclopedia of Lies and Utter Fibs
Joseph's Coat, An Anthology of Multicultural Fiction
Translated by C. Day Lewis, The Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid of Virgil
Norman Podhoretz, Why we were in Vietnam
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic
New Scientist, 2nd November 2002
Alfred Kubin The Other Side: A Fantastic Novel
Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary
Bernard Gordon, The Dimensions of Conflict in South East Asia (1966)
Colin Mason, Sukarno's Indonesia
The Giant Book of Myths and Legends
Anna Funder, Stasiland
NIV New Testament and Psalms
Peter S. Beagle, The Inkeeper's Song
The Giant Book of the Unknown
Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramisinghe, Our Place in the Cosmos
The Horse and Pony Handbook
Bricks, Pavers, and Tiles
Suetonius, the Twelve Caesars
Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes- The Complete Illustrated Short Stories
John Barrett, Biochemistry of Parasitic Helminths
Rudyard Kipling, Many Inventions
Magnus Pyke, Synthetic Food
Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
Garth Nix, The Keys to the Kingdom: Grim Tuesday
Thoams and Finney, Calculus and Analytic Geometry, 7th Ed.
G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works Volume 2: St. Francis of Assisi, The Everlasting Man, St. Thomas Aquinas
Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
Peter F. Hamilton, The Confederation handbook (A Vital Guide to the 'Night's Dawn' Trilogy)

2 comments:

Dr Clam said...

'Our Place in the Cosmos' is of course directly relevant to Marco's latest post. It is a fine example of a self-destructive strategy of argument I often use myself:
(1) Meticulously deveop a logical, self-consistent, and well-documented version of the 'weak' version of your argument. e.g., that bacteria can come from space.
(2) Generalise your 'weak' argument into an over-the-top 'strong' argument without bothering to look for evidence. e.g., claim that bees can come from space too. This allows people who might otherwise have been convinced by (1) to pigeon-hole you as a nutter and continue on as they were before.

Marco Parigi said...

Sure, but 1) is related to "here is the evidence". And 2) is where that aspect fits in to what one (and followers) believes. 2) is always going to rely on Occam's razor a lot, and therefore is pigeonholed as a faith.