The Odyssey by Homer

You inspired me, so I ordered a copy too. I see there's a 2017 translation by Emily Wilson they say is all the rage.

Eric Cline says the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the book of Exodus are probably memories from the same time period.

I suppose that when it comes to this sort of literature, you need to calibrate your expectations and approach it with a bit of an anthropological spirit in order to appreciate it. — SophistiCat

Certainly, but expectation-calibration can only do so much to mitigate intense displeasure. (And I secretly suspect there is literature written around the same time (and long before) which doesn't suffer from the same faults or has a more lasting power.)

I liked her sister's signature work a lot more, for all that it is more than a little unhinged — SophistiCat

Still haven't read Wuthering Heights. It does sound more promising.

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Right now, some Russian holiday reading:

Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin.

Eric Cline says the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the book of Exodus are probably memories from the same time period — frank

Does Odysseus cross paths with Moses as they both try to fnd their way home? Wait, don't tell me and spoil it.

This got me thinking about Jung and his claims of the consistent themes in myths cross culturally.

Star maker by Olaf stapledon

Does Odysseus cross paths with Moses as they both try to fnd their way home? Wait, don't tell me and spoil it. — Hanover

The big expert on Homeric Greece was named Moses Finley (his real last name was Finkelstein.) The World of Odysseus

Does anyone have any sci fi recommendations? I’m open to anything

• Ubik, Philip K. Dick
• A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
• Trouble on Triton, by Samuel R. Delany
• Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban
• The Doomed City, Strugatsky Brothers
• The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells
• The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe

I’ve heard of clockwork orange and the Time Machine but none of the others. Thanks

:up:

I should point out that these ones are idiosyncratic choices:

• Trouble on Triton, by Samuel R. Delany
• Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban
• The Doomed City, Strugatsky Brothers

(Roadside Picnic or Hard to be a God would be the normally recommended Strugatsky novels)

Sapolsky Behave

Does anyone have any sci fi recommendations? I’m open to anything — an-salad

Here are some of my favorites. They’re all better than @Jamal’s suggestions. Also much more conventional.

To start, some books I read in younger days I'm still fond of:

• The "Foundation" trilogy by Isaac Asimov. I was surprised to find it was written in 1941. A BIG IDEA book - the biggest. I reread it a few years ago and the writing stinks, but I still love it.
• "Tales from the White Hart"--short stories by Arthur C. Clark.
• "Starship Troopers"--I never liked Heinlein much--too macho/fascist--but I reread it a few years ago and really liked it. Much like the movie without the knowing smirk.
• "The Man Who Folded Himself" by David Gerrold. Good mind-blowing time travel book where the ramifications get more and more tangled when all the versions of the main character meet for a single permanent reunion.
• "The Lathe of Heaven" by Ursula K. LeGuin. Mind-blowing changing reality with your mind. Clever and well written. Chilling.
• "The Iron Dream" by Norman Spinrad. A book within a book. Adolf Hitler's putsch fails so he escapes and comes to the US and becomes a science fiction writer. In the inner book--"Lord of the Swastika"--he puts all his crazed racial fantasies into words instead of death. Clever but sort of a one-joke routine.
• "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman. I like military science fiction and this is my favorite. But it's not like any other I've read. Hard to describe. The humans and aliens keep trying to battle, but time dilation keeps screwing up the timing. Clever.

More or less recent books. Generally very well written.

• The "Ancillary Justice" trilogy by Anne Leckie. Probably my favorite science fiction books. Good space opera but also strong and sophisticated social commentary. Humane and thought-provoking.
• "Murderbot" series by Martha Wells. A clever and quirky genderless android. Again--humane and socially sophisticated. Often funny.
• "Someday All this Will be Yours," by Adrian Tchaikovsky (or Czajkowski as Jamal's wife might spell it.) Over the years I've gotten very tired of time travel books until this woke me back up again. Very clever.
• "The City and The City" by China Mieville. A crime novel taking place in two cities that somehow overlap each other in time or space or dimension or something. Sounds screwy but it works. For me, Mieville is the best writer around. My favorite is "Railsea," but it mixes a lot of fantasy in with the science. Actually, all his books do.
• "Blindsight," Peter Watts. Very philosophical. We argue about consciousness a lot here. This book gave a good visceral glance at what it might be like to be intelligent but completely un-self-aware.

And so many more.

Conventional how? Many of your choices seem pretty far out to me, based on your descriptions. Those of them I've read, I like: Asimov, Clarke, Mieville, Le Guin. I think The Lathe of Heaven is very uderrated in comparison with the Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed (not that it's better).

Adrian Tchaikovsky (or Czajkowski as Jamal's wife might spell it.) — T Clark

She spells it Чайковский. Czajkowski looks like the Polish version.

She spells it Чайковский. Czajkowski looks like the Polish version. — Jamal

My apologies to your wife.

Reading Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle.

A fairly easy read, although I can’t claim to remember it all as I go along. It reads like the eccentric lecture notes of a favourite, slightly idiosyncratic philosophy lecturer.

"The Iron Dream" by Norman Spinrad. A book within a book. Adolf Hitler's putsch fails so he escapes and comes to the US and becomes a science fiction writer. In the inner book--"Lord of the Swastika"--he puts all his crazed racial fantasies into words instead of death. Clever but sort of a one-joke routine. — T Clark

There was a film a few years ago called Max that seemed to argue that Hitler might have remained a harmless artist, but after being rejected by art school, he did not abandon art so much as transform it into performance art through politics, with Nazism, and ultimately the Holocaust, conceived as a perverse aesthetic project enacted on society itself. Disturbing stuff.

I dig the previous recommendations.

A Fire Upon The Deep by Victor Vinge is great work of world-building. Vinge has other books that are stories assuming the same premises/narrative fleshed out in very different ways. They are all good in their own way, but this one hurt my brain the most.

There was a film a few years ago called Max that seemed to argue that Hitler might have remained a harmless artist, but after being rejected by art school, he did not abandon art so much as transform it into performance art through politics, with Nazism, and ultimately the Holocaust, conceived as a perverse aesthetic project enacted on society itself. Disturbing stuff. — Tom Storm

I think the movie you’re talking about and the book I’m talking about are covering about the same conceptual ground. Thinking about it, though I think Hitler was too much a genius to be held to such a small scope. I could see him going crazy or committing suicide, but I can’t really see him writing or painting or any other mundane occupation. I think he was too big, too great to be contained.