De Reader Dunno De Différance

Due to an untimely laptop crash recently, my reading program has been expedited. I have surely exceeded 100 books already this year. Which of course pales in comparison to Winston Churchill's alleged book-a-day even while Prime-Ministering. Nonetheless, here's a few things I noticed while reading during the past few months.

1. You know you're reading some serious shit when the author uses the word 'problematic' as a noun rather than an adjective.

2. Buckminster Fuller likes to omnioveruse compound neologisms and Heideggerian hyphens in his throughout-the-book prose.

3. You're not reading a book qua book or a newspaper qua newspaper if you're not flipping any pages.

4. It's interesting how every author aligns philosophers differently. One author may villify Plato, Descartes, Heidegger and Nietzsche and lionise Socrates, Hume and Popper, another may decry Socrates, Bentham and Mill and praise Hume and Kant, and yet another may criticise Kant, Descartes and Bentham and adopt Socrates, Hume, Mill and Nietzsche. And yet others just disagree with all of them. Makes one wonder if everyone was reading the same writings.

5. One man's epiphany is often another man's truism. But isn't a truism always-already just a truism however it is expressed? At least truisms are true, by definition.

6. Books with the words 'tractatus', 'principia', 'being' or 'critique' in their title are guaranteed to be difficult. Let's hope no one writes Tractatus Principia: A Critique of Being.

An August Month Indeed

This August has been unusually eventful, and fruitful. The month started off with my presentation on the possibility of achieving immortality. I also attended several screenings at the Melbourne International Film Festival. The English Premier League kicked off once more. And in that time I finished reading perhaps five books, of which three were of the highest intellectual achievement, on neuroscience, consciousness, and ethics respectively (although of course each book necessarily encroached on the other two areas, sometimes vastly so).