SmartBomb

I apologise for having no taste at all. Earlier books are just listed, and I'll add a little more detail to books as I update them in the future. Feel free to mock and deride my sorry choice of reading materials. JANUARY: - Otherland – Tad Williams - The Meaning of Tingo – Adam Jacot de Boinod - Dying Inside – Robert Silverberg - Consider Phlebas – Ian M. Banks - The Dalai Lama’s Book of Wisdom - Stardust – John Gribbin FEBRUARY: - The Immoralist – Andre Gide - The Demon Haunted World – Carl Sagan - The Sleeper Awakes – H. G. Wells - Parallel Worlds – Michio Kaku - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick MARCH: - Homeward Bound – Harry Turtledove - The Wonder of Things – A. C. Grayling - Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes - Buddhism, Plain and Simple – Steve Hagen - The Oxford Book of Death - Misc. APRIL: - Man Plus – Frederik Pohl - A Hole in Space – Larry Niven - Night Warriors – Graham Masterton - Gateway – Frederik Pohl - Einstein for Dummies MAY: - Night Plague: Graham Masterton - Snow Crash: Neal Stephenson - Mapping the Mind: Rita Carter - If on a Winter Night a Traveller – Italo Calvino - The Horror in the Museum - H. P. Lovecraft JUNE: - The Shapes of Sleep: J. B. Priestly - The Norse Myths: collected - Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings - Edgar Allen Poe - A Bottomless Grave: Victorian Tales of Terror - Hugh Lamb (Ed.) JULY: - The Collected Poems - Christine Rossetti - Science, Skepticism and the Search for God - Michael Shermer - Lucky Wander Boy - D. B. Weiss - Power Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World and Extra Life - Chris Kohler - The First Men in the Moon - H. G. Wells AUGUST: - The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera - Does Anything Eat Wasps? - New Scientist - Tales of Unease - Arthur Conan Doyle - Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre - Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carrol SEPTEMBER: - The Conan Chronicles - R. E. Howard - The Forever War - Joe Haldeman - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - Haruki Murakami - The Blackstone Chronicles - John Saul OCTOBER: - Atomised - Michel Houllebecq - Girlfriend in a Coma - Douglas Coupland - The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

Book prudes, the lot of you! I'm a devout corner-turner and spine bender. In fact, the first thing I do with a new book is flip to the middle and bend the spine riiiiight back. Personally, the book is just the medium, and I tend to let mine get 'lived' in very quickly, leaving them battered, written in (including impromptu shopping lists across pages) and generally loved to death. Bookmarks are just another way of the system getting you to spend your money. Viva la revolucion, etc...

Excellent, another man with high Cthulhu Mythos and low base SAN! Nice to meet you. AD&D Third Edition rules. Oh dear oh dear. Enough said. So, favourite H.P. tale? Mine is The Whisperer in Darkness; it builds perfectly, and the denoument is an absolute masterstroke! Did you play the PC game Dark Corners of the Earth recently? Tolerable if frustrating. Good SAN system, though.

I always played chaotic neutral: 'I'll save your village. FOR A PRICE!' Sadly, my friends gave up on the roleplay, so I'm forced to get my vicarious thrills from PC RPG games instead, I had a dwarf character in AD&D with an enchanted beard which gave him +4CHA when used on women. It was hilarious!

That depends if you will suffer a CHA modifier of -2 to all rolls by admitting to liking roleplay... I used to have a group of friends of similar tastes, as we ran groups for Call of Cthulhu, AD&D, Vampire the Masquerade and Warhammer. Where else do I get to be a dwarf and talk with a silly accent this side of Arkham Asylum? I am a (dice) tosser and proud of it!

Sing along with me Gyre: 'That is not dead which can eternal lie. Yet with strange eons, even death may die.' What was it Lovecraft wrote: 'The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate its contents.' Anyway, I have to go and have my brain taken to Pluto by the Fungi from Yuggoth.

Well, it's a delicate subject indeed! As an atheist myself, people seem to expect me to launch on some tirade against their belief system, or start babbling about evolution or other scientific proof. Contradictory as it seems, I also believe in tolerance and understanding. After all, what did we ever learn from shouting and violence?

Whilst I am certainly a Dawkins advocate, I can also agree with your points. He is vehemently against religion, although connotations of religion = evil are not what he intends; he is more religion = misguided folly; and perhaps more like Carl Sagan in The Demon Haunted World. However, you are right insofar as Dawkins' highlighting WHY there is no god, etc, is rather a nostrum and does not solve the problem, as people need religion for a reason; and simply removing the 'crutch' for people will do more harm than good. Perhaps Dawkins should introduce some Buddhist elements as well, to help people understand they have one life, and to make it count, etc. I think more important, and Dawkins does at least sideswipe this, is to get people to consider their beliefs and not merely close the door on them as right and true. Can I just say that this is a great forum as we can have this discussion without somebody resorting to insult?

Ia! Ia! R'lyeh ? Cthulhu ftagn! Ia! Ia! Mglui naflftagn Dagon e Y'ha-nthlei! Ia! Ia! Y'ha-nthlei! Sorry about that, but it's nice to be able to put that where (hopefully) somebody will understand. I'm a long-term Lovecraft fan, discovering one of the story compilations on a whim back when I was at college. In my opinion, he's certainly one of the most important horror writers; his deep mythos and almost purposefully dense language conjure up horrendous alienation. The Chasium roleplay was also superb, as well. If you're interested, let me know and I'll give you a short list of 'best of' Lovecraft tales to read to best get an overview. Reading this reply will cost you 1D4 SANITY.

Certainly get The Outsider, and also The Fall; that's Camus in a nutshell in two books! If you like that, also check out The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus; harder going, but worth the effort...

Whilst poor Dawkins does get rather lionised, I certainly admire his evangelical atheism. Dawkins, in all his works from Blind Watchmaker to God Delusion is certainly passionate, but never anything but humanist and rational. Rather then seek 'blind converts', his vision is of a failed and broken belief system that does little to evolve us as a species. As Philip alludes to above, if religious types get to damn atheists to hell, then atheists are allowed to bring their tools of reason, science and the scientific method to bear. It's certainly not a 'dead horse' when you consider that religion (depsite the positive effects if can have) is still causing upset, death and unrest in the world.