Influence Peddlers

Fall                                                Waning Autumn Moon

What literature has influenced you the most?

The Bible, various authors

The Stranger, Albert Camus

Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard

Novels of Herman Hesse

The Trial, Franz Kafka

The Trilogy of Desire and Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser

Metamorphoses, Ovid

(temple of literature, Hanoi)

Novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer

Novels of Willa Cather

Divine Comedy, Dante

Dramas of Eugene O’Neill

Poetry of Robert Frost

Poetry of Rainer Marie Rilke

Poetry of Wallace Stevens

Chinese classical poetry

Romance of the Three Kingdoms

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien

The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley

A Glastonbury Romance, Copper Powys

Short stories of Jorge Borges

100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Marcia Marquez

Divine Comedy, John Milton

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Beowulf

These are the ones I’ll admit to right now.

Reading Matters

Fall                                                             Waning Autumn Moon

Found these questions on one of my frequent reads, The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Thought they’d be interesting to answer.

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly?

Wired, Scientific American, Scientific American Mind, The Economist, Funny Times, The Sporting News  (dropped this year long term subscriptions to Orion, Parabola)

What do you read in print vs. online vs. mobile?

All of the above I read in print with modest exceptions.  Online I read Dissent, Arts and Letters Daily, New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post and, as the election season heats up I read several political blogs (see below).   Big Think, TED and Connections give me a quick injection of creative, new ideas when I need them.

Q: What books have you recently read? Do they stand out?

Game of Thrones (4 volumes).  This is one of the best written fantasy novels I’ve ever read.  No competition for Tolkien, but very good.  Monkeys Journey to the West.  Another Chinese classic, a picaresque novel about Monkey as he guards a monk journeying to India to retrieve copies of Buddhist sutras.  The Sibling Effect.  Understudied in the past, this book recounts recent work on siblings.  All Things Shining.  How to find resources for living in the Western classical tradition.  Stumbled on their appreciation of the sacred and the holy.  Reading the Classics.  A very good book by Italo Calvino.  In the tradition of the Renaissance humanists.  Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  As any frequent reader of this blog knows, I’m reading this one line by line in Latin and translating as I go.  And learning Latin as I go.

I listened to Wolf.  A Booker Prize winner novel about Thomas Cromwell.  I also listened to a lecture series on existentialism.  Wonderful.

Q: Do you read blogs? If so, what blogs do you like best?

The Perseus Project

Not a blog, but if you love the classics, especially Greek and Latin classics, this website is a goldmine of resources.

What Should I Be Doing With My Bees This Month?

A Stillwater bee-keeper with common sense advice of northern bee keeping

 

All of these website offer analysis and strategic thinking about national and state level political matters.

Beyond the Polls,

Cook Report

Real Clear Politics

Politics: Analysis, Polls

 

Julia Bennet

Blog of a philosophical Australian model.  No kidding.

The Bottom of Heaven

An African-American woman writes this young black experience blog.

The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension

This one exists in its own dimension.

 

Q: Do you use Twitter? If so, whom do you follow?

Twitter proved too much of a pain for me.  Dropped it long ago.  Facebook.  I’m sorta there.  Check in once in a while.  Post less frequently than that.  Use none of the digital sharing technologies.