X-Git-Url: https://git.hcoop.net/clinton/website/src/unknownlamer.org.git/blobdiff_plain/8c288476a450fdff29e9db447e2dd2b13685ae3b..0426bc8a30cba2a8a449ea66a056ac4e1f6ffe53:/book-list.lisp

diff --git a/book-list.lisp b/book-list.lisp
index 3848bb1..f6217ec 100644
--- a/book-list.lisp
+++ b/book-list.lisp
@@ -26,9 +26,9 @@ naturally)."
    :fiction 3
    "One of Kahlil Gibran's earlier works, I did not much like *A
 Tear and a Smile* excepting the last poem (\"A Poet's Voice\").")
-  ("The Prophet" :fiction 9 "")
+  ("The Prophet" :fiction 9)
   ("Sand and Foam" :fiction 7 "An interesting little book of aphorisms.")
-  ("The Madman" :fiction 8 ""))
+  ("The Madman" :fiction 8))
  ((|John| |Taylor| |Gatto|)
   "Former teacher and now author-activist."
   ("Underground History of American Education"
@@ -37,7 +37,7 @@ Tear and a Smile* excepting the last poem (\"A Poet's Voice\").")
 system. Available
 [[http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/][online for free]]."))
  ((|Luke| |Rhinehardt|)
-  ""
+  nil
   ("The Dice Man"
    :fiction 7
    "<quote>
@@ -59,7 +59,7 @@ The style, plot, and content are equally neurotic; part comedy, part
 attack on psychoanalysis, and part deep philosophy. It was often
 difficult to put down, and was read in under a week of spare time."))
  ((|Neal| |Stephenson|)
-  ""
+  nil
   ("Snow Crash"
    :fiction 9
    "As one must read the *Bible* to understand English literature, so one
@@ -80,7 +80,7 @@ the 1940s and present day slowly unravelled the tale in a nice way.
 I'd still have to recommend *Snow Crash* if one wished to read only one
 Stephenson novel."))
  ((|Marcus| |Aurelius|)
-  ""
+  nil
   ("Meditations"
    :nonfiction 6
    "I enjoyed reading this collection of meditations on Stoic
@@ -114,7 +114,7 @@ young esthetician; the second is a pair of long letters from an older
 ethicist friend to this esthetician. You are then left to resolve the
 conflict between the views."))
  ((|Thomas| |More|)
-  ""
+  nil
   ("Utopia"
    :fiction 7
    "I read most of Utopia in high school with the TI-89 ebook reader, but
@@ -126,12 +126,33 @@ espoused resembles resembles state communism (even if perhaps as a
 negative ideal), but with an strange blend of 14th century European
 social customs."))
  ((|William| |James|)
-  ""
+  nil
   ("The Varieties of Religious Experience"
    :nonfiction 7
-   "[[William James - The Varieties of Religious Experience][A partially finished extended summary]]"))
+   "[[William James - The Varieties of Religious Experience][A partially finished extended summary]]")
+  ("The PhD Octopus"
+   :nonfiction nil
+   "<quote>
+America is thus as a nation rapidly drifting towards a state of things
+in which no man of science or letters will be accounted respectable
+unless some kind of badge or diploma is stamped upon him, and in which
+bare personality will be a mark of outcast estate.  It seems to me high
+time to rouse ourselves to consciousness, and to cast a critical eye
+upon this decidedly grotesque tendency.  Other nations suffer terribly
+from the Mandarin disease.  Are we doomed to suffer like the rest?
+</quote>
+
+[[William James - The PhD Octopus][Full Text]]"))
+ ((|Henry| |James|)
+  "The novelist brother of William James; I've not read many (read:
+one) of his books, but what I did was decent."
+  ("The Altar of the Dead"
+   :fiction 7
+   "A short novella about a man who maintained an altar in a church
+for all of his lost loved ones on the surface, but something a bit
+more beneath."))
  ((|Gregor| |Kiczales|)
-  ""
+  nil
   ("The Art of the Metaobject Protocol"
    :nonfiction 10
    "AMOP is useful as a reference to the CLOS MOP (although less so with
@@ -141,4 +162,32 @@ series of revisions that fix limitations of earlier implementations
 and gradually work toward a generic and well designed MOP for
 CLOS. Through that process one is made more aware of a few general
 object protocol design skills, and gains insight into how to cleanly
-make mapping decisions customizable.")))
\ No newline at end of file
+make mapping decisions customizable."))
+ ((|Friedrich| |Nietzsche|)
+  "A bit acerbic and esoteric, Nietzsche is for me a good *secular*
+counterpart to Kierkegaard's theistic philosophy. Nietzsche's
+polemical works raise important questions for anyone who reads works
+on ethics. As such it is a shame that he has gotten a bad reputation
+by being read by far too many angsty teenagers who see (and relay)
+only Nietzsche the asshole rather than Nietzsche the master of the
+polemic."
+  ("Beyond Good and Evil"
+   :nonfiction 8
+   "A somewhat more comprehensible, if a bit less aesthetically
+pleasing, presentation of much of the philosophy found in *Thus Spoke
+Zarathustra* in the negative form. The final chapters are very
+important (not to detract from the value of the rest of the work) if
+one wishes to understand *On the Genealogy of Morals*.")
+  ("On the Geneaology of Morals"
+   :nonfiction 9
+   "*On the Geneaology of Morals* is a wonderful book of three
+polemical essays on the origin of moral/ethic valuations, and the
+blindness of modern philosphers whose very thinking is tainted by
+these valuations unknowingly.")
+  ("Ecce Homo"
+   :nonfiction 7
+   "*Ecce Homo* is Nietzsche's very strange autobiography and
+explanation of his own works. At points it is clear that it could have
+used a bit more editing (prevented by Nietzsche ... falling into a
+catatonic state and all), but is still a very useful book to read as
+Nietzsche explains the overall structure of his works.")))
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