Current Paper Book Just Finished: Anatomy of Criticism, by Northrop Frye (What appears to be a decent electronic copy)
Frye is technically speaking about criticism of poetry, but his analysis applies to prose as well. (One of his complaints is that there is no literary term for a general work of prose fiction, with "novel" being inadequate for the task: lots of things are prose fiction that
aren't novels.)
A splendid work, due for a re-read soon, as there is too much depth to catch in a single reading.
Current Paper Book in Progress: Mimesis: the representation of Reality in Western Literature, by Erich Auerbach (There does not seem to be an electronic version)
This is a deliberate follow on to Frye, and at least in the opening stages, equally impressive.
Current Paper Book Next Up: Language, Thought, and Reality, by Benjamin Lee Whorf (A re-read)
Whorf was co-creator of what is generally called the "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis", which holds that your language influences how you think and what you can think about. (If your language has no words to express it, can you
have a particular concept?) This is a collection of his writings. Whorf got grief from the linguistics community because because his degree wasn't in linguistics, and he was therefore an amateur rather than a professional, but that might make the work even more compelling.
(The electronic copy linked above is at archive.org, but looks like it will take a bit of work to cleanup and properly reformat.)
Current eBook in Progress: The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, by John Maynard Keynes (Electronic version from the University of Adelaide in Australia)
When people speak of "Keynsian" economics, this is the source document. Keynes was attempting to understand the aftermath of the Great Depression, and more specifically, why there
wasn't full employment.
It's rather dry and technical, because Keynes was writing for other economists, and felt compelled to carefully define his terms and state his premises, as he was challenging established orthodoxy. (That largely derived from
On The Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation by David Ricardo)
Next up in that stack is probably
Karl Marx's Capital,
Volume 1,
Volume 2, and
Volume 3
Given the current fractious debate on the economy, it seemed wise to go to the original source documents and read what various economists actually
said, rather than what people tossing their names around
said they said. (The "said they saids" are generally wrong, and are likely relying on someone
else's inaccurate idea of what they said...)
And because I don't
just read non-fiction...
Other Paper Book Just Finished: How Firm a Foundation by David Weber
The fifth book in the Safehold Series. In the medium term future, humanity attains FTL travel capability, and expands into the galaxy, plating a number of colonies. They encounter the Gbaba, an alien species which apparently feels
it should be the only intelligent species, and wages war against humanity. Human technology becomes equal to or a bit better than the Gbaba's, but the Gbaba have had an interstellar empire for thousands of years, and there are a
lot of them. Over the course of 50 years, humanity is pushed back and its colonies destroyed one by one, till the Gbaba are poised to destroy Earth. A last ditch colonization effort is mounted, to find a planet
far away where a remnant of humanity can rebuild.
The original plan is that mankind will refrain from using advanced technology for 300 years, as it was technology that provided the traces the Gbaba used to find the colonies. The bet is that after destroying Earth, 300 years will give the Gbaba time to decide they have exterminated humanity and stop looking. The leader of the colony expedition, Eric Langhorne, has other ideas. He has the colonists reprogrammed while in cold asleep. They awake on Safehold as Adams and Eves, with no memory of their former existence, and the crew of the expedition uses technology to appear to the newly awakened colonists as Angels and Archangels, revealing God's plan. The Archangel Langhorne intends that humanity should
permanently abjure technology, restricting themselves to wind, water, and muscle power.
Not everyone on the expedition's crew agrees with Langhorne, and 900 years after the Creation, Lieutenant Commander Nimue Alban awakens in a cave on Safehold. Nimue herself is long dead, but a recording of her personality has been transferred to a PICA, a highly sophisticated android body. After learning of what happened since she was recorded, she alters her PICA to male form and ventures forth on Safehold to form resistance to the Archangels and the Church of God Awaiting, and to restore mankind to the path of technological progress. The Gbaba are still out there, and humanity must be prepared to meet them.
______
Dennis