Do you still own your textbooks?

[The Mad Monk]

Book hoarder here, too. Half my furniture is bookshelves, and my desk is also a book repository.

BROTHER!!!

[Ming]

I can't even begin to count all the book shelves in our house. Thousands upon Thousands of books. But it's time. We are pitching or selling 90% of the paper backs, and I'm only going to keep select hard backs (first editions, favorite authors, signed editions) We will be downsizing our house again soon since we are now empty nesters. It's time to get rid of all the books that I will never read again.

[The Mad Monk]

That is so sad.

[Lorizael]

When you do get rid of the books, lie and tell us you found a good home for them.

[Ming]

That will be up to Half Priced Books... we won't get much for the books we can't sell direct to people, but it's better than throwing them out.

[Aeson]

I have 4 books to my name, no textbooks thankfully.

[Lorizael]

What a coincidence--I have 4 dollars to my name!

[Bereta_Eder]

I sold a lot of books at a second hand store (killed them actually because the price was very low)
Most were "worthless" novels etc (stephen king etc)
I kept the most valuable ones.
Never regretted it or needed them.

DId the same with all the vinyl records. This I regretted

[Dinner]

I kept the twxtbooks for my major but sold the rest. One of them I use a couple times per year while the rest haven't been opened in around a decade.

[C0ckney]

i have none. i gave them all away after i left university. no regrets.

[Bereta_Eder]

I have never sold a textbook; I have given a couple away, when asked. I take a lot of personal satisfaction from my collection; so much so that I have textbooks from classes I have never taken. After buying my required load (used whenever possible), I would then browse the stacks for anything achieving a certain combination of interesting and cheap. This included a rather thick book on constitutional law, and a smallish paperback entitled "The Intellectual Foundations of China", which piqued my interest in Confucianism and Taoism.

I wrote this at the other site

The excaltation of inactivity (european vs chinese thought)
There are some books that make an serious impact.
The excaltation of inactivity by french writer francua jyllien (SP? - maybe the title is different in english) is hugely interesting.

It puts face to face european and chinese life philophy.

This francoua guy wanted to go as far away from greek thought (which he considers the foundation of european thought) to something enterely different.

This book is not about inactivity but about the chinese way of thinking about life (and its extension to religion).

I am nowhere near to know the appropriate words in english to describe the philosophical nuances in this book but it is fascinating. I learned as much about greek.european thought as i did about the chinese one.
It nevered dawned on me how we thought. I took it for granted.

Turns out there are solid foundations in ancient greek thinking that have completely soaked european realities and there are very very significant antithesis betwwen european and chinese thought.

Whereas in europe action is glorified, intervention, often violent, is praised as glorified, in china it is the subtle indirect cultivation of surrounding circumstances that is what is being done. An action, a clear discerning and/or violent action is seen as failure in chinese thought (and religion). It means that you have failed to naturally and indirectly, in harmony with natural laws, make about so that the result would come.

And that can also been seen at the fact that china doesnt even have prototypical homiric epics like greece has.

Its civilization wasnt born out of violent, imposing on nature intervantion.

There is no platonic ideal in chinese thought to which we should strive often violently, fast and regardless of the natural harmony to achieve.

The book is filled with examples and sayings.

The writer even dwelved deep in pre-socratic greece, hell pre archaic greece to find something equivalant.
And he did find it. In supoernatural greece before the golden years there was "Mytis" (Ididnt even know this word existed) a word that after the coming of classical philosophy dissapeared from the vocabulaty!!


What is mytis?
The favor of the circumstances.
Zeus apparenyl married her and then ate her to make the world/nature favorable circumstances his one for ever.

To that it's what the chinese thought strive.
I found it very interesting and much more in harmony and much less violent.




I found her!
In english, it's not mytis, it's metis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metis_%28mythology%29

I adore how metis and eros are painted as the primal cosmogenic forces of the universe.
the pursuit of favorable circumstances and love.
excellent

[Main_Brain]

I value my textbooks more than my Cherryh or Pratchett or Banks or Bujold collections.

Bujold returned to writing so it's probably incomplete anyways

[Jon Miller]

So does Cherryh, but I don't find her books in the last decade to be so great.

Bujold's books I don't remember ever becoming uninteresting, so that is good news.

When did this happen? Last I saw on goodreads she still said she wasn't writing.

JM

[Main_Brain]

It's still only available in Hardcover I think so should be pretty fresh.
Lacks the fun factor of Captain V. Alliance though.

Verdict: Soso, wait for paperback

[The Mad Monk]

I wrote this at the other site

Actionless action.