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APOCRYPHA


                                                      September 16, 2004

If I can be
said to have:

  BIBLES

Then there is also Apocrypha,
books that don't quite make             THINKING_HOWTO
it into the cannon, or once
did but have now fallen out
of favor...

   Arthur Koestler,
   "The Sleepwalkers"

   James Howard Kunstler,           NOWHERE_MAN
   "Geography of Nowhere"

   Kevin Kelley,
   "Out of Control"              CONTROL

   Lucas Reinhardt,
   "The Dice Man"              DICE

   R. Buckminster Fuller,
   "Ideas and Integrities"

   Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers,
   "Order Out of Chaos"                       PRIGOGINE

   Ed Sanders,
   "Investigative Poetry"

   Nietzsche,                   TRAGEDY
   "The Birth of Tragedy"

   W.S. Arens
   "The Man-Eating Myth"

   Samuel Floriman                               FLORID
   "The Existential Pleasures of Engineering"

   Jerry Pournelle                  
   "A Step Farther Out"     This is a collection of popular         
                            technical/political articles                                                     
                            that impressed me when they were    POURNELLE            
                            running in Galaxy magazine back                                                   
                            when I was a teenager.          
                                                       
                                                        NEUTRAL

Interesting volumes that have probably never quite
made the cut for me:

   "Nausea" by Jean Paul Sartre    NAUSEA

   Robert Heinlein,            HEINLEIN
   "Starship Troopers"

   Ayn Rand,                        RAND
   "The Fountainhead"
   "Atlas Shrugged"

   Jack Kerouac,                 KEROUAC
   "The Dharma Bums"

   "Pirate Utopias" by Peter Lambourne Wilson

   "Temporary Autonomous Zones" by Hakim Bey

But maybe this list is excessively pretentious...
When you really come down to it, there should be
books like this on the list:

   "Doorways in the Sand" by Roger Zelazny.

    A relatively light-weight book (though not
    as low as Zelazny eventually sunk, mining     TAKEN_LIGHTLY
    that vein of Amber)... but didn't it have a
    serious effect on the mental well-being of
    the teenage version of myself that read it
    so many times?

  And perhaps also:

     Clifford D. Simak   "Time is the Simplest Thing"
     Jack Williamson     "Darker Than You Think"
     Robert Heinlein     "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel"


           Not to mention works from the
           mystery/adventure genre...         DEEP_BLUE


And maybe I should invent a new category for stuff
that doesn't quite make it into the "Apocrypha"?

   "The Last Intellectuals" by Russell Jacoby

                                    LAST_INTELLECTUALS

   "The National Defense" by James Fallows   (1981)
   "The Threat"           by Andrew Cockburn (1983)



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