Books you've read this year (2010)

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I should think it discrimination if a school only accepted homosexuals.

ok, you have a point there- but would it also be discrimination if a school specifically forbade homosexuals from attending? i believe it would. would it be discrimination on the part of a school that only accepted blind or deaf people? yes it would, but that brings up the fact that sometimes discrimination serves an important purpose. an animal that has been abused by one gender of human, often needs a home in which lacks that particular gender, because many animals are like the cat which jumped on the hot stove and got burnt- said cat more often than not can't understand that a cold stove is harmless. when i was the victim of bullying at various points in my life, i became sensitized to the slights of everybody else besides the bullies, so that i eventually needed to become a hermit, because i lost the ability to discern goodies from baddies. so it can be said that i discriminate on this basis. you may discriminate on some other basis that you have not divulged. the majority of earthings will discriminate, for some reason or another.

you know the phrase, "birds of a feather flock together"? wouldn't you rather associate with like-folk? most people are like that. where it becomes a problem is when disenfranchisement takes place, in which a minority of some kind becomes locked out of the system of public goods because the lions' share of others won't deal fairly with said person. in many areas of the country, a gay youth cannot get a proper education in a hostile learning environment in which bullying of gays is tacitly accepted among the school administration and the bulk of the other parents who don't want their children associating with gay kids- hence the need for an all-gay school in those prim[A]tive [misspelling intentional] areas of this country, at least until there is an effective solution to bullying in general. just my jejune opinion

I see a pattern. I would like to read the one about the gay ghost haunting his bishop dad, that sounds interesting.

Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts.

All the Lovely Bad Ones by Mary Downing Hahn.

the "pattern" is that i am a sucker for the otherworldly. "the other side" is relatively rare, though you may be able to find a copy in a large metropolitan library. it's a pretty cool read, though the late bishop pike was a didactic character who sometimes challenged the endurance of his readers.

too bad the film adaptation was less than well-done.

I'm with you on that, this one's never quite enough.



I might have a crack at finding it, cheers!

I could have sworn I read more books than this in 2010, but this is all I can remember.

Guided by Voices: A Brief History: Twenty-One Years of Hunting Accidents in the Forests of Rock and Roll by James Greer
Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan (technically this was required reading for a university class, but it's well-written and surprisingly lucid)
The Forest People by Colin Turnbull (also required reading; it was interesting but not something I'd choose)
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers by Paul Hoffman (disappointing - I wanted more Erdos and less generic history of math anecdotes)
Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds
Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Culture by Wendy Fonarow

There's also countless math textbooks... but we'll not go there.

2010 was a good year for me insofar as books. Lots of good material to read.

The Stranger - Albert Camus
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Why Does e=mc²? - Brian Cox
Introducing: Lacan - Darian Leader and Judy Groves (illustrated, but still an incredibly dense read)
Selections from Basic Writings of Nietzsche
And I'm in the middle of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger at the moment.

Oh, and-- shameless plug-- I wrote a full-length novel this year myself, which I've read and reread now in entirety at least 3 or 4 times for editing purposes, if that counts.

I'm reading Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes right now and this started in 2010.