Membermfd101

About My Library

Largest sections are: (1) history - mostly Europe from Ancient Greece to C20th, Americas C15th-18th, Pacific C16th-19th contact, & WW2; wars & warfare are big; (2) philosophy - mostly Greeks, C17th-18th Anglos, Kierkegaard & C20th; and now we have speculative realism to delight us after the decades of tedium called deconstruction & postmodernism ("30 years lost to navel gazing"); (3) literary theory & literatures - mostly Eng-, Fr- & Ger-language, others in translation except for some It, Sp & Lat; (4) linguistics - mostly text linguistics, semantics & Paris School narrative semiotics; (5) anthropology & comparative mythology - lots of French structuralism (not aging too well); (6) religions & theologies - mostly Christian & Jewish - considered both from a secular historical point of view & as discourse (mythology, historiography, oral literature, narrative structures).

What's growing? 'History' has been out of control for years, and 'Philosophy' continues to expand at a great rate. Almost all my buys these days are digital books (Kindle & Kindlized PDFs): no space to place more print books aesthetically, and this is reinforced by both the heat & humidity here in rural Thailand & the difficulty of receiving print books by mail or courier.

Intellectual curiosity: a manifestation of the sin of Greed.

Library: velleities of knowledge - v. under 'Control: freaks'. Combining in the present century the classical with the post-modern pleasures, blindness with obesity. Like Montaigne I speak as one who inquires and is ignorant. The unread books of my library are the horizon of my ignorance, an ignorance that expands, like the cosmos, ever faster. But they were, these unread books, like those I have read, chosen for my library on the basis of their content and my interests, so they have a useful function organizing my ignorance through demarcation, turning mysteries into problems. The unread are, like the unready, a tribute to optimism.

Motto: Et in veritate vinum

About Me

Retired Australian civil servant

Location

Surin province, Thailand

Member Connections

Friends

ACGalaga, BibliophileCafe, blueheron77, ClaudiaMoscovici, dbreazeale, DubiousDisciple, gangleri, lascaux, lil_ghostcrab, malboo, Michael.Sherbon, NADiaman, Naren559, paulhagon, robertsgirl, Smethers

Interesting Library

bibliophiles, briansb, cesarschirmer, hnn, jenfarquhar, LolaWalser, marektamm, markell, mgallagher, michaelg16, pomonomo2003, Romanus, Savages, sourhash