Esoterica Message Board

I decided to start this group after looking through the group list here and realizing I don't really fit into too many of the catagories. Am I a science fiction fan? Well, I read a lot of it but not so much as to be defined as a fan. And its the same with plenty of other groups.

My interests are broad, prone to both the popular and the obscure. I tend to wander down intellectual pathways and collect detritus, then vear off on something else. This means my library tends to be a disconnected group of random books rather than a coherent collection. In other words, I'm shallow, but broad.

To get things started, here are some random books from my collection that do not have any relation to each other that I can discern, other than being books.

Inside Outside by Philip Jose Farmer
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
A Whore Just Like the Rest by Richard Meltzer
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Eleven Plays by Henrick Ibsen

Specialization is for insects.

If there's not a metric for the most diverse library, there should be! Perhaps a sampling of that which is just within reach... Currently The World Almanac Book of Facts 2005, The Ethical Brain by Michael S. Gazzaniga, Is That in the Bible? by Charles Francis Potter, The Eternal Now by Paul Tillich, Advice to Writers by Jon Winokur, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges, Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature by Paul Shepard, and The Song of Songs: Love Lyrics from the Bible by Marcia Falk and The Song of Songs: Text and Commentary by Robert Graves. And that's just what's on my desk, not what's stacked up behind me on the floor!

Msg 3 was me - didn't realized I'd logged out somehow.

The last three books I read were What is Literature? by Jean-Paul Sartre, Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood and The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Since I buy books faster than I read them, months or years will often pass between the time I buy a book and the time I read it. I bought all of these books years apart when I happened to be interested their particular genre or subject, and yet I basically chose to read each of them on impluse, one after the other. Yet all of them have this odd tint of existentialism to them, "man alone in the universe" and all that. The last two in particular have a certain dreamlike quality to them (Blackwood in the beautiful suspense of "The Willows" and Le Guin as a thematic device and occasionally beautiful prose style).

I love synergy.

A Wrinkle in Time takes me back to my first sensawunda; I was in junior high.

Whereas the last three books I read (this is fun -it's a longitudinal study!) were Evil in Modern Thought by Susan Neiman for a church class, Some Memories of a Long Life by Malvina Shanklin Harlan for a notable ride on Greyhound, and Back Then: Two Lives in 1950s New York by Anne Bernays and Justin Kaplan, a wonderous slice of life memoir. Those are the three which come to mind, anyway.

I've split off the "last few books you read" discussion off into its own topic thread. Just so you all know.

I've been on this science fiction binge for the last couple of weeks, in part because I have stacks of old science fiction I haven't read and in part because I'm taking a most of the books I have read back to Oregon with me so as to store them with the rest of my collection (and replace them with another stack of books I haven't read). I want to finish up as much as possible and science fiction goes quick.

It started with Lathe of Heaven and has now continued to Day of the Triffids. Hopefully I'll finish that one today and move on to Kurt Vonnegut' s Player Piano, followed by Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, finishing up with Philip K. Dick's Now Wait for Last Year.

I find it interesting that science fiction is the most popular genre on this site. I guess it just appeals to the kind of people who would take the time to catalog their entire libraries on the internet. I'm not really a sci-fi buff, not by a long shot, but over the past year I've developed this odd interest in classic science fiction. It's my interest in obscurity I think. I love digging up weird, musty old paperbacks that no one ever reads any more. It means I end up with a stack of Fritz Lieber and Hugo Gernsback books, but often one has to give into compulsion.

Are you sure you didn't mean eclectica rather than esoterica? -- that is, if there is such a name for eclectic reading material!

Rise, Ye Sea Slugs!

I chose "esoterica" because it sounds cool and because I like the idea of strange, different interests that somehow connect with one another.

But basically because it sounds cool.

Hmmm...fine line between the two definitions in the context of the forum.

Esoteric:
1. understood by or meant for only the select few who have special knowledge or interest; recondite: poetry full of esoteric allusions.
2. belonging to the select few.

Eclectic:
1. selecting or choosing from various sources.
2. made up of what is selected from different sources.

The first novel by Craig Ferguson, Between the Bridge and the River is both 'eclectic' in its allusions (can't think of a book that has more) and 'esoteric' in its entirety, in that its deepest message will connect only with those familiar with all the allusions! Yet, ironically, because there are so many allusions to literature, cultures, cinema, religion, philosophy, mysticism, psychology, pop culture, etc, the book is simulaneously 'esoteric' and 'accessible!'--though on another level.