We do a bit of reading.

I used to read a lot growing up. Then i read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and got really into fantasy as a result. Turns out most fantasy out there is absolute shit, and Tolkien's literature is part of the meager exception. So, because of this, i quickly got sick of books alltogether.

Years later, when i started going to university for engineering, i began reading again, althrough only textbooks for a while. My favorite textbook is Discrete-Time Signal Processing by Alan V. Oppenheim and Ronald W. Schaefer.

Eventually, during my mid-twenties i started having problems falling asleep at night, and began reading other non-technical books at bed in order to increase my chances of falling asleep. Now i also enjoy reading about topics such as philosophy, history and psychology, in order to understand myself and the world around me.

Reading can be good. Obviously it depends what you read.

Literature for enjoyment

I used to avoid reading anything other than my university textbooks for several years. Now i've figured i enjoy reading other stuff that's unrelated to my field of study. It's nice to read just for its own enjoyment and to relax before i go to bed. I'm a slow reader, so it takes a while for me to complete a whole book.

Fantasy

Last year i read J.R.R. Tolkien's Silmarillion, which was alright. I really liked some of the stories in it. The first chapter was really interesting, describing the creation of the world and all that. There's a lot of names of people and places, too many for me to really construct anything meaningful around, most of the time. Snorre's The King Sagas also do this (it's a historical work, after all), but in that one the people and places are at least factual, which makes it more interesting to me (subjectively speaking). Don't get me wrong, i still really like The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (as far as i know, the best fantasy books every written).

Traditionalism

Right now i'm reading the book Revolt Against the Modern World by Julius Evola. It tries to assess the spiritual reasons for the rise and collapse of civilizations, imposing a cyclic view of history from a somewhat elitist viewpoint (i.e. the elite hold the fundamental truth of reality, and everything else follow). It first describes the symbolism of the traditional/ancient world and what role it played to keep society as a concise and functional unit. Many of these traditions share striking similarities across the world, suggesting some kind of common lineage. Evola proposes that there are in total four major ancient tranditional lineages; the Aryan, the Hyperborean, the Lemurian and the Atlantic, each attributed to their own hypothetical places of origin. Then Evola proceeds to describe the meta-historical cycles, and how they fit in describing the cycles of different major historical empires such as the Greek Empire, the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. He attempts to construct a model for how societies tend to develop spiritually. Four phases are described: the golden age (associated with sun-worship, then hero-worship), the silver age (feminine-spirited, associated with rule of the priestly class, eventually leading to decadence), the bronze age (associated with the titans, a lofty and naive attempt to defeat tradition, to blindly attempt to take the place of gods), and the iron age (collapse of society, spiritual death and emptiness). I enjoy it very much, and have soon reached the end of the book. I wonder what verdict Evola will have for the modern world?

Saga literature

Inbetween, i also read The King Sagas by Snorre Sturlasson, which describe the lineage of Norwegian kings. So far, i've reached the saga of Olav den hellige, who succeeded in converting Norway into Christianity. It will be interesting to revisit, now after soon having read the adjacent work by Julius Evola, which offer meaningful constructs to understand mythical texts. The King Sagas blur the line between history and mythology. Due to its long timespan, the earlier sagas more resemble myths, while the later sagas are more historically precise.

Psychology

The last book i read prior was Delueze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism. In it, they try to describe the mental illness of Schizophrenia as a dual control-system, an interaction between two systems dubbed the desire machine and the body without organs. It's quite dense, but nonetheless entertaining. The process of deterritorialization, to involuntarily decode coded streams of information without end, and a boundless force of production simply driven by an inner need to produce, are all described as products of this interaction between the desire machine and the body without organs, which sum up what they dub the schizophrenic process. The process of describing a system in the same terms, is named schizo-analysis, as opposed to Freuds psycho-analysis. The lens of schizo-analysis can then be be applied to explain greater systems such as history, society, ideology and anything, really, and perhaps even as a force to change society. At least that's what they attempt to demonstrate. It's pretty funny, and often times makes sense even despite how absurd it all is. Very enjoyable read. It seems like i'm looking in from the outside with the perspective of the psychologists, on how they view the human psyche (which i know differs a lot between them, but yeah - you know what i mean).

Other favorites

I really like dystopic science-fiction such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Another personal favorite of mine is Arto Passilinna's Volomari Volotinen, his wife and other old things, an absurdist love story about the endless accumulation of random items.