Aspies For Freedom

Just finished:

In The Coils Of The Snake , third in an excellent fantasy trilogy.
and
Young Warriors , an anthology of short stories about young warriors (mostly fantasy), with stories by the wonderful Tamora Pierce and Janis Ian, who is a famous songwriter.  I was excited to see her story because I didn't realize she wrote fiction, and I love her music.

I've been meaning to get my hands on a copy of The Taming Of The Shrew, but haven't gotten around to it yet.  I'm also wanting to read up some more on autism, also haven't had a chance yet (what with parental control and all).

Kurt Vonnegut- I've been meaning to read some of his work, but haven't had a chance yet.

I also read unusual things as a child-
Lord of the Flies in fifth grade
Dante's Inferno in sixth grade
Midsummer Night's Dream in fourth grade (and I understood it, too!)
Farenheight 459 in sixth grade
And He Built A Crooked House (a short story by Heinlein) in fourth grade

I guess we aspies have a penchant for such things.

the line that really was a circle.

FUBAR why dont you ask your local library iff another library near by has it. They can get it sent to your local library then. Well you can do that in the uk anyways
:wink:

For school (MA in Eastern Classics) I'm reading The Tale of the Heike and The Tale of Genji. They're really strange (to me, an American) and really cool--for instance, the stories of The Heike, although in prose, were delivered orally, in song, by a class of blind lute-playing bard/monks, and compiled into a book only later. The stories from The Heike are about as big in Japan, even now, as the Arthurian stuff was in the Middle Ages, or the Victorian period.

Genji is beautifully written, but hard to follow. First, the language is unique and...slippery: for instance, it was rude during Heian Japan to name nobles directly, so people are denoted by titles, the clothes they are wearing, their actions, etc--so the same character can be called many different things during the course of an episode, and the name by which that character is known to tradition might be different from all of them. Everything is understated, alluded to rather than said outright (the verbs don't even have subjects in the original), and the characters engage all the time in highly intricate, hyper-emotional social interaction--both extremely subtle and extremely important. (I think one character might have Asperger's; her life is pretty sad.) I'm learning a lot about the way people interact with one another.

Out of school, I would be reading    An Instance of the Fingerpost, except I spend all my time on the Internet ever since I discovered AFF. Oops.  *smiles* I should be doing my homework now...

I also spent my childhood reading voraciously. I remember finishing Mrs Kirby and the rats of NIMH in one morning in fourth grade; my classmates would watch me to see how quickly I read.

Settling Accounts: The Grapple by Harry Turtledove

Im reading "Dragons of the garden of eden" by Carl Sagan. Its about the evolution of the human brain, why and how it functions the way it does, and its implications.
Some of the ideas feel a little out of date, and I dont agree with some of the things he writes, but it is undoubtly an interesting book, recommended :wink:

Just finished 'The Forge of God' by Greg Bear.

Now back to reading 'Hitchcock-Truffaut'.

I am reading Spin State by Chris Moriaty

I read up to the end of The Two Towers years ago, but I lost interest at the Return of the King, so I got it out on tape and listened to that. That is pretty much the only fiction I have ever read.

I am currently reading 'Freaks, Geeks & Aspergers Syndrome : A User Guide To Adolescence' It shouldn't take me long though so I will read the other book I got from the library and then Schrödinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality.

Right now I am reading a story called "The Good Good Pig" by Sy Montgomery. I haven't had much time to read it because I had a lot of work to do at school. But it starts out with a woman and her husband, who are both very fond of animals, and they decide to raise a malnourished piglet who's been push away by his siblings. They named hime Christopher Hogwood. He was a black and white spotted pig. it took him a while to nurse him to a healthy size, and he ended up weighing 250 pounds. Anyway, i think that seriously, the woman has aspergers like us. She thinks that being close to her family is not all that important. She stated in this book, "Frankly, family meant little to me. Almost everyone in my extended family was dead before I was born-my father's mother and brother, my mother's father-and those few who survied to my birth lived too far away to often see. If family was really some cohesive, commited unit, how could my parents so admantly reject the chosen spouseof their only child? To me, family meant a mother and a father and the offspring that biology dealt them-often to their mutual sorrow. I wanted none of it."(22) She was more attached to animals than people. She did not have any children, because she was content to just have her husband and all her animals on the farm.

Oh, gosh yeah. There's no way a normal person could write as obsessively and prolifically as he does, and I mean that in the most complimentary sense possible.

...Although, I think good writers in general have some AS traits, like obsessiveness and the ability to fixate solely on a particular thing (their writing) for extremely long periods of time. Idiosyncratic and unusual use of language can lend a distinctive flair to written work, too.

<i> American Gods </i> by Neil Gaiman. I love this book and try to read it at least once a year. It's that good.

and

<i> Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife </i> by Mary Roach.

Nearly finished with:  "Terrier" by Tamora Pierce (my favorite young-adult author since age 8 or 9);
Just finished reading:  "The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen" By M.T. Anderson, who is not only hilarious, but a quite versatile author, too.
Also reading:  "Unstrange Minds", an autism book by a father who is also an anthropologist.