Untouchables, by Narendra Jadhav. I don't know much about India and I want to change that. I also love a good memoir.

I finished the first few chapters of Mircea Eliade's "A History of Religious Ideas Vol. 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries". The book starts with the earliest clues we can guess at with regard to prehistoric man, and then briefly explores each successive development as religious ideas and impulses are brought forth in subsequent civilizations.

Prehistoric men were hunters following the game. Their sense of spirituality centered around hunting, contemplating where their prey came from and therefore where man himself came from. I found the suggestion interesting that they purportedly felt a kinship with the animals they hunted and went to great lengths to honor and verify the remains of the animal, presumably under the fear that the animal might exact vengeance on them from the afterlife. To me, this presages some early awareness of karma, or cause and effect of killing. My favorite part about prehistoric religion is that they the deification of all this was wrapped into a archetype or figure named "The Lord of Wild Beasts". Awesome.

From there, you have the slow transition to agricultural society and the subsequent emergence of the oldest known civilization in Sumer. Like the hunters, man worships what he spends his time on; getting food. While growing food and paying dependent attention to the cycles in nature, man develops an awareness of the continuity of life after death. Crops dying in winter are reborn next season. This model gets applied to human life and presages later concepts of reincarnation. Society also shifts more feminine with greater emphasis placed on cycles, continuity and working/worshipping the natural world. The Sumerian myth of Inanna descending into the underworld to die and be resurrected, as well as her husband, Dumuzi, undergoing a periodic banishment seems to set the early tone for later figures of resurrected gods like Jesus. You've also got Gilgamesh and the quest of man to find immortality and be free of death.

Later, you've got the Egyptians, where preparing for death becomes a literal science. Also important is the emerging belief of an incarnated deity in the form of the pharaoh god-kings. Presently, I'm reading about the subsequent influence spread over Europe with all the stone monoliths like Stonehenge, which also seem to be contemplative of death. Perhaps stone was imagined to capture the soul and immortalize the deceased, resulting in the modern day gravestone?

Anyway, cool shit (to me). I've been loving the opportunity to chime in on my current read each weekend on this site. Makes me feel like I'm doing a book report in elementary school. Hopefully others find it half as interesting as I do.

Picture of the "Lord of Wild Beasts" below.

I’m reading the dark forest, although my recommendation would be to start with the three body problem. Brilliant hard sci-fi series in the context of the Chinese cultural revolution

I will finish tomorrow the book about the "Magic Hungarian football team", and I will take a break on Monday... Tuesday will start an other book (which btw was planned for this week), The Intelligent Investor (Benjamin Graham, 2006).

Unscripted: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship by MJ De Marco.

Quit my job and I try to rid of myself of thought of getting a new job and instead build business instead.

Going to read - Shoe Dog - again. Great book about the journey of creating a business, sport and life. Great number of characters in this story. FYI - the audio book is excellent too

The Bonfire of the Vanities by ol' Tom Wolfe

Not reading it currently, it's one of my favorites. Super windy road, but a really fun read!

Not really a book, more like a small essay: "What has government done to our money", from Rothbard

Second Homeland: Turkey (Ernst Reuter's Ankara Years) by Reiner Möckelmann

It is a book about the experiences of Germans who fled to Turkey from Hitler's rule.

Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

I’m a magpie when it comes to books, attracted by thin books with fancy covers and reputations that associate them with bestseller status. An additional draw for this book is that it is not just about book lovers, but also about bibliophiles who have been categorised into seven types of people. Although I am a free spirit, I paradoxically gravitate towards systems of sorting people into personality types like MBTI and DISC. Anyway, I put aside ‘The Cappuccino Years’ to tackle this first.

There’s something about the British’s sense of humour that I absolutely adore. It’s like Shaun Bythell makes the most unflattering assessments of people in such a deadpan manner that your impulse is to LOL instead of furrowing your eyebrows. And it’s how he nonchalantly drops caustic bombshells when you least expect it that elevates the hilarity that I derived from this book.

Besides his brutally honest observations of human behaviour, Shaun Bythell also regaled me with his anecdotes accumulated from twenty years of ownership of his second-hand bookstore. I also quite relished how he name-dropped famous British authors - past and present alike - which rendered a good view of how he viewed the literary world through his lens. Also, he obviously knows a thing or two about the life of overstretched parents because he wrote “a book so short, so perfect and so digestible that it might as well have been written for parents of young children” (pg 31). I finished reading it leisurely while sipping bubble tea. Blissfully uninterrupted because the boy was at school. The sense of accomplishment from finishing a book cannot be overstated. Sense of achievement deepened by learning this chic French word ‘betes noires’ from him.

Oh, did I find myself in his descriptions of the seven types? It’s hard to say because these days, I only patronise bookstores and hang around the bargain section, trying to find the best picks that will yield the most value for money using the book vouchers I win from some giveaway competition. LOL.

When Physicists Stormed the Markets - by, James Weatherall - A story about trying to predict the unpredictable... Very good!

The ABCs of Economics with my 6 year old. Never too soon.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. This books really helps.

Nostr: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide By Ben Wehrman

Not exactly a book.

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires A book by Tim Wu

The Genesis Book. Enjoying it so far, seems a very top line view on the contributors but have been researching the individual contributors as I go through.

"The Magic of Thinking Big" by David J Schwarz

The book is all about self-confidence, removing negativity, and the importance of believing in yourself

The Genesis Book by Aaron van Wirdum

going to start reading Chris Dixon’s Read Write Own this weekend

excited to see all the ways i agree/disagree with his views, and hear his best arguments for crypto

I read True Names by Vernor Vince this last week. It's a short (less than 100 pages), fun story about nyms, cyberspace warfare, and AI.

Worth reading even if for no other reason than so many people mention it. Here's a review I wrote.