#_bookshelf2017_

🌟🌟⭐⭐⭐(2/5) As far as Harry Potter stories go, this installment felt rushed in its construction, lacking care in its effort to reach the end. The climax is as satisfying a magical moment as any resolution that one could hope for from a J.K. Rowling creation, but the buildup to that climax relied heavily on the previous seven Harry Potter stories in a way that weakened the story itself. My own personal background in theater granted an element of anxiety to the reading of this script; each scene consisted of less than ten minutes of action (rarely even reaching 5), impossibly complex visual illusions, a surprising lack of consideration for the way real theater works, and extravagant set changes. I doubt this play will be performed very often, and never outside of the context of a well-established commercial theater with very generous donors. Overall this is a story which would work well as a graphic novel or a novelette addendum to the series. I did read this story as if it were simply another Harry Potter book and as such by the time I reached its ending I was not disappointed, nor was I impressed. If you cringed when reading the final epilogue of the Harry Potter series, then this is a volume best left in the realm of unread books. #bookstagram #booksireadin2017 #readinglist2017 #HarryPotterAndTheCursedChild #JKRowling #JohnTiffany #JackThorne #HarryPotter #theater #theatre #isittheaterortheatre #_bookshelf2017_

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟(5/5) Modern non-fiction seems to be filled with regurgitated ideas and recycled platitudes, rebranded for the modern age so that modern thinkers can modernize old ideas. Rarely do we come across the presentation of a universal idea which has come to the teacher by means of inspiration, as if remembering a truth which exists in every part of the body, mind, heart and soul. In Man's Search For Meaning, we first make our way through a harrowing first-person account of the experience of a survivor of a Holocause Contentration Camp; next, we are treated to a symposium on Logotherapy, the pragmatic psychology which treats finding meaning as the proper pursuit of humankind's existence. The true gem of this copy is the Postscript, "The Case for a Tragic Optimism," which should not be read without reading the book first, to the same magnitude that eating dessert without dinner would provide satisfaction without nutrition. Man's Search For Meanung is one of the few rational voices we hear from the haze of a confused and confusing century, and certainly one of the only voices of hope which still reaches us from the horrors of near-death at the hands of the WWII-era Nazis. "Happiness cannot be pursued; kt must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.' Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation... Once an individual's search for a meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capacity to cope with suffering." "Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now." #MansSearchForMeaning #ViktorFrankl #ViktorEFrankl #Logotheraphy #psychology #meaning #findingmeaning #happiness #spirituality #suffering #nonfiction #nonfic #nonfictionbooks #nonfictionliterature #nonficliterature #bookstagram #bookrecommendation #readinglist2017 #booksireadin2017 #_bookshelf2017_

🌟🌟⭐⭐⭐(2/5) Fear is L Ron Hubbard's answer to both modern and atavistic psychology; it is an eerie rendering of the way our perception can obscure the absolute. Fear takes two-dimensional characters who are essentially stand-ins for outdated traditional gender stereotypes and drags them through a four-dimensional, ever-changing hellscape. The effect is that the characters are never quite on solid ground except for the immensely boring moments they spend playing house. It is as much an autobiography for Hubbard's psychology as it is an exploration of the murkiness of the human psyche. Besides having a predictable and unsatisfyingly abrupt ending, Fear presents itself like a man harboring a deep mental sickness: the surface is cool and still, yet every time the story goes deeper than the surface, the reader encounters a twisted knot of nonsense, violence and volatility. #Fear #LRonHubbard #horrorliterature #horrorlit #psychology #bookstagram #bookrecommendation #readinglist2017 #booksireadin2017 #_bookshelf2017_

🌟🌟🌟🌟⭐ Neuroscientist Sam Harris takes a departure from his usual discourse on modern world religion relations to delve into the world of "spirituality without religion." Waking Up is not an argument against religion; rather, it is an exploration of those things that are constant across all spheres of human spirituality, with a special focus on the how and why of meditation. This book is perhaps the best beginner's guide to the experience of becoming aware of one's own consciousness; its objectivity in regards to neuroscience is indispensible as a balance to the subjectivity of Harris' own accounts of the benefits of meditation study. #WakingUp #SamHarris @samharrisorg #neuroscience #meditation #spirituality #spiritualitywithoutreligion #consciousness #bookstagram #bookrecommendation #readinglist2017 #booksireadin2017 #_bookshelf2017_

🌟🌟🌟⭐⭐ "We associate truth with convenience, with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We alsofind highly acceptable what contributes most to self-esteem... Economic and social behavior... are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding." -John Kenneth Galbraith on 'conventional wisdom' #Freakonomics #StevenDLevitt #StephenJDubner #bookstagram #bookrecommendation #readinglist2017 #booksireadin2017 #_bookshelf2017_

🌟🌟🌟⭐⭐ "For men, time is passing; for time, men are passing." "The infinitelt small and the infinity large are interdependent, linked by the same bonds..." "Forces are not ingredients that have to be arbitrarily introduced into theories next to the particles they govern, but rather that they are a result of properties of symmetry to which these particles abide." "When we want to grasp duration for what it is, it is always the same failure. Duration does not limit itself to lasting, it lives! No matter how small the fragment under consideration is, a microscopic examination is enough to read a multiplicity of events; always embroidery, never the real stuff; alwats shadows and reflections on the river's moving mirror, never the clear flow." "Were it not for the point, the immobile point, there would be no dance, and all there is is the dance." #Chronos #étienneklein #physics #astrophysics #quantumphysics #time #spacetime #gravity #relativity #scienceforamateurs #bookstagram #bookrecommendation #readinglist2017 #booksireadin2017 #_bookshelf2017_