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So, what are you reading?
I'm adding Said's Covering Islam to my list.
The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Heidegger and Being and Time. I struggled to understand Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology before and this book has been much clearer to me. About 40% of the way through and, though this isn't really the correct way to distinguish them, it's only now getting out of laying the metaphysical/phenomenological groundwork into more recognisably unique claims about authenticity, the concept of the Other etc. Obviously the concept of Dasein is recognisably Heidegerrian too and the other topics are still derived from that so this distinction isn't a philosophical one, but just from a reader's perspective everyone has their answer to Descartes, whereas now it feels like the book is on to totally new ideas.
I will have to read Being and Time eventually because Heidegger isn't someone you can just get the gist of. He departs from common sense and the normal usage of words and creates his own precise definitions such that you'll be lost if you read something without understanding the previous pages. I don't think it's obscurantist though, you'll get tripped up on hyphenated constructs but the definitions of things like 'there-being' are written clearly somewhere. It's just that without the benefit of traditional usage to rely on you have to keep a lot more in your head at once to follow along.
Also reading H.L Mencken's The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The book was written in 1908, before Kaufmann told us not to trust Nietzsche's sister and apparently even before some of his more famous books had been translated into English, but also before WW1 Germany and then the Nazis had built their own mythos around Nietzsche (and before later scholars and philosophers reacted in the opposite direction). I'll have to read more to see if the former are scholarly quibbles or major barriers to understanding, but Mencken at least has the benefit of having a blank slate encounter with a relatively new philosophy. I haven't reached the meat of the philosophical exposition yet but so far this book is quite easy to read.
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