Light reading

I really should be getting down to finishing a draft of my paper on Sextus for the Symposium Hellenisticum and examining a PhD thesis, but I might get distracted by a new book which arrived this morning. It's hard to ignore -- the cover (black with red lettering -- very 80s) and title demand attention. And it might help with some of the worries I've been having about pleasure and pain.

There's a lot of good stuff in there, for a brief glance, although it won't really count as holiday reading. Hmmm. Is pain the next place for me to turn my philosophical attention after death? Is there a pattern emerging here?

Still, there are a number of philosophers interested in pain (insert joke here). Here is a good blog on the subject, by Adam Swenson, currently wondering about snail venom. (His 2006 Rutgers PhD on pain and value can be read here.) And the editor of the collection pictured here has a good online bibliography.