classic books -- mandatory reading?
Son of man
make a point to at least mention to your own children (grown up or
young doesn't matter) or try to get them reading? Why I ask is because
I think I've neglected book reading for quite a long time -- except of
the philosophical kind -- and would like to start delving into some
classics that everyone pretty much takes for granted that everyone
else has read. Children's classics such as Treasure Island are ok to
recommend too. Think of this book list as the equivalent of a must see
movie list in which Star Wars would be on everyone's list.
Son of man
I should mention I've read only Robert E Howard conan books and some
mechwarrior novels. Other than that, it's been mostly movies so it's
about time I got some "book culture".
daletx
Anything/everything by Mark Twain.
Followed by anything/everything by Kurt Vonnegut.
Oh, and "1984" and "Animal Farm" in there, somewhere.
DT
Son of man
Kurt Vonnegut....going to have a look see.
Hidden Draggin
Siddartha by Herman Hesse
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
Two Treatises on Government
Jews, God, and History
Stories That Scared Even Me by Hitchcock
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Fiction by James Tiptree Jr. really Alice
Sheldon)
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Sparrow
--
Hidden Draggin - Gilbert Hansford
Don't join dangerous cults, practice safe sects!
http://twitter.com/hiddendraggin
http://hiddendraggin.posterous.com/
Wally Chapman
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Naked Lunch - William Burroughs
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
Fields of Fire - James Webb
Tha Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
Julian
herbzet
daletx wrote:
>
> Son of man wrote:
> > Those of you who are pretty well read ... what classic books would you
> > make a point to at least mention to your own children (grown up or
> > young doesn't matter) or try to get them reading? Why I ask is because
> > I think I've neglected book reading for quite a long time -- except of
> > the philosophical kind -- and would like to start delving into some
> > classics that everyone pretty much takes for granted that everyone
> > else has read. Children's classics such as Treasure Island are ok to
> > recommend too. Think of this book list as the equivalent of a must see
> > movie list in which Star Wars would be on everyone's list.
>
> Anything/everything by Mark Twain.
Yeah, good. Certainly "Huckleberry Finn" is essential; it's the
sequel to "Tom Sawyer", which is very enjoyable even for children.
> Followed by anything/everything by Kurt Vonnegut.
Probably his most well known is "Slaughterhouse Five". I happen to
also like "Breakfast of Champions" very much.
> Oh, and "1984" and "Animal Farm" in there, somewhere.
"1984" is essential, one of the hallmark books of the twentieth century.
It's an easy read; focused, novelistic, relatively brief.
Another quintessential 20th century book that is a big fat doorstop,
and hard to read, is James Joyce "Ulysses". I wouldn't criticize you
if you skipped it, but you might want to have a look.
My own recomendation is the big fat doorstop "Moby Dick", which I
periodically return to & reread. Perhaps the Great American Novel.
Among the writers of sea-stories "his crown is as secure as Shakespeare's own".
Oh, yeah, read and/or rent "Hamlet". Mel Gibson's version is good;
there's probably other good versions out there, too.
(Actually Phillip Roth wrote a novel called "The Great American Novel".
What's it about? Baseball, of course.)
In another post someone recommended "Stranger in a Strange Land" by
the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, probably his most widely
read work. My personal favorite of his is "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".
He wrote a lot great sci-fi novels -- any collection of his short stories
will also be good.
--
hz
Julian
Candide - Voltaire
Beerlet Dhiblang
Mark Twain .. plain spoken & satiric
Recent but already classic: Terry Pratchett: Thief of Time, Going
Postal, Eric, Hogfather ... many things by Terry Pratchett. Just ask
around here, Dale & Lee Rudolph probably have a short list of their
favorite Pratchett stories.
Sirens of Titan ... Vonnegut's idea of a love story. Also Cat's
Cradle, Galapagos (boils down to how a biology teacher saves the human
race from extinction) ... look for other canonical lists of KV's
writings.
H.P. Lovecraft ... the purplest prose, gobs of fun. Ignore the gory
cover art the publisher's put on the covers, in a pulp sort of way the
stories are lavishly gothic. Just a warning though, Lovecraft was a
xenophobe (he loathed Vermonters...) & a hint of the racism common in
his day comes out in his stories.
Sandy posted a link to one of the chapters of Gargantua ... quite
amusing.
/l
Kitty P
"Son of man" <sono...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:d806fd8f-d8f4-4610...@h2g2000vbd.googlegroups.com...
We hear references in popular movies and books all the time. Probably
because there are only so many plots available to humans. The following have
many of the plots...
Gilgamesh (you've probably read it)
Homer's Illiad, Odyssey
Bhagavad-Gita
The Thousand and One Nights
Voltaire's Candide
Aeschylus' Agamemnon
Dante's Divine Comedy
Chaucer's Cantebury Tales
Shakespeare's Macbeth
The Brother's Grimm Fairytales
Les Miserables
Don Quixote
Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird
Kurt Vonegut's Slaugherhouse-Five
George Orwell's Animal Farm
Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate
Lee Rudolph
news:d806fd8f-d8f4-4610...@h2g2000vbd.googlegroups.com...
Oh, hell. Would you settle for a list of books that I take it for
granted everyone else *damned well should read*?
The Alice books (_Alice in Wonderland_ and _Through the Looking Glass_),
and specifically Martin Gardner's _Annotated Alice_.
_Finn Family Moomintroll_ and the rest of Tove Jannson's Moomin books.
_Ten Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Years With Pogo_, followed by any and all
other collections of Walt Kelly's work (but read that one first).
As previously mentioned, _The Stars My Destination_ by Alfred Bester,
and _The Weapon Shops of Isher_ by A. E. van Vogt. It may help to read
these first (if not last) when you are a teen-aged male geek (but that's
the case with nearly all of the great pulp SF, not to mention the much
larger quantity of un-great pulp SF).
The various fantasy works of L. Sprague de Camp (with or without
co-authors)--I assume that along with Howard's original Conan
stories, you've read de Camp's continuation of the franchise;
his own books (particularly the ones that take a bunch of
disparate classical mythoses and mash them together with some
soft-core scientifiction) are much better, or so I once thought.
Fritz Leiber's stories about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. _Three
Hearts and Three Lions_ by Poul Anders@n.
_The Left Hand of Darkness_, the Earthsea Trilogy, and (after the
trilogy) the other Earthsea novels by Ursula LeGuin.
If you read only one book by Terry Pratchett, make it _Small Gods_
(not because it's necessarily his best, though it may be, but because
it is one of several--_Pyramids_ being another--that are less dependent
on the whole fabric of the Discworld than most of them, while at the
same time it is ... well, read it, that's all, brutha).
_How to Lie With Statistics_ by Darrell Huff (non-fiction, but about
some of the biggest fictions going, and very entertaining to boot).
The Grijpstra-deGeer detective stories by the late Jan Willem van de
Wetering (if I spelled everything in that sentence correctly, it will
be a minor miracle).
_The Daffodil Affair_ by Michael Innes (J. I. M. Stewart).
_The Hero With a Thousand Faces_ by Joseph Campbell.
_The City and the Stars_ / _Against the Fall of Night_ by Arthur C.
Clarke (two versions of the same story, both worth reading--again,
with the pulp disclaimer).
_Windows 95 Secrets_--oh, wait, wrong bookshelf.
That should hold the little bastards.
Lee Rudolph
bonfils
a816-79d...@h2g2000vbd.googlegroups.com:
When grown up:
Moby Dick
The Odyssey
Don Quixote
T.S. Eliot's poetry
I would recommend Shakespeare as well, but not for reading. Go see some
good productions of Macbeth, Hamlet or King Lear instead.
The same goes for the Samuel Beckett's plays - but he wrote lots of good
prose as well.
When I said "when grown up", it's because all of the above are tough to
get through - which is part of the fun, but not necessarily appreciated
by teens or young adults.
(Perhaps this doesn't apply to the Beckett plays. Endgame and Waiting
for Godot can be fun of Pythonesque proportions, if they're done right)
Throw the kids some Herman Hesse instead - at that age, that's your idea
of "deep"...
--
bonfils
http://kim.bonfils.com
To send me a massage, please remove your.underwear
Son of man
> "Son of man" <sonofm...@comcast.net> wrote in messagenews:d806fd8f-d8f4-4610...@h2g2000vbd.googlegroups.com...
I must say I envy the lot of you for having so much "book culture",
think I will start with that small gods as it is so highly reccomended.
Son of man
Heard much about Moby Dick of course, but also a large undertaking to
read. Seems like it was a favorite of Captain Picard as well :)
Son of man
> "Son of man" <sonofm...@comcast.net> wrote in messagenews:d806fd8f-d8f4-4610...@h2g2000vbd.googlegroups.com...
Gilgamesh I've heard mention lots before....but nope, haven't read it.
I will now. Thanks.
Keynes
Good reading for kids -
Alice in Wonderland
Wizard of Oz
Aesop's Fables
Mark Twain
Anything by Jack Vance
Same list for grownups, adding
Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and Mother Night
(and all his others.)
Tao Teh Ching
Chuang Tzu
Mumonkan
Blue Cliff Record
Oh. And the want ads...
herbzet
Son of man wrote:
Take a *season* to read it. Seriously.
Key symbolism: going to sea = deep thinking/meditation = death to
ordinary life = entering a spiritual realm.
Khan quotes from it in "The Wrath of Khan".
The film by John Huston starring Gregory Peck as Ahab and Richard Basehart
as Ishmael has a screenplay by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury wrote a book,
"Green Shadows, White Whale", about his months in Ireland (where
Huston lived) writing the screenplay, surrounded by ... Irishmen.
For compressing a huge book into a two hour screenplay -- not bad.
Not really a substiture for reading it, though.
P.S. -- In Phil Roth''s "The Great American Novel" the lead character
is a baseball pitcher named Gil Gamesh.
P.P.S. -- I remember my mother reading us "Heidi" under dogwood trees
in the back yard over the course of a summer. Pretty good. Also "Lassie
Come Home" is a good childrens book. The climactic moment of drama is
different when read as a child, from when read as an adult.
--
hz
indiosd...@yahoo.canada
Everyone else seems to understand (rightly) the request as looking for
Classics, but for some reason I fixated on "children," and kept thinking
about books I read when I was in primary school (which would be the first
books I passed on to my hypothetical children). I greedily wrote down the
titles everyone's suggested, but those I was already familiar with
(basically the oldest quarter or so) have been far far less influential on
me that the books I read when I was a kid. I reread those books and can
see all sorts of adult me in them. So here's my list of books I read as a
kid and happily would read again--not necessarily classics, just what was
read and liked:
L Frank Baum, Wizard of Oz &c
John Bellairs, Curse of the Blue Figurine &c
Beverly Cleary, Henry Huggins &c
John D. Fitzgerald, The Great Brain
Gordon Korman, Bruno and Boots series
C S Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia
J R R Tolkein, Lord of the Rings
E B White, Charlotte's Web &c
In terms of proper adult fiction, what I like best is all "religious" in
some way (Frank O'Connor, Flanner O'Conner, Chesterton) so maybe not ideal
if you're taking a break from philosophy--although this is all a very
human religious. I think you'd immediately love or hate a Chesterton
novel like _Manalive_. Ben's Frank Delaney's _Ireland_ is my favourite
adult novel written in the last couple decades.
Have fun!
Luke
Julian
Nearly every book I read before 11 years old is now banned
or at the very least withdrawn from public libraries.
Most notorious is...
http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/1/7/8/2/17824/17824-h/17824-h.htm
indiosd...@yahoo.canada
Bah, that this is banned insults all the black people named "Sambo" and
all the black people with very dark skin. The Wikipedia article has a
sortof amusing list of attempt to rehabilitate it--including turning the
protagonist into a black labrador...
Luke
Lee Rudolph
>Everyone else seems to understand (rightly) the request as looking for
>Classics, but for some reason I fixated on "children," and kept thinking
>about books I read when I was in primary school (which would be the first
>books I passed on to my hypothetical children). I greedily wrote down the
>titles everyone's suggested, but those I was already familiar with
>(basically the oldest quarter or so) have been far far less influential on
>me that the books I read when I was a kid. I reread those books and can
>see all sorts of adult me in them. So here's my list of books I read as a
>kid and happily would read again--not necessarily classics, just what was
>read and liked:
...
>C S Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia
...
>In terms of proper adult fiction, what I like best is all "religious" in
>some way (Frank O'Connor, Flanner O'Conner, Chesterton) so maybe not ideal
>if you're taking a break from philosophy--although this is all a very
>human religious
As contrasted with the inhuman religiosity of Lewis, enthusiastic apologist
for (_inter alia_) a hell of eternal torment (adumbrated sufficiently in
_The Last Battle_)?
Not that I didn't groove on the Chronicles of Narnia once upon a time,
but *whew* do they stink of Christian apologetics to me now.
>I think you'd immediately love or hate a Chesterton
>novel like _Manalive_.
_The Man Who Was Thursday_?
Lee rudolph
Wilson
> Son of man wrote:
>> Those of you who are pretty well read ... what classic books would
>> you make a point to at least mention to your own children (grown up
>> or young doesn't matter) or try to get them reading? Why I ask is
>> because I think I've neglected book reading for quite a long time --
>> except of the philosophical kind -- and would like to start delving
>> into some classics that everyone pretty much takes for granted that
>> everyone else has read. Children's classics such as Treasure Island
>> are ok to recommend too. Think of this book list as the equivalent
>> of a must see movie list in which Star Wars would be on everyone's
>> list.
>
> Siddartha by Herman Hesse
> A Prayer for Owen Meany
> Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
> Two Treatises on Government
> Jews, God, and History
> Stories That Scared Even Me by Hitchcock
> Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Fiction by James Tiptree Jr. really Alice
> Sheldon)
> Stranger in a Strange Land
> The Sparrow
That last one will leave a mark.
--
Wilson
indiosd...@yahoo.canada
Lee Rudolph <lrud...@panix.com> wrote:
>indiosd...@yahoo.canada writes:
>
>As contrasted with the inhuman religiosity of Lewis, enthusiastic apologist
>for (_inter alia_) a hell of eternal torment (adumbrated sufficiently in
>_The Last Battle_)?
>
>Not that I didn't groove on the Chronicles of Narnia once upon a time,
>but *whew* do they stink of Christian apologetics to me now.
Heh, they must have successfully indoctrinated me in my youth then; I
still like even the Christiany parts of them. (And I have no time for any
other Christian apologetics, not even other Lewis works. The darker
Flannery O'Connor Christianity is still attractive, all "darkness and
bafflement and hunger" as David Mitchell's bad vicar said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGDndcxH-O4
Of course, my first crush was on Peter the High King, so the net effect of
Narnia on my immortal soul was probably a wash at best. Hee, hee.
>>I think you'd immediately love or hate a Chesterton
>>novel like _Manalive_.
>
>_The Man Who Was Thursday_?
I liked that too, but _Manalive_ is sillier and dearer to me. Less dark
and profound.
Luke
Wilson
As an antidote to the Christianism of Narnia, I'd suggest "His Dark
Materials" trilogy by Philip Pullman. A good read, fun and not *too*
deep.
--
Wilson
Benjamin
Very fun indeed! Despite the inredible heartbreak.
Kitty P
"Wilson" <Wil...@nowhere.net> wrote in message
news:wf-dnVQj3OOnfHjX...@supernews.com...
Stranger in a Strange Land was my number one favorite book for years.
Wilson
That one too! Of his recommendations, I've only read the last two and
both of them changed the way I look at the world at least a little bit.
--
Wilson
Hidden Draggin
Siddartha is the fictionalized life of Buddha with emphasis
on the "Middle Way" and life as a householder.
A Prayer for Owen Meany is a powerful look at fate, belief, and destiny.
Stars My Destination is thought of as one of the best science fiction
novels ever. It is a tale of revenge.
Two Treatises on Government by John Locke is one of the founding
documents of Liberal Democracy concerning itself with the origins
of power and consent of the people and most importantly, property
rights and the rights of the individual.
Jews, God and History is a popular history of the Jewish people
examining their disproportionate impact on history and the riddle
of their survival.
Stories that Scared Even Me is a collection of masterworks
by some of the best science fiction and mystery authors.
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is a examination of the works
of Alice B. Sheldon, the secretive CIA employee who wrote under
the name James Tiptree Jr. and whose focus was death.
The Sparrow is a scifi story of the first contact with another
intelligent species, miscalculation, disaster, and maiming and
near destruction of the main character, a Jesuit priest.
Déjà Flu
Well, maybe ...something... He'd have to follow it with "Children
of God", which isn't one of Russell's best efforts. I put her
stuff in the old "Science Fantasy" genre and often wonder if,
as she weaves her tales, she really has much to say other than
pointing out that religious encounters and dogmatics usually wind
up making a mess on the floor of history. Of course, when it comes
to literature, Fantasy is a prokaryote in my library.
Good Pullman recommendation, btw.
My recommendations for Bernie have pretty much been covered,
and the remaining ones would be too abstruse. I'd add my fav
instruction manual: "Zen Training" - Sekida, though. The rest
are too technical.
--
Ubi dubium ibi libertas
Déjà Flu
And I know why.
And I'm not telling.
And you know I know you know I know.
make a pic of a sardine can with people pics instead of fish.
herbzet
For kids: Mushroom Planet stuff -- do you remember any titles?
My favorite living adult novelist: John LeCarre. His best work
is probably "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy", but that leaves you with
nowhere to go but slightly downwards.
Probably a good start is "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold". They
made a movie out of it with Richard Burton -- I need to rent it sometime.
The narrative voice in this book tells you practically nothing about
what's going on inside the characters heads -- you have to stay sharp
and infer the emotional life.
The author has written almost nothing but spy novels, but they exceed
the genre -- they are literature.
P.S. -- I too am a fan of Flannery O'Connor!
--
hz
Hidden Draggin
ABSFG: The Other Delicious Meat!
Kitty P
Déjà Flu
> "Dￜjￜ Flu" <cha...@gmail.com> wrote in message
I love women so much that
I don't even have to kiss 'em.
Just dressing the same way is enough.