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 Now online (1)dogboy ...and 130 guests Last 5 registered Oplandisks nothingstar N_loop yipe foxtrotromeo Browse members... |
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of all the books i've read, i believe these to be required reading for everyone who's alive: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll Don Quixote by Cervantes The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro Ulysses by James Joyce To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy i'm not including Cult Books or superficial stuff like that. these are the books that i truly believe add meaning to life. what are your picks? |
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Fear and Loathing |
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really? |
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Cat in the Hat TV Guide Digg Batman |
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see, now this is a *real* answer. totally full of joie de vivre. |
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Of those I've only read 1984 by Orwell. Generally I pass on the thick literature stuff in favor of a quick fantasy novel. Not to say it's bad, i'm just never in the mood for it. Give me Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time before Dickens and I'll be happy. Alice In Wonderland looks slightly out of place with the rest of your books up there; I've always thought of it as (intended) popular fiction for it's time rather than a great literary undertaking (like War and Peace.) I've never read it though so I'm probably mistaken. |
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it's subversive literature that satirised the mannerisms and politics of the time. outside of that, it's the most gleeful romp into absurdity one can read, and will have you grinning ear-to-ear like the cheshire cat. i can't imagine a person going through life without reading it. if you like big fantasy series then i think you'd enjoy war and peace if you gave it a chance. it doesn't have the fantasy stuff, of course, but it has the same addicting quality. just think of it as an entire series collected in one book if the length seems too daunting. |
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and if you do ever read war and peace then i recommend going with the new anthony briggs translation, which modernises it without being cheesy. in fact his translation adds a lot more impact for the modern reader. |
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Length isnt a problem for me if the story is good. I'll look into War and Peace. I think one of the reasons I've shyed away from the big classics is because that community of readers and writers generally do not accept popular fiction as true literature. There's sort of an arrogance about what's real writing and what isnt. A goog book is a good book, whether it's about aliens coming through peoples cell phones or a little girl surviving the Holocaust. |
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biographies of musicians, interview collections |
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go study literature to get perspective on things. high literature is just another genre. i think war and peace was briljant, mostly for the great way it displayed things (realism) and maybe it's the archetype for soap as well. i think it is not that much literature as all the characteres, in retrospect, are cliched. i do want to read a large part of your list for the same reason you read the bible, they are part of our culture, well and i reckon they are written pretty good |
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Aristotle - The Nichomachean Ethics Kierkegaard - Collected works (or at least The Concept of Dread and Either/Or) All of Kafka's books Sartre - Being and Nothingness Plato - Phaedrus |
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i finished 'never let me go' a while back. it was OK. i believe huxley's brave new world and the doors of perception are on my list. |
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Vladimir Nabokov - Ada or Ardor I cannot praise this book enough. Absolutely superb. Robert M. Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Best philosophy book I've read. Best "philosophy of work" that I've ever come across, too. |
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I never learned to read! |
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I've just started reading Moby-Dick. I believe it's classed as Essential. The worst list on here so far is Drunken Mastah's... by a country mile! That's not a reading list.. it's a punishment for being literate! |
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Those books are "complex pleasures". |
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People read philosophy books because they need some non-commital existential bollocks to explain why theyre such a prick. |
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Ha ha ha! |
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Hahaha, I find most fiction books unbearably boring, though... Tedious in-depth explanations of surroundings and the appearance of every character involved in the story with awkward explanations of their expressions (facial or otherwise) are the worst parts, but there's also something about the common implementation of dialogue and explanation of actions that annoys me. |
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I find that most people read what they read because (a) they like it and (b) because they think it's important. It's usually a combination, but it can be either. I've also always found it weird that when someone makes a "top 100" (or whatever) list of books, they seem to think that only fiction qualifies as reading. There was a list of "top 10 most important books" or something in a newspaper a while back, and I dare argue that the Nichomachean ethics have been way more important than Erlend Loe's "L." |
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I also find that the opposite is true of the news: Too little in-depth discussion and explanation. Maybe someone should make some writers of fiction write newspaper articles and tell them the data, the actual information, is the landscape their "story" is set in.. maybe then we'd get some decent articles. |
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MEIN KAMPF |
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You're talking about bad litterature, not fiction books. Here's a listlist Days and Nights by Alfred Jarry Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau The Castle by Franz Kafka The Adventures of Baron Münchhausen The Goosebumps collection The Songs of Maldoror by the Comte de Lautréamont Nadja by André Breton Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert |
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besides aristotle is a cunt |
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sade i want to read to because amorality is kewl i think siddhartha is pretty ace, and the foundation series by asimov |
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nobody mentioned poetry, so The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot |
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Maldoror is poetry, but thank god it's in prose. |
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This looks quite good: |
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Wilhelm Reich - Listen, Little Man! Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet UG Krishnamurti - Mind Is A Myth Jiddu Krishnamurti - Questioning Krishnamurti ... (for idiots) |
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Gibran's The Prophet...good one! While living on Maui, Felix, a good friend of mine would perform the book live...he had each line and chapter memorized, and would perform it with the audience passing around a sheet of the chapters, and calling out "Prophet, tell us of LOVE!" or "Prophet, tell us of CHILDREN" Then Felix would quote in a deep and wise tone... "Hmmmmmmmm, your children are not your children, but life yerning to pass through you!" or something to that extent... |
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Some that are missing from the list: Catcher in The Rye - JD Salinger Islands in the Stream- Ernest Hemmingway The Dark Tower books (7) -Steven King Ground Beneath Her Feet - Salman Rushdie |
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Yes, Catcher in the Rye is really good. |
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Does Murakami's work qualify for lists like these? He's an expert on Blurry border between reality and dream The only "absolute classics" I've read: Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment: I enjoyed some parts but founds others a bit tedious, specifically the themes of an anguished soul, praying for salvation etc. Too melodramatic. Kafka's The Trial and The Castle. Really enjoyed these two, enthralling. Camus' The Fall: Read this mostly because the band is named after it. Don't think I really "got it" completely. Existensial crisis, exaggerated self-examination etc. |
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I would also like to nominate Hamsun's The Hunger |
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Theodore Sturgeon - Thinking cristal |
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I heard if you take a dump and flush the toilet while reading Alice in Wonderland it will sync perfectly to what's going on in the book |
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Mashah do you like Nietzshe? As for books I've enjoyed; 48 Laws Of Power, Brave New World, 1984,Slaughterhouse-Five, and The Celestine Prophecy |
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what dead thing? |
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*death |
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hahaha so true |
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The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles, is quite lovely. I recommend it before or after The Death. |
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such a yummy edition as well. |
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I've got Don Quixote at hand's reach, the two tomes, and I really really want to read it but it's BIG. |
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not only is it an engrossing read but it's positively dripping with metafictional qualities. if you like how godard films know that they're films then you'll enjoy how don quixote is aware that it's a book. by the end it becomes a book about a book about a book about the book you're reading. |
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just be aware that it digresses even more than gravity's rainbow. |
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Oh I know, I'm sure it's awesome, but more than 1300 pages is quite a commitment. Not sure why I care though, let's rock. |
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\m/ |
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