sharke

craigb


I might go for the second-most influential book of all time (after the various incarnations of the Bible):

Atlas Shrugged is a hard slog, but I think it's worth a read. Her writing style can be a little wooden though. I understood that style more after I read her book "The Romantic Manifesto" which outlined her theories of art. Atlas Shrugged is selling a philosophy, and it does it with cartoonish characters who are imbued with a set of exaggerated characteristics designed to communicate the essentials of her ideas. Personally I found her descriptive style to be a bit of a chore. I much prefer her non-fiction works, like Capitalism and The Virtue of Selfishness. 

True points about AS (the sermons get a bit tiring), but what about the Fountainhead?

+1 Catch 22.  I read it in HS and it messed up my tender young mind for a couple of months.  I found irony in everything.

The Cantos by Pound.  A hard slog and you need a concordence to "understand" it, but some of the most beautiful language you'll ever read.

Carnage and Culture by VD Hanson.  He stomps Jared Diamond and leaves him on the bar room floor like Edgar Allen Poe.

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I'll probably have to read Atlas Shrugged, someday. My to-read list goes on forever.

To be perfectly honest, english being my second language, I haven't read a fraction of all the classics I've heard about. For your average novel, it's pretty straight forward. For stuff that's a bit more literate, it requires more efforts though.

Furthermore, because of language policies back home, you couldn't find them in their original language - meaning that, not only no one ever mentioned their name, but when I started having an interest in Byron, Blake, Joyce and even Kerouac, Burroughs and the beat poets - all I could put my hands on were translations.

I used to think that I'd need one lifetime just to learn latin, greek, german, russian and read all those books in their original language.

Hey Rain, since you have French you could read the big Proust one

I'm almost 41 - not sure that leaves enough time. ;)

You know what, it almost seems surreal that I didn't even try to read it back in the days... That's one book I was likely to want to read.

The Bible

 Rimshot  same here.  You can find plenty of reasons to either love or hate it depending on your view.The same goes for deciding if its bunk of not depending on which "expert" you listen to. Some are convinced it is all rubbish and I won't try to convince them otherwise other than to point them toward looking at ALL of the evidence both for and against. Don't just listen to the guys in your camp.

 Some arguments that stir it up are-

 Some stories were robbed from other literature and predate it. 

 A lot of it never happened.

 There is no way we live on a young earth

 The flood is a scientific impossibility

 These are just a few of the arguments out there. Sometimes the answers are somewhere in the middle and they don't detract from the book. Sometimes finding those answers require thinking outside the box. People who read authors like Christopher Hitchens will disagree to the death. Some religious people have muddied the waters even more unfortunately.

 After it's all said and done though, the book will stand and all of those people will be long gone . If I'm wrong I'm in the same place they are. If they are wrong they loose everything...think about that.

 Further discussion is outside the TOS but I am open to PM if someone wanted to discuss it further as this delves into religious discussion territory.

Now that I think about - if you want to have a basic knowledge of western thought, and esp. Anglo, there are two things you need to know.

The Bible.  Whatever else you may think about it, the moral code contained in it permeates western thinking, and is told in stories making it easy to digest and incorporate.

Next, Shakespeare.  In many ways the first popular and mass audience author.  So much of the texture of the language was given by Shakespeare (writting just after the first English Bibles).  Not only the laguage, but the characters nail archetypes.  Hamlet, Macbeth etc.  If you're native language is English and haven't read most or a lot of Shakespeare, it is like leaving your house buck nekid.

The rest, as they say, is gravy.

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Hi,
Having been born in a house of literature with over 40k books of Portuguese, Spanish and Brazilian Literature, there were a lot of things over the years that I have never forgotten, that have been quite wonderful. As far  as "important", it would come much later, since I had to learn English from scratch when I was 16 years old, and that made it another 5 to 6 years before I could actually sit and enjoy reading.
 
It was a very rough time, with lousy grades in all writing/reading courses in school and eventually I graduated from UCSB with the highest grade I ever had in 1982, which tells you that my English perception simply got better!
  
Some of the best books I have ever enjoyed, in no particular order!
 
Doris Lessing - Briefing for a Descent Into Hell
Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception
John Lilly - The Center of the Cyclone
Robert Monroe - Journeys Out of the Body .... (... click!...)
Aleister Crowley - Diary of a Drugfiend (The best book about "trips" ... ever!)
Carlos Castaneda - The Art of Dreaming (The best book on dreaming ever!)
Taisha Abelar - The Sorcerer's Aprentice
Florinda Donner - Being in Dreaming
Nevil Drury - The Shaman and the Magician
Peter Weiss - The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat ..... (Marat/Sade)
Herman Hesse - Steppenwolf
Peter Hammill - Killers, Angels and Refugees
Chuck Jones - Chuck Amuck
 
I'm an internal person, due to the change of languages at 15. It also did not help going from Portugal to Brazil at 9, which was another "language" and culture. Thus, for me, the cultural dragging and control of a social community is not as important, and my internal emotions and studies always went inside to find a "center" and feel more connected with "myself". Thus, you will find a lot of the things I say here sounding like completely different and not socially minded ... as a way to help people find something on the inside, that they might nknow or not know ... I'm not interestedin "changing" anyone, of "manipulating", or "controlling" anything, and I walked through that in directing on stage and some film with actors very easily and quite comfortably, which was a sign that I saw something else ... that most people did not see.
 
Thus, my tendencies always went away from the "chupeta" (choopetta - pronounciation) that many societies give folks from top ten to the same clothes, the same everything, including the arts! I don't think that you can "find" yourself, when you are doing the same as everyone else, because you lose a side of yourself that is important to this equation. AND, most of the artists that "made it", usually walked away from this mold and worked on their own work and self, more often than not ... which is the only secret they have ... which is not a secret, and is the translation of "the father and I are one" ... meaning that your inside and outside are the same and not different, and work on the same things.
 
The surprising thing is that many women have been more interesting for me to read than men ... for them the internal experience is more physical than external as it is for me, and their view is, thus, stronger and something that us, men, do not look at enough ... likewise it might be suggested that the women do not think as much, and I disagree! In many ways, they conceptualize better, as was shown by the two books by the ladies in the Carlos Castaneda group ... they are far better writers and more interesting than he was.
 
Have fun reading!
PS: IF, I have a comment, about "reading", it is that most people do not read enough and rarely get out of their comfort zone ... and as such, learning to appreciate another person, language, culture and such gets harder, and this is my experience in 3 different countries. No one here will read 1000 Years of Soliture ... Pablo Neruda ... to find out what the whole thing is about, and the Internet often is about the veritable CLIFF NOTES, not literature, and this is the part that is missed ... the "experience" ... which is the ONLY thing that teaches you anything!