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I'm not going to go for any specific number of books but I'm going to try and read mostly books from Harold Bloom's Western Canon http://home.comcast.net/~dwtaylor1/theocraticcanon.html, particularly the earlier stuff in the first two categories that I haven't read much of.
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Jan 2, 2015 01:10
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Radio! posted:Going for 52, as usual, but I'll do the Stravinsky Challenge™ too since it seems easy enough. Booklord, do you have any suggestions for books in the various categories? Especially the post-modern, absurdist, and hate/love categories. Good post modern books: Something by Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow is hard to read but one of the best books ever written, Mason & Dixon is easier + very good, Crying of Lot 49 isn't 1000 pages long and some people like it but I thought it was bad.), J R (haven't read but everyone loves it, also difficult to read), White Noise (same as J R), If on a winter's night a traveller (reads very nicely, quite short, not as good as the others but still very good), Nabokov stuff (Pale Fire is really great) Good absurdist books: I'm not really sure about these but La Peste is good. Stuff by Samuel Beckett? I've never really been sure of the difference between absurdist and just existential literature so find something someone else calls absurdist and good and read that. Dostoeyevsky? IDK. I've heard people call My Idea of Fun by WIll Self absurdist and it's a pretty good book. Good books about love/hate: What we talk about when we talk about love (lovely short stories about love + rural America, v good, v sparse style which makes it a nice read), Lolita (classic AMerican love story), this category is really quite broad because lots of things are about this so I'm going to recommend two books I really love, Invisible Cities (love of a place?? you should read it anyway it's beautiful) and Moscow to the End of the Line (also called Moscow - Petushki, about a man who is getting a train to see his son and he gets very drunk on the train and starts talking to people about his life and problems)
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Jan 2, 2015 19:10
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Poetry people there is a poetry thread HERE http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3608630 and it's got some stuff you could probably consider, if you want to read good poetry. If you have never read any poetry you have liked before you migth like one of the poems mentioned in the OP and some of the early posts sincd ethey're all very influential etc. If you really don't like poetry at all then I suggest you pick up a book of poems by Edward Lear and make sure you read them out loud, and you will find that actually you do like poetry.
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Jan 3, 2015 14:34
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The line breaks and punctuation in poetry aren't just there because they need to be, they give the poem a rhythm, and personally, I find it difficult to appreciate this rhythm without reading the poem aloud, at least once or twice. Edward Lear's poems are essentially just interesting gibberish with a really lovely rhythm to them, and while recommending him is sort of a joke, I think if you often look at something like The Waste Land and think it's just fruity language with random line breaks, reading (aloud) something like Edward Lear, that gets you just to focus on the feeling of poems could probably help.
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Jan 3, 2015 15:28
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The Berzerker posted:I wouldn't mind some recommendations for philosophy or poetry as I haven't gone down either of those paths too much. For poetry, I'd prefer recommendations of a collection rather than just one specific poem. I'd also appreciate some suggestions for something banned or censored. A quick google shows me that Lolita was banned in Canada at one point and I've never read it so maybe I'll read that, it's on my shelf. Philosophy is really broad so if you can think of something in particular ythat interests you, then recommendations will be easier. That said here are some really good philosophy books that you should read: Fear + Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard - Soren Kierkegaard tries to reconcile belief in a loving God with the fact that he demanded ABraham kill his son. Abraham must have been prepared to do it, because if he knew God would tell him to stop then there was no risk involved + no faith. Is Abraham a monster + blindly carrying out the orders of a higher power no matter what they say actually evil? Follow Johannes de SIlentio as he delves into the deepest darkest reaches of Christianity. The book can be a bit difficult sometimes but is worth it IMO it's very well written + the topic is interesting to me at least. Tractatus Logico Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein - Wittgenstein focuses on the use of language in philosophy + how we don't define the terms of our use of language well enough and end up making all kinds of errors in thinking by not being precise. Essentially concludes that philosophy is mostly rubbish, because you can never say what you want to say, and even if you could no one would understand you. Short but dense and gets into Logic in the middle which isn't very easy to follow but it's written in such a way that it is so easy to skip bits + come back to them later and you can spend a couple of minutes digesting each sentence if you're really struggling. His arguments are better (and there's more of them) in Philosophical Investigations, but that is a much bigger book Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche - V important book in modern history, there are a lot of ways to interpret what Nietzsche says and that is a bad thing sometimes. Written as a pseudo-religious text telling a story about a philosopher and his ideas of the Ubermensch and just about everything else in the world etc. Kind of a slog in a way the other two aren't, but still quite good, if yuo can say you've read it and have your own interpretation you look cool and smart to people. Bonus points if you correct them re: the Nazis. If you really feel like delving in to the philosophy thing then pick up Bertrand Russel's History of Western Philosophy, it's very well written, analyses philosophy from 500BC to 1946 in terms of cultural movements + stuff well worth reading if you want to know more.
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Jan 6, 2015 02:16
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The list isn't actually anything that's going to be rigidly administered if you read something and say "yeah this book was about red" but actually that book wasn't about red nothing is going to happen. It's a guideline to get you maybe reading broadly and outside your comfort zone, rather than reading 200 spiderman comics and calling it a year.
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Jan 8, 2015 03:48
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A lot of people seem to treat this as a rigidly adhered to competition against yourself and that's a weird approach imo. Please just use the reading challenge to expand the scope of your reading, no one cares if you didn't make 50 books because you got stuck on this one book for ages, 50 books is an arbitrary constraint you placed on yourself a year ago. If you ended up reading one thing that you enjoyed, and you might not have read if you hadn't posted in this thread then that's a good reading challenge.
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Jan 8, 2015 04:03
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Mr. Squishy posted:I too will take up the booklord-challenge. I'm currently re-reading Purdy's House of the Solitary Maggot and finished today A Third of a Nation, a weird depression-era play about how poo poo hosuing in New York is, and how the government should pay up to fix things up. Don't u usually read all those sorts of books anyway? Doesn't seem like much of a challenge IMO.........
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Jan 13, 2015 02:54
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Please don't read FIght Club as your post modern book.
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Feb 28, 2015 13:13
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oliven posted:Why not? Because it is a) bad and b) not really very post-modern.
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Feb 28, 2015 19:17
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Blind Sally posted:here's a "novel" idea: people should read whatever they want I realise that sometimes I call people stupid for reading bad books but this time I was genuinely saying that the guy should reconsider or at least not go away thinking FIght Club is representative of post modern ism
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Mar 4, 2015 19:39
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I have read maybe 1 book on the Harold Blloom Western Canon list and it was Tristram Shandy and it was a great book about how authors, and indeed every person, are all impotent. I have read other books too, but they were mostly about philosophy. Now I'm reaidng some other books. Well, thanks.
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Mar 26, 2015 22:12
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Guy that read The Man WHo Was Thursday: good.
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Mar 26, 2015 22:12
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Even though I think you're a bit weird, please don't not expand your reading horizons because you didn't like this one book.
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Apr 29, 2015 13:50
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thehomemaster posted:
There are almost no real classics that aren't pretty funny in some way.
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Apr 29, 2015 22:10
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I have read very few books actually in Harold Bloom's Western Canon, but I did read Harold Bloom's Western Canon, which is a cool book in which an old man tells you why Shakespeare is good and gets annoyed at feminists.
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May 18, 2015 17:34
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Lmao why are the collected poems of Poe on this list? Just in case you start thinking all books are good?
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May 30, 2015 23:21
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DannyTanner posted:Someone give me a wildcard. The Ego and His Own by Max Stirner.
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Jun 6, 2015 08:33
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I have read At Swim-Two-Birds which is great, and I guess the Torah which is also great, even though IDGAF about the tabernacle. I think I read something else but I can't really remember? I've been reading little bits of lots of books, and can't really remember what books I have actually read off the top of my headf. So far I have read maybe 1 of the books I set out to read at the start of the year, and I probably won't read more from the list than that. Edit: I read Henry IV parts 1 & 2, and they were good but not as good as the really good tragedies ty Edit 2: I also watched the first episode of RIget which is a book because I had to read the subtitles except when the Danish words were just ENglish words said weird. CestMoi fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Jul 10, 2015 |
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Jul 10, 2015 19:28
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Mr. Squishy posted:It's the colour red that has me worried (that Stavinsky will track me down and beat me up for failing the challenge) Read Jung's Red Book
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Jul 29, 2015 22:51
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Read Babyfucker by Urs Allemann for love/hate.
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Jul 29, 2015 23:25
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Guy A. Person posted:
What did u think of these 2? I think I'm the one that recommended them at the start of this thread for philosophy and it's cool to read that people have picked them up, even if the one guy who read Fear and Trembling that I saw earlier seemed to sort of miss the point imo.
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Oct 3, 2015 20:35
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Any impression of me knowing anything is pure coincidence. That said, definitely pick up History of Western Philosophy if you're interested just bear in mind that Russell gets a bit flustered about Germans post-Kant and can't really deal with them so don't think what he says is a particularly good representation of their ideas. In terms of what I recommended I think I'd probably recommend the Tractatus again, because it's worth it even if the only thing you understand is the first bit and the last bit and you grasp absolutely nothing in the middle and it gives you a lot to think about. I think my love of Fear and Trembling is partially down to how well it addresses the sorts of problems that I had with Christianity during my childhood so I can see that as perhaps not being the best thing to recommend generally but it's difficult to think of anything particularly accessible but in a similar continental vein. Myth of Sisyphus? idk. I might make a philosophy thread since philosophy is cool. Edit: Apparently A New History Of Western Philosophy by Anthony Kenny + Bryan Magee's The Story of Philosophy are good alternatives to the biased History of Western Philosophy so maybe check them out?? CestMoi fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Nov 14, 2015 |
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Nov 14, 2015 13:16
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Stravinsky posted:The blind owl is long? Sometimes you might need to think about words while you read it and this artificially lengthens the book >.<
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Nov 29, 2015 22:31
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I think it's kind of sad that a few people are reading Blind Owl and just going "well I'm obviously not smart enough to get this", you are smart enough The Book Barn posters and I believe in each and every one of you.
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Dec 9, 2015 15:44
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