Quote:
Originally Posted by amplify
GEB is one of the 5 books I'd take with me to a desert island along with Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Homer, an edition of Shakespeare, and a book of Shelley's poetry.
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i bought a second hand copy of D&F a while back, it didn't stick.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Luckbox Inc
ohh. I'm doing mine
The Waves by Virginia Woolf.
No other book has affected me as much
The Blue Cliff Record
Complete Poems of Amy Clampitt
would need a thick dictionary to go with it
War and Peace
have gotten 1/4 of the way through it twice. Would like to actually finish it someday.
Complete Rilke
Its Rilke
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I struggled with mine - here's a first three:
A
Raymond Chandler novel, not sure hwich one, maybe the
Little Sister, or
The Long Goodbye. I don't there are any books i've reread more often as RC - maybe the hungry caterpillar
The Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin. Maybe a con given it's 4 novels, but it's a coherent whole imo. ULG's science fiction is awesome, too, and remarkably undervalued imo. John Wyndham's science fiction -
The Kraken Wakes in particular is tremendous but they're short and i don;t want to scam a 'complete works' into the 5 books
The Pillow Book, Sei Shonagon, it's a miscellany of aristocratic life in medieval japan, it's poetic and funny and full of sex.
Some belated Christmas reading ideas:
Cultural Amnesia - I don't know if you have CLive James in america: he's an australian guy best known as a quirky amusing tv presenter, but really he's actually a candidate for the world's smartest person not named amplify, and is astoundingly knowledgable and interesting. His autobiogs are supposed to be very good but this is a collection of short articles on major figures of the twentieth century. He is very interested in the phenomenon of totalitarian regimes, but he is most interesting on the subject of the vibrant cafe-centred jew-heavy literary and intellectual scene of eastern europe in the first half of C20. My original copy was missing a bunch of pages, which meant that goebbels metamorphised into goethe mid-paragraph, which was confusing.
reccomendation
Tom Holland: Has written three books that i know of - one on the Roman Republic, one on the battles between the greeks and the persians
and one i'm reading now on christianity around 1000ad. He's interesting and smart (although i am no expert on the periods he writes about) and the subjects are amazing. I'd quite like to read Mary Beard's book on pompei also, andi would recommend that any copies of Boris Johnson's books be burned (i got through like 30 pages of his book on the romans in europe and it was terrible)
Under the Frog by Tibor Fischer. I always reccomend this book, because if anyone hasn't read it yet they should. Basketball, romance and rebellion behind the iron curtain, the funniest sadest book ever.
in ur philosophy thredd, posting about literature.
I've always found the need to read philosophy from the bottom up as a major factor preventing me from being bothered to do it much.
all i know about heidigger is that he influenced a lot of the japanese philosophers, and that a lot of the chicago u taught japanologists write crap about him alot which is really annoying.
Two Plus Two
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