@obi

Thanks for mentioning the Odyssey.

Not a book, but one piece of writing that does really speak to me is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Also, completely off-topic: Would you be willing to share some of your "guilty-pleasures" with us? Like how Draug and I really like the James Bond books, which, in reality, are *not* cream of the crop literature.

The Trial by Kafka. I like how I'm torn between seeing his words as layer upon layer of profundity and as the scrawlings of a muddle-headed hack when I read him. Picking up Kafka is probably the closest thing possible to truly seeing raw genius. Or not. Anyway, I like it.

Anyone who bothers to picket a Shakespeare play because it allegedly misrepresents a king of England who's been dead for hundreds of years is exactly the kind of person whose opinion does not matter at all. At all. It would be like people picketing when Cleopatra came out because Elisabeth Taylor wasn't Greek and too pretty.

And Putin, better he be a propagandist for the Tudors than the Hanoverian usurpers. Am I right?

Invictus +1

The Trial is my favorite story by Kafka and probably my favorite short story.

Asking why Richard III's reputation important is like asking why is the War of the Roses important. Richard III died heroically on Bosworth Field, betrayed by his closest allies, leading a hopeless cavalry charge. Richard III is a symbol of Yorkshire pride. When considering the anti-northern bent of the government in London over the years, this is important.

These damned fictional accounts of history matter, unfortunately, because people don't research the truth. It's much harder to look up who King Edward I was and what he did than it was to watch the abomination that is Braveheart. So people get the impression that Edward I was a genocidal maniac who wanted to murder or breed out all Scots from existence. Braveheart was about a period even more distant than the War of the Roses, but yet it inflamed anti-English sentiment and had a real impact.

And your sentiment that fighting against Shakespeare's defamation of Richard III is a lost cause is exactly the problem. If pernicious myths are left to fester, they are harder to dislodge.

With all due respect, at some point historical figures will just become characters when somebody wants to tell a compelling story. While this Richard III might get a bum rap in the play (full disclosure: I never even heard of the play before this thread), Shakespeare's play is a piece of entertainment and should not be expected to be historically perfect. What matters is that the work reveals something about the human condition, not that it's a rote recitation of what some obscure English king did centuries ago.

By the standard you set no period piece would be possible. I get pretty annoyed when I see misrepresentations or anachronisms in movies or whatever, but what you should really judge the work on is its quality of storytelling, not some historical fanboy criteria of accuracy. Gladiator butchered Roman history and misrepresented the Republic as a democracy, but it had compelling things to say about love of family and civic idealism and that's part of what made it a good movie.

Lord of the Rings has to be one of my favourite books :) Also I love Animal Farm by George Orwell, its an interesting one that gets you thinking. Though I couldn't really narrow down to many books that would be my absolute favourites or I'd give a 50 long list :p

The books which have had the greatest impact on me were ones I read as a kid:
Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthurs Court - Mark Twain
Gullivers Travels - Jonathan Swift
The Chronicles of Narnia - C S Lewis
Empire of The Sun - J G Ballard

These days I only read non-fiction. The two standouts for me would be The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins, and Guns Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond.

its unfair to single out Obi as a pretentious intellectual. i think most of you guys are. you guys probably had to read ninety percent of the books listed here in school. the other 'what are you reading right now?' thread a few weeks back was similarly hilarious. at least obi comes off as sincere: i actually believe he reads and enjoys the books he talks about, although i guess he might not have the greatest depth or breadth of knowledge. which is reasonable because he is a twenty year old junior college student.

Actually of the books I mentioned the only one I studied in school was The Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe -CS Lewis. But I read it ages before I studied it.

yeah, your childhood list was fine. but the two sentences following it are probably a bit pretentious. maybe pretentious is the wrong word, actually.

How so?

I read non-fiction - that makes me pretentious does it?
Fiction is great. I wish I read more, but as I have grown older my reading tastes have changed. Maybe I have just become less imaginative. Or I just read stuff that I find interesting. Those two books I listed are a great read. Not pretentious at all. Both writers have a very accessible easy to read enjoyable style (Richard Dawkins and Jared Diamond).

"these days I only read non-fiction" comes off as a bit douchey, if you ask me.
and then you list two of the most famous "pop intellectual" books of the past decade as your favorites. but you call them standouts, to emphasize how much reading youve done (gladwell, pinker, levitt are in there, too im sure)

anyway, i wasnt even really referring to you. i was more talking about the guys who were bashing obi as a way to trumpet their obscure taste in theater.

sorry, that post was in response to 'how so?'

and yeah, reading dawkins and diamond isnt pretentious. its just that a lot of people around here love to read those types of guys and then work them into every single conversation about anything.

anyway, sorry, i didnt mean to come off as an asshole. i more just wanted to stick up for obi, who seems like a typical young enthusiast for this kind of dusty stuff. no one reads Edward Said in the womb, yknow?

Ah so you mean me? Actually no. I've never taken a class in my life that related to theatre. All my theatre interests are entirely for fun. And you seem to have missed my point. I'm not arguing that obscure things are better, I'm just saying that Obiwan has somehow managed to defeat the entire point of his own question. The point of things like this is to learn things about other people, and he's said "I like Hamlet." Yeah, him and the rest of the English speaking world, (and a good portion of the non-english speaking world, hell, it's even been translated into Klingon.) My point is that obiwan's answer doesn't say anything interesting about him, nothing at all. THAT is my point.

Putin, I'm wondering, have you moved to texts that actually expand Marxism in a meaningful way? Positive scientific works from economists like Kalecki, Kaldor, Pasinetti, Sraffa or Roemer? Or do you preffer normative works that focus on social critique from moral perspective, something that a positive economist like Marx would despise?

Also it's interesting that obiwan likes Plato and Nietzsche, philosophers I have a very reserved relation to, together with Hegel and Sartre. I'm definitely biased since I haven't read much from them (in case of Hegel even nothing) but I find it natural that I don't wish to spend too much time studying works from guys that didn't click with me at first.

I blame Plato for being an intellectual hypocrite, guess who would be the first one to try free fall from that cliff in Sparta), although one can't deny the tremendous inspiration he provided for generations of philosophers, which kept them occupied until they moved on to more sensible teachings of Aristotle (to those who disagree, ask yourself whose kind of realism is more sensible, disregard the fact that nominalism trumps them both). Also, the notion of World of Idea is pretty damn funny, especially when its most articulate modern proponents are probably obiwan's beloved mathematicians.

The problem I have with Nietzsche is his position as an icon of intellectual poseurs (Sartre, be patient, I'll come to you in a minute), which partly stems from a fact that his works resembled Plato in their verbose and literate inclinations (providing space for meaningless disputes about what he actually wanted to say, the often quoted God is dead being a prime example) and partly also from his nihilism (hipsters like that). Other than that, some of his ideas are interesting but one should stay away from the later works that were written with the "help" of his sister...

Criticizing Hegel is probably redundant, his dialectics and idealism do that for me all the time. His grand theory was probably the most detrimental philosophical construct the mankind ever encountered. Minus points also for the fact that poor Schopenhauer had empty aulas because of those parallel lectures given by Hegel.

Where Camus provided existentialism with some value (although it was still basically a rip-off of that giant of 20th philosophy Heidegger), Sartre stripped the thoughts to the bone, added some sugar coating and sold it to ecstatic masses of hipsters. Still, he may be redeemed by his role of public intellectual.

Since I seldom agree with some philosopher on everything he proposes, I don't really have a favourite work to mention, although guys like Nicolas de Cusa, Popper, Baudrillard, Heidegger, Jonas or von Hayek come to mind first. Then there are interesting ancient guys I know very little about (and that knowledge is second-hand, not from direct reading) but who I wish to read sometime like Gorgias, Herakleitos, Mozi and Han Fei.

When it comes to fiction, I adore Vonnegut, Coelho and Mahabharata. I also have a strange affinity to spin-offs to legendary series, I like the works by Brian Herbert and K.J. Anderson more than original Dune and also Second Foundation trilogy more than the original one. Not to mention that Hobbit and Silmarillion top Lord of the Rings in my eyes, although the films are damn nice. A comic is fine too.

"these days I only read non-fiction" doesn't sound that douchey to me, I remember a time when I was 16, reading some pseudohistorical novel from Persia and then suddenly realized how many times I already read something similar in archetype to that book and was simply disgusted and puzzled. Semi-permanent halt in reading fiction ensued and it took some time to find out that reading shit just for the sake of reading is just as bad as not reading because of fear of reading shit. Nowadays, I still read mostly non-fiction because I don't have much time and also because the real world is so fascinating that few made up stories can rival the joy from finding out something more about the stuff that is going on around us. Not to mention that deeper knowledge of e.g. social sciences is probably more useful than reading everything from Shakespeare although it's obiwan's field of study so it would be stupid to criticize my fellow same-age-as-myself student for that.

Sorry for that wall of text, but few incetives to be tl;dr are stronger than procrastination of unpleasant tasks (as practising Lagrangians in my case).

You, among others. And sorry, I just assumed you read catch 22 in school. I had to and ive always considered it one of those books (along with catcher in the rye, animal farm and hamlet) that everyone reads in high school and then references in their college essays. My point is, Obi is a first year (i think?) junior college student majoring in English or philosophy. Its very plausible that Hamlet and Nietzsche and Hume do 'speak' to him and its very reasonable that he hasn't yet progressed beyond the standard canon. And so its a bit shitty to jump on him and say "hamlet is uninteresting, surely you've read something better...instead, x, y , and z are better examples of books that should inspire"

@Frank

Of those books you listed, I only had to read Catcher in the Rye.

@ Frank - And further to my point, again I can't speak to his philosophical choices, but the other thing about saying Hamlet is, no one can disagree with his choice without seeming like a pretentious douche. He's made a choice that completely shuts down any opportunity for discussion or debate. It's like saying your favourite piece of music is Beethoven's 9th or your favourite painting is the Mona Lisa, or your favourite film is Citizen Kane. There's no room to disagree. There's nothing much to say about choosing Hamlet, because it is a great play, and everyone knows it. There's no discussion to be had about it. Essentially what I'm saying is, make a controversial choice, and make a choice that really speaks to your own taste. I'm sure obiwan does like Hamlet, I like Hamlet too. Most people who are more than passingly familiar with Shakespeare will like Hamlet, but if I say "What's your favourite play?" and you say Hamlet, what does that tell me about you as a person? Nothing, because so many people admire that play, all it tells me is that you have a lot in common with nearly everyone else in the world.

>these days I only read non-fiction" comes off as a bit douchey, if you ask me.
and then you list two of the most famous "pop intellectual" books of the past decade as your favorites. but you call them standouts, to emphasize how much reading youve done (gladwell, pinker, levitt are in there, too im sure)

Frank I read popular books on history, science, economics etc. I am not a student or a professional academic. I am not ashamed of that. I like the books I read, and this a thread about books we like reading.

Douchieness is in the mind of the beholder, so I don't mind that you find it douchie. I am pretty sure we are in different age groups. I probably like lots of things you would find douchie. Whereas you are probably into lots of things I used to enjoy, but alas I have become old and boring.

Yes I have read Pinker. But not the other two. Are they a good read?

With regards to douchieness - I am curious as to your thinking. Is it because I sounded like I want to sound "intellectual" by naming those books, but really gave myself away by choosing books that a "true intellectual" would not name? Thus pretentious. Was that your reasoning.

Btw I like Obi.

oops... sorry I just saw your other post.

that was @mafia, by the way.
anyway, i just find these threads consistently high in unintentional comedy. for example, someone earlier said that an emerson essay "explains how i think." and then like two posts later, the same guy fesses up to not having actually read any emerson.
and its also hilarious how everyone on this site had such unbelievable literary taste as a young child. The Odyssey, Morte L'arthur, Twain, CS Lewis. Really? i was a pretty nerdy kid who read a lot but my favorite authors (and everyone else's) were guys like Matt Christopher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kid_Who_Only_Hit_Homers) and Gordan Korman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Can%27t_Be_Happening_at_Macdonald_Hall)

@ Frank, actually catch-22 was also for fun. No high school of mine would ever have assigned a book that good. And I would never suggest that obiwan should like my choices. I like my choices because they appeal to me, if they also appeal to someone else, well then I probably have rather a lot in common with them. I just kinda wanted to put some choices of mine out there because that is the point of this thread and also to give an idea of what I meant. I chose Brecht and Weiss for instance because of my left-wing sorta-Marxist leanings. I was trying to get him to say something that would appeal to some aspect of his personality, other than just "I like philosophy and theatre." Also it's been like a year now, shouldn't obiwan by all logic be a second year by now? I suppose your point stands, but I've only just graduated from university and I didn't even study English lit or Theatre. I've only got like 2-3 years on him.

Frank those books/authors you mentioned *are* popular with kids. It's not like they are James Joyce. They are great books and popular books for a reason.

Hahahahaha I loved Gordan Korman as a kid. Are you Canadian Frank (those books are set in Canada right)? I gotta say I do agree about the incredible literary taste we all apparently had as kids. Even when I was a teenager I was mostly into reading Harry Potter. Hell if Harry Potter weren't done I'd still be eagerly waiting for the next book (Though I'd argue that CS Lewis has no more literary merit than J.K. Rowling). I still have a weakness for Agatha Christie murder mysteries, and have been slowly working my way through those Swedish thrillers about that crazy punk girl with the dragon tattoo who played with the hornets' nest that was on fire, or whatever. I'm certainly not above admitting my own taste in the modern equivalent of pulp fiction, (not the movie, the genre).

@ mafia: fair enough. i think we should just go a bit easier on obi. he will branch out eventually. anyway, if obi is the only guy who picks hamlet and so on, doesnt that actually say something interesting about him?

@spy: yeah, I know. I guess its just a question of selective memory. We all read Huckleberry Finn and Goosebumps, and we all loved both of those. but no one ever brings up Goosebumps when we talk about our favorite/most inspirational books as kids. I for one have much fonder memories of the Boxcar Children than i do of the Iliad

I wonder if the fact that the only work from Shakespeare I read, viewed or heard was Romeo and Juliet says something interesting about me. Apart from the well known fact that I'm a barbarian when it comes to theatre.

@ Frank - For sure, you're right, and I didn't mean to seem harsh, which perhaps I kinda did. The first post i made severely sleep deprived and really bitchy. Came off much worse than I otherwise would have. I usually am quite polite and respectful to Obiwanobiwan.

@ ulytau - Yeah, that's really all it tells me. But it's too bad, Romeo and Juliet is not a particularly characteristic work, but it is pretty good. But if theatre isn't your thing, theatre isn't your thing. Nothin' wrong with that.

@invictus, abgemacht, et al. - I am going to France in a couple of months and getting on a very long train ride just to see prague and the kafka museum there. The Castle is my fav, tho I hesitate to recommend his stuff to impressionable young borderline-schizophrenics (you know who ;).

@Obi - "Everyone's embarassed by my saying math is fascist?" - no Obi, everyone's embarrassed by your efforts to get people to agree that math is rubbish/invalid just because you find it difficult and frightening. It's very childish.