5 Books Everybody Should Read

[The once and future king]

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich >>>>> Crime and Punishment.

Just a personal preference.

[george w]

the power of now by eckhart tolle.

it's basically just buddhism wrapped up in a nice western package. he is very good at writing about it.

[stigmata]

Don Quixote -- Cervantes

Basically the first modern novel, and very very funny. There's a new translation out by Edith Grossman which is extremely readable.

[2/325Falcon]

Hagakure - It's a snapshot of a life most people today couldn't imagine living.

Meditations - Many people could use a shot of Stoicism in their daily lives.

[Borodog]

For A New Liberty - Murray N. Rothbard
The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Time's Arrow - Martin Amis
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Robert A. Heilein

Right now I can't think of what might deserve to be a fifth.

And diebitter,

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Silas Marner

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You are one sick bastard. I hated that book in 8th grade.

[diebitter]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Silas Marner

[/ QUOTE ]

You are one sick bastard. I hated that book in 8th grade.

[/ QUOTE ]

You've probably grown into it by now. Try it again.

[MsgrMartinez]

In Search of Schrodenger's Cat - An accessible book about quantum physics. Even if you're not interested in science per se, you should be interested in what modern science has to say about the nature of reality.

Sophie's World - A primer of the history of Western philosophy, told in the context of a frame story (so it is not at all dry).

Neither of these are "great works" but can and should be read by anyone who is intellectually curious about the world around us.

[TwoOuter]

I'll submit Emerson's Essays, especially Self-Reliance. It changed my thinking more than anything else I read in high school.

"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

[amplify]

That haven't been mentioned:

1. Canterbury Tales. Yes, in Middle English. You get used to it after a while and once you do, you are ready to read the seminal work of Western Fiction. Alternately bawdy and sublime, each tale is unique and the Wife of Bath's Tale is only one showstopper.

2. The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose. It gets worse, for this one you have to do calculus, but it's infinitely rewarding to actually understand the mathematics behind modern physics.

3. Book of Secrets by Osho. Tantric methods for enlightenment. Indispensable.

4. The Frontiersmen. Simon Kenton was a badass.

5. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Whether you read it chronologically as history or just to enjoy Gibbon's intricately florid prose, this is easily one of the major accomplishments in any field. Still the gold standard.

[John Cole]

Zeno,

At least with the internet--or at least here--we're forced to communicate through writing. Perhaps chat rooms are closer to what Thoreau had in mind.

I was lucky in that I didn't read Walden until grad school. If I had to read it in high school, it may have been ruined for me.

Last night I watched Cowards Bend the Knee, a film by Guy Maddin, who used A Squeeze of the Hand, a chapter title in Moby Dick, for one of the chapter titles in his film. I loved the allusion.

Speaking of allusions, I saw a building company at work, and on the side of one piece of equipment was the company's name: Edifice Wrecks. I guess reading good literature helps for some stuff.

You might also be interested in a volume of poetry called World Poetry, which features poets from around the world, both ancient and modern. I'll check to see if Po-Chu is included if I can find it in my double-stacked bookcases.


You're right about the personal essay; the selection is vast, and I do love many of the classics. The first of the personal essayists, Montaigne, is still among the best, but in my collections of essays I always find some great stuff I've never read. Since I never read Agee's A Death in the Family, his "Knoxville: Summer 1915" blew me away. Here's an excerpt:

We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in that time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.

... It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the tress, of birds' hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt: a loud auto: a quiet auto: people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard, and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber. A streetcar raising its iron moan; stopping; belling and starting, stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed; still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter; fainting, lifting, lifts, faints foregone: forgotten. Now is the night one blue dew.

Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, he has coiled the hose.

Low on the length of lawns, a frailing of fire who breathes...

Parents on porches: rock and rock. From damp strings morning glories hang their ancient faces.

The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.

On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there... They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine, ... with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth lying on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the of hour of their taking away.

After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her; and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home; but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.


I hope someone else finds this as exquisite and moving as do I.

John