What books should everyone read?
- Thread starter danny la rouge
- Start date
http://books.google.com/books?id=CSsfg3325iEC&pg=PT1&dq=derrick+jensen+endgame+volume+2#PPP1,M1
coz it'll help- you understand.
coz it'll help- you understand.
Ahh beat me to it with the second, bump that. And Stasiland is excellent.
George Orwell's "A Hanging", you could read that waiting for a bus and spend the rest of the day thinking about it. Individuals, the system, complicity, guilt, humanity, the human desire for a little dignity, death penalty thoughts, colonialism, imposition of values, well written pieces...
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
I'd highly recommend 'What is Mathematics?' by Courant and Robbins. It's been around since the 1940's, requires say O-Level maths to get started on it and is designed for someone who wants to really understand what maths is about.
Another recommendation, accessible if you've been able to handle the former is 'The Feynman Lectures on Physics' which does a pretty similar job in that field.
according to Einstein
Another recommendation, accessible if you've been able to handle the former is 'The Feynman Lectures on Physics' which does a pretty similar job in that field.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
I'd recommend Ross Ashby's 'Introduction to Cybernetics'. Long out of print, but available on the web as an electronic book. Again only o-level maths is required. http://pcp.lanl.gov/ASHBBOOK.html
I don't know of a better introduction to understanding what happens in self-regulating systems, which when you think about it, are really quite important to us.
I'd also like to mention David Pimentel's 'Food, Energy and Society' which provides a comprehensive scientific look at our basic life support systems, Christopher Alexander's 'A Pattern Language' which provides a practical guide to repairing our environment and Kropotkin's 'Field's, Factories and Workshops' which gives the two former works a useful political context.
I don't know of a better introduction to understanding what happens in self-regulating systems, which when you think about it, are really quite important to us.
I'd also like to mention David Pimentel's 'Food, Energy and Society' which provides a comprehensive scientific look at our basic life support systems, Christopher Alexander's 'A Pattern Language' which provides a practical guide to repairing our environment and Kropotkin's 'Field's, Factories and Workshops' which gives the two former works a useful political context.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Very good choice.
The non-fiction I would recommend would be Julian Jaynes's The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. I read it many years ago and it gave me at the time a very new way of looking at the mind. It's taken me until recently to work out exactly what I think of it (with the help of Urban, in fact) – I only read it once, but its central arguments are still crystal clear in my head.
For fiction, if I'm to recommend just one book, I can't think past Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. It is everything a novel should be.
clusterflux
Ham handed knee jerk
Cruel Shoes by Steve Martin and Napalm and Silly Putty by George Carlin are two I would recommend for the category of American Humor.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
people should definetly read what the fuck they want, and bollocks to must reads. Literature is a broad church and many worship. Who are you and I to deny the validity of someone elses reading experiences. No one.
Eliot: Middlemarch - the greatest novel in the English language
Tolstoy: Anna Karenina - the greatest novel not in the English language (although obviously I'm not suggesting that you have to read it in the original Russian)
Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling - because of it's influence on 20th century philosophy
Tolstoy: Anna Karenina - the greatest novel not in the English language (although obviously I'm not suggesting that you have to read it in the original Russian)
Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling - because of it's influence on 20th century philosophy
clusterflux
Ham handed knee jerk
Canaan by Geoffrey Hill is one I would suggest for contemporary poetry. There are some good books here and I like the idea of people sharing books they think others should read. Perhaps the word "should" turns some people off, I just take it to mean books they found to best reward the reading time.
Paulie Tandoori
shut it you egg!
i remembered One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, i think that's worth a read anytime. i found it to be a very powerful description of solitude and punishment, authority and attitudes arising from 'socialist' practice in the ussr. also worth a read are love on the dole by walter greenwood and the road to wigan pier by orwell, both evocative descriptions of working class destitution in their own ways.
It is a really powerful piece of writing.
obanite
Kroketten
If This Is a Man by Primo Levi, for a moving, objective journey through Auchwitz. I think what with most of the vets of WW2 being dead now, it's more important than ever that we all remember just how horrific human beings can be to each other and just how hugely evil the state and totalitarianism can get. We must not forget what happened and must never let it happen again.
purves grundy
ambient clown remix
Sartre's Roads to Freedom trilogy, and Knut Hamsun's Hunger.
Laney
Got Faith?
I've just finished reading this, and it made me sick. Six hundred pages of embittered despair and the most unflattering portrait of the w/c I've ever come across. Self-righteous and preaching, it continually slams home the point that the workers are wretched and stupid, and concludes that they deserve to remain so as they refuse to speculate on or lend support to parliamentary socialism.
I can't see how this book has inspired or uplifted anyone, although I can see how it might have enlightened.
Well it does help to explain how people come to be exploited and exploit. It's also a snapshot of a historical period we like to think of as a golden age before the ravages of WW1. Given the author's background I doubt its contents, especially some individual incidents, are entirely fabricated. What it does do is point out some telling hypocrisies of organised religion, when you think about it there are parallels today. Yes, there are flaws to the book (the character Barrington for example seems a strange afterthought) but it's funny and tragic and shows that systems fail and people need to think about why things are the way they are.
Meltingpot
Living in our pools we soon forget about the sea
"Illusions" by Richard Bach. I need to replace my copy, it's falling to bits.
(OK, maybe it isn't for everyone).
(OK, maybe it isn't for everyone).
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Why?
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
I drew an entirely different set of impressions from it;
that "the working man", having been told by his "betters" that Labour and/or socialist politics were "bad for business", saw their only recourse to be aping the views of those "betters", (hence the arguments between the painters about "protection" and "free trade"):
that organised religion could be used as a device for social control;
that you don't need to "convert" people, because you can inspre them by example;
that the belief that the bosses have any interest in you beyond maximising the surplus value of your labour deceived many people, and;
that in the end, if you don't make a stand you've no cause to complain.
That's not to say that the book isn't bitter, because it is. Tressell actually lived what he wrote. One would expect him to be bitter.
As for his unflattering portrayal of the working class, you're talking about a time where the older males wouldn't have been submitted to compulsory education, where conditions for the mass of the working class really were that piss poor, and where your employer knew and might even play on the fact that he was what stood between you and the workhouse.
Enlightenment is more than enough.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Which volume?
Laney
Got Faith?
I do agree that those messages are in the book. I disagree that enlightenment is more than enough.
What I really dislike is the tone of the book and the repeated implication that the situation is so hopeless that you'd be better off murdering your family and then committing suicide. There is a sharp contrast between the sophistication of the socialists (i.e. Owen and Barrington) and the beyond-salvation barbary of the rest of the w/c. Enlightenment is meaningless if with that knowledge you also acquire the belief that the w/c is too dense and savage to ever see the truth.
I think socialists often consider themselves above the mindset/competence/intelligence etc of the complicit w/c. Owen is an isolated hero and the sole bastion of morality amongst the workers... I don't think this is the way to look at the world and I can't see any progress in this book - the title is w/c scorn itself.
Well I think it is a literary work so some incidents are more dramatic than representative. Parts of the novel are designed to shock you and wake you up to a possible consequence of poverty.
The difference between the socialists and the other workers can be a bit stark sometimes (the vernacular in some and lack of it in others doesn't help) and as mentioned I personally find Barrington a bit surplus to the novel. However there are a couple of characters who I think manage to avoid being strictly one or the other; Easton and Harlow (towards the end) spring to mind. What is also telling is that Barrington and Owen may be frustrated and at times look down on fellow w/c but they don't give up fighting and trying to spread their message.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
Dune Messiah
The book is a comment on the futility and horror of absolute power, from the perspective of one as trapped by the power.
"The moon falls' passage is a great poetic bit.
The book is a comment on the futility and horror of absolute power, from the perspective of one as trapped by the power.
"The moon falls' passage is a great poetic bit.
Laney
Got Faith?
So did you take inspiration from this book, then? I can't see how it would compel anyone to attempt to build a better world...
I can see a lot of smug socialists walking around safe in the knowledge that they know better and are morally and intellectually superior to their fellow man, and don't have to do anything about it, because the situation is utterly hopeless!
Me personally? No, but I'm not a socialist and don't wish to be. I found it entertaining, moving and enlightening in its explanation of how exploitation can arise and be perpetuated. Made me think but hasn't inspired me at all. But that's just me, I'm sure others would get something more from it.
because it matches reality closer than Marx
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Which writings of Marx do you mean? And which bits of Smith? The fact that Marx's economic writings on capital were in large part based on the previous work of Adam Smith seems to have passed you by?
I've never found that reading any one book has made me any more enlightened about anything - often I have read 'great texts' or other canonical literature and ended up thinking 'so what?' I also wouldn't say that I actually 'know' them per se.
When I have learn things it has typically involved discussion and reading lots of bits of different things over time - a kind of 'mosaic effect' rather than reading from start to finish through one large text.
In many ways it would be better to read through a textbook or syllabus on a subject which itself had lots of references that you then had to follow up. This also helps because it helps set texts in context, provide commentary and often includes contemporary restatements/refinements of older ideas.
I think that for a given amount of time and effort this 'mosaic' approach - as long as it is not spread too thinly - will actually achieve more. You can then see if you are drawn towards reading the whole of a text in depth depending on your own interests.
In terms of a 'well-rounded education' you could probably reduce it to these things:
Overview of literature, art, music (mainly european and post-colonial, but possible global as well)
Global geography (inc economics and human geography)
World history, UK/european history
Overview of science, mathematics and technology
Current affairs and social/personal issues and skills
In this context I'd argue that it doesn't come down to picking a canon of texts.
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