Great Books To Read

[Pam]

Not trying to insult any Rand fans here, but I just don't get what all the fuss is about........

You are not alone. Just Google Ayn Rand sucks and see.

[GOAT]

The Next 100 Years - George Friedman

Puts things into an interesting perspective. We are not so doomed afterall.

[Zacha341]

I dig some of your selections.... I loved the film adaptation of "My Dinner with Andre".

My usual list:

• The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes
• Gödel, Escher, Bach and Metamagical Themas, by Douglas Hofstadter
• Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo
• Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll
• The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
• Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
• Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
• Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes Saaverdra
• The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli
• Zen and the Beat Way, by Alan Watts
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig
• Kafka, The Complete Stories, by Nahum N. Glatzer
• My Dinner With Andre, by Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory
• The Invented Reality, by Paul Watzlawick
• The Foxfire Book, by Eliot Wigginton
• Gödel's Proof, by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman
• The Prisoner, by Patrick McGoohan [[the television series)
• Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell
• anything written by Noam Chomsky
• A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn
• The Little Prince, by Antoine deSaint-Exupery
• I Hear Voices, by Paul Ableman [[the short story)
• Epistemology and Cognition, by Alvin I. Goldman

[Jimaz]

I dig some of your selections.... I loved the film adaptation of "My Dinner with Andre".

Ah, thank you, Zacha341.

I think a common theme in my reading is the appreciation of authors who both try and succeed in sincerely understanding points of view opposed to their own. Only then does the light bulb pop up over the reader's head. I can't get enough of that sensation.

I think the "My Dinner with Andre" film preceded the book but I could be wrong.

The Origin of Consciousness is breathtaking. Jaynes dug relentlessly into ancient history in an attempt to discover just when, where and why our species became aware of anything at all. Right or wrong, his thoroughness deserves admiration.

And thanks to my ex for recommending so many of these beloved books.

[rb336]

Also Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco

or "How to travel with a Salmon & Other Essays" or "The Island of the Day Before"

A pianist I knew in NYC lived in the same building as his son. I missed him by minutes one day. bummer

[terryh]

god is not great -how religion poisons everything by Christopher Hitchens!
The Battle For God-which is about the re-emergence of religious fundmentalism by author Karen Armstrong who was a nun.

[vetalalumni]

"Harlem Speaks: A Living History of the Harlem Renaissance" by Cary D. Wintz

[Patrick]

Just finished Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line by Ben Hamper. A pretty good read but it revealed how fucked up GM was even 30 years ago. I hope Hamper was an exception and that his actions didn't reflect the larger workforce.

[EMG]

The Left Behind Series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.


They're old now, but at least the series is now complete including prequels and sequel and they're a great read if you're into Christian end-times fiction.

[vetalalumni]

Just picked up two books for early fall reading:

• "The Grace of Silence: A Memoir" by Michele Norris
• "Living with Uncertainty: The Moral Significance of Ignorance" by Michael J. Zimmerman

Currently reading two other books:

• "Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth" by Alice Walker
• "The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar"

[G-DDT]

I'm nodding with "Brave New World" [["Brave New World Revisited" is even heavier, and it defeats Neil Postman's argument in "Amusing Ourselves to Death" when he compartmentalizes "1984" from "Brave New World" on the grounds that "1984" was more about government imposed dystopia. "Revisited" shows just how frank and conspiratorial aware Huxley was about some things).

In fact, I'm nodding with a lot of many of the ones mentioned [[Eco-he died recently-skates the line with "Name of the Rose"-but it was a good movie, Godel, Escher, & Bach is very clever, miffed that the theatrical run for "Trumbo" was far too brief during the hectic holidays for me to see it in a theater, Zinn, Chomsky, etc.), but I'm shaking my head with a whole bunch of others folk's have posted.

I read more nonfiction, theology, and history than anything. It's rare for me to read fiction [[much less epic-I think "Hitchhiker's Guide..." was the best I could do-I'd get rather long into something like the Hobbit or Dune-and maybe I made the mistake of telling certain "good men" how far I've gotten, and then I'd suddenly get strangely angry and irrationally worked up when I'd get to certain words and portions later on. So, I'd have to stop. Very odd trigger.).

I read Martin Cruz Smith's "Gorky Park" when I was in Boston. I guess it took him some years for him to complete. It has a somewhat typical action ending, but I found it compelling.

[black gold man]

[Livane]

I can recommend "Good Morning, Midnight" by Jean Rhys. It is fiction, but it is also very spiritual in a way. To me at least.

[Jimaz]

I'm nodding with "Brave New World"....

Just by coincidence I watched that movie last night. It's kind of hokey in a 1970s way but still interesting.

For the uninitiated: It's about social engineering taken to the ultimate extreme.

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is a bit over 3 hours. Weird factoid: Ford was their deity. Yes, that Ford.

[old guy]

I finally got around to reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
I wish I had read it years ago. Everything they didn't teach you in school.

[Jimaz]

I finally got around to reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
I wish I had read it years ago. Everything they didn't teach you in school.

It quietly stands in defiance against the defeatist "History is written [only] by the victors."

Others who are interested can read it here for free: A People's History Of The United States.

[canuck]

À pretty good book about Theodore Roosevelt's exploration of a River that was later named after him in Brazil. "River of Doubt" by Candice Millard.

[G-DDT]

Just finished "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" by le Carre. Though some may see it as dense and anticlimactic, I really enjoyed it, especially for those reasons.

He did not make it an easy read, as the lingo is so thick and the intentions conveyed over a wide expressive span, you are basically hopping on stepping stones blindly, hoping you got the gist. Once you do, you're brain reels at all the ins and outs and back and forth and careful peelings of an onion that are done by the main character. Luckily, reading "Operation Mincemeat" [[by Macintyre-the true account of how British intelligence basically employed a sort of necromancy-upon the dead body of a homeless Catholic man-to sway the outcome of the war) prepared me, as it went into the various spider sensitive ways they had to treat this false flag report they put into the German's reach [[asking for the body and "plans" back, but not being too insistent, but not sounding like they are giving up on the "plan"-back and forth etc.-and that's not including all the details that went into creating the "identity" of said dead body.); yet, in the end, it was Christians within the Nazi Regime-like this guy https://frted.wordpress.com/2012/01/...e-nazi-regime/that Wikipedia refuses to have an entry on [[but that didn't stop an older 900+ page book by Brown called "Bodyguard of Lies" to go into details about such effort by von Roenne and the Vatican's connections with guys likehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_..._politician%29 and the entire Schwarze Kappele network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarze_Kapelle).

I identify with the character-someone pushed away from a scene, stiff and removed after hurt in a romance, and reassessing the many details and past social interactions, while backtracking hard evidence to see where the betrayals lie. In fact, the other characters [[like Prideaux the betrayed and Guillam) I feel I identify with.

My mind is slightly troubled, though, knowing that this book has connections to the Kim Phiby and the Cambridge 5 incidenthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Spy_Ring, in which leCarre and another favorite author of mine [[Greene-I read The Tenth Man-not to be confused with The Third Man-and liked very much how it was done and handled for a short piece) may've been on opposite sides of the situation. I still would like to believe Graham was ignorant of Philby's activities.

[Jimaz]

From Description of a Struggle, by Franz Kafka [[Page 40)

ii A Walk

I walked on, unperturbed. But since, as a pedestrian, I dreaded the effort of climbing the mountainous road, I let it become gradually flatter, let it slope down into a valley in the distance. The stones vanished at my will and the wind disappeared.

I walked at a brisk pace and since I was on my way down I raised my head, stiffened my body, and crossed my arms behind my head. Because I love pinewoods I went through woods of this kind, and since I like gazing silently up at the stars, the stars appeared slowly in the sky, as is their wont. I saw only a few fleecy clouds which a wind, blowing just at their height, pulled through the air, to the astonishment of the pedestrian.

Opposite and at some distance from my road, probably separated from it by a river as well, I caused to rise an enormously high mountain whose plateau, overgrown with brushwood, bordered on the sky. I could see quite clearly the little ramifications of the highest branches and their movements. This sight, ordinary as it may be, made me so happy that I, as a small bird on a twig of those distant scrubby bushes, forgot to let the moon come up. It lay already behind the mountain, no doubt angry at the delay.

But now the cool light that precedes the rising of the moon spread over the mountain and suddenly the moon itself appeared from beyond one of the restless bushes. I on the other hand had meanwhile been gazing in another direction, and when I now looked ahead of me and suddenly saw it glowing in its almost full roundness, I stood still with troubled eyes, for my precipitous road seemed to lead straight into this terrifying moon.

After a while, however, I grew accustomed to it and watched with composure the difficulty it had in rising, until finally, having approached one another a considerable part of the way, I felt overcome by an intense drowsiness caused, I assumed, by the fatigue of the walk, to which I was unaccustomed. I wandered on for a while with closed eyes, keeping myself awake only by a loud and regular clapping of my hands.

But then, as the road threatened to slip away from under my feet and everything, as weary as I myself, began to vanish, I summoned my remaining strength and hastened to scale the slope to the right of the road in order to reach in time the high tangled pinewood where I planned to spend the night that probably lay ahead of us.

The haste was necessary. The stars were already fading and I noticed the moon sink feebly into the sky as though into troubled waters. The mountain already belonged to the darkness, the road crumbled away at the point where I had turned toward the slope, and from the interior of the forest I heard the approaching crashes of collapsing trees. Now I could have thrown myself down on the moss to sleep, but since I feared to sleep on the ground I crept -- the trunk sliding quickly down the rings formed by my arms and legs -- up a tree which was already reeling without wind. I lay down on a branch and, leaning my head against the trunk, went hastily to sleep while a squirrel of my whim sat stiff-tailed at the trembling end of the branch, and rocked itself.

My sleep was deep and dreamless. Neither the waning moon nor the rising sun awoke me. And even when I was about to wake up, I calmed myself by saying: "You made a great effort yesterday, so spare your sleep," and went to sleep again.

Although I did not dream, my sleep was not free from a continuous slight disturbance. All night long I heard someone talking beside me. The words themselves I could hardly hear -- except isolated ones like "bench. . . by the river," "cloudlike mountains," "trains. . . amidst shining smoke"; what I did hear was the special kind of emphasis placed on them; and I remember that even in my sleep I rubbed my hands with pleasure at not being obliged to recognize single words, since I was asleep.

"Your life was monotonous," I said aloud in order to convince myself, "it really was necessary for you to be taken somewhere else. You ought to be content, it's gay here. The sun's shining."

Whereupon the sun shone and the rain clouds grew white and light and small in the blue sky. They sparkled and billowed out. I saw a river in the valley.

"Yes, your life was monotonous, you deserve this diversion," I continued as though compelled, "but was it not also perilous?" At that moment I heard someone sigh terribly near.

I tried to climb down quickly, but since the branch trembled as much as my hand I fell rigid from the top. I did not fall heavily, nor did I feel any pain, but I felt so weak and unhappy that I buried my face in the ground: I could not bear the strain of seeing around me the things of the earth. I felt convinced that every movement and every thought was forced, and that one had to be on one's guard against them. Yet nothing seemed more natural than to lie here on the grass, my arms beside my body, my face hidden. And I tried to persuade myself that I ought to be pleased to be already in this natural position, for otherwise many painful contortions, such as steps or words, would be required to arrive at it.

The river was wide and its noisy little waves reflected the light. On the other shore lay meadows which farther on merged into bushes behind which, at a great distance, one could see bright avenues of fruit trees leading to green hills.

Pleased by this sight, I lay down and, stopping my ears against the dread sound of sobs, I thought: Here I could be content. For here it is secluded and beautiful. It won't take much courage to live here. One will have to struggle here as anywhere else, but at least one won't have to do it with graceful movements. That won't be necessary. For there are only mountains and a wide river and I have sense enough to regard them as inanimate. Yes, when I totter alone up the steep path through the meadows in the evening I will be no more forsaken than the mountains, except that I will feel it. But I think that this, too, will pass.

Thus I toyed with my future life and tried stubbornly to forget. And all the time I blinked at that sky which was of an unusually promising color. It was a long time since I'd seen it like this; I was moved and reminded of certain days when I thought I had seen it in the same way. I took my hands from my ears, spread out my arms, and let them fall in the grass.

I heard someone sob softly from afar. A wind sprang up and a great mass of leaves, which I had not seen before, rose rustling into the air. Unripe fruit thudded senselessly from the trees onto the ground. Ugly clouds rose from behind the mountain. The waves on the river creaked and receded from the wind.

I got up quickly. My heart hurt, for now it seemed impossible to escape from my suffering. I was already about to turn and leave this region and go back to my former way of life when the following idea occurred to me: "How strange it is that even in our time distinguished people are transported across a river in this complicated way. There's no other explanation than that it is an old custom." I shook my head, for I was surprised.

• DetroitYES Home » Detroit Connections » Fun Videos » Kafka 1991

[G-DDT]

Favorite text from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: "Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation. And if Ann wanted to return-well, he would show her the door."

[Al Dav]

I recommend for all my friends 'Sensei' and 'AllatRa' books by Anastasia Novykh. This is unique information that is available to everyone. These books have changed my life for the better... They gave me the direction of the life way.

[MizMotown]

My number one is A Course In Miracles.

This is how A Course in Miracles begins. It makes a fundamental distinction between the real and the unreal; between knowledge and perception. Knowledge is truth, under one law, the law of love or God. Truth is unalterable, eternal and unambiguous. It can be unrecognized, but it cannot be changed. It applies to everything that God created, and only what He created is real. It is beyond learning because it is beyond time and process. It has no opposite; no beginning and no end. It merely is.

The world of perception, on the other hand, is the world of time, of change, of beginnings and endings. It is based on interpretation, not on facts. It is the world of birth and death, founded on the belief in scarcity, loss, separation and death. It is learned rather than given, selective in its perceptual emphases, unstable in its functioning, and inaccurate in its interpretations.

From knowledge and perception respectively, two distinct thought systems arise which are opposite in every respect. In the realm of knowledge no thoughts exist apart from God, because God and His Creation share one Will. The world of perception, however, is made by the belief in opposites and separate wills, in perpetual conflict with each other and with God. What perception sees and hears appears to be real because it permits into awareness only what conforms to the wishes of the perceiver. This leads to a world of illusions, a world which needs constant defense precisely because it is not real.

[Zacha341]

Gee I'd have to say books -- hard to pin down to a book. One my favorite books [[or shall I say letters/ segments) is the New Testament, particularly the book of Romans.

[JBMcB]

The Gulag Archepelgo by Solzhenitsyn. A fantastic expose on how the Soviet Union operated, along with a detailed history of the Gulag system.

[Pam]

Not fun reading but good information on hidden history:

Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and The Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot.