Hi guys, I'm looking for a book that takes on misogyny and patriarchal oppression from a Tolkienien standpoint, it's so hard to find good fantasy that doesn't silence women's voices and remove their autonomy! I'm sure you know what I'm "Tolkien" about 
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Feb 14, 2010 18:28
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ONE TWO THREE TIMES TWO TO THE SIX/JONESING FOR YOUR FIX OF THAT LIMP BIZKIT MIX
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Bohemienne posted:Because saying that most fantasy writers can't convincingly portray female characters to save their lives is totally the same thing as saying they're cogs in the patriarchal oppressive machinery. So do you have a recommendation of a fantasy book that has psychologically convincing female characters? Like, I'm hoping for something that's at least Avatar good on the convincing scale.
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Feb 15, 2010 01:18
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Team Black Zion posted:If you haven't already read a Peoples History of the United States by Howard Zinn, it's the most important critical look at American history and politics (with an emphasis on greed and corruption) that you will probably ever read. It doesn't start in the contemporary era, though, it builds from the birth of America and then works its way upwards. If you want a book where every page will make you mad as hell at capitalism then that would be it. It's actually pretty superficial and ideologically driven compared to much more well-researched, theorized, and scholarly Marxist, post-Marxist, and critical theory texts.
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Feb 16, 2010 02:54
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Team Black Zion posted:Yes, I would be happy to expand my knowledge of the subject, any recommendations would be appreciated. Are you talking about Marxism/Crit Theory in general, or specifically regarding a survey of American history?
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Feb 16, 2010 04:24
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King Plum the Nth posted:E: Thanks man! I really appreciate it! I was actually asking for my SO, who's a vegan hipster chick who has a hard-on for Joanna Newsom, so the Tolkien part was really super important! Nai haryuvalyë melwa rë!
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Feb 19, 2010 02:38
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. She does like all of these, she's just a bit shy about her tastes and not sure they fit the bill. She said she could come up with a list ("Honey, I've read so much over the years") but her first recommendation was
voland posted:Where should one start with William Faulkner? Anywhere, I started with The Sound and The Fury and was none the worse off for it. Just like with most any book, if you put in the time, focus, enjoyment, and emotion, it isn't nearly as difficult as people make it out to be. And considering how it's the best American novel of the 20th century, it'd be good to read anyway.
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Feb 21, 2010 15:38
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Encryptic posted:If you didn't like The Road, you probably won't like his other stuff either. His other stuff is different plot-wise, but the same general style. I'd say that The Road is a lot more banal linguistically.
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Mar 3, 2010 02:29
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Schmopenhauer posted:I'm supposed to do some book reviews in a small magazine. In case any Book Barn goons are Danish, and appreciate philosophical literary fiction, I'd love a recommendation. I rarely read new books so I'm a bit lost as to what's coming out at the moment in my native tongue. Try Poop goen der Wieselmaier by Daker Prouenplumbkt.
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Mar 5, 2010 02:49
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FortCastle posted:If you're just getting into reading one of the things I would recommend staying away from is reading the classics first, a lot of people will say you should jump into Ulysses, Moby Dick, or A Tale of Two Cities but you should read around some of the things you enjoy before getting into those or else you will find them painful. I don't know about any racing or car books but some good books I would recommend for anyone who is starting to read and trying to find out the genres they enjoy are The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (a light science fiction comedy), Ender's Game (slightly more science fiction but not hard sci-fi), The Hound of the Baskervilles (an easy Sherlock Holmes book that almost everyone would find enjoyable), or The Lord of the Rings (kind of big and daunting but pretty much the fantasy book that everyone who likes fantasy loves and not too bad if you are already on the fifth Harry Potter book). Those are extremely general suggestions but it's hard to recommend things without knowing your reading levels and preferences but just remember to read books you enjoy before moving on the ones you "appreciate" like the classics and such. Don't don't don't do this, stop denegrating the classics as little things that you put on pedestals and throw in closets, and that classics are not as enjoyable as books with lasers and elves and poo poo. This is the entirely wrong way to read books. If you are not enjoying a book, you shouldn't read it, however, if you can only get enjoyment out of things that go bang bang and cheap philosophy and poor wit (all those things that simply make you feel comfortable), then perhaps you should remove yourself from the body politic because you are doing nothing for yourself, those around you, or society at large. My advice to DreamOn13: Don't read for entertainment. If you just want to be entertained, don't change your consumption, just consume whatever, in any media. If you want to read because you think reading will "make you better," or has some sort of "value" within itself, you must choose to read things that have genuine value and make you a genuinely better person. Genre novels will not. If you like books about cars, read On The Road to start you out, if you haven't read it already. Read some Tom Robbins. Neither of those are really top-notch, but they're good places to start with literature. If you want sci-fi/fantasy, read A Voyage to Arcturus or some of the old Arthurian romances. None of that stuff is difficult, but it'll put you in a position where you see reading as a unique experience and will want to do it more often and search out your own reading lists. It will make you put thought into your reading, and any time a person thinks hard about their cultural consumption, she is improving herself.
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Mar 8, 2010 01:32
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FortCastle posted:I didn't mean it like that at all, I meant that going from zero to sixty isn't a good way to get into reading. Of course they are enjoyable but to get their full effect you need to read around to be able to appreciate what they are. Maybe it's only me because I am only speaking from my own experience in loathing the A Tale of Two Cities and Moby Dick the first time that I read them but I think that I tried to go too deep too quickly. They are amazing books and I feel that he will be turned off by them if he starts his reading experience with hem but maybe I'm wrong, read what you want, read what you enjoy. I genuinely know of no one who would recommend someone who is just starting out reading to read Ulysses or Moby Dick. They might suggest A Tale of Two Cities, although they're more likely to suggest Great Expectations (I don't like Dickens except for Bleak House and Hard Times). But people in general have a very narrow conception of what the "classics" are (ie. whatever they read in hs/college), and I don't think it's helping anyone to suggest reading genre fiction before reading literature. However, I do think it's funny that what you suggest he start off with are the recognized "greatest works of the genres" and these are supposed to be easy to get in to, as opposed to the greater difficulty of regular literature. In any case, Lord of the Ring is boring as hell, and the reason Harry Potter is so popular for the general populace of kids rather than just fantasy nerds is because it's 1)more like a traditional novel, and 2)made for an ADD generation.
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Mar 8, 2010 02:11
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criptozoid posted:The XIX century called, they want your hopelessly naive view of Literature back. I'm not going to get into a discussion here (see OP), but I somehow doubt you've read very much 19th- (or for that matter, 20th-) century criticism (especially since your comment doesn't seem to acknowledge the huge debates about the social role of literature that took place throughout the century, for example, in Britain's periodicals, but was instead simply homogeneous). And I don't see how reading for self-improvement is "hopelessly naive," seeing as how it's been one of the main, if not the main, justification for art since the Poetics, and continues to be to this day. While most critics will leave out discussions of value in their criticism, following Frye, the idea of value tends to be implicit in most criticism and definitely is in pedagogy.
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Mar 8, 2010 14:58
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Rabbit Hill posted:Bumping this.... TL;DR: any books that feature evil priests/preachers a la Claude Frollo or Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter? J K Huysmans' La Bas features an intense portrait of Catholic Satanism in late 19th-century Paris. It also features a psychological/theological biography of Bluebeard, the infamous feudal child murderer. There's also some great aesthetic discussions, the sorts that Huysmans is famous for.
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Mar 8, 2010 18:41
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Nione posted:I suppose some of what I'm really looking for is when the Victorian characters refer to the evils of "French novels." What are those? (And no, I'm not looking for Fanny Hill.) They're talking about libertine novels like Dangerous Liaisons and Justine. Later Victorians would also be talking about Flaubert and the Realists, in particular Madame Bovary. Super late Victorians would be talking about the Decadents like Joris-Karl Huysmans and Leopold Sacher-Masoch (and one of the better books of the period, Monsieur Venus by Rachilde) and their English proteges like Wilde. In terms of your first request, I really liked Burney's Evelina (especially when two aristocrats decide to make a bet on which of their elderly maids would win in a footrace), and her The Wanderer is considered by some to be her finest work. Helen Maria Williams' Julia is a fantastic response to The Sorrows of Young Werther, featuring a woman who is actually more intelligent than the man she drives crazy (! - a rare thing during that period, even in women's writing). Those works are very difficult to find online and expensive to boot, so you're better off going through a library. And you should probably read Shamela just so you don't get too caught up in the Romantic/Gothic domestic novel as Austen's Catherine Morland does.
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Mar 13, 2010 03:21
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OrangeGuy posted:I am also in the market for self-cultivation through philosophical study. This was the primary interest of the ancient philosophers before Aristotle, so there's lots of stuff from Plato, but particularly the dialogues telling the story of his death, and the Phaedrus. Moral philosophers like Epictetus, or the writings of Marcus Aurelius are fantastic (essentially moral aphorisms), Cicero is necessary for Roman writing, and Lucretia's "De Rerum Natura" will be a different take on "self-cultivation," from the Epicurean side. Boethius, Augustine, and Aquinas are the classic Christian writers, and Rousseau's "Confessions" is the most important modern update. Walter Benjamin's writings on the flaneur are interesting for their approach to the construction of the bourgeois self, as is de Certeau's "The Practice of Everyday Life," and of course Pierre Bourdieu's "Distinction," but each of these are going to be harder than you might be ready for, and they aren't "self-help guides" but rather critiques of the modern process of cultivation. They're also works of Continental Philosophy, so many analytical philosophers might reject them outright as being corrupted by their "interest" and socio-critical methodologies. Those are good places to start I think.
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Mar 27, 2010 04:43
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Argenterie posted:I'm in dire need of some all-encompassing, major love-enducing, character-driven, epic science fiction or fantasy. I miss the first time I read Game of Thrones, the Robin Hobb FitzChivalry books, or Dune, or Hyperion (& sequels), or Ender's Game (& first set of sequels). Even something plot-driven would be okay at this point (Ringworld, Rama). Anything? Please? Try Endymion by Keats.
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Mar 31, 2010 03:55
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pwnyXpress posted:I'm looking for books that largely inspired or created groups of political/socio-economic thought. I have the following already on my list: Don't read Mein Kampf or Atlas Shrugged, they are both trash. As for the others, they're ok, but read Capital and the German Ideology, and Discourses on Livy instead/in addition. I'm not sure why you'd want to read The Wealth of Nations, but Thomas Paine's writings are great. You could always read Keynes' General Theory, Adorno and Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Mills' The Power Elite, Foucault's Discipline and Punish, and literally thousands of other things. Gramsci and Althusser are also huge right now, or you could read Bill Buckley's God and Man at Yale to see the beginnings of the social conservative movement.
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Apr 1, 2010 02:44
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Lockback posted:I read "Don't Sleep, there are Snakes" and loved it. http://books.google.com/books?id=vU...epage&q&f=false That was my intro to linguistics, along with Plato. You could always just read Saussure if you want the actual, original intro to linguistics, but it's such a huge field. Austin is also a big big name, and his speech-act theory provides something like a narrative, ie. it narrativizes language. So does Wittgenstein. But really, if you really want to learn about linguistics, don't settle for easily digestible material because it will 100% certainly be simplified and misread, if sympathetically. But as you can tell, I know a lot more about philosophy of language than I do linguistics, so this stuff isn't science-geared.
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Apr 10, 2010 09:30
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Strontosaurus posted:I'm writing a final paper for a science fiction class I'm taking at school, and I was hoping to be able to do my report on nanosplatter (nanopunk stories where people die violently). So far, though, I've only been able to get my hands on one such short story, "Blood Music" by Greg Bear. Can anyone possibly point me in the direction of some other splattery nanotech stories? Failing that, what are the "best" nanotech stories? I'm planning to focus my paper on dissociation of the human form and body horror associated with new technologies, so anything that might include that sort of element would be appreciated. Would JG Ballard count for this?
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Apr 18, 2010 05:24
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Strontosaurus posted:Yeah, definitely. I thought I actually ordered one of his short story collections on Amazon for this project, but apparently not. Which collection do you think would have what I'm looking for? I would think The Atrocity Exhibition would be perfect, although it's less about "new technologies" as about restructuring the recent American past. But I think that makes it much better from a literary standpoint, instead of being "Cool Ways to Kill People: The Novel." But maybe not what you're thinking exactly. 7 y.o. bitch fucked around with this message at 06:38 on Apr 18, 2010 |
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Apr 18, 2010 06:32
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Nimrod posted:I could use some recommendations for good books on mythology. Stuff like Welsh, Norse, Irish/Celtic, African, Chinese, anything. I've had a pretty difficult time finding good ones in the past. Just looking at my shelves here, but for Welsh, I have "The Mabinogion," described as "Celtic mythology, Arthurian romance, and an intriguing interpretation of British history." For Ireland, I have "Tales of the Elders of Ireland," the "largest literary text surviving from twelfth-century Ireland," and "The Tain," "the longest and most important tale of the Ulster Cycle ... the great epic of Irish folk literature [featuring] the heroic, monstrous Cu Chulainn, one of the most mercurial, engaging characters in any literature." Penguin also makes a good collection of African origin myths, and Amos Tutuola is the most engaging (and funniest) writer of Yoruba myths.
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Apr 21, 2010 19:37
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Facial Fracture posted:The Christian Tradition is more than I was hoping for, but that's fine. Looking it over, I'd much rather read it than the sort of crash-coursey stuff I've perused so far. And I wouldn't have found it myself, so thanks. I was trying to look for something for you, but it seemed as if anything that's both scholarly and relatively short is also very narrow time-wise, so I think your choices will either be something of very substantial length, or something that is popular/less-convincing. I also can't tell if you'd be averse to just reference material, but apparently the Oxford Dictionary of the Popes is very good and sound, and not too long.
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Apr 25, 2010 23:54
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Boon posted:It's just a novel long rant. There are so many better books on athiesm and religion, and Dawkins obviously doesn't know his material very well. I think William James's "The Varieties of Religious Experience" is one of the best books there is on religion, and Diderot's, Voltaire's and de Sade's stuff make our "militant atheists" look like child's play.
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May 8, 2010 04:13
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Can someone recommend the best book(s) on the Arab-Israeli Six-Days War? I'm looking for scholarly works and articles, not popular works.
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Jun 5, 2010 06:28
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barkingclam posted:On one hand, I figure it might be best to read it fairly close to the way it was written, but the idea of a 500-page poem is daunting at best. Just so you know, the prose editions tend to be more accurate and are often "literal" translations, so that'll be the closest to the actual meaning. You should also remember that the poems were originally recited, and that the texts that we have of them probably date from around 400 years after Homer spoke them. The poetic editions, then, are attempting to replicate the cantatory and oratorical nature of the poems, and perhaps make it easier to catch specific references to lines from other works. Personally, I'd go with a heavily annotated poetic edition, but for the most part, the Greek versions are already at a huge remove from the originals, so any English translation will be twice removed and essentially a rewrite. You read the poems mostly for the sense of them rather than the specific language. Also, you will be a much better reader if you begin reading long poems. They require much more effort and thought just to make sense of the words, but they also teach you to hear the "art" of writing - rhythm, alliteration, enjambment, etc. - a lot better, and thus you'll become a more discriminating reader on one hand, and on the other, able to appreciate good art more at the aesthetic level when you come across it. You're already reading some of the most difficult and important texts in history, might as well push yourself just a little bit more and take a little more time. 7 y.o. bitch fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Jun 15, 2010 |
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Jun 15, 2010 04:54
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barkingclam posted:Thanks for the advice, 7 y.o. bitch and Facial Fracture. I'm going to go for Fagles' translation. Penguin uses it for both the Odyssey and the Iliad and they've been pretty good to me in the past. Those are the ones I have, and I think they are perfectly serviceable (I like them), although I'm sure the heavy repetition sounds much better than it reads. Perhaps read aloud the first few pages to yourself to get the cadence into your head so that you remember that this is essentially song, and far from prose.
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Jun 17, 2010 06:03
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AN ANGRY MOTHER posted:Well I'm definitely going to hunt down the suggestions I've gotten so far, but I should have been clearer in my post that I was looking for an encyclopedia type book. So far I've only found Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, but it's a bit out of my price range. Actually, I'm finding some cool stuff in the "people who bought this also bought" on amazon. We know, but an "encyclopedia type book" is going to be very, very boring, and you're not going to remember any of it. It's best to go to source material in this case since the sources are some of the greatest literature ever produced. Plus, I mean, the "circles of hell" thing, while not completely original to Dante, like, that's where all popular understanding of it comes from. The Old Testament doesn't say hardly anything specific about Hell, and says even less about "Lucifer." Dante literally made most of it up. "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso" will also show a lot of our traditional understandings of purgatory and heaven in it. You can also read "City of God" and "The Pilgrim's Progress" if you want. And in terms of "price range," there are free libraries most anywhere, and the majority of them do inter-library loans as well. If you know what you're looking for, here are two well-known encyclopedias, available online: Encyclopaedia Biblica: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Encyclopaedia_Biblica Jewish Encyclopedia: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/ And here's the Lucifer page: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=612&letter=L I mean, why are you looking for info on angels and demons in the Bible? Do you just think they're cool or something? That Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible looks like it's almost definitely going to be the best thing for you then. Here's a list of every library in America that has it: http://www.worldcat.org/title/dictionary-of-deities-and-demons-in-the-bible-ddd/oclc/39765350&referer=brief_results edit: Also, I know I've pushed it a lot, but if you want some good literature that features demonology, J. K. Huysmans is great, specifically "La Bas" or "The Damned." 7 y.o. bitch fucked around with this message at 06:00 on Jun 18, 2010 |
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Jun 18, 2010 05:54
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Facial Fracture posted:Is there a particularly good translation of La Bas? I remember your mentioning it before and since I liked A Rebours I'd be interested to read it when I've got through my current pile of stuff. There appear to be three translations available: the 1928 one by Keene Wallace, one by Brendan King, and the most recent by Terry Hale. The Wallace one apparently has some rather major errors in it, and between King and Hale, Hale has the better pedigree as a translation scholar, although King was working on a dissertation on Huysmans at the time of his translation. From the brief comparison I could do, Hale's (the Penguin Classics one) seems to have a more natural and concise rhythm, and it happens to be the one I read. But the two are pretty similar, for the most part. The Penguin one is also going to be cheaper. While I was looking on Amazon, I noticed people saying how "difficult" the book was because of its "digressions" and vocabulary, but I was surprised at how easy the book was (especially compared to A Rebours), and how quickly it moved. It definitely has the feel of a thriller, and is almost pulpy, the kind of book Dan Brown wishes he could write. In translation, it reads a lot like The Picture of Dorian Gray in terms of style (which of course makes such obvious sense I feel dumb writing that statement), although much less psychologically concerned.
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Jun 20, 2010 06:43
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Mustang posted:I'm about to finish a British Literature class and the text book has books 1,2,9, and 12 of Paradise Lost. I'd like to read the whole thing but what I liked about the text book was all the footnotes at the bottom of every page explaining references to the bible and such. Anyone know of a copy of Paradise Lost like this? For Paradise lost, the version you'll want is the Norton Critical Edition, which has extensive footnotes, and then in the back it also comes with "contextual" writings, like selections from the Bible, contemporary theology, and other writings by Milton; and a number of critical essays. And the New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha is very, very good, and cheap as hell for what it is. As far as I know, it's pretty much the authoritative scholarly work for folks who perhaps don't know Greek and Hebrew.
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Jun 23, 2010 18:57
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sc0tty posted:Going to quote this again, as I have a simliliar request. My girlfriend loves the Twilights series and is totally wrapped-up in the romantic side of the storyline. Could anyone recommend a book(s) that is actually written decently that might appeal to someone like this? Sci-fi or Vampire themes are a bonus, but not required. I know gently caress all about Twilight or it's chastity-peddling poo poo, but if she loves that, Meyers just steals every plot she's ever done from an endless number of domestic and gothic novels from the beginning of the 19th-century. If your gf hasn't read much Jane Austen, just have her read those. But Twilight's sentiment and dialogue are so cloying and poor that it's better if you just say, "I don't know," so that she doesn't have anywhere to look. As for vampire sex, the best one is gonna be Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla," it's lesbian vampire horror erotica. Vernon Lee does great supernatural erotica as well (see her "Hauntings"), as does Elizabeth Bowen in "Demon Lover." None of these are really modern because everything produced nowadays is complete trash by 19th-century chaste vampire erotica standards. (Ahahaha that's a sentence I never thought I'd write.)
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Jul 1, 2010 06:18
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delicious beef posted:Can anyone recommend me good accounts of drug use (real or imaginary) in fiction? Preferably hallucinogens, but anything interesting and well written. Have you read Naked Lunch? That's usually the go-to book. And there's always Confessions of an Opium Eater. Which I actually need to read ...
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Jul 8, 2010 00:24
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barkingclam posted:Can anybody recommend a good anthology of English (or American) literature for a non-student? I've been reading my sisters Norton and Longman anthologies while she's home for the summer and really been enjoying them. But they're both a little too textbook-ish and expensive for me to go out and buy myself. Is there anything like this meant for more general reading? What is your price range? I mean, for the amount of material you'll be getting in a great "student" anthology, you would spend a ton more on just a fraction of the material if you were to buy it separately, say through Amazon, or even a local used bookstore (that's all assuming you don't want to read online, or don't have a Kindle with easy access). Plus, the editors have given you stuff that's incredibly worthwhile already, so it helps gear you towards finding new material that isn't trash. And you've already said that you "really enjoy them" ... There are the Oxford Books of Prose and Oxford Books of Verse series that collect literature under general (ex. English verse) and niche (ex. English ghost stories) themes, which makes them more accessible, I suppose, since you know more of what you're getting. The best general poetry collection available (imho) is the full Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry, and it's unique in collecting the poems under "themes," like Nature, Love, Animals in poetry, etc., rather than chronologically, and I guess in that sense is closer to a popular anthology without losing the benefits (intro essays, context, criticism, selection) of a proper student anthology. There's also a Wadsworth collection of drama, but that's necessarily a less-comprehensive selection. The Wadsworth collections can be bought for around 30 bucks each, used. The Oxford Books are cheaper. Also, you can get a 3000-page single-volume used Norton English Lit Anthology for 40 bucks on Amazon. Considering the small size of the text, that's 300 hours of entertainment, a full year's worth of reading if you wanted. For less than the price of a video game, or for about the same amount as a nice dinner, or 8 hours in a movie theater. Or you can get the full, 2-volume, 6000-page version, for about 80 bucks. They really aren't that expensive considering.
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Jul 27, 2010 00:02
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CaptainScraps posted:The Beautiful and Damned is wholly mediocre, stay away from that one. Naw, they're all really good, it's just that they're all also really overrated, Gatsby most of all. The nice thing about Fitzgerald is you can knock his entire oeuvre out in less than a month and get him out of your system.
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Aug 4, 2010 08:57
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Magnetic North posted:I am looking for advice as for what books to read to shore up my literacy a bit. I'm looking for somewhat philosophical works, but preferably novels since I want this to be a leisure activity. Nothing too academic or dry though I can manage that, but also nothing too postmodern and intentionally obfuscating weak ideas with inanity. That drives me crazy. If you're not afraid of super-long novels, I'd recommend The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil, a fantastic Austrian novel of ideas. It's superficially about the crumbling Austrian aristocracy and Astro-Hungarian monarchy, but that's mostly an excuse for the characters to have discussions about political change and its spiritual effects on the mind and society. Often these discussions are highly ironized, and if you pick up on that, then what might seem dry is actually intensely witty and funny. That's the main tone of the book, and why it's so great, imho. There's also Bouvard and Pecuchet, Flaubert's unfinished novel about two copiers who try to amass knowledge of everything in society but never seem to be able to (or you could read Flaubert's other, more famous, novels, Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education). The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne is wickedly funny, but perhaps you might think it is too "post-modern" or obfuscatory even though it was written in the mid-1700s. J-K Huysmans' A Rebours is a novel about nothing where the main character just talks about flowers and monks and art and whatnot the whole time in intense detail, usually in discrete chapters, and its absolutely beautiful in terms of its language, but may be too dry for you as well. There's also the standard Point Counter Point, another novel of ideas, and Brave New World, which I think is terrible satire and hyperbolic, but I'm not exactly in the majority opinion on that one, by Aldous Huxley. I also tend to think of both Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence as emotionally philosophical, if that makes sense, since they wrap up society, being, and pure human sentiment and emotion almost better than anyone.
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Aug 9, 2010 08:33
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appropriatemetaphor posted:What are some good, and not too scholarly, books about the history of Communism? I don't really know much about the differences between Marx, Lenin, and all those dudes. Stuff about socialism is okay too. Leslie Holmes's Communism: A Very Short Introduction is probably the best thing for you, since it's written by an expert in the field and covers a wide range of material in discrete sections. The "further reading" in the back will also be invaluable. It's probably the most unbiased beginning source you'll get, considering the subject. A lot of "histories of Communism" tend to mix theory, people, and political policy up rather indiscriminately, so it can be very tough going for someone new to it, especially if they don't know in particular what sorts of subjects relating to Communism/Socialism/Marxism they want to get into (for example, history of theory in general, within specific nations, political policy, "horrors of communism" type stuff, communism and capitalism, Marxism and the humanities/social sciences, etc etc.). If you just want to read up on Marxism in general, marxists.org is a great resource.
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Aug 13, 2010 15:13
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Prof_Beatnuts posted:Hi there, just got finished with a couple of books: Jude the obscure, Blood Meridian and American Psycho and now I want to read a truly depressing book, something that makes you feel like poo poo. I've been searching around on Google for a list of depressing books but I either find very feminine stuff, or stuff for children. Just finish what you started with Hardy and read the rest of him.
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Aug 26, 2010 05:13
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Red Haired Menace posted:im trying to decide whether to read some Lawrence or Hardy (I've already read Sons and Lovers and Jude), which one/which book should I go with? Since you've already read Hardy's best one, I figure you might want to read Lawrence's best, Lady Chatterley's Lover. And really, those are the only two "essential" D. H. Lawrence books (unless you consider Rainbow and Women in Love essential), while Hardy has at least four. Lawrence's short stories are really good as well. You should also check out both their poetry, particularly Hardy, whose poetry is very different in tone from his novels. But I mean, in a way you're asking, "Who's the better read, Shakespeare or Milton?" and the answer is always, "Just read both."
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Aug 26, 2010 17:10
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crime fighting hog posted:but mostly an rear end in a top hat main character in a dirty, broken world? I particularly liked Jim Davis' Garfield.
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Sep 5, 2010 00:51
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petewhitley posted:If you can get past (or enjoy) the Machiavellian aspects of it, Robert Greene's The Art of Seduction is a pretty good study of this. It's mainly a series of examples from history/literature, and borrows heavily from Casanova's memoirs among other sources. No. No it isn't. It isn't a "focus on ... human emotion/connection" at all. To suggest otherwise is absurd. It's a book written by a failed Hollywood screenwriter, and written with the interests of marketing over art. It's a terrible, trashy, disgusting book, just like all of Greene's books are, promoted by a con-man and dressed up in the pseudo-intellectual style of con-men. There are absolutely no reasons to read any of his books. Not because they are amoral, but because they are stupid and made for autists. And to compare him to Machiavelli is to Machiavelli a great disservice if you knew anything about Machiavelli.
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Sep 6, 2010 19:05
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petewhitley posted:
You have no sense of quality or value. And I meant that Machiavelli was a great, thoughtful thinker, although I know what you meant. And I don't consider Greene's book Machiavellian in any sense of the term - it is not intelligent enough for that. Now, perhaps Greene himself is Machiavellian, seeing how he has pulled the wool over your eyes and vast numbers of others ....
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Sep 7, 2010 02:44
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CheerGrrl92 posted:2) A book on conversation. I just have a hard time meeting random people that arent friends of friends because I can't do smalltalk any better than the average person so naturally I sound like an average person. Any suggestions? I would suggest cultivating your innermost being first. May I suggest Plato?
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Sep 8, 2010 04:33
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