[dohminator]

Brave new world
To Kill a mockingbird
Plato's republic
Nichomacean Ethics (Aristotle)
Kant's Metaphysics (ok, not so much for the enjoyment, but if you study it closely his thoughts are pretty damn good)

Stefen Zwieg - World of Yesterday (pretty damn good book that covers pre wwI austria throught ww1 and up to ww2 from the perspective of the author)

 

[cpw]

I went to a high school w/ a mandatory 2 yr Humanities program. We read the classics. I didn't enjoy it much at the time but read most again in college (7 yrs studying lit.) and really enjoyed Plato, Aristotle and lyric poetry (Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, Coleridge).
As for novels, Catcher in the Rye, Huck Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Crying of Lot 49 are all books I read at that time and have read several times since.
CPW
PS Does chronic misspelling online scare anyone else as much as it scares me? Makes me wonder if people read much at all anymore.

 

[Bill Ward]

By CPW
Quote:

PS Does chronic misspelling online scare anyone else as much as it scares me? Makes me wonder if people read much at all anymore.

Things fall apart.
The center cannot hold.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . .

Misspelling is often the product of haste. More frightening is the proliferation of barbarisms, the email telegraph code that steamrollers everything in pursuit of "economy." If u no wat I mean?

BW

 

[cpw]

Quote:

Originally posted by Bill Ward By CPW Misspelling is often the product of haste. BW

You can tell the ones caused by haste. Those repeated several times in the same post leave little doubt.
CPW

 

[rsaavedra]

Quote:

Originally posted by Bill Ward Misspelling is often the product of haste.

Haste + also English not being the native language of the writer, as in my case

Also, knowing that the edit function is available, I almost always post without checking anything, once submitted I read the posting and then correct. Could do that in the "preview", but most times I want to see my posting right away on the thread.

 

[cpw]

I certainly don't mean to put anybody down, especially non-native speakers. I speak 3 languages fluently but don't write as well in any of them as I do in English. I wasn't trying to be pedantic or come off as some sort of snob. The thread just happened to be about reading and my theory is that spelling is getting worse because people don't read as much as they used to. That's all I was getting at.
CPW

 

[dohminator]

Quote:

Originally posted by cpw I certainly don't mean to put anybody down, especially non-native speakers. I speak 3 languages fluently but don't write as well in any of them as I do in English. I wasn't trying to be pedantic or come off as some sort of snob. The thread just happened to be about reading and my theory is that spelling is getting worse because people don't read as much as they used to. That's all I was getting at. CPW

I'm not a very good speller a lot of times. It doesn't have to do with not reading a lot. It has always been kind of a weakness in me. My reading comprehension has always been spectacular, but I always did mediocre on tests of my English use skills.

So in summary, I'm a good reader but bad writer.

 

[BANGPOD]

Head-Fi'ers --

1. The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas
2. All Quiet on The Western Front, Remarque
3. The Old Man and The Sea, Hemingway

My three favorites with genre no object.

Scott

 

[Demolition]

It sort of dawned on me that this thread is referring to things that we read while we were in school (however long ago that might have been). For some reason, I thought this thread was geared towards people who were presently attending school.

Well, in that case... I read a lot of classic literature and philosophy texts while in university, but three stand out in my mind:

"The New Image Of The Person" - Peter Koestenbaum
"Myths To Live By" - Joseph Conrad
"The Divided Self" - R.D. Laing

D.

 

[ricola_pak]

Had to read James Joyce's THE DUBLINERS cos I was in the IB program.

Loved it.

 

[stuartr]

Well, the best class I have ever taken was by my professor Sergei Davydov -- an expert on Nabokov and Pushkin. This particular course was solely on Nabokov. We read a bunch of short stories, The real life of sebastian knight; pnin; invitation to a beheading; despair; pale fire; lolita; speak, memory; the defense and the Gift. Though I love them all, Invitation to a Beheading is my favorite novel of all time -- it is so funny. I am a short story person though, and when I first went to Russia, I was madly in an unrequited love and reading his short stories, using them as a refuge. On every page I would find a reference to describe the object of my affections -- a description of the shade of her hair, a turn of phrase she used, a shared feeling that a protagonist had for a lover. In any case, it will always hold a special place for me. Beyond that, most of the works I really love I read on my own -- all the Salinger, Maughm, Marquez...
I did read Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark" in high-school, which I still really love.

 

[Czilla9000]

I hate to say this.......but their have not been any compulsatory books that I have had to read that I have enjoyed. I go to a private school, if that makes a difference.



However, I do very much like English. I like debating the author's ideas, though usually I strongly dislike the authors ideas.

The worst book I have had to read is "Native Son" by Richard Wright. A black man kills two innocent women and it is society's fault

.

 

[stuartr]

Forgive me if this sounds strange, but I don't really like literature with a lot of ideas. I prefer artistry in the writing and a well-crafted story to sweeping ideas. I think for this reason I never really got into Dostoevsky (though I like Notes from Underground) and Tolstoy as much as I liked Nabokov, Bulgakov or Pushkin (just to name the Russians)...I find social critique in literature is usually really boring...I don't want the author to be out to do anything more than entertain me and him/herself. If some ideas slip in, so be it, as long as they don't hinder the artistry or bog down the storyline. Cherneshevksy would be the perfect example of something that is just far far too boring to actually sit down and read since it is so sodden with ideas.

 

[cpw]

Interesting. As a historian, one would expect you to lean toward the marxist side of lit crit. Historians are typically more interested in the material conditions from which texts emerge. They like to look at how socio-economic forces shape the text. Obviously, this is a generalization.
History was never my strong point and I always prefered more experimental and playful texts where the language itself was the true subject.
CPW

 

[hempcamp]

Quote:

Originally posted by stuartr Forgive me if this sounds strange, but I don't really like literature with a lot of ideas. I prefer artistry in the writing and a well-crafted story to sweeping ideas. I think for this reason I never really got into Dostoevsky (though I like Notes from Underground) and Tolstoy as much as I liked Nabokov, Bulgakov or Pushkin (just to name the Russians)...

I completely see where you are coming from. Dostoevsky should have been a philosopher, not a novelist. No matter how good the translation (my Russian isn't good enough to read the original), Dostoevsky's artistic ability always seems to be obscured by the depth of his writing. Don't get me wrong, I love Dostoevsky, particularly The Idiot and Brothers Karamazov, but definitely not for his literary style.

I've always found Tolstoy to be a bit more likeable artistically, but I think War and Peace gets more literary credit than it deserves simply because it was such a massive undertaking. Anna Karenina is very enjoyable though.

For sheer reading pleasure, I much prefer Bulgakov's Master & Margarita, Platonov's Foundation Pit, Gogol & Turgenev stories, Kharms, Zamyatin, et al. Russians writers have mastered the ironic and the absurd better than any others in the world except perhaps for Mark Twain, Rushdie, and some obscure French dramatists like Alfred Jarry.

--Chris