Posted on 03/09/2007 11:22:35 PM PST by Blind Eye Jones
The Island of the Day Before by Eco.
I'll also nominate "Moby Dick," simply for the chapter on the whiteness of the whale. It was very white, we get it already!
Anything by William S. Burroughs.
The Silmarillion --- by J.R.R. Tolkien
I'd add The Mysterious Stranger, in fact most of Sam Clemens' later fiction which bordered on science fiction.
Aesthetics by Benedetto Croce.
hehehe...i was going to say the soft machine / nova express / wild boys trilogy ...
To: Allegra
Anything by Virginia Woolf.
Anything by Tom Wolfe.
Afraid of Anything By Virginia Wolfe
I made it about half-way through this, until I realized it just wasn't going to get any better. I thought my dad had given it to me, and since he's the most well-read person on, like, the entire planet, I figured it must be worthwhile. A few years ago, I asked him why he gave it to me, and he said he never would have given me, much less actually recommended, anything by Eco.
I read snippets ofIn Search of Lost Time periodically, but so many more interesting books have prevented me from finishing it.
The price was right. CANCER WARD by Solzhenitsyn is my all time favorite novel. I've learned that the American translator took liberties and it is probably an easy read in English for an American than in Russian for a Russian.
Stevens' book on Unix TCP/IP is pretty good.
You can only read such Biblical books by the Power of the Holy Ghost, elsewise you are on the outside looking in!
Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" is excellent. "Gravity's Rainbow" made me feel like a dummy a lot of the time, took a while to finish, but I enjoyed it. I might even get most of the subplots on a re-reading.
Classic Lit: As I lay Dying by William Faulkner - bleh!
Most British poetry - oops - not a book
Revelation has generated a lot of books by various Biblical scholars. I read one out of curiosity to see how other people were interpreting it.
The conclusion I came to is pretty much what I stated above. It is meant to be difficult to decipher, but there are also several passages that are very clear.
Anything by Keynes
I liked that one, though Lord of the Rings is definitely better.
"I gave Kant's Critique of Pure Reason a shot. It was totally impenetrable."
Hard to understand, but a model of clarity compared to Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind (or Heidegger's Being and Time).
Man am I with you guys on this one. You can call "Gravity's Rainbow" indulgent, you can call it turgid, you can call it anything you want, but bottom line is that it is sheer torture to read. It is PUNISHMENT.
Also, anything by Soren Kierkegaard. Take this short but ever so typical example from "The Sickness unto Death": "The self is a self which relates itself to itself or is a relation relating itself to itself in the relation."
Say, what?
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