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If there is one book you would persuade others to read, which would it be?

4K views 90 replies 51 participants last post by  Echoes 
#1 · (Edited)
Pretty difficult I'd say.

I would have to say it's a tie between Noam Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance" and Michael Shermer's "The Science of Good and Evil".

Which book would you force (if such thing could be done) others to read?
 
#46 ·
Re: If there is one book you would force others to read, which would it be?

L'étranger (The Stranger) - Albert Camus.

A must-read in my opinion. Camus wrote the most outstanding novel about absurdity.
 
#47 ·
Re: If there is one book you would force others to read, which would it be?

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

Huxley was a pure genius. He was right, Orwell was wrong.

wiki: On 21 October 1949, Huxley wrote to George Orwell, author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, congratulating him on "how fine and how profoundly important the book is". In his letter to Orwell, he predicted:

Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience


Wiki: Social critic Neil Postman contrasts the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.


and this must go with this:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

....

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.




We are lucky, we still live in a world where we can see things with our own eyes, although it's becoming increasingly difficult. Take the Gaddafi story for instance. Our grandchildren will not have this option, people will suffer less, they will even be much happier, but also much duller. Less suffering and less character, less variegated world. This is the future and people will embrace it wholeheartedly. We will love that new form of slavery. Cheers! :)
 
#54 ·
Re: If there is one book you would force others to read, which would it be?

The Cleveland Amory Cat series (The Cat Who Came for Christmas, The Cat and the Curmudgeon and The Best Cat Ever)

The Perfect Mile, by Neal Bascomb

Strokes of Genius, about Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal and the 2008 Wimbledon final
 
#58 ·
Re: If there is one book you would force others to read, which would it be?

For something a little hard hitting: Disgrace

For something un-put-downable: The shining

For something with a challenging context: Surfacing

But of course, it'd just be easier to forget books and sleep.
 
#60 ·
Re: If there is one book you would force others to read, which would it be?

hah reading some of the replies here it's funny i had a teacher that forced me and the rest of the class to read

1984
of mice and men
the great Gatsby

and a few other classic. All great!

I suggest "The Idiot" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (or how you like to spell the russian author)
 
#61 ·
Re: If there is one book you would force others to read, which would it be?

1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (though I suspect it loses much of its appeal during the translation process)
The Lüneburg Variation by Paolo Maurensig
I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
 
#64 ·
Re: If there is one book you would force others to read, which would it be?

I don't know about "force", but I would try to "persuade" Christians to read the Koran and Muslims to read the Bible.
I find them to be very good literary works as well.

I especially like the part of the Bible where some guys call a prophet "baldhead" and he invokes some bears that devour 42 of them.
 
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#63 · (Edited)
Re: If there is one book you would force others to read, which would it be?

Not very original but yeah Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World are masterpieces. Which can very much be compared, besides.


La France contre les robots by Georges Bernanos (not sure there is an English version though). Les grands cimetières sous la lune (The Great Cemetaries under the Moon) has been translated, I think. And interesting to compare with Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene.
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Impasse Adam Smith by Jean-Claude Michéa
The English : Portrait of a People by Paxman

Books I just ... recommend lol.

Edit: oh and how could I forget about Balzac's Lost Illusions and Dickens huh well everything ...
 
#68 ·
Re: If there is one book you would force others to read, which would it be?

Animals in Translation and Animals Make Us Human, by Temple Grandin, animal scientist who overcame autism. She talks about the benefits of pets and animals not just for those with autism, but for everyone. These books integrate two of my topics of interest.
 
#69 ·
Re: If there is one book you would force others to read, which would it be?

The collected signatures of tennizen-vol 1.
 
#70 ·
Re: If there is one book you would force others to read, which would it be?

The collected signatures of tennizen-vol 1.
I have saved every signature you have ever created and used them at parties to voice my social dominance and pick up chicks.
 
#73 · (Edited)
Another vote for "1984".

"Letters to a Young Contrarian" by Christopher Hitchens is quite good, this is before he transformed himself into an unbearable neo-con.

At least some parts of Robert Fisk's mammoth but amazing book "The Great War for Civilization".
 
#86 ·
"Letters to a Young Contrarian" by Christopher Hitchens is quite good, this is before he transformed himself into an unbearable neo-con.

How can you believe in "transforming". Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde in a way. I think the support for the War in Iraq perfectly fits in his doctrine. He always already believed in this war.



On another note I agree with Shiaben. If I compare Huxley to Orwell, I think the former's novel is much closer to present-day society than the latter, which is logical since Orwell's novel was not meant to be anticipating.
 
#75 ·
Say what you want about Hitchens, but he's not a neo-con.

Now that you mention him, another vote for "The God Delusion" and "The Greatest Show On Earth" by Richard Dawkins and "The Moral Landscape" by Sam Harris.
 
#76 ·
Well, you are right that he is very hard to define as of now.

He labels himself as "anti-totalitarian", but at the time of the Iraq war, he did not mind the neo-con label which he later dismissed.

You liked "The God Delusion?" I mean, did you find it to be persuasive?

I thought it was OK, even better than Hitchen's own "God is not Great".

Though, I must say all these new Atheists are too militant for me in there views on religion, however there scientific work is quite good (Dawkins and Harris).

I quite liked "The Blind Watchmaker" by Dawkins.
 
#77 ·
I find The God Delusion a tad too science-oriented, but brilliant and yes, very persuasive. I find Hitchens a bit overrated though.

Why do you think they are too militant? Though that's going a bit off-topic.
 
#78 · (Edited)
Well these are some of the books that have been most important to me.

Philosophy: Plato's Parmenides, Aristotle's Nicomachaean Ethics, Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Nietzsche's Beyond Good & Evil.

Poetry: Homer's Iliad, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Donne's Songs & Sonets, Pope's Dunciad, Blake's Songs of Innocence & Experience, T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.

Fiction: Cervantes's Don Quixote, Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Dostoyevsky's Crime & Punishment, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Joyce's Ulysses.

Short Fiction: Boccaccio's Decameron, Gogol's Petersburg Tales, Poe's Tales of Mystery & Imagination, Maupassant, Chekhov, Borges's El Aleph.

Drama: Sophocles's Antigone, Aristophanes's Lysistrata, Shakespeare's King Lear & Macbeth, Ibsen's The Wild Duck, Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? .

Other: Tacitus's Annals of Imperial Rome, Montaigne's Essais, Dr Johnson's The Rambler, Gibbon's Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams.
 
#81 ·
Glad to see people mentioning Dawkins. "Atheists for Jesus" - I like that. :worship:
Yes, The God Delusion is awesome, but his The Selfish Gene is even better imho.

As for a lighter touch - Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
 
#83 ·
Jean Jacques Rousseau: Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men)
 
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