Post: #1

For a more thorough breakdown, read my post on my blog about the why and what I'm doing.

http://notesfrombeyond.com/self-developm...ssic-books

To summarize, I'm setting out to become better-read, starting with the classics.

I'm using a book list from The Well-Educated Mind. We'll try to read at a similar pace and then meet up on Skype to discuss what we've read about in order to bring the ideas alive a bit more.

A couple things.

This isn't a reading group. I'm just looking for one or two people who are interested in doing the same thing, and I think an overcrowded discussion will defeat my purposes.

You're welcome to do a group conversation here, but I believe there's already a book club on the forum if you want that sort of thing. Alternatively, you can drop a post here or in the comments on my article to try to find a partner yourself if you find the endeavor worthy.

Second, I don't want to have all these book discussions with someone who looks at everything through the lens of gender dynamics. Those conversations have their place and we can discuss it sometimes, but if "red pill" is a part of your everyday vocabulary, we may not be the most productive pair.

I'm looking to discuss the material on a broader level and based on its own terms.

Anyone in?

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you'll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." - Rudyard Kipling

Post: #2

What do you mean by "classics" BB?

Post: #3

This is the book list I pulled from somebody's blog. *** marks books they already finished; just disregard them.

Some of these selections are questionable. I know you don't want to examine them from the lens of gender relations, but some of them will force you to do just that--like The Feminine Mystique, which is stated on Amazon as responsible for sparking 2nd wave feminism. In my opinion (for what it's worth), you'd be better off substituting stuff like that for another Dostoevsky novel, Greek tragedy, some Sherlock Holmes, or some of William James' stories.

As it happens, I just started reading The Epic of Gilgamesh today, but I can't see myself reading The Feminine Mystique or Mein Kampf.

Edit: I've read the titles in bold.

Fiction:
Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes ***
The Pilgrim's Progress -John Bunyan
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen ***
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens ***
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte ***
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby Dick - Herman Melville ***
Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ***
The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain ***
The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad ***
The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton ***
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald ***
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Wolfe
The Trial - Franz Kafka
Native Son - Richard Wright
The Stranger - Albert Camus
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Seize the Day - Saul Bellow
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ***
If on a winter's night a traveler - Italo Calvino ***
Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison ***
White Noise - Don DeLillo ***
Possession - A.S. Byatt

Autobiography
Augustine - The Confessions
Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe
Michele De Montaigne - Essays
Teresa Of Avila - The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself
Rene Descartes - Meditations
John Bunyan - Grace Abounding in the Chief of Sinners
Mary Rowlandson - The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration
Jean Jacques Rousseau - Confessions
Benjamin Franklin - The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Henry David Thoreau - Walden
Harriet Jacobs - Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
Frederick Douglass - Life and Times of Frederick Douglas
Booker T. Washington - Up from Slavery
Friedrich Nietzsche - Ecce Homo
Adolf Hitler - Mein Kampf
Mohandas Gandhi - An Autobiography: The Story of my Experiments with Truth
Gertrude Stein - Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Thomas Merton - Seven Storey Mountain ***
C.S. Lewis - Surprised by Joy: the Shape of my Early Life
Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X
May Sarton - Journal of a Solitude
Aleskandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago
Charles W. Colson - Born Again
Richard Rodriquez - Hunger of Memory: Education of Richard Rodriquez
Jill Ker Conway - The Road from Coorain
Elie Wiesel - All Rivers Run to the Sea

History/Politics
Herodotus - The Histories
Thucydides - The Peloponnesian War
Plato - The Republic ***
Plutarch - Lives
Augustine - The City of God
Bede - The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince
Sir Thomas More - Utopia
John Locke - The True End of Civil Government
David Hume - The History of England, Volume V
Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract
Thomas Paine - Common Sense
Edward Gibbon - The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Mary Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Alexis De Tocqueville - Democracy in America
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - Communist Manifesto
Jacob Burckhardt - Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
W.E.B. Du Bois - The Souls of Black Folk
Max Weber - The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism
Lytton Strachey - Queen Victoria
George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier
Perry Miller - The New England Mind
John Kenneth Galbraith - The Great Crash
Cornelius Ryan - The Longest Day
Betty Friedan - The Feminine Mystique
Eugene D. Genovese - Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
Barbara Tuchman - A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein - All the President's Men
James McPherson - Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich - A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard
Francis Fukuyama - End of History and the last Man

Drama
Aeschylus - Agamemnon
Sophocles - Oedipus the King
Euripides - Medea
Aristophanes - The Birds
Aristotle - Poetics ***
Everyman (14th Century)
Christopher Marlowe - Doctor Faustus
William Shakespeare - Richard III
William Shakespeare - A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare - Hamlet
Moliere - Tartuffe
William Congreve - The Way of the World
Oliver Goldsmith - She Stoops to Conquer
Richard Brinsley Sheridan - The School for Scandal
Henrik Ibsen - A Doll's House
Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Ernest
Anton Chekhov - The Cherry Orchard
George Bernard Shaw - Saint Joan
T.S. Eliot - Murder in the Cathedral
Thornton Wilder - Our Town
Eugene O'Neill - Long Day's Journey into Night
Jean Paul Sartre - No Exit
Tennessee Williams - A Streetcar Named Desire ***
Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman
Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot ***
Robert Bolt - A Man for All Seasons
Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Peter Shaffer - Equus

Poetry
The Epic of Gilgamesh ***
Homer - The Iliad and the Odyssey
Greek Lyricists
Horace - The Odes
Beowolf
Dante Alighieri - Inferno ***
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ***
Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales
William Shakespeare - Sonnets
John Donne
King James Bible - Psalms ***
John Milton - Paradise Lost
William Blake - Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Williams Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
John Keats
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson ***
Christina Rossetti
Gerald Manley Hopkins
William Butler Yeats
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Robert Frost ***
Carl Sandburg
William Carlos Williams
Ezra Pounds
T.S. Eliot
Langston Hughes
W.H. Auden

Post: #4

Yep, that's the list.

I think actually reading her book is very important, though. It's about learning a specific system for reading and educating yourself through literature.

Personally, I would find it fascinating to read those two books you mentioned skipping, especially Mein Kamp. I'm looking forward to that one. It can be a challenge to read ideas you don't agree with but it teaches you a lot. And that book specifically is a fascinating piece of history.

Most people make the mistake of assuming that people that don't share their own views don't have anything meaningful to say or are so misguided as to be stupid or crazy; realizing that most things can be well-rationalized has been one of my greatest lessons in life.

It's at least helpful to understand why people think the things they do. And an interesting peek into the human mind, if not a downright disturbing one at times.

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you'll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." - Rudyard Kipling

Post: #5

You're absolutely right, but my reasons for not wanting to read Mein Kampf are mostly because many reviews say that the prose is just incoherent rambling. If it was a legitimate outline on the tenets of Fascism/National Socialism, I would read it. Just the same as I genuinely want to read the entire Bible and Koran and the Communist Manifesto. Apparently Hitler was just a shitty writer. I might give some of the feminist books a shot, but they're wayyyy down at the bottom of my list. What book do you plan on starting with? Is there leeway or a strict order you have to follow?

By the way, The Importance of Being Ernest is really a brilliant play. If you haven't read it already, I think you'll really enjoy it.

Post: #6

I'm here for you man just let me know what to do next.

Post: #7

Not sure why there isn't any Hemingway books on that listthat you found, especially "the old man and the sea."

Emerson's essays should also be on there.

If I wasn't spending all my spare time learning Spanish, I would join you on this venture, for sure. It sounds enlightening.

Post: #8

I'd definitely be down for this. I'm interested in reading and studying a lot of those books anyway, and would like to have a partner to discuss them with.

Post: #9

Chekhov and Bulgakov should be on that list

Post: #10

(03-31-2015 09:29 AM)Sweet Pea Wrote:  You're absolutely right, but my reasons for not wanting to read Mein Kampf are mostly because many reviews say that the prose is just incoherent rambling. If it was a legitimate outline on the tenets of Fascism/National Socialism, I would read it. Just the same as I genuinely want to read the entire Bible and Koran and the Communist Manifesto. Apparently Hitler was just a shitty writer.

Part of educating yourself is gathering enough first-hand data to make your own judgements. Obviously, people hate Hitler and like to say that he's a terrible writer. Just like those who oppose Roosh will call a clearly-structured post by him a "rant". I've dipped into the online text of Mein Kampf and found small sections quite readable, although it may well be that the overall book is repetitive or has other flaws.

If nothing else, it was fascinating to read about the young Hitler wandering the streets of Vienna - the city where Freud, Mahler were working at that moment, and the young Stalin was working as a kitchen hand - and read of Hitler's gradual awareness of the Orthodox Jews he saw walking around in their distinctive garments, and his growing hatred. It's fascinating to realise that for a moment or two he can make this hatred seem quite reasonable. That is a learning experience.

Post: #11

(03-31-2015 10:29 PM)RawGod Wrote:  

(03-31-2015 09:29 AM)Sweet Pea Wrote:  You're absolutely right, but my reasons for not wanting to read Mein Kampf are mostly because many reviews say that the prose is just incoherent rambling. If it was a legitimate outline on the tenets of Fascism/National Socialism, I would read it. Just the same as I genuinely want to read the entire Bible and Koran and the Communist Manifesto. Apparently Hitler was just a shitty writer.

Part of educating yourself is gathering enough first-hand data to make your own judgements. Obviously, people hate Hitler and like to say that he's a terrible writer. Just like those who oppose Roosh will call a clearly-structured post by him a "rant". I've dipped into the online text of Mein Kampf and found small sections quite readable, although it may well be that the overall book is repetitive or has other flaws.

If nothing else, it was fascinating to read about the young Hitler wandering the streets of Vienna - the city where Freud, Mahler were working at that moment, and the young Stalin was working as a kitchen hand - and read of Hitler's gradual awareness of the Orthodox Jews he saw walking around in their distinctive garments, and his growing hatred. It's fascinating to realise that for a moment or two he can make this hatred seem quite reasonable. That is a learning experience.

Another reason Mein Kampf is worth studying - genocide has been a part of the human story since anyone started to write our story.

As history goes, Hitler was a horrible human, but when lined up against other mass murderers in history he is probably about average, on par with Stalin or Idi Amin in this century (but nowhere close to Vlad the Impaler or King Leopold).

Unique among all mass murderers, however - Hitler wrote a book. So it is our one look into the mind of someone who would (and could) do this type of thing. And that is what makes it worth studying.


Good luck with the classics BB! Someday I want to get around to doing this, I HATE that my memory of Gatsby is through the eyes of a bratty teen boy who didn't want to be doing homework.

Post: #12

I don't understand you guys saying particular texts should be on the list. If you haven't read the book they cane from how can you know the purpose or criteria or whether it's even meant to be a complete list?

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you'll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." - Rudyard Kipling

Post: #13

(03-31-2015 09:29 AM)Sweet Pea Wrote:  You're absolutely right, but my reasons for not wanting to read Mein Kampf are mostly because many reviews say that the prose is just incoherent rambling. If it was a legitimate outline on the tenets of Fascism/National Socialism, I would read it. Just the same as I genuinely want to read the entire Bible and Koran and the Communist Manifesto. Apparently Hitler was just a shitty writer. I might give some of the feminist books a shot, but they're wayyyy down at the bottom of my list. What book do you plan on starting with? Is there leeway or a strict order you have to follow?

By the way, The Importance of Being Ernest is really a brilliant play. If you haven't read it already, I think you'll really enjoy it.

Yeah, there's a specific order and approach.

(03-31-2015 03:31 PM)Cyr Wrote:  I'd definitely be down for this. I'm interested in reading and studying a lot of those books anyway, and would like to have a partner to discuss them with.

I've got someone on board but can manage another. I think the varied viewpoints would be interesting. Message me.

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you'll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." - Rudyard Kipling

Post: #14

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you'll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." - Rudyard Kipling

Post: #15

I met Jeffrey Brenzel once. Dude gave a no bullshit talk about academia and the reality for students and professors at Ivy League schools (he was the former Dean of Admissions at Yale).

I'd like to join in if there is still space.