/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14559101]

What few books are actually really essential that you need to have read them in your life?

[Anonymous No.14559106]

>>14559101
Bible

[Anonymous No.14559132]

>>14559101
>The Bible
>Heraclitus
>Plato and the Neoplatonists
>Augustine
>maybe some stoics
>Ovid
>Beowulf
>Nibelungenlied
>Dante
>Montaigne
>Shakespeare
>Kant
>*various German Idealists if you like*
>Schopenhauer
>Goethe
>Schiller
>Wagner
>Heidegger
>Codreanu(necessary)
>Hitler

Really the essentials anon, but no belief can replace action, and vice versa. No book can really give you experience.

[Anonymous No.14559135]

>>14559132
>no belief can replace action, and vice versa. No book can really give you experience.
So reading is ultimately pointless?

[Anonymous No.14559145]

>>14559135
If all you do is sit in your basement and read, then yes.

[Anonymous No.14559151]

>>14559135
Vice versa anon, no action can replace belief. Being an extrovert myself I would not be content in simply harbouring knowledge like a scholar, but doing. We always take share in both however, and that is expressed in the various complexities of the individual.

In a simple way, this>>14559145

[Anonymous No.14559157]

Zhuangzi

[Anonymous No.14559159]

Marx's Capital is pretty much all you'll ever need. If you're curious beyond that then stretch out into Marxist-Leninist theory and praxis.

[Anonymous No.14559166]

>>14559132
>Codreanu
Kill yourself

[Anonymous No.14559168]

>>14559101
>few books
ngmi
for starters opensyllabus.org

[Anonymous No.14559172]

>>14559101
Upanisad

[Anonymous No.14559179]

>>14559151
I read books to reach a critical mass and then it'll manifest into idea or a vision which will serve as a foundation for an movement.
Doing action just for the same of doing action is ultimately pointlessm

[Anonymous No.14559189]

>>14559159
shit bait

[Anonymous No.14559265]

>>14559166
Why so angry? He's a good read.

[Anonymous No.14559267]

>>14559179
>Doing action just for the same of doing action is ultimately pointless
As pointless as belief for belief.

[Anonymous No.14559280]

>>14559168
That's a good link thank you

[Anonymous No.14559310]

>>14559265
For shilling your retarded favorite writers in an otherwise legit list. It's like introducing an ad in any content. kill yourself subhuman

[Anonymous No.14559388]

>>14559267
True. Im not opting for scholar path but merging action and belief is something im struggling on.

[Anonymous No.14559397]

>>14559101
>essential
good DIY manual
personal investing guide
decent cookbook
atlas

[Anonymous No.14559453]

>>14559310
cope & that isn't why you said kys

[Anonymous No.14559508]

>>14559397
>good DIY manual
must be hard not having a dad lol
>personal investing guide
if you can't pay an investor to do the job, you'll always be poor
>decent cookbook
get a wife
>atlas
is this bait ?

[Anonymous No.14559541]

>>14559508
>good DIY manual
>must be hard not having a dad lol
No that Anon but what is the objective of read if you don't learn something useful?

[Anonymous No.14559622]

The Bible
Moby Dick

[Anonymous No.14559913]

>>14559622
>Moby Dick
Why?

[Anonymous No.14559942]

If on a friend's bookshelf
You cannot find Joyce or Sterne
Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton,

You are in danger, face the fact,
So kick him first or punch him hard
And from him hide behind a curtain.

– Alexander Theroux

[Anonymous No.14560002]

>>14559101
The Great Books of the Western World

[Anonymous No.14560763]

>>14559913
good read innit

[Anonymous No.14561193]

>>14559942
based

[Anonymous No.14561213]

>>14559132
>Hitler is more important than Milton

[Anonymous No.14561245]

>>14559101
Obviously, no specific books are essential for life, but some books add a great deal to your understanding of history, evolution of culture, literature, etc. My very basic Western canon starter kit: just 20 classic authors & works (pre-20th-century) that were so influential and important that knowing them would help with any later literature you might read:
1. The King James Bible
2. Dante
3. Milton
4. Homer
5. Aeneid
6. Graves' Greek Myths
7. Don Quixote
8. Morte d'Arthur
9. One Thousand and One Nights
10. Gulliver's Travels
11. Moby Dick
12. War and Peace
13. Notre-Dame de Paris
14. Beowulf
15. Chaucer
16. Crime and Punishment
17. Shakespeare
18. Gilgamesh
19. Faust
20. The Decameron
(if you had any real interest in medieval I'd add The Pearl-poet, Petrarch, Ovid, Golden Legend, and Boethius)
Of course, if we were going for non-fiction (philosophy, etc.) it would be a completely different list (Plato, Marx, Paine, Machiavelli, Darwin, Aquinas, Smith, Kant, Wollstonecraft, Einstein, etc.) Modern work would need Proust, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Woolf, James, Orwell, Kafka, Hemingway, etc., and so on. But reading those basic 20 seems like a solid start. I'm aimed at understanding literary references and huge precedents, so the list will always be imperfect.

[Anonymous No.14561258]

>>14561245
>Gulliver's Travels
I don't understand why this book is so well remembered when A Tale of a Tub is all but forgotten. Gulliver's Travels is Swift's single worst work, albeit his longest work, whereas Tub is his best.

[Anonymous No.14561264]

>>14559132
>Codreanu
Magyarophobic fuckboy.

[Anonymous No.14561287]

>>14559101
>what FEW books are essential
Holy Bible
Aesop
Plato
Aristotle
Ovid
Beowulf
Tolkien
Orwell
Sowell

>>14559132
good list but a bit long and missing Aristotle (he was not a Neoplatonist). and don't mind the fags criticising you for Codreanu or Hitler, they're absolutely necessary.

[Anonymous No.14561298]

>>14559101
Quran

[Anonymous No.14561322]

>>14561287
>Sowell
kys

[Anonymous No.14561369]

>>14561322
no u

if everyone read Sowell, they'd start to understand the levers of economics and communications being used against them to keep them divided and from thinking critically.

[Anonymous No.14561376]

very good compliment to Orwell imo

[Anonymous No.14561414]

>>14559101
nicomachean ethics
fear and trembling
discipline and punish
on liberty
enquiry concerning human understanding
trial and death of socrates: euthyphro, apologia, meno, crito, phaedo iirc

[Anonymous No.14561449]

>>14559135
You need both an interior and an exterior world

[Anonymous No.14561457]

>>14561258
A Tale of a Tub is masterful satire, but GT is more important because the story uses wilder fantasy elements, and it was mislabeled as a children's classic for two centuries, which greatly expanded its influence.

[Anonymous No.14561851]

>>14561457
It is a children's classic, the reading level is minimal. I understand that the most fantastical elements are satirical allegories, but the point remains.

[Anonymous No.14562094]

>>14561851
Gulliver's Travels should never have been co-opted for kids, despite the fantastic element. The proof is the constant bowdlerizing and "adapted for kids" it's suffered over the years as publishers tried to clean up the giant nipples and pissing, etc.

[Anonymous No.14562110]

>>14562094
What child can't cope with a pissing joke?

[Anonymous No.14562135]

>>14559135
Socrates couldn't read

[Anonymous No.14562152]

>>14562110
The same ones that can't handle a 300-page 18th-century misanthropic satire. Why are we having this debate? Have you actually read the book in its original form?

[Anonymous No.14562222]

>>14562152
>The same ones that can't handle a 300-page 18th-century misanthropic satire.
So, lowbrows?

I'm just immensely disappointed that Gulliver's Travels wasn't another Tub. Maybe his brain was already softening, or his Deanship put him in too much contact with children and made pandering too deepset a habit.

[Anonymous No.14562340]

>>14562222
He got major blowback from Tub, from among the most powerful people in the country. He lost his nerve.

[Anonymous No.14562467]

>>14561449
But which leads to other?

[Anonymous No.14562771]

>>14562340
This is true. It damaged his career chances quite a bit, since Queen Anne found it offensive, and Swift's advancement in the church suffered as a result.

[Anonymous No.14562883]

Essential reads;

Bible
Koran
Great Gatsby
All Shakespeare
The Hungry Catapillar
All works by Robert Burns
Dune
Dracula
Handmaid's Tale
Dubliners
Dracula
1984
Brave New World
Clockwork Orange
How to Kill a Mockingbird
My Booky Wook
Harry Potter
Complete Mr. Men works

[Anonymous No.14562904]

The only thing you need to read is literally just Metamorphoses by Ovid.

[Anonymous No.14563009]

>>14562904
Why?

[Anonymous No.14563082]

>>14563009
Because it’s the greatest piece of literature ever written.