the books that taught you a lot / changed your worldview

[Karl Henning]

Good luck David! It's hard to predict how it's likely to strike someone else. If you look at the reviews on Amazon, there are lots of ratings, and they span the whole spectrum from one to five stars, and pretty uniformly too. There's no secret about which end I'm at: there aren't many novels that I've read three times straight through, and then gone on to listen to the audiobook while riding my bike! But it seems to disappoint many people, particularly fans of The Time Traveler's Wife who, I suppose, were looking for more of the same.

After my concert Friday evening, Alan, I'm starting this book, I vow! : )

[Elgarian]

After my concert Friday evening, Alan, I'm starting this book, I vow! : )

A second medal opportunity!

[coffee]

Nicolae Steinhardt- The Happiness Diary

What language did you read it in?

[Florestan]

What language did you read it in?

Romanian. I am Romanian myself.

[coffee]

Romanian. I am Romanian myself.

Hristos a înviat!

I studied Romanian for about 5 weeks once, mostly as a way to spend time with a beautiful Romanian woman....

[Xenophanes]

Now that goes back a long way for some of them. I'll try to remember some which made a great impression on me in approximately the order I first came upon them.

Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories, and The Jungle Books--my mother used to read them to us, and she was good at it.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol--my father used to read it to us, and he read it very well, too.

Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

Sophocles, Oedipus cycle

Plato, Dialogues--this would be the more popular ones

Plotinus, Enneads--some of them

Augustine, Confessions

Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes

Willkiam Faulkner. whose novels convinced me that I thought about the world a lot differently than literature professors do.

Jacques Maritain, Scholasticism and Politics--the first of many of his books I have read.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man, The Complete Father Brown Stories.  My brother loaned my Father Brown Stories to a girl, and she never gave it back. I eventually got the Penguin edition.

Etienne Gilson, A Gilson Reader, ed. A. C. Pegis, the first of many by him.

John L. McKenzie, S.J., The Two-Edged Sword--the first of many books of his I have read.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History--Eliade was certainly an eye-opener.

Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel--the first Asimov story I remember reading. It certainly wasn't the first SF I read, since Dad read a lot of science fiction.

The Jerusalem Bible, with all those notes and marginal references

[Cato]

Nicolae Steinhardt- The Happiness Diary

Okay, now I feel frustrated, since nothing by Steinhardt has been translated (as far as I can find) into English or German.

Fascinating story about his life there on Wikipedia!

[Florestan]

Hristos a înviat!

I studied Romanian for about 5 weeks once, mostly as a way to spend time with a beautiful Romanian woman....

Adevărat a înviat!

Yes, that can be a strong incentive to learn the language... any language actually...   

How far did you get? (I mean with the language, not the girl )

[Florestan]

Okay, now I feel frustrated, since nothing by Steinhardt has been translated (as far as I can find) into English or German.

That's a pity because the book is indeed fascinating. He "wrote" it mentally while in prison (some 300 pages) then put it to paper after being released. It's a kind of spiritual/factual autobiography focusing mainly on his jail experience and religious conversion but with numerous flashbacks and digressions. It's witty and good-humored (come to think of it: to title a jail diary "The Happiness Diary"...) and written in a high-quality literary style - one of the greatest books of Romanian literature.

Fascinating story about his life there on Wikipedia!

He was one of a kind for sure. Incidentally, I am sure he and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn would have got along on excellent terms had they met: their social, political and religious outlook was very similar.

[Karl Henning]

If you undertake a translation, Andrei, you've no lack of friends here happy to help you file the burrs off the resulting English text. (Just saying.)

[Cato]

If you undertake a translation, Andrei, you've no lack of friends here happy to help you file the burrs off the resulting English text. (Just saying.)

Do it!  Do it!  Do it!  Do it!   

[Florestan]

If you undertake a translation, Andrei, you've no lack of friends here happy to help you file the burrs off the resulting English text. (Just saying.)

Do it!  Do it!  Do it!  Do it!   

Don't tempt me, gentlemen! 

Seriously now, this is a job for a professional translator (and s/he must be assisted by a professional historian in charge of annotating the text - the book is choke full of references to Romanian historical events and personalities without the knowledge of which much of book's charm would be lost).

[Karl Henning]

Make it happen, Andrei!  We're for you!

[drogulus]

     My view has developed rather than changed, so many books have contributed to it. To my surprise I can't think of one so important that it overshadows all others. The trend which all these books must have led me towards is the steady extirpation all all vestiges of idealism, or confusion about words/concepts and the entities to which they ostensibly refer. Words have objects which are sometimes only other words, and in other cases things with their own properties. This comes up in many spheres of interest to me, particularly ethics, aesthetics and politics in which the names for schemes of value are treated as natural things like the entities they are values about. Beethoven was a real guy, for instance. He composed music. And, a scheme of value says he and the music are grrrrreat! Also, I say that. But I notice that his greatness isn't a thing alongside his isness, issit? If it was such, then there would also have to be a "Greatness of Greatness". Therefore we can disagree with Plato that there are horses and the Form of a horse because then there would have to be the Form of the Form of the horse......Ah, no, I think a mistake has been made. So I pay attention to the difference between words and things as best I can, and find it useful to do so in many ways.

      But what books? I really don't know.

[Philoctetes]

But what books? I really don't know.

So Plato's Dialogues.

[Ataraxia]

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu
Dhammapada - The Buddha
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
Teach Yourself Zen - Christmas Humphreys
Mindfulness in Plain English - Venerable Henepola Gunaratana
Old Path White Clouds - Thich Nhat Hanh
Buddhism Plain and Simple - Steve Hagen

[Dungeon Master]

Back when I was a lost adolescent, I was given this book for Christmas by my father.

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Not this one, exactly, but the large format illustrated edition which is now sadly out of print. It is incoplete to say it is a history of science. It is more a celebration of human understanding, including science, art, music and endeavour.

It focused my life and set my future path in terms of values, beliefs and career.

Later on, when half-jokingly looking for the meaning of life, I stumbled onto Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene".

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It consolidated everything I had read previously. It is a very simple, very clear explanation of the workings of life and evolution. But it goes further than that. It explains how there is no real purpose to life, in the sense we usually talk about, but as humans we can make our own sense of our own lives, and to value the extremely fortunate and brief time we have of consciousness.

I sincerely believe these 2 books should be required reading for everybody on the planet. The world would be a better place.

[North Star]

Those look interesting, Rob.

But surely the purpose of life is to create more life. 

[Zizekian]

Malcolm X's Autobiography
Bertrand Russell's Why I'm Not a Christian
Mikhail Bakunin's God and the State
Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Susan Brownmiller's In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution
Karl Marx's Capital, Vol. 1