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Frank, what a fascinating project. I envy you. Consider: <br>
Category: Science Fiction: Card, Orson Scott: The Redemption of
Christopher Columbus.<br>
<br>
Most people think that Ender's Game / Speaker for the Dead are Card's
best. I loved both of those but think Christopher Columbus is a better,
more thought-provoking book. It somewhat fits with a "technology run
amok" theme you are working on. Heinlein's early stuff is excellent,
the later stuff was pretty weird. Asimov has not held up as well as I
thought he would when I was in my teens in the early 60s, IMHO. <br>
<br>
Also: Card is a discerning reader, and he writes about books he is
reading in his column, "Uncle Orson Reviews Everything" which is
published from time to time on his website,<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.hatrack.com">www.hatrack.com</a><br>
<br>
Under Religion, you ought to include the Book of Mormon. I assume you
have read the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures; if not you must. I
recommend anything by the Dahli Lama; I especially liked his recent
book on happiness, which is a series of conversations between Himself
and a psychiatrist. <br>
<br>
A good commentary on the Book of Isaiah is vital to understand the Old
Testament. The one I like is out of print and I can't find it on
Abebooks, so I can't recommend anything specific. <br>
<br>
Best wishes, <br>
Lynn<br>
<br>
Premise Checker wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="midPine.NEB.4.61.0410272131430.505@panix2.panix.com">Meme 036:
Frank Is Abandoning Reality
<br>
sent 4.10.28, 4:59 am Central War Time, the minute of his 60th birthday
in Kansas City, Mo.
<br>
<br>
"I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just
gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except
that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my
feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty
began the part of my life you could call my life on the road...."
<br>
----------
<br>
<br>
I am abandoning reality for fiction and will stop reading non-fiction
books. I think I know pretty much, at least in outline form, what is
actually known about human nature from the biological and social
sciences. Novelists have a way of getting at the complexities of the
human condition that scientists have not. So not having read much
fiction since I read all twelve volumes of Dostoyevsky in the 1970s, I
am returning to deepen my understanding. What aspects of our humanity
may we be giving up as we take control of human nature through
manipulating the genome, through nanotechnology, biotechnology,
artificial intelligence, man-machine hookups? Will we become the
emotionally flat robots depicted in science fiction novels and movies?
Could our selves and our lives, instead, become deeper, even deeper
than Beethoven in his last decade?
<br>
<br>
I also want to know how human nature varies. Is the world converging to
one system of thinking? Or has there been enough gene-culture
coevolution of human populations--it's still taboo to say races, owing
to lingering 20th century egalitarianism--that there will be
significant *internal* barriers to Western hegemony? As I said in my
last meme, there has been a major reorientation of the dominant
left-right polarity, from central planning vs. free market in the
earlier twentieth century and equality vs. inequality in the later part
to pluralism vs. universalism in this century.
<br>
<br>
I'm asking for lists of your favorite novels, stressing non-Western
literature, those that have depth of characterization and are worth
rereading. (But are novels all alike, the medium being the message?)
I've read all of the (University of Chicago) Great Books (except that I
could only get through a quarter of War and Peace) but have read only
one non-Western novel, Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima. I need to broaden
my learning. So please send your lists. (I do NOT read poetry.) Books
that appear on many lists are most likely to get read. I shall assume
your permission to forward your lists, unless you tell me otherwise.
<br>
<br>
(Having last had an English class in 1964--yes, I am that old--my
memory of what happened in those classes is completely vague. How is a
40 or 50 minute class, that is in neither a lecture nor a seminar
format, get filled up? Can anyone point me toward webpages of
transcripts of typical literature classes?)
<br>
<br>
I have four categories in my project:
<br>
I. Western novels
<br>
II. Non-Western novels
<br>
III. Science fiction novels
<br>
IV . Religion, books of or about.
<br>
<br>
Here's the list of what I've accumulated so far:
<br>
<br>
I. WESTERN NOVELS
<br>
<br>
1. Kerouac, Jack, On the Road. America. This will be the first book. I
<br>
read.
<br>
2. Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. England. Never read anything by
<br>
her.
<br>
3. Balzac, Honoré. The Bureaucrats. France. Since I've lived among the
<br>
bureaucrats far longer than Margaret Mead lived among the
<br>
Samoans, this novel is probably the one for me to get
<br>
introduced to Balzac.
<br>
4. Colman, Hila. Diary of a Frantic Kid Sister. America. Teen-age: I
<br>
should know something about this genre.
<br>
5. Goethe, Johann von. Elective Affinities. Germany. Sarah's very
<br>
favorite.
<br>
6. Gover, Robert. One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding. America. One of
<br>
Charles Sletten's favorites.
<br>
7. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against Nature and La-Bas. Germany. Two of
<br>
Sarah's other favorites.
<br>
8. Jelinek, Elfriede. Wonderful, Wonderful Times. Austria. Just won
the
<br>
Nobel Prize for Literature.
<br>
9. Jünger, Ernst. On the Marble Cliffs. Germany. Another of Sarah's
<br>
favorites.
<br>
10. Kleist, Heinrich von. The Marquise of O- and Other Stories.
<br>
Germany. Given to me by George. Kleist never wrote a novel and
<br>
committed suicide at age 34.
<br>
11. O'Connor, Flannery. America. Three by Flannery O'Connor.
<br>
12. Schaefer, Jack. Shane. America. A casebook. I love casebooks, for
the
<br>
give me background! Love Cliff Notes, too, since I have great
difficulty
<br>
following lots of characters.
<br>
13. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. England. A Casebook. I have read
<br>
the play but need to really study it.
<br>
14. Trevor, William. The Story of Lucy Gault. Ireland. One of Marcia's
<br>
favorites.
<br>
15. Wilson, Sloan. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. America. A classic
<br>
work from the 1950s protesting the conformity of the era. Others
include
<br>
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged; David Reisman, The Lonely Crowd; Robert
<br>
Lindner, Prescription for Rebellion; C. Wright Mills, The Power
<br>
Elite; William Whyte, The Organization Man. All non-fiction here,
<br>
except Atlas Shrugged, but I don't know fiction very well.
<br>
16. Wolfe, Thomas. You Can't Go Home Again. America.
<br>
17. Zola, Emile. Earth. France. Given to me by Denise, but I'll
probably
<br>
read the much more famous Nana instead.
<br>
18. The Dedalus Book of Decadence (Moral Ruins). A sampler. France. We
<br>
have a division of labor in our house: I read the books on cynicism
<br>
and nihilism, while Sarah reads the books on decadence and
<br>
degeneration. But this is fiction, so I shall read it.
<br>
19. Goethe, Tieck, Fouqué, Brentano. Romantic Fairy Tales. German.
<br>
<br>
II. NON-WESTERN NOVELS
<br>
<br>
1. García Márques, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Colombia.
This
<br>
will be my first non-Western novel. Almost everyone recommends it.
I'll be
<br>
getting a case book and the Cliff Notes. I've downloaded everything
<br>
on it from <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.oprah.com">http://www.oprah.com</a>.
<br>
2. Allende, Isabel. Chile. Several lying around the apartment, I don't
<br>
know which to read first.
<br>
3. Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Argentina. He never wrote a
<br>
novel. Another non-Western author nearly everyone recommends.
<br>
4. Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Non-Fiction. This is literature,
really.
<br>
5. Jin, Ha. Waiting. China.
<br>
6. Pramoedya Ananta Toer. The Buru Quartet. Java. Given to me by
<br>
Denise. Will read one volume initially.
<br>
7. Mahfouz, Naguib. The Thief and the Dogs. Egypt. Winner of the Nobel
<br>
Prize for Literature in 1988.
<br>
8. Murasaki Shikibu [Lady Muraski]. The Tale of Genji. Japan. My copy
is
<br>
just Part One. If I like it, I can get the whole thing.
<br>
9. Tanizaki, Junichiro. Some Prefer Nettles. Japan. Given to my by
<br>
Denise.
<br>
10. Truong, Monique. The Book of Salt. Vietnam. She noted that Gertrude
<br>
Stein and Alice B. Toklas had a Vietnamese cook, so she wrote a
<br>
novel about Paris in the 1930s from the standpoint of the cook!
<br>
11. Watase, Yu. Alice 19th. A Japanese Manga (comic book format). You
can
<br>
get a mangastrap, a jacket designed for holding your arms to read
<br>
mangas on long Japanese subway rides. A good idea, but as Japanese
<br>
goods are very expensive, they cost $160 to import!
<br>
<br>
III. SCIENCE FICTION
<br>
<br>
1. Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age. Given to me by Carolyn and
<br>
autographed by the Author at the National Book Festival earlier
<br>
this month. This will be my first science fiction novel.
<br>
2. Anderson, Poul. A Midsummer Tempest. Patterned after two Shakespeare
<br>
plays.
<br>
3. Asimov, Isaac, et al., editors. The 7 Deadly Sins of Science
Fiction.
<br>
I've already read The 7 Cardinal Virtues. 4. Benford, Gregory (et
al.), editors. Hitler Victorious.
<br>
5. Brown, Fredric. Compliments of a Fiend. The only Fred Brown book,
<br>
published in his lifetime, that I have not read.
<br>
6. Herbert, Frank. Dune. I can get the Spark Notes on this one.
<br>
7. Le Guin, Ursula. The Dispossessed. Actually, I don't physically own
<br>
a copy, but this seems to be the first one to read. How will it
compare
<br>
to Dostoyevsky's novel of the same title?
<br>
8. Wells, H.G. The Time Machine. Casebook version.
<br>
9. Wells, H.G. The War of the Worlds. Casebook version.
<br>
<br>
IV. RELIGION
<br>
<br>
1. Gregg, Steve. Revelation: Four Views, a Parallel Commentary. This
book
<br>
gives the four principle interpretations of the last book in the
<br>
Bible in parallel columns for each verse. This will be my first book
<br>
in this category.
<br>
2. Cleary, Thomas, translator and presentor. The Essential Koran. I do
<br>
not want to read the entire Koran.
<br>
<br>
I have stacks of other books of or on religion, too many to list. I
also have lots of unread books on the art that probes the human
condition more than any other, namely Western music. I have multiple
recordings of nearly all the great masterpieces of classical
instrumental music.
<br>
<br>
In order to speed myself in this task of abandoning reality, I'm
stopping my finding and forwarding articles on many subjects until I've
read at least one book in each category. I read slowly and have no idea
how many months this will take. (This may grow into a full sabbatical.
I need, too, to catch up on stacks of back issues of the Times Literary
Supplement, long my favorite serial. I shall continue to bounce
articles to my various lists at the request of others. And I'll
continue to participate in threads started by others.
<br>
<br>
In parallel with the books above, I'll be reading Mary Ann Caws and
Christopher Prendergast, The HarperCollins World Reader (2 v., 2796
pp.), along with its Instructor's Manual (846 pp. The only copy in the
OCLC World Cat database is at the Mohawk Valley Community College!) and
the accompanying Issues in World Literature (a mere 108 pp.). I will
also be reading the President's Council on Bioethics (Leon Kass,
chairman) anthology, Being Human, which consists of selections from
literature, almost entirely Western. The purpose of the book is to
display the fullness of human nature, or at least Western human nature,
to caution us about getting rid of it. Whether Kass believes West is
Best, I don't know.
<br>
<br>
I'm launching a website immediately after sending this. It is
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.panix.com/~checker">http://www.panix.com/~checker</a> (you must include the tilde). I shall
upload more on Beethoven's birthday. If you have sent me e-mail and
really wanted a reply but didn't get one, bug me. I've just gotten too
far behind. I'm not blanking out, for I hold my hypotheses lightly and
do not want to continue chasing after bad ones.
<br>
<br>
Get to work on lists of novels, particularly non-Western novels, for me
to read!
<br>
<br>
[I am sending forth these memes, not because I agree wholeheartedly
with all of them, but to impregnate females of both sexes. Ponder them
and
<br>
spread them<br>
.]<br>
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