which book should you have read by now but haven't?

[rae121452]

for me there are two: MOBY DICK, which i've tried several times to read but can't complete and MADAME BOVARY, which i always give up on halfway through.

there's also GROUP PORTRAIT WITH LADY which i've read half of innumerable times but never finished.

 

[ChloeTzang]

Hmmmm. "Should read" to me always means that really, they're unreadable and over-rated coz I'd have read them already if they were readable.

For me, "should read" is probably the Greek and roman classics. I've read the Iliad, odyssey and The March of the Ten Thousand as well as Jason but I have a pile of them I "should" read but I've never. Thucydides. Euripides. Aristophanes. Plato. Aristotle. Hesiod. All those. I look at them waiting for me and then I pick up a good romance or a science fiction novel and go later guys....

 

[Kantarii]

I keep meaning to finish “Paradise Lost” by John Milton, but it’s hard to get past a couple dozen pages for some damn reason. The same holds true for Dante’s “Infero”. I suspect I will read tons of other classics long before I finish those two aforementioned works.
Kant

 

[nosebone]

for me there are two: MOBY DICK, which i've tried several times to read but can't complete and MADAME BOVARY, which i always give up on halfway through.

there's also GROUP PORTRAIT WITH LADY which i've read half of innumerable times but never finished.

Melville is tough sledding. I've tried and tried. My copy of Moby Dick is tattered like it's my favorite book. The truth is its been thrown against the wall in frustration more than once and used as a coaster.

There are gobs of the "classics" that I've never read, because a lot of it doesn't appeal to me, even though I know I "should" read them. I've picked up used books from the wholesaler by the bushel, but I doubt I'll ever get through them all.

 

[KindofHere]

...............

 

[TANSTAAFL58]

Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, by Sir Issac Newton. Affectionately referred to as The Pincipia.The most important book ever written was sadly written in Latin, and I don't know any Latin.

Sir Issac Newton: invented calculus* so he could invent physics. Solved equations of motion, planetary physics, universal gravitation, optics, the progression of the equinoxes, tides, and heat transfer and invented a type of telescope still in use, and the cat door.

Ok, he also wasted the last years of his life on Alchemy (looking for the philosopher's stone) and died a virgin.(maybe!)

*Leibniz was a putz.

 

[SimonDoom]

Ulysses, by Joyce. I've started it quite a few times but never gotten far. Which is strange, because I've read and re-read and loved Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, one of my favorite novels. Ulysses is no. 1 on my list of books I have to read.

 

[rae121452]

Ulysses, by Joyce. I've started it quite a few times but never gotten far. Which is strange, because I've read and re-read and loved Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, one of my favorite novels. Ulysses is no. 1 on my list of books I have to read.

LSD in my younger days really helped me enjoy ULYSSES. and don't read THE SOUND AND THE FURY unless you've ingested several mikes.

 

[SamScribble]

Ulysses, by Joyce. I've started it quite a few times but never gotten far. Which is strange, because I've read and re-read and loved Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, one of my favorite novels. Ulysses is no. 1 on my list of books I have to read.

I re-read Ulysses every couple of years. It seems to get better each time.

But I have never read a Harry Potter book. Should I? Hmm. I somehow don't think so.

 

[oggbashan]

Karl Marx: Das Capital

David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature

Sir Francis Bacon: Novum Organum

 

[ChloeTzang]

Karl Marx: Das Capital

David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature

Sir Francis Bacon: Novum Organum

Chloe's brain explodes.......

 

[Polyacrylate]

I re-read Ulysses every couple of years. It seems to get better each time.

But I have never read a Harry Potter book. Should I? Hmm. I somehow don't think so.

FWIW, I'm in the process of reading the Harry Potter books with my kids. The first two were pretty tough to get into, but I found myself getting invested in the story in the third one.

 

[KindofHere]

.................

 

[SimonDoom]

But I have never read a Harry Potter book. Should I? Hmm. I somehow don't think so.

I read the whole series and enjoyed it. It's not great prose, but it's an impressive feat of imagination. I thought the world building and story were enjoyable. But it's a series of 7 novels that get longer as the series goes on, so it's a big undertaking.

 

[BentonVirtus]

It's not a book, but an author. I've never read any Shakespeare and probably should.

 

[oggbashan]

Chloe's brain explodes.......

Why? I haven't read them - yet.

 

[ChloeTzang]

Why? I haven't read them - yet.

I've looked at Das Kapital and brain cells died. I looked up Hume and backed away, very slowly and carefully. I'm afraid my reading does not extend in that direction with any success....

 

[Carnal_Flower]

I'm a big failure with Faulkner, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon. It's just never going to happen.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I've looked at Das Kapital and brain cells died. I looked up Hume and backed away, very slowly and carefully. I'm afraid my reading does not extend in that direction with any success....

I've still got my Collected Works of Marx and Engels (a bright red three volume collection) and Collected Works of Lenin (blue, three volumes) from my first year history unit - Modern Revolutions. I managed to get through Das Kapital - given my dad was a Marxist historian, I had to, really.

Ironically, their theories of production and Lenin on imperialism were pretty much right (money rules, and markets expand globally) but they radically over-estimated the power of the worker to spread it about evenly.

 

[PenLightStories]

Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest?

I guess the question is: should I read them?

 

[Setanta84]

I've looked at Das Kapital and brain cells died. I looked up Hume and backed away, very slowly and carefully. I'm afraid my reading does not extend in that direction with any success....

Hume's a good writer and--like most great philosophers--he communicates his ideas in the simplest possible terms. The real hurdle to reading him is just getting used to the way people wrote back then. A comma really is just a simple pause and a sentence can cover most of a page. Especially when reading something complex, that can be a bit of a chore at first.


Beyond getting impatient with the pacing/wanting to skip ahead to the actual hunt for the Whale, I'm always kind of surprised people find Moby Dick a hard read. It's one of my favorites and I find it pretty engrossing.

 

[SamScribble]

Are you a vegan too and drive a Tesla? (Read that as somebody ribbing you, good naturedly.)

[/I]

I love some vegan food. I find that it goes really well with a rare steak. Or some calf's liver. Or lamb's brains. Yum.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

How the hell do I know what books I should have read and haven't? WTF?

I guess I should have read the book about how to handle guns before I did. I told my buddy I was sorry for shooting him in the foot, but what the hell, you really don't need your little toe do you?

Then then there was the operators manual for my car. I really didn't mean to run over all those geese crossing the road. If I had just known where the brake pedal was.

And then if there had only been a manual for how to raise children, maybe my kids would have turned out different. One married a stripper/porn actress and the other married a lazy no account who is 15 years older than she is. If only I had a manual I could have read.

 

[oggbashan]

...

And then if there had only been a manual for how to raise children, maybe my kids would have turned out different. One married a stripper/porn actress and the other married a lazy no account who is 15 years older than she is. If only I had a manual I could have read.

There have always been manuals on how to raise children, including masses of contradictory advice in the Bible.

The problem has always been, not that the parents don't read the manual, but that the children don't.

And then the authors rewrite their advice every decade after a generation of parents followed the earlier version of the manual and found it didn't work.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

There have always been manuals on how to raise children, including masses of contradictory advice in the Bible.

The problem has always been, not that the parents don't read the manual, but that the children don't.

And then the authors rewrite their advice every decade after a generation of parents followed the earlier version of the manual and found it didn't work.

Well, of course there is, now that I don't need one.