Re: Book Thread number ?
I'm at 41, and not many of the ones I've missed interest me. I do look at lists like that to see if there's anything that sounds interesting that I haven't considered before, but I do not react positively to the phrase "everyone should read".
Same here. If you want an experience in extreme
Well, Actually can-you-top-this lit listing, look at Mortimer Adler's Great Book list. It is truly a flight from the sublime to the ridiculous.
It includes:
The entire Herodotus history
The entire Thucydides history
Hippocrates, srsly?
Apollonius of Perga on Conic Sections
The entire Livy history
The entire Tacitus history
Nicomachus of Gerasa's Introduction to Arithmetic
Ptolemy's Almagest
Galen's On the Natural Faculties
Plotinus' The Enneads
St. Augustine's entire works
St. Thomas Aquinas' entire Summa Theologica
Nicolaus Copernicus' On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
William Gilbert's On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
William Harvey's On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals AND On the Circulation of the Blood AND On the Generation of Animals
Isaac Newton's entire Principia
Edward Gibbon's entire nine volume The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Fourier's Analytical Theory of Heat
Hegel's entire works
Michael Faraday's Chemical History of a Candle AND Experimental Researches in Electricity
Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology
de Tocqueville's entire Democracy in America
Claude Bernard's Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
Karl Marx' entire Capital
William James' entire Principles of Psychology
Arnold J. Toynbee entire A Study of History
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle; The Cancer Ward
So, here's the thing. I read these types of books, for fun, all the time. I would never take on the above in any amount beyond just a sampling. These are all books it is important to know
about, but not to read.
The inclusion of the math and science titles is ridiculous. They are, in addition to utterly out of date for real knowledge, technical documents that are inelegantly written. From a standpoint of the appreciation of clear thinking and clean, beautiful method, virtually any short essay written by a competent science writer within the last hundred years would be a boundless improvement over the Adler selection in every possible way. I believe these are included as a gratuitous nod to the sciences' importance in western culture to stave off criticism and not because of any merit in the actual work.
The religious works should, again, be known about but they are nearly impenetrable without special subject matter knowledge, and are incomprehensible without a doctoral level of contextual history. Sampling suffices. 100 pages of Augustine? Absolutely! 10,000? Um, no.
The histories are beautiful but an insufferable slog. The only way to truly consume all of those pages is without the attention and appreciation they deserve. As with Aquinas, to have read all of Thucydides is to have savored none of him.
Hegel was brilliant. Hegel's "writings" are abnormally terrible in part because they aren't really his writings -- like Aristotle they are course notes compiled by his students and edited poorly by The Master Himself. Thousands and thousands of pages of stuff that is no doubt genius but somehow wound up on the page as a jargon-filled mess. Hegel makes Heidegger look like a competent writer. You will get more knowledge and understanding from a 50-page precis on any Hegelian subject than from the original document. (I would say the same about Kant but at least Kant is short, and his jokes are funny.)
Solzhenitsyn's inclusion on the list is strictly a hamfisted ideological maneuver. Like many Political Chic authors, he's just not a good writer. If you must listen to this sort of dreary anti-communist bilge just read any random article from American Spectator.
