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Amazon's 1,082-volume Classics Collection: $7,989
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Who would buy 828 feet worth of books, for nearly $8,000, that would take 20 years to read at the rate of one title per week? And how much does it cost to ship? The Real Time columnists at the Wall Street Journal Online ponder these and other deep questions raised by Amazon's The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection, whose sheer jaw-dropping enormity reminds them of e-tailers' wacky offers during the dot-com boom. 'We think the collection is a perfect fit for more than a few software engineers we've known -- smart, self-directed people who are eternally curious, yet abhor wasting time intellectually and can't hide their impatience with the fuzziness of liberal arts,' Jason Fry and Tim Hanrahan write. 'For them, here's a pre-selected, pretty comprehensive list of Western classics, assembled for purchase with a single mouse-click -- and available in a form that eschews frills for portability and ease of use. Think of it as Humanities In a Box. OK, a Very Big Box.'"
My personal library is about the same size, including lots of thick computer manuals, and it takes up less than half that.
They probably dropped a decimal point.
I take it you don't have kids? My reading rate dropped by an order of magnitude once that happened. Now I grab whatever time I can.
OK, they're paperback which means the popular ones would wear out quickly. But if you were feeling philanthropic and wanted to give an otherwise sparse school library a boost, I could see it.
You should probably ask them first, though. I'm picturing Monday morning at the hometown library. The UPS rep knocks on the door to get a signature, and the librarian looks up to a couple semi-loads of books starting to be unloaded in their front yard!
"Well..here I am..." - Jubal Early
I've never been a fast reader. In fact, I'd say at best I read only a page or so a minute. But I'm also a very visual person, so I appreciate reading slowly and letting my mind make up it's own movie. The more descriptive the book, the slower I go. My room mate reads probably 3x as fast as I do, but I'm fairly certain he misses a good portion of what he reads, because he doesn't really process it. When you have "book club" type discussions with people, you find out rather quickly who doesn't pay enough attention to the small details. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I figure if I'm going to read a book, I'm going to get the most of it.
That's besides the point that reading is a leisure activity for me, not a goal or accomplishment. There's just no need to race through it.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
Okay okay, we get it, you can read super fast, give us a break. May be you should learn the value of a "leisurely pace".
Man, slashdot isn't the place to find humility, thats for damn sure.
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Just sayin', it isn't unthinkable for an institution to purchase something like this.
Finding God in a Dog
Most (all?) of these titles are in the public domain, so the publisher's only cost is printing. And they're paperbacks. Penguin is making a pretty good margin on these.
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
The number of books you own increases as time passes.
The number of books you'll have time to read during the rest of your life decreases.
At some point in your life, these two lines cross.
Meaning there is a point in your life when after that, you won't live long enough to read all the books you have.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
How much was your comment in billable time then?
Ok, you're a PC postmodern relativist.
I've read:
The Lady Murasaki - The Tale of Genji
Omar Khayyaam - Rubaiyat
The 1001 Nights.
I agree that they're worthwhile. I would like to read
Moses Maimonides - Guide for the Perplexed.
The reason that these great book lists are Eurocentric is that the Western cultures are ours. A Chinese who hasn't read some Confucious would be strangely lacking: he simply wouldn't have the background to understand the fundamentals of his own culture. I like your suggestions for further reading, but I think that any Westerner would be foolish to try to understand other cultures before he has understood his own. Reading Confucious before reading the Greek and Christian authors will make a Westerner a bad copy of a Chinese, with a false idea of the meaning and worth of both cultures. A fish needs to know water before he studies air.
Those of us in the Western cultures need to know who Plutarch wrote about, and what he said about them, what Socrates and Plato and Aristotle had to say, who and what Peter and Paul and Luke and John wote about, and how that man they wrote about was fundamentally different in outlook than the Greeks and the Hebrews, and on and on. We need to know some Shakespeare and Conrad and Chaucer and Aquinas and Cervantes and Dante and Thucydides and Bunyan and Tacitus and what-have-you.
Western civilization is deep and complicated, and it has an intellectual history that no other culture really parallels. What Mortimer Adler called ``the great conversation'' is a more than 2000 year-long discussion on men and gods and God, what those others should expect from us and we from them, and on the nature of reality. Other cultures have stated opinions on all of these things, of course, but so far as I know, only our literature and our culture has explored the range of ideas and opinions in the sort of depth and over the number of centuries that ours has. For example, the idea that the individual has intrinsic value, that it's not acceptable to slaughter your enemies or your peasants or even the savage tribesmen on the next continent, even if they're useless to you, is a uniquely Western idea, barely 2000 years old. The idea that slavery is intrinsically wrong is another example of this uniqueness. Slavery exists today only where Western culture hasn't yet reached.
The great books lists are intended to let Westerners get a good grounding in our own culture, and our culture is so enormously rich and varied that that's not a small project. The lists just try to give folks a starting place: you don't stop with the great books, you start with them. So, for all the reasons I've mentioned, Eurocentricism is both wise and unavoidable.
See what I've been reading.
At best they're scanning. Might be good enough to get you an understanding of a simple book (most fiction work). But there is nothing particularly enjoyable in doing so (in my opinion) and they definetely miss the subtleties of the stories.
Now I am probably going to get all kinds of replies saying that no, they indeed read and absorb every last word. Sorry, I don't believe it.
I should mention at this point, I've got a BA in English. Just ended up with one, because I needed something to do while I wasn't studying CS. So I have a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about.
That being said, a lot of "classics" are crap, and if I could unread some of them I would. You pick things no one disagrees with, and fail to mention things like 17 different works of Trollope, the miserable dregs of Steinbeck and Hawthorne (included because they're Steingbeck and Hawthorn) that no one would read if they knew any better, and Ulysses which routinely tops the list regardless of whether it is a "best" list or a "worst" list. 12 Books by D.H Lawrence, who should be dug up and shot for inventing the word "Demi-virge".
Add to that hundreds of volumes of ancient commentary and philosophy from Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, et al, which, while undeniably cool, is completely inaccessable to a layman. The freaking Satyricon is on that list; it's not the kind of book you can just pick up and read.
You get Ian Flemming, and you get E.M Forrester...And you get TEN books of Freud! TEN! Doesn't say you'll chop off your own penis after reading just five, but there you are.
The last thing I need is an apologist who didn't even bother to get the degree, but who is oh-so respectful of the snotty english profs I grew to detest, telling me that _I_ need a more balanced perspective. The bastards pulled the Shakespeare requirment the year after I got my degree. They PULLED the SHAKESPEARE requirement FROM the ENGLISH degree.
These are the last people who should be allowed to decide what is and isn't a classic.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.