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Ask Slashdot: What Are the Books Everyone Should Read?
dpu writes "Part of my New Year's resolution is to encourage reading as a hobby in those around me — especially my friends' children (ages 2 to 22), but my wife and I as well. There is a lot of 'classic' literature out there I'm familiar with, and will be promoting to the short masses here (Fahrenheit 451, To Kill A Mockingbird, In The Heat of the Night, Huckleberry Finn, Cryptonomicon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, A Wrinkle In Time, When Rabbit Howls, etc.), but I know many of you are much better read than I am. What recommendations would you make? What are the books that everyone should read? I don't care if it's been banned by schools, burned by communists, or illuminated by 15th century monks. If you think everyone around you should read it, I'd love to know about it."
Just for once, read the f'ing manual.
Whenever you see bugger read it as formic - ROFLMAO
The Dictionary. All other books are generated from this one.
Thumbs might be a new thing, but I bet they always had that middle brow.
I think John Rogers sums it up well: There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
I've tried reading the Koran. So far, I've parsed the first eight Sura.
Even being a Christian and having significant historical knowledge of the Bible and its history, the Koran is still very, very difficult to understand for a westerner not familiar with the history of the Koran. There are significant direct references to Biblical, Arab, and Islamist events that are frequently made and referenced throughout its passages. Even more difficult are the indirect references. Many messages and commands require background knowledge in order to construct what is being said. If you want to study the Koran, you are best off taking a university course on it, or at least going to some community and/or Islamist center where the instructor knows and understands the material.
I found the Old Testament far more entertaining. Granted, all the lineages were a bit dry, and detailed blueprints of the Arc of the Covenant just don't help me day-to-day, ya know, but heck, collecting foreskins for a king to wed his daughter, that stuff's just good as gold!