Required reading

[Cochise]

So, I've become much more of a reader in the past year or so. Let's say that you could choose one book to have all the DCer's here read. What book would you choose? (excluding holy texts)

No cheating listing multiple works - only choose one. Political, apolitical, whatever you got.

[go bowe]

books?

those things with ink and paper and all?

who reads books nowadays?

you can get everything you need on fox news and fox sports...

well, can't you? :shrug:

[recxjake]

"Bias" Bernard Goldberg

[Rausch]

Warday.

Forget politics, it's the most researched book in the last 30 years.

It's a "what if" book based in the 1980's about nuclear war.

They took into account emp devistation, political implications, economic implications, you name it.

Truly an amazing book. It's outdated, of course, but when you consider the scope of the novel it's truly an uncanny work....

[patteeu]

Atlas Shrugged.

[Amnorix]

Gah. Choose only one!

I'll go with Blackhawk Down. Even if you've seen the movie, the book offers so much more depth and perspective on the entire situation. A very well balanced true story account.

Read EVERYTHING. Foreword, afterword, all of it. There's some amazing stuff in there.

[Amnorix]

Atlas Shrugged.

That good eh? I remember a former gf spending like 2 years to read the damn thing, but she was a slow reader. She said it was great, but I never asked for the particulars.

Maybe I need to give it a read.

[Cochise]

Can Man Live Without God, Ravi Zacharias. Comes from a theistic perspective but works at a lot of different levels. Good book, not the lightest read, but it will challenge you. I liked it at a time where I had a much more skeptical viewpoint than I do now.

[Cochise]

Atlas Shrugged is one of those books I have on my shelf that I haven't read. When I'm looking for a new one I'm like... well... I want to start that one.. but this one isn't so darn big...

[tiptap]

Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon

[NewPhin]

Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon

Good choice. I'll go with Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, just to throw a little leftist political thought in.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace would be a closer runner up.

[Cochise]

Good choice. I'll go with Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, just to throw a little leftist political thought in.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace would be a closer runner up.

Hey damnit no cheating! :cuss: :)

[mlyonsd]

John Paul Jones by Evan Thomas.

I learned things about the Revolution that they don't teach in school.

Arguably, the Revolution kept going because Jone's raids on towns in England were the only good news for quite a while.

[patteeu]

That good eh? I remember a former gf spending like 2 years to read the damn thing, but she was a slow reader. She said it was great, but I never asked for the particulars.

Maybe I need to give it a read.

It can get repetitive and it probably could have used two or three hundred fewer pages, but if you're going to read an Ayn Rand book, it's the one. It helps if you keep in mind that she wrote it at a time when communism was on the rise in popularity and capitalism was being questioned if not doubted.

[Taco John]

Draining the Swamp
Harvey F. Barnard


I'm not so interested in swaying people to my way of thinking. Everyone is on the path that they are on for a reason. I'd rather all of our paths become a little easier. This book is about what's wrong with the money right now, and how we can fix it before it fixes us.

[Amnorix]

It can get repetitive and it probably could have used two or three hundred fewer pages, but if you're going to read an Ayn Rand book, it's the one. It helps if you keep in mind that she wrote it at a time when communism was on the rise in popularity and capitalism was being questioned if not doubted.

err...the 1930s??

[patteeu]

err...the 1930s??

It was published in the 50's so maybe it's taking it too far to say that the "popularity" of communism was on the rise, but among the intellectuals, there was considerable facination with communism at that time.

And of course, we had a socialistic revolution of our own during the FDR days.

[penchief]

"The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran

[Adept Havelock]

"Elmer Gantry" by Sinclair Lewis

[Nightwish]

"The Incarnations of Immortality," by Piers Anthony (7 books). Fiction, and whimsical fiction at that, but chock full of interesting observations of religious ideas.

[Old Codger]

Either "The day the earth stood still" ...or "Atlas shrugged.."

[Fishpicker]

I couldnt really reccomend anything political...everything is skewed and biased.

for entertainment I'd reccomend A Song of Ice and Fire: A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. I'm not a big fan of high fantasy but I got hooked on this series.

[Fishpicker]

"The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran

excellent choice

[Taco John]

I'm going to have to check out a few of these books...

[DanT]

“No romantic novel ever written in America . . . is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.”
—H. L. Mencken (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679728953/qid=1134093791/sr=2-3/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_3/002-7594624-4529634?s=books&v=glance&n=283155)

I'd recommend Willa Cather's masterpiece. (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0743487699/ref=cm_cr_dp_pt/002-7594624-4529634?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=283155&s=books)

[Amnorix]

"The Incarnations of Immortality," by Piers Anthony (7 books). Fiction, and whimsical fiction at that, but chock full of interesting observations of religious ideas.


GAH! Stop after book one (On a Pale Horse). A very good book, but the series quickly goes downhill thereafter (as is typical of Piers Anthony).

[Amnorix]

It was published in the 50's so maybe it's taking it too far to say that the "popularity" of communism was on the rise, but among the intellectuals, there was considerable facination with communism at that time.

And of course, we had a socialistic revolution of our own during the FDR days.

Communism's rise in America was in the very late 20s (Eugene Debs and those guys) and into the 30s, with some degree carrying into the 40s and WWII. It was not long after WWII ended that the Iron Curtain dropped, we were airlifting to Berlin, China went Communist with many recriminations in Congress, McCarthyism reared its ugly head, and the Korean War began.

[patteeu]

Communism's rise in America was in the very late 20s (Eugene Debs and those guys) and into the 30s, with some degree carrying into the 40s and WWII. It was not long after WWII ended that the Iron Curtain dropped, we were airlifting to Berlin, China went Communist with many recriminations in Congress, McCarthyism reared its ugly head, and the Korean War began.

I'm not going to quibble with you about when communism was rising or when it was popular, but the book is a part of the author's reaction to the attraction to collectivism of many of her contemporaries.

[Braincase]

"Time Enough for Love" by Robert Heinlein. I love Lazarus Long's perpective on life, business, and politics.

[Cochise]

So we've got two for Atlas Shrugged but none for the Fountainhead? How come?

Just wondered. I bought the Fountainhead a while back and it's getting to the top of my queue, but I haven't read it yet. Wondering if I should get the other one too.

[listopencil]

Atlas Shrugged.


I was going to say that. Bastard. OK. Fine.

Time Enough For love.

[listopencil]

"Time Enough for Love" by Robert Heinlein. I love Lazarus Long's perpective on life, business, and politics.




Dammit!

[listopencil]

So we've got two for Atlas Shrugged but none for the Fountainhead? How come?

Just wondered. I bought the Fountainhead a while back and it's getting to the top of my queue, but I haven't read it yet. Wondering if I should get the other one too.



Fountainhead isn't as good. Atlas Shrugged is the only Ayn Rand book you need to read to get what she's trying to say.

[listopencil]

Communism's rise in America was in the very late 20s (Eugene Debs and those guys) and into the 30s, with some degree carrying into the 40s and WWII. It was not long after WWII ended that the Iron Curtain dropped, we were airlifting to Berlin, China went Communist with many recriminations in Congress, McCarthyism reared its ugly head, and the Korean War began.

Ayn Rand went on public speaking tours and published many papers to combat the spread of communism/collectivism in this country. She used the Soviet Union (her one-time homeland) as an example of why it was so bad.

[listopencil]

err...the 1930s??




Atlas Shrugged
(1957)
Ayn Rand's masterpiece. It integrates the basic elements of an entire philosophy into a highly complex, yet dramatically compelling plot—set in a near-future U.S.A. whose economy is collapsing as a result of the mysterious disappearance of leading innovators and industrialists. The theme is: "the role of the mind in man's existence—and, as corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest."

The Fountainhead
(1943)
The story of an innovator—architect Howard Roark—and his battle against the tradition-worshipping establishment. Its theme: "individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man's soul; the psychological motivations and the basic premises that produce the character of an individualist or a collectivist." Ayn Rand presented here for the first time her projection of the ideal man. Roark's independence, self-esteem, and integrity have inspired millions of readers for more than half a century.

Anthem
(1938)
This novelette depicts a world of the future, a society so collectivized that even the word "I" has vanished from the language. Anthem's theme is: the meaning and glory of man's ego.

We the Living
(1936)

Set in Soviet Russia, this is Ayn Rand's first and most autobiographical novel. Its theme is: "the individual against the state, the supreme value of a human life and the evil of the totalitarian state that claims the right to sacrifice it."

[Area 51]

The Sixth Column (The Day After Tomorrow) - Robert Heinlein, 1941.

If you like Science Fiction this is a great read. Some of his other books are as vivid in description as this one, but this one has a pretty far flung story line considering it was written before 1941.

I read a few of his books while I was isolated from the rest of the normal world, Heinlein had a grasp on future possibilities that few could even imagine.

[The camera] came to rest on great masses of humanity, men, women, children, huddled, jammed, behind barbed wire. The pick-up came down close enough to permit the personnel of the Citadel to see the blind misery on the faces of the crowd, the wept-out children, the mothers carrying babies, the helpless fathers.
They did not have to watch those faces long. The pick-up panned over the packed mob, acre on acre of helpless human animals, then returned to a steady close-up of one section.
They used the epileptigenic ray on them. Now they no longer resembled anything human. It was, instead, as if tens of thousands of monstrous chickens had had their necks wrung all at once and had been thrown into the same pen to jerk out their death spasms. Bodies bounded into the air in bone-breaking, spine-smashing fits. Mothers threw their infants from them, or crushed them in uncontrollable, viselike squeeze.

[Adept Havelock]

Heinlien's best:

The Hugo award winner "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress".

Lunatics unite! You have nothing to lose but your FN chains!

TANSTAFFL!

[DanT]

Heinlien's best:

The Hugo award winner "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress".

Lunatics unite! You have nothing to lose but your FN chains!

TANSTAFFL!


TANSTAAFL (there ain't no such thing as a free lunch) was the name of the snack shop in my University of Chicago dormitory. I always thought it was a Milton Friedman quote. According the Wikipedia.org, it's also in Heinlein's classic, which I've been meaning to read for years but haven't gotten around to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TANSTAAFL

[listopencil]

I've read everything Heinlein published , TANSTAAFL is in many of his books.

[listopencil]

Heinlien's best:

The Hugo award winner "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress".

Lunatics unite! You have nothing to lose but your FN chains!

TANSTAFFL!


Yep-that was a good one. Hard for me to pick a favorite. Time Enough For Love, Farnham's Freehold, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers...just a huge body of excellent work.

[listopencil]

The Sixth Column (The Day After Tomorrow) - Robert Heinlein, 1941.



Also one of my favorites. He was way ahead of his time and did a lot to legitimise SF.