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I've read several messages about how musical performances have changed lives. I can't really relate, unless, perhaps, for songs where the message is verbalized.Books are different. I know at least two, right, off the bat for me. Plato's Dialogues and Howard's "Mystic Path to Cosmic Power". Include, also, the works George Seldes. These books shifted my thinking. Showed me something about myself and the world that I'd not been aware of.
Follow Ups:
"1984" - had difficulty sleeping at night after that one.
Plato is important but I believe he distorted Socrates, who rates much higher for me but his 'own stuff' is pretty thin on the ground.We have let 'the guardians', and their descendents run things for WAAAY too long.
My list.
Recently
3 books by J. Ralston Saul, One is a sort of sceptics dictionary, deliciously cruel about managerialism, and market theory.
discovering Bierce in all his cruel insight, and rediscovering Mencken
Early on,
the bible, esp. the New Testament,
The Book of Common Prayer
Ovid, everything I could.
Virgil - ditto.
Rabelais
Hardy
George Eliot.
Henry Lawson.
Judith Wright.
TS Eliot,
Tolstoy,
Dickens,
Shakepeare's (fully workshopped!) plays.
Dr Johnson and Boswell,
plus Pepys,
John Aubrey, now he's a riot. Actor Roy Dottrice did a one-man show of him in old-age, I wonder if the Beeb ever recorded it?
Diary Of a Nobody.
Thurber, anything.
Milligan, everything
Das Kapital - K. Marx.
Bertrand Russell, everyone on OUTSIDE should read his short dissection / essay of being a POLITICAL person, esp. party political. thanks to him also for "undecideability" and a bunch of good bullshit filters.
And my son's want me to 'get off the net'
Timbo in Oz
The Skyptical Mensurer and Audio Scrounger
Peace
In my younger days, Catcher in the Rye and Ullyses changed my ideas about what the written word could do. These books breathed. In my college years, Watts Wisdom of Insecurity was pivotal in opening a door to Krishnamurti, Suzuki(s), Trungpa, Wittgenstein and a slew of others. That Watts pebble created a lifelong ripple. I don't know that I've read a book that hasn't changed me in some way. Mostly for the better. I think :^)
1) Johnny Got His Gun/Dalton Trumbo
2) The Power and the Glory/Graham Greene
3) Bread and Wine/Ignazio Silone
4) In Dubious Battle/John Steinbeck
5) Let Us Now Praise Famous Men/James Agee
6) Hear Me Talkin' to Ya/Nat Hentoff & Marshall Stearns
7) On Native Grounds/Alfred Kazin
8) Moby Dick/Herman Melville
9) Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man/James Joyce
10) The Thin Red Line/James Jones
11) To The Finland Station/Edmund WilsonBe forewarned: These books generally-but not all-have a decidedly political bent, so if you are a big supporter of the current administration in Washington or have spent the past week in deep mourning for Ronald Reagan, you probably won't enjoy them. But you will miss some great literature.
NOT Bush/Cheney. Raygoon, etal.
Thomas Hardys classic. Nothing profound, just a great story but like generations before me and since any form of literature was ruined at school by endless studying grammatical concepts, sentence structures etc. etc. as if the story being told was of a secondary nature. The result for many of us was a strong distaste for literature of any kind.
5 or 6 years after leaving school i picked up the copy above of Far From The Madding Crowd in a Penguin Classic edition because the wonderful painting on the cover had caught my eye and i started the first page and never stopped. In the 20 years since then i haven't been without a book of some kind close at hand and devour good writing like a hungry man.Regards
Paul
Who, what, when, where,how, why, and what happens next. We live half of our lives in the future. We want to know what it could be like.I know what you mean about literature. I was an English Lit. major who learned to write (somewhat) in school. Some authors are incredibly evocative.
I said that I cut my teeth on Plato and he changed my life. Well, he did. Now that I remember back to when I was a freshman, it was Prof. Johnston and our readings of Aldous Huxley essays that really got me interested in fine writing. I think most of those essays are out of print. I should look them up on ebay.
Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass."
E.H. Carr's "What is History."
Howard Zinn's "A Peoples History of the United States."
In that order
Howard Zinn was an important influence on me. Thank you for the other reference.
Same here, Howard Zinn also an important influence on me. I love Norm Chomsky too.
Cheers,
W
Budda dosen't know north or south.
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