(no subject)

[fpb]

Wow. My book meme entry has gone completely ballistic. Who would have said that to say which books I like or not would have caused so much reaction?

Comments

[sanscouronne.livejournal.com]

I never realized that God Himself put out a book list that you must not only read in its entirety, but also LOVE in its entirety.

Also, I'm mildly offended that the DaVinci Code would be on the same book list as Les Miserables.

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

I'm mildly offended that the DaVinci Code would be on the same book list as Les Miserables.

You too, eh?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Nobody was ever going to make a list of currently available books that satisfied everyone else. I have to say that the inclusion of Alice Sebold, from all I have heard, strikes me as nearly as bad, as does the near total absence of classics - Homer and Virgil, let alone Kalidasa or Li Po, do not exist - and genre fiction of every kind - no Agatha Christie, HP Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov or ER Burroughs; not even Kipling, Poe or Jules Verne. And Verne reminds me that there is a grave shortage of European classics: where are Cervantes, Thomas Mann, Balzac, Goethe, or Dante? Where are CS Lewis and GK Chesterton? And if we are talking about books as such, how about history, biography, or science? Gibbon, Mommsen, Favre, Galileo, Feynman, Lingard, Dumezil, Braudel, or Michelet? and all the lives of great or little men and women from Thayer's Beethoven to St.Therese of Lisieux' Autobiography? How about philosophy? Is any person educated if they haven't read Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, or Thomas Aquinas? How about even the much-advertised Enlightenment? Whatever happened to Voltaire, Rousseau, Herder, Beccaria, Diderot (even the dirty bits)?

In short, this lists represents a narrow, ultimately rather undemanding pundit's view of reading from exactly the modern-lit point of view I do not approve of. It does little to broaden the mind or take it beyond one particular subject, namely highbrow modern fiction.

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

How about picking a list of your own! Now that would be interesting.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I tried, but I gave up after #6, feeling a complete prat.

[sanscouronne.livejournal.com]

Or, being pessimistic yet realistic, maybe we ought to rejoice if people have read any of these books at all? Many people would not consider a quick glimpse into any of these books while there are more amusing distractions to be had...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That's a good question. To be a good Jew or Christian, is it your duty not only to be familiar with the Bible (your community's version of, I mean), but also to love it and enjoy it in an aesthetic sense? On the one hand, that would put a bit of a strain on the people told to enjoy the lengthy lists of prescriptions on all sorts of petty matters in the first five books (for instance); on the other, unless you enjoy the writings in the first place, how can they affect you at all? And Psalm 119 tells us that some people actually enjoyed the study of the Jewish law for its own sake.