what are your top five books

[Codreanu]

Literature
"The Divine Comedy" - Dante Alighieri
"Pierre" - Herman Melville
"Ulysses" - James Joyce
"Selected Writings" - Antonin Artaud
"Dream of Fair to Middling Women" + "How It Is" - Samuel Beckett

Honourable mention: "Sartor Resartus" - Thomas Carlyle

Poetry
"The Cantos of Ezra Pound" - Ezra Pound
"Selected Poetry and Prose" + "Collected Poems" - Stéphane Mallarmé
"The Snow Poems" - A.R. Ammons
"Duino Elegies" - Rilke
"Complete Poems" - John Keats

Honourable mention: "Hymns and Fragments" - Hölderlin

Philosophy
"The Philosophy of the Unconscious" - Eduard von Hartmann
"The Phenomenology of Mind" - Hegel
"The World as Will and Idea" - Schopenhauer
"Being and Nothingness" - Sarte
"Concluding Unscientific Postscript" - Soren Kierkegaard

Honourable mention: "Wissenschaftslehre" - Fichte

Psychology
"The Divided Self" - RD Laing
"The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" - Julian Janes
"Schizophrenia: the Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry" - Thomas Szasz
"Psychological Types" - C.G. Jung
"The Hypnosis of Life" - Roy Masters

Honourable mention: "The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism & the Metaphysics of Colour" - Barry Stroud

Religion
"Hostage to the Devil" - Fr. Malachi Martin
"The Passion of Thérèse of Lisieux" - Guy Gaucher
"Revolt Against the Modern World" - Julius Evola
"Shakti and Shakta" - Arthur Avalon (Sir John Woodroffe)
"Providence" - Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange

Honourable mention: "Dark Night of the Soul" - St. John of the Cross

 

[Codreanu]

23. Fathers and Sons

Is this the one by Turgenev? Would you believe that I had once began reading this, making it to page three hundred fiftysomething, only to discover that 40+ pages were missing from my copy? I sat it aside and never finished with it...

Some great picks there, esp. "Crime and Punishment" and "Foucault's Pendulum".

 

[Oh my god. it's Robby!]

yeah, i like other Turgenev as well, but speaking of non-fiction as you did;

1. Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida
2. Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud
3. Vom Kriege by Carl von Clausewitz
4. The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
5. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein
6. The Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chodron
7. History of the Russian Revolution by Leon Trotsky
8. Anabasis by Xenophon
9. What is Property? by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
10. The Art of War by Sun Tzu
11. Das Kapital by Karl Marx
12. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
13. The Phenomenology of Mind by Georg Hegel
14. Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World by Sir Edward Creasy
15. Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche
16. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
17. History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
18. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
19. Dien Bein Phu by Vo Nguyen Giap
20. The History of Madness by Michel Foucault
21. The World as Will and Idea by Arthur Schopenhauer
22. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
23. Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky
24. New Essays on Human Understanding by Gottfried Leibniz
25. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
26. Dictionnaire Philosophique by Voltaire
27. The Ego and Its Own by Max Stirner
28. (The) Apology (of Socrates) by Plato
29. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise by Heloïse & Pierre Abélard
30. Byron's Poetical Works by Lord George Byron

 

[Nikita]

The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoievsky
The Informers - Bret Easton Ellis
In the loneliness of coton fields (Dans la solitude des champs de cotons) - Berand Marie Koltès
1984 - George Orwell
Pour un oui ou pour un non - Nathalie Sarraute

 

[BillyBudd]

There are so many. Some of my favourite newer books include:

David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas (all his four books, actually)
Ian McEwan - Saturday
Mark Haddon - The curious incident of the dog in night time
JK Rowling - Harry Potter and the half blood prince

 

[Math Tinder]

The Thief's Journal by Jean Genet
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Stars by Richard Dyer
Autoportrait by Robert Mapplethorpe (not originally created as a book, but perhaps the best and most truly book-ist of them all)
The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll

love, math+

[edited - forgot about The Basketball Diaries, swapped out The Lover - The Lover's ace too though]

 

[charlie tango]

As i don't have enough patience to read very often i have only 2 fave books.
They are;
Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut.
Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall by Spike Milligan.

 

[Oh my god. it's Robby!]

Stars by Richard Dyer

Richard Dyer is a Professor of Film Studies at the University of Warwick. His work is described as "emphasising the aesthetic and historical specificity of cultural texts" and he "is writing on the concept and practice of pastiche on the work of Nino Rota and the role of music in film."

-interesting...

 

[Math Tinder]

Hi Robby, yeah, Richard Dyer is ace. Stars is basically the inaugural book in the academic study of stardom (or at least that's what I was taught). It's kind of incredible that no one had written a long-form academic work on the subject until Dyer; Stars came out in 1979 (!).

Stars is one of the books that's helped me understand Morrissey the most, actually, as I came to know stardom largely through knowing Morrissey. Stars is written in a film studies context but its ideas are applicable to any kind of star; I highly recommend it. Of course, being the inaugural work in a cultural studies subgenre, it shows its age a bit, but then all my favorite books show their age.

Dyer also wrote a lovely little book called Heavenly Bodies that's several case studies in film stardom, and also the amazing White, about racial whiteness.

xo, math+

 

[Sonar]

Nice thread.

1. Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain
2. Philip Roth - Sabbath's Theatre
3. Joey Goebel - Torture The Artist
4. Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections
5. F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby