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Old 01-25-2008, 01:17 PM
 
Location: Blankity-blank!
11,446 posts, read 16,135,306 times
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I seldom read fiction, unless the book is used to present ideas.
My most memorable books are:
"Also Spoke Zarathustra" by Friedrich Nietzsche
"Twilight Of The Idols" & "The Anti-Christ" by Friedrich Nietzsche
"The Ubu Plays" by Alfred Jarry
"Artaud Anthology" by Antonin Artaud
"A Short History Of Decay" by Emile Cioran
"Tropic Of Cancer" by Henry Miller
"Walden" by Henry David Thoreau
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Old 01-25-2008, 02:19 PM
 
Location: Oxford, England
13,032 posts, read 24,557,451 times
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Very impressive list Visvaldis. I haven't read any of them apart Miller and Thoreau.

My most stimulating and sometimes rather arduous ones to read :

Plato's "republic"
Dante's "Divine Comedy
"J.J Rousseau's "Social Contract"
Marx's "Das Kapital"
"The Elegant Universe , string theory" by Brian Greene
Lovelock's "Gaia, a new look at life on earth"
Macchiavelli's "The Prince"
The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art by James Clifford
Nietzsche: Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
The Selfish Gene and The God delusion by Dawkins ( I find him incredibly arrogant but a brilliant mind nonetheless)
Pablo Neruda's poetry
Montaigne's essays
Blaise Pascal's "pensees"
Sartre's "colonialism and neocolonialism" and "Crime Passionel, les mains sales"
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Old 01-25-2008, 10:00 PM
 
3,724 posts, read 9,288,789 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Visvaldis View Post
I seldom read fiction, unless the book is used to present ideas.
My most memorable books are:
"Also Spoke Zarathustra" by Friedrich Nietzsche
"Twilight Of The Idols" & "The Anti-Christ" by Friedrich Nietzsche
"The Ubu Plays" by Alfred Jarry
"Artaud Anthology" by Antonin Artaud
"A Short History Of Decay" by Emile Cioran
"Tropic Of Cancer" by Henry Miller
"Walden" by Henry David Thoreau
Judging from your list, I think we have different definitions of 'intellectual stimulation.'

However: I enjoyed The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Various of Will and Ariel Durant's histories
Food First [interesting view of global agribusiness]
A lot of psychology, including texts and such things as The Minds of Billy Milligan, The Search for Bridey Murphy, and When Rabbit Howls
scads of books on prehistoric ruins, art, archeology
geology
natural history, from the earliest fossils to contemporary herpetology
Organic agriculture and animal husbandry
medieval and modern history
linguistics

Actually, you could just go down the shelves of any library with the Dewey system and pick any category except math, and I've read something in it, and got one more point of view on life. I don't do math, beyond making sure my outgo doesn't exceed my income.
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Old 01-26-2008, 09:28 AM
 
Location: Piedmont NC
4,596 posts, read 11,417,489 times
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OK, I'll admit that even though I read extensively, and majored in English in college, I found this thread both intriguing and intimidating.

I've read several titles from your lists, but it has been SO long ago until I remember just bits and pieces. Some of these should be 'must reads,' I think, for well-educated people, however. I think I read a lot of these while I was in college, and have since, picked them up out of curiosity -- or like your original post suggests, for 'stimulating' reading.
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Old 01-26-2008, 12:07 PM
 
3,555 posts, read 7,823,717 times
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Haven't read everything on the above posts, but more than 3/4.

Recent reads that I've found stimulating;

American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips

Collapse, Jared Diamond

A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson. Science for dummies like me.

The Mother Tongue, English and how it got that way, Bill Bryson.

And perhaps the greatest (American) book ever written; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (aka "Mark Twain").

golfgod
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Old 01-26-2008, 01:11 PM
 
Location: Utah
1,458 posts, read 4,118,261 times
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I like this question...I don't read to "escape", I think most of us are already delusional as to the world we live in! And I like to expand my mind, make connections... I like thinking.

The titles that immediately come to mind, are books that are already on any list of "what's your favorite/most memorable/most recommend/ect book?".

So I'm rolling this around in my mind....
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Old 01-26-2008, 01:16 PM
 
3,724 posts, read 9,288,789 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by RDSLOTS View Post
OK, I'll admit that even though I read extensively, and majored in English in college, I found this thread both intriguing and intimidating.

I've read several titles from your lists, but it has been SO long ago until I remember just bits and pieces. Some of these should be 'must reads,' I think, for well-educated people, however. I think I read a lot of these while I was in college, and have since, picked them up out of curiosity -- or like your original post suggests, for 'stimulating' reading.
Heh. I bet a nickel I'm older than you are, and some of these I read in high school. And I forgot some of the ones I found most intriguing: The Virus That Ate Cannibals, The Descent of Woman, everything I could find by Lyall Watson, especially Supernature and Beyond Supernature, Life on Man, and the original trilogy about Thomas Dooley in Indo-China.

It's not meant to be intimidating, though it might be if one were handed a reading list that included all these. Much of what I read was accidental - I'd have a term paper due and get sidetracked by something that interested me while doing research. The hardest one was trying to do a biography of Thomas Dooley while disguising it as a 'modern history' project!
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Old 01-26-2008, 01:27 PM
 
Location: Piedmont NC
4,596 posts, read 11,417,489 times
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Guilty of doing the exact same thing -- starting out on one thing and going off on some tangent. When I was teaching, and the kids started their research papers, I would get interested in ALL sorts of things, either from helping them with their research, or from reading their papers and source materials.

I remember all of the hoop-lah over The Da Vinci Code -- first the book and then the film -- and thinking, "where were all of you people when Holy Blood, Holy Grail was published back in the 1980s?"

I like books of any genre that make me think and question. Don't you think it keeps us young and in-touch with the rest of the world? What thrills me is the access, now, to the written word -- any place in the world -- and all of the new perspectives that affords me. Wonder if too much stimulating reading could give you a brain ache?
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Old 01-26-2008, 02:06 PM
 
3,724 posts, read 9,288,789 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by RDSLOTS View Post
Wonder if too much stimulating reading could give you a brain ache?
Nah, it just gives me headaches, because it's so difficult for me to read print. And non-fiction just doesn't make it as audiobooks. The one that frustrated me most was Tale of the Genji - I finally chased down a complete copy several years ago, all I don't know how many pages [well over a thousand of really fine print], and I planned to read it when life didn't keep interfering. When I finally had the time, I couldn't, the print was too small. So I ordered the audio from the talking book library, and the advisor there said 'Oh, are you taking a world lit class? Is there anything else you need?' Duh. No, I wasn't taking a class, I just wanted to 'read' the whole thing from start to finish - though there wasn't exactly a finish, it just stopped. I guess she died or something before it was done.

When the Internet Public Library first started, it was a real on line library with the texts of thousands of classics and other books that the copyrights had run out on. Now it's essentially a clearinghouse for links to other places for doing research. There are still quite a few sites that have entire books on them, which I sincerely appreciate, because with those I can enlarge the fonts enough to read more or less painlessly.
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Old 01-26-2008, 04:31 PM
 
Location: Maine
22,846 posts, read 28,076,526 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Visvaldis View Post
What are the most intellectually stimulating books you've read?
Anything by G.K. Chesterton and Wendell Berry. I don't always agree with either one of them, but they always make me think.
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