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- Oct 12, 2006
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A High School kid told me that ze wanted to read:
Dr. Zhivago
Essays by Joan Didion
The Power Broker
Umberto Ecco
Swann's Way
Ayn Rand
War and Peace
Pushkin
Dead Souls (Gogol)
Lolita
Don Quixote
Catch-22
Toni Morrison
Joyce Carol Oates
so that ze would be smarter (ze is currently in the middle of Crime and Punishment and then moving on to War & Peace. I gather the list came from zir head and is sort of a "books literate people have read" list.
Apart from the futility of the task and the oddity of the list already compiled, what books would you suggest? My approach would be not to focus on "books literate people have read" which is near endless, but rather choose books that would be mind expanding and introduce new ways of thinking. So apart from the various Dialogues, I would suggest something like Taleb's Black Swan and Hofstader's Godel, Escher, Bach. Especially since the kid is already pretty well read in the humanities from what I can tell.
Dr. Zhivago
Essays by Joan Didion
The Power Broker
Umberto Ecco
Swann's Way
Ayn Rand
War and Peace
Pushkin
Dead Souls (Gogol)
Lolita
Don Quixote
Catch-22
Toni Morrison
Joyce Carol Oates
so that ze would be smarter (ze is currently in the middle of Crime and Punishment and then moving on to War & Peace. I gather the list came from zir head and is sort of a "books literate people have read" list.
Apart from the futility of the task and the oddity of the list already compiled, what books would you suggest? My approach would be not to focus on "books literate people have read" which is near endless, but rather choose books that would be mind expanding and introduce new ways of thinking. So apart from the various Dialogues, I would suggest something like Taleb's Black Swan and Hofstader's Godel, Escher, Bach. Especially since the kid is already pretty well read in the humanities from what I can tell.