Interesting...

I don't mean to interrupt you all from reading Emma, but a friend of mine pointed this book out to me, and I thought you guys might find it interesting. It's got a different perspective on a few of the "Great Books" that we read.

At one point, the author writes: "The desire that something be true, rather than the desire for truth itself, may well be the root of all evil. It is certainly the origin of all ideology, and ideology was the source of much of the evil in the past century."

Interesting, no?

PS - I didn't actually *read* this book, so I have no idea if it's any good, and don't really know anything about it, I just think it's interesting how the Great Books come up everywhere, all the time, and are used for such a variety of purposes by so many different sorts of people
PPS - Do people inform you of any and all great-books-related things that they find? People certainly have started pointing them all out to me... it's quite funny.

Bilateral Decision: Book #1

Dear Comrades,
Good news, the first book of the summer is Emma, by Jane Austen!

The date to have Emma completed by is: June 4, which is three weeks from today.

I had a planning meeting about book group and we decided that picking one book at a time will be better than laying out an entire program right now. This way, we can see what people want to read, who is reading, etc, as we go.
Of course, the people who decide to take part in book #1 will get more of a say in the next books. Hartley and I thought Emma was a safe bet for making people happy.

Please comment with complaints about the book, the date, etc, and/or to say you're planning to take part!

And, of course, Congrats on surviving finals everyone!!!! We no longer need refer to ourselves as "First years."

Love,
Hannah

Picking Books

Seven would work, if we want to do one every two weeks. There are 14 weeks in summer. Maybe everyone should vote for their top 10, rating them 1-10. Then we can look at what gets the most votes. Who wants to be in charge of tallying votes? I can do it if you want... let me know.

So...

How are we going to choose? And how many books are we going to read? Maybe all of us should pick our top 6/7, and then we could choose the 5 (or how ever many we decide to read) with the most votes. What do you think? Other ideas?

Suggestions, Humbly Submitted for Your Consideration

While I am reluctant to offer advice on setting up the details of the Great Books Boot Camp, Ashley talked to me about it and asked if I would post my thoughts. So here they are:

1. I suspect this thing will only work if it is run by all of you and not by me. So, you should certainly feel free to disagree with everything below.

2. A modest program will likely work better than an ambitious one.

3. The final book list does not have to be a complete summer’s worth of reading—I am certain that many of you will have other books you want to read over the summer, and a schedule that is not all-consuming will probably work better.

4. This may seem obvious, but the longer the book, the less likely everyone will read it; similarly, the worse the prose style of the book, the less likely everyone will read it. That is only a serious problem if the reading list becomes an “all or nothing” sort of thing.

Looking over the list of books suggested so far, there are a large number of quite lengthy books. The long ones are:

100 Years of Solitude
Anna Karenina
Life of Johnson
Institutes of the Christian Religion
The Canterbury Tales
Don Quixote
East of Eden
Federalist Papers
Philosophy of History
Leviathan
Critique of Pure Reason
Moby Dick
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Tin Drum
War and Peace

For the shorter works, here are a few comments:

1. The Communist Manifesto, The Metamorphosis, Much Ado About Nothing, and Of Mice and Men are very short, quick reads.

2. For Mill, the best bets are: On Liberty, Utilitarianism, or The Subjection of Women

3. For Freud, the best starting place is either 1) one of the parts of the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (the three sections are Parapraxes (aka Freudian Slips), Dreams, and General Theory of the Neuroses—the whole book is long (almost 600 pages), but the sections can be read alone) or 2) (if you want a complete, short book) Civilization and its Discontents.

4. For Swift, Gulliver’s Travels is the obvious choice.

Wow - apparently 24 hours from when I received a "join our group" email was a long time.... I guess everyone is studiously avoiding studying ;-) What is the plan for voting on submissions?
p.s. - I also vote for starting with Jane Austen

Full List

Here are all the suggestions, alphabetized. There are 34. There are 16 weeks in summer.

1984
100 Years of Solitude
A Passage to India (E.M. Forster)
Anna Karenina
Borges
Boswell's Life of Johnson
Brave New World
Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion
The Canterbury Tales
The Communist Manifesto
Don Quixote
East of Eden
Emma
Federalist Papers
Freud
Hegal: Philosophy of History
Hobbes: Leviathan
JS Mill:
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
Lolita
Marx: Communist Manifesto
Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)
Moby Dick
Much Ado About Nothing (William Shakespeare)
Nietzsche's Ecce Homo
Of Mice and Men
Paradise Lost
Pride and Prejudice
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Sun Also Rises
Swift
This Side of Paradise (F.Scott Fitzgerald)
The Tin Drum
War and Peace

Summer book suggestions

Hey! THANK YOU HANNAH FOR THIS AWESOME BLOG!!! And Rohita for organizing everything!! You guys are awesome!

Here are some more options:

Lolita
Emma
Brave New World
Paradise Lost
The Sun Also Rises
The Canterbury Tales
East of Eden
Don Quixote
The Communist Manifesto
Something by Freud... (by the way, today is his birthday)

These are just ideas. I don't really know how long some of these are, so they may be too long. I think Hartley was right about keeping them shorter for the meantime.

Anyway... let's start this soon! I'm really excited about it! Can the first book be something really entertaining and readable? And by that, I mean something by Jane Austen, lol, if that's all right with everybody.

Summer Books

Dear Beloved Comrades(?)

I have decided that we should read the following:

1) 100 Years of Solitude
2) A few choice works by Borges
3) War and Peace
4) Stranger in a Strange Land
5) The Tin Drum (seriously, hehe)
6) Brave New World
7) Of Mice and Men

Well, it's a start. What do you think?

Great Books Boot Camp

So, I know that this is not reasonable for all of us, because some of us will have lives over the summer.  But for those of us who are going to be bored, and/or are dorks, etc., I was hoping I might find a comrade or two for a more arduous set of readings beyond the full class reading club, and beyond that happy entertaining world of novels.  

Possible readings would include:

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion 

Hobbes: Leviathan

(that's right, Calvin and Hobbes!)

JS Mill: (not sure what)

Federalist Papers

Freud

Boswell's Life of Johnson (man crush!)

Hegal: Philosophy of History

Marx: Communist Manifesto

Nietzsche's Ecce Homo (gotta see what is written under those chapter titles)

Another Greek Tragedy would be good, if anyone has a suggestion other than Oedipus

Also, what happened to Mr. Swift?? Canterbury Tales could be fun, too.  And Alessandra's favorite English teacher always said Moby Dick was the best novel ever, so we should probably read that.  

Book Suggestions

1) A Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert Heinlein)
2) Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
3) Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
4) Of Mice & Men (John Steinbeck)
5) Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
6) War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
7) 100 Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez)

Oh - and a negative on The Metamorphosis - didn't like it.

Check out this list, it's one of those silly "best 150 novels" lists. It's by no means perfect, but it is certainly a decent list of possibilities.

For those of you that haven't read it, read East of Eden. It is AMAZING, I'd be happy to read it again if ya'll want. Same with The Fountainhead. And Anna K. And A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And 1984... but especially East of Eden.

PS - I figured P&P went without saying...

Book Suggestions

I figured this would be a good place to post our wishes for summer reading. We can test out the blog and list our preferences.
I guess I'll go first.
1) This Side of Paradise (F.Scott Fitzgerald)
2) Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)
3) A Passage to India (E.M. Forster)
4) Much Ado About Nothing (William Shakespeare)

Welcome to the Great Books Blog!

Tada! Here it is, the great books summer blog. I have invited all of you to be authors of the blog via email. You'll probably have to sign up and stuff, and then we can all be one big happy bloggy family!