Serious answers only, please. No more than ten, also. I can't read all that many in a short period of time. Thank you!
2006-12-01 14:20:16 · 25 answers · asked by Anonymous in Arts & Humanities ➔ Books & Authors
Thank you, everyone!!! I am extending my question for four more days so I can get more answers. Background: I want to challenge myself by undertaking some more serious intellectual material. I read Will Smith recommended Plato's "The Republic" to be required reading for everyone, and I undertook a mission to amass a reading list of books that expand the mind. Please, write. Thank you again!
2006-12-03 20:35:23 · update #1
Paradise Lost, by John Milton
anything Shakespeare has written
Faust- by Goethe
Dante's Divine Comedy
the Bible
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
Germinal, by Emile Zola
Candide, by Voltaire
these are just a small sample; honestly, you should read anything and everything. Even the most worthless literature may prove to have valuable lessons, or, at the very least, examples of poor grammar and writing that you can learn to avoid in your own writing.
2006-12-01 18:02:08 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
Very difficult question. Depends on what kind of intellectual you want to be. There are just so many books out there.
Dante's Divine Comedy
Goethe's Faust
The Portable Nietzsche (most of his stuff really)
The Bible
Shakespeare (hard to narrow it down to a single play. Hamlet or King Lear or Macbeth or Julius Caesar)
Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground
Lao Tze's Tao Te Ching
George Orwell's 1984
Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Virgil's Aeneid
Works by Freud, Jung, Joseph Campbell, Kant, Hume, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Aquinas, Plotinus, Aristotle, T.S. Eliot, it never ends!
2006-12-01 14:45:08 · answer #2 · answered by Underground Man 6 · 2⤊ 0⤋
The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse, And The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Try these Authors as well:Ayn Rand, Margaret Atwood, James Joyce, Gunter Grass, Kahlil Gibran, Umberto Eco, Alice Walker, William S. Burroughs. Look up a list of Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winners to get some more names.
2006-12-01 18:05:18 · answer #3 · answered by ? 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I love to read and I read everything from Chaucer to King !
So I really hope you will read what you love!
If you really want to get the goods so to speak, then check out the many prizes offered to respected writers by various countries.
Here in Canada it is the Giller prize in the UK I think it is the Booker. Simply go to their web sites and peruse the past winners and even the runners up for titles that tickle your fancy!
Other things to consider are era? Your sure to impress if you familiarize yourself with say Plato or Socrates or say the Iliad by Homer.
Here are a few of my picks:
Timothy Findlay - Pilgrim
Alistair MacLeod - No Great Mischief
Alexandre Dumas - Three Musketeers
Geoffrey Chaucer - Canterbury Tales
Charles Dickens - Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities
2006-12-01 15:21:03 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
Start with (1) the Bible -- no joke. A lot of western literature contains layers that are missed unless one has a good understanding of the Bible.
I would recommend getting a good foundation in the classics prior to some more modern works -- most works refer back to a lot of pieces.
2. Iliad -- Homer
3. Odyssey -- Homer
4. Aeneid -- Virgil
5. Beowulf -- Unknown
6. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
7. Le Morte d'Arthur -- Malory
8. The Canterbury Tales -- Chaucer
9. The complete works of Shakespeare
10. Paradise Lost -- Milton
To be truly an intellectual you will need to go above and beyond these as well as seek out works from non-western sources as well as non-traditional voices -- women, minorities, etc.
2006-12-01 14:47:34 · answer #5 · answered by Jamir 4 · 1⤊ 1⤋
History cannot be forgotten.
Try:
The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire,
Civilization by Clark
Diary of the Plague Years
An Incomplete Education
The Sword and Womankind (pub 1907)
The Origins of the Species
She.
He.
The Stages of a Man's Life.
and of course the unabridged, non-edited version of Grimm's Brothers Fairy Tales.
After all of that, post again next month for a more complete list.
2006-12-01 14:37:09 · answer #6 · answered by speranzacampbell 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Try: The Modern Mind, by Peter Watson
And maybe
The art of being an intellectual.
by Ignace Lepp
On being an intellectual,
by Jacob Bronowski; Gerald James Holton
2006-12-02 13:58:23 · answer #7 · answered by Ace Librarian 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
War and Peace
Ovid's Metamorphosis
Shakespear's Sonnets and whatever
Brave New World - Huxley
Animal Farm - Orwell
Ulysses
Look Homeward Angel
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Mein Kampf ( because it is ridiculous)
Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche
The Propeht - Gibran
Nectar in a Sieve - Kamala Markandaya
The Once and Future King - T H White (for fun)
There are so many
Sometimes you have to read the most controversial books to form your own opinion; that is what an intellectual is.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=7591
Zen and the Art of Motocycle Maintenance is great too
2006-12-01 14:37:06 · answer #8 · answered by Anonymous · 4⤊ 1⤋
Forget popular fiction such as Stephen King, etc. Here you go: The Fall by Albert Camus; Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce; Anna Karenina by Tolstoy; The Red and the Black by Stendhal; The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner; Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy; Moby Dick by Herman Melville; Great Expectations by Charles Dickens; and after reading one or two (not necessarily in the order listed), email me and we'll chat about them...
2006-12-01 14:27:29 · answer #9 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
1. The Great Divorce
2. Brave New World
3. The Idiot
4. 1984
5. Fahrenheit 451
6.Utopia
7. Candide
8. The Prince (Not to be confused with The Little Prince)
9. Any Shakespeare
10. Night by Elie Wiesel
2006-12-01 15:24:17 · answer #10 · answered by chistoso13 2 · 1⤊ 1⤋