More Reading
The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews—Judith A. Chevalier
DO NOT read this paper. It’s awful. It actually uses this sentence as its conclusion “The evidence suggests that customer word of mouth has a casual impact on consumer purchasing behavior at two internet retail sites. We believe this has not been shown before.” Groundbreaking.
Street Gangs: The New Urban Insurgency—Max G Manwaring
I wrote about this here.
Brave New War—John Robb
A MUST read. Wrote about it here.
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
It’s the third time I’ve read it this year. Every time I do I become more convinced that it ought to be included in high school canon. It ought to go Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, The Jungle, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mocking Bird, Catcher in the Rye, Fahrenheit 451, Fight Club. Is there a better book that sums our age? Anything that better encapsulates the existential vacuum and how a society struggles to overcome it? Everyone of those other books were banned or disparaged or slighted by critics but in time we came to see how valuable they were. FC is the same.
The weird thing about The Jungle is that you only need to read two chapters to get the key concepts. That’s it. It’s just too repetitively awful to read the whole thing.
Ryan, I apologize for not getting back to you about my planned career path. I’m holding back on telling people details until I actually get the ball rolling a good distance down this particular road. I don’t want to risk talking and not end up doing the walking.
The Jungle was written as a newspaper series with no intention of turning it into a book. Each chapter or part is supposed to be relatively independent. The reason it is so ridiculous is the same reason Seinfeld would be unreadable if you put all the episodes back to back.
I thought the book sucked for the record.
I always thought Paulo Coelho’s novel “The Alchemist” should also be required reading for anyone graduating High School or entering University.
Every time I tell someone this their reaction is as if I just told them “Everybody Poops” is a classic American novel.
I’ve read that book (The Alchemist) probably twice every year since I first bought it and I learn something new pretty much each time I pick it up. It definitely helps remind me what is important in life.
The problem with The Alchemist is that it isn’t about a particular part of modern history. All those books above are used because they can be taught simultaneously in history and english classes. Not saying having kids read fever books is a great strategy but it is efficient.
All Quiet on the Western Front wasn’t roundly accepted post-WWI?
Was I the only one who was greatly disappointed by Fahrenheit 451? Since I heard of it as one of the great classics in sci-fi, I always intended to read it, and was very excited to talk about a book that actually seemed interesting to me in school, but when I finally read it, I was disgusted how awful it was written and how little Bradbury had made of that promising idea and interesting setting. It felt like a play, whith interesting story, but an awful director, no props or stage design, and actors who never rehearsed but only learned their text by heart. Just awful.
Quite the contrary though with True West, a play we read before, and that nobody expected much from. It happened to be very entertaining and well written (our teacher chose it as she was tired of reading Death Of A Salesman every year), not a must, but I enjoyed reading it.
Eva
I think the Point of The Jungle was to motivate the people to correct wrongs. It sort of worked and not in the way Sinclair intended.
Subversion of a pure intent may be a great topic if you’ve not already done something on it.
Eva: You don’t know literature if you’re dissing Fahrenheit 451. The repeated usage of the concept of “play” leads me to confirm my initial judgment.
One must see a play, not read it to truly understand it. Shakespeare on the page is shit compared to Shakespeare on the stage.
amphibian: I’m actually agree with you on your last point – I both read True West and saw it on stage, and the latter was more interesting, even if I liked both. Same goes for Shakespeare (unfortunately I’ve rarely had the chance to see a play of his on stage).
For Fahrenheit though, I think it’s legitimate to use theatre as analogy since it just describes what I did not like about the novel. As I said, it surely deserves it’s reputation for the idea of that society, for the message it contains and maybe for the plot. But still, my personal opinion is that Bradbury is overrated, because he could’ve made that much more of it. He gives the reader some people who interact (and who serve their purpose in the story, but don’t go any deeper mostly), but doesn’t bother to desribe the scenery. We barely know anything about the world where everything takes place, hence it felt to me like actors on a blank stage.
One could surely argue that there is reason behind this minimalism, that maybe in this Bradbury shows his true genius, and maybe they’d be right, but I just found it, well, very dry. No offense, but that’s my opinion. Maybe I’ll pick it up again in ten years and think different, who knows.
it’s nice to see someone giving fight club the attention it deserves. i’m always a little disappointed when people have seen the movie and liked it but failed to follow up with a read through. i think of the philosophy as dialectical existentialism. nietzsche was wrong–god isn’t dead. he abandoned us, which is worse because now we spend our entire lives trying to compensate for a perceived fundamental flaw through narcissistic ego masturbation. we try too hard because we want to matter. only when we finally give up and surrender to the depravity of ourselves can we find anything meaningful and redeeming.