That's what Slate asked a number of influential people in this
article. What's your answer?
Mine would have to be Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, which exposed me to a much broader range of possibilities in fiction that I had before. I hated it the first time I read it. I thought it was pretentious and unnecessarily difficult. But on second
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Yeah, with Barthes, I suggest starting with Mythologies, which makes these really astute and funny observations about French life in the '70s. It's kinda equivalent to reading a Barthes short story collection.
No pressure with litfic. At this point, I'm just planting the seed and don't really care how long it takes for it to grow. So contribute over there at your own leisure. I just want to keep populating it so people would have stuff to think about when they visit.
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To name a book by a title, I would say Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Assigned not in a Lit class but an intro to Political Theory seminar (also my Freshman year), reading this following more canonical poli sci faves like Locke or Hobbes or Mill or Marx was a body blow to my sensibilities. Here was proof that ideas weren't only to be taken ( ... )
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dude, what's up with you? i called your cell on friday and you never called me back. i'm happy just maintaining contact on lj, but we did talk about going to the whitney.
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oh, and i hope you don't mind, but i'm going to use this episode to ask what people's etiquette thresholds are, because i myself am slightly unclear about it. if you do mind i'll just do a friends-only post and filter you out, so you i can either talk about you in front of you or behind your back.
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A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch.
I picked it up Senior year because the 20th century brit lit class read it, and I was enthralled to the point of rewiring the electrical to get a light in my closet and locking myself in.
It convinced me to break up with my girlfriend.
I've since read 15 or so Iris books, and that one 5 times
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"the green knight"
"message to the planet", i actually didn't like reading this one at all, but it has been the one that I think of most often, so it is really great.
"the sacred and profane love machine" beyond having a brilliant title this one was fun.
i love how Iris can sum up people's conflicting emotions so quickly. the characters almost always have conflicting emotions, which is wonderful because emotions are never simple.
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Animal Liberation by Peter Singer- led to me being vegetarian for 6 years, and I still find its basic arguments hard to refute.
The Language Instinct by Steve Pinker - best cog sci book I read, chapter that summarizes similarities across cultures is breathtaking
Intro to Algorithms by Cormen/Leiserson/Rivest: the bible. Stark beauty of this textbook convinced me to become a computer science major after I saw it on a friend's bookshelf. Cover by Alexander Calder still perfect.
Living High and Letting Die by Peter Unger - moral philosophy that will leave you feeling guilty years later. This book is why I give to oxfam every year, and why I know I don't give enough.
Mind of a Mnemonist by R. Luria - fascinating book about patient who had absolute recall; leads to all kinds of interesting observations about nature of memory
The Modernist City - this is how I learned about Brasilia and began to realize what precisely I hate about modern urbanism. actually I hated the way this book was written, ( ... )
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