kerble wrote:

rayj wrote:26. The Koran (does reading a translation of this one count? Not to the believers...)

I would actually argue that it does, fwiw. I was raised in a muslim household and attended sunday school for about eight years (1st-8th). I studied urdu as a language before religious studies and can speak that just great, but we only ever learned Arabic phonetically. It's fucked b/c on paper, they're essentially the same letters in both languages with I think only three or so variants.

I can read Arabic aloud, but I don't understand a damn word (give or take). Kinda pisses me off in hindsight considering how much time I spent there. you'd think they'd teach you more of the language instead of just the english translation. CRAP.

my story isn't unique to our school, either. I've met lots of folks that have the same experience.

I still regret not being able to speak Arabic to this day. I think it would've been cool. plus whenever the point of what languages do you speak, Arabic always has to come with the "I can read and write it" modifier. weak.

As a complete outsider to the whole culture, and someone barely able to speek the eenglish these days, I have to say that Arabic sounds musical, and is, with the possible exception of Japanese calligraphy, hauntingly beautiful in written form. Plus, it's backwards. How cool is that?

Sorry.

It has been hammered into my head that the only Qu'ran is in its native tongue, untranslated from the time it was transcribed straight out of Muhommad's mouth. I'm pretty sure it is the ONLY one of the three religions to come out of that region/time that can say that. Translations can whip the crap out of semantics...

of that list i've read:

The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
The Republic, Plato
The New Testament
The Koran
Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
Common Sense, Thomas Paine
Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard
The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

there are a few on this list that i'd like to eventually read, but im not really interested in the bulk of what's on here.

86. The Trial is probably my favoritest book ever...
93. 1984


i got halfway through 12. The Republic and quit even though it was for a class and various others i think i've probably read parts of but definitely not cover-to-cover...

Recovering Latin/classics scholar here, so I've read a lot of "the usual suspects". Coupled with the fact that I went to a Jesuit school, I've read a bunch of the religious stuff as well.

Some of what I have read, but don't remember a whole lot of:
Confessions, Augustine of Hippo
Summa Theologicae, Thomas Aquinas
On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs, Nicolaus Copernicus
The Harmony of the World, Johannes Kepler
"Experiments with Plant Hybrids," Gregor Mendel
Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, James Clerk Maxwell

but as research I am going to have to crack the Copernicus and Kepler again.

Stuff I read and re-read often:
The I Ching
The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (I have a couple of different translations)
Don Quixote, Parts I and II, Miguel de Cervantes
The First Folio [Works], William Shakespeare (I treasure my copy of The Riverside Shakespeare)
The Trial, Franz Kafka

I am embarrassed to admit I never read these:
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

or any of the philosophical stuff.

1.The I Ching
2.The Old Testament
3.The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
4.The Upanishads
5.The Way and Its Power, Lao-tzu

6.Analects, Confucius
7.History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
8.Works, Hippocrates
9.Works, Aristotle
10.History, Herodotus
11.The Republic, Plato
12.Elements, Euclid


13.The New Testament

14.The Gospel of Truth
*Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

15.Enneads, Plotinus
*Confessions, Augustine of Hippo
16.The Koran

17.The Kabbalah
18.Summa Theologicae, Thomas Aquinas (I liked this one alot.)
19.The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri

20.The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli
*On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther

21.On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs, Nicolaus Copernicus

22.Don Quixote, Parts I and II, Miguel de Cervantes
*The Harmony of the World, Johannes Kepler
*Novum Organum, Francis Bacon
*The First Folio [Works], William Shakespeare
23.Dialogue Concerning Two New Chief World Systems, Galileo Galilei
24.Discourse on Method, René Descartes
*Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes

25.Ethics, Baruch de Spinoza

25 1/2.Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Isaac Newton
26.Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke

*A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume

27.Candide, François-Marie de Voltaire
*Common Sense, Thomas Paine

*The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
28.Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
*Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

*Phenomenology of Spirit, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
**The World as Will and Idea, Arthur Schopenhauer

29.Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard
30.The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
"Civil Disobedience," Henry David Thoreau
31.The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Charles Darwin

*"Experiments with Plant Hybrids," Gregor Mendel
32.War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
33.Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, James Clerk Maxwell
34.Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
*The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud

35.Relativity, Albert Einstein (and more)

36.Psychological Types, Carl Gustav Jung
*I and Thou, Martin Buber
37.The Trial, Franz Kafka

38.Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre
*The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich von Hayek

39.Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
**Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff
*Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein
*Syntactic Structures, Noam Chomsky

*Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung [The Little Red Book], Mao Zedong
*Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B. F. Skinner


*Read from , probably for school etc.
**want to read

since i am a dummy, the books that i have read are common sense by thomas paine and autobiography by benjamin franklin.

i've read the divine comedy, don quixote, pilgrim's progress, vindication of the rights of women (and also tom swift's vindication of the rights of animals [or whatever his response was called]) and 1984. 5/100 seems pretty awful.

i've read almost all of candide and war and peace

i read/liked that book about the dude who turns into a cockroach by kafka, so i should probably check out 'the trial'

but i mean who's going to read the whole old testament (apart from my mother) or the dictionary or the koran

also what the hell is the I CHING

and lastly why aren't all the religious texts in the top 3? i'm pretty sure way more people have been killed and died in the name of god than because of the dudes in the illiad. there have to be way more christians than there were greeks? right?

davesec wrote:but i mean who's going to read the whole old testament (apart from my mother) or the dictionary or the koran

In some colleges, the bible (both old and new testaments) is read as a work of literature. So are parts of the Koran.