(Part 3) Reddit mentions: The best history & criticism books

Most of what I teach is covered in the classic work How to Read A Book from the 1950s; happily there is a new 2012 edition but the 1972 one is fine as well.

I didn't learn how to read efficiently until grad school, and then only through trial and error. Most of what I discovered on my own can be understood as part of Adler's "active reading" strategies from this book. If everyone read it as an undergraduate and practiced the techniques grad school would be a lot easier. I push my undergrads to read a lot, sometimes 250-400 pages for a single class; it's impossible at the beginning of the semester but by the end they can all do it.

We also focus on note-taking strategies in the class. They have to take notes on everything they read, and I read (and grade) their notes throughout the semester. It's a lot of work for all of us but the students say it helps tremendously both with their speed and comprehension-- and I think it boots their confidence as well.

There was a book called The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age published way back in 1995 that discussed much the same issues, only regarding books, and how they would fare in a world of massive amounts of other data.

Gutenberg himself clearly designed his first movable type to look as close as possible to 15th-century hand-written script. Even for his machine-printed books, he wanted them to look "like the real thing." It's much the same as today's iPad editions of magazines, that try to reproduce the magazine complete with an animated page-turn effect leafing from one page to another.

The Gutenberg Elegies also recounted a time when written words were rare and valuable. A monk who copied books for a living wrote in his journal about the unusual experience, while travelling down a road, of coming across a scrap of paper, and upon closer inspection seeing that the paper on the ground had writing upon it! He was impressed by this and tried to read the paper, guessing how it had ended up on the ground. When I happen across a photograph of myself from a certain year of my childhood, it's a find of something rare and valuable. When my now-2-year-old daughter grows up, she will have terrabytes of stills and videos of herself, searching at any time by keyword, date, or GPS location. The individual images will seem like a piece of something ubiquitous, not a rare scrap of something hard to find.

Despite tech changes, people value good shots of their kids. Many parents I know, even ones who could afford a dSLR, only photograph their kids with iPhones, and if you take a genuinely good portrait of their baby, that'll be something valuable to them. Maybe it's a cliché to you, but to them, it's their baby. Something that's still somewhat rare, like a high quality large print they can hang on a wall, could become a memorable keepsake. In a world of millions of pictures, the ones that people actually chose to look remain incredibly valuable.

I mean, you really need to be reading anthologies to get a basis of the poetic tradition and then move on to individual books. While individual books of poetry help you get a sense of each writer, getting a taste of many poets throughout many periods is the only way to really become well versed (pun-intended). Also, part of the way to learn how to read poetry more critically is learn how to write poetry, or at least what goes into writing poetry. And my personal advice is to purposefully read poetry that is hard for you to grasp or find interest in, whether that be due to understanding or content (e.g. Yeats and his faeries don’t interest me in the slightest).

Theory/Reading Critically:

• A Poetry Handbook (super basic approach)
  
• How to Read Poetry Like a Professor
  
• Why Poetry?
  
• The Poetry Handbook
  
  American:
  
• Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American
  
• The Oxford Book of American (my personal favorite)
  
• Any of The Best American Poetry collections, to read the most contemporary poems.
  
  Other:
  
• The Norton Anthology
  
• Six Centuries of Great Poetry
  
  Source: Have a Master’s Degree in poetry and currently working on my MFA. My expertise is in 20th & 21st Century American Poetry, particularly post-War/post-45.

I'm not a rare books or special collections librarian, but I thought the question was interesting. Some resources I found:

• It will be useful to look at job ads for rare books libs to see what qualifications they're looking for. Here's an old ad I found: rare books librarian at UC Berkeley
  
• Apparently there is a specific section for rare books within ACRL: http://rbms.info/. Getting involved with this org & attending conferences would be a great start, I imagine. Also, they have a good careers FAQ page: http://rbms.info/careers-faq/
  
• And don't forget they do make library books about working in libraries. Try requesting this at your local library: http://www.amazon.com/Rare-Book-Librarianship-Introduction-Guide/dp/1591588812
  

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Nifenegger

This book was such an amazing listen. It jumps back, forward, and way forward in time, which keeps your brain working. The narration is brilliant with a male and female narrotor. The story is one of my favorites of all time, mixing an extremely unique love story with a new take on time travel. Also, the main character Henry is a strong man, unlike how he was portrayed in the movie that hollywood butchered.

Definitely A Song of Ice and Fire. Please do suggest to him, though, that this would be a brilliant time for him to expand his literary horizons. Start with some compelling but intellectual novels such as 1984, Brave New World. Then... anything! Camus, Sartre, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy...

Check out the 1001 Books you must read before you die, it might be worth getting him in itself.

Jenkins' Textual Poachers is a classic. For a general history I'm fond of Jamieson's Fic: Why Fan Fiction is Taking Over the World. This is an anthology of variable quality, which somehow seems appropriate for fan fiction studies. Worth it for the intro chapters on the history of derivative works, and the Sherlock Holmes fandom as an longstanding case study.

The bigger question here is what do you mean by "literary genre"? One of the whole points of fan fiction is that it exists independently of the publishing industry's power structure and literary fads. Plus there's a huge range of motivations in writing it, and hence the final product varies wildly in topic, tone, and writing quality. About the only thing we all have in common is cribbing off the source material for characterization; with the rise of radical AU not even the canon setting is a common factor anymore. Is this enough to qualify as a coherent "literary genre," or maybe it's a collection of many different genres?

Side note: I loathed Fangasm. May as well title it: "Two Otherwise Intelligent People Lose Their Minds in Pursuit of Celebrity Crushes." One of the authors is an actual professor (media studies?) that published a fan studies textbook, so a compare and contrast of what she says academically vs. what was marketed to SPN fans would be interesting.

I would recommend The Torchlight List. It is a book that aims to help readers gain a wide perspective of the world through 200 books. I have read a few on the list and most are easy to read but provide a wealth of knowledge. The author writes chapters and within those chapters recommends certain books on subjects such as history, science and others.

The Long Walk was a work of fiction. I enjoyed the hell out of it when it was published, but since then there has been a lot of interested readers doing research.

Read "[Looking for Mr. Smith]
(http://www.amazon.com/Looking-Mr-Smith-Greatest-Survival/dp/1626365415/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1459265463&sr=8-8&keywords=looking+for+mr+smith)" by Linda Willis to gain insight into Rawicz's story and its true origin. After reading this book I've had to join the chorus of people who believe that Rawicz was actually somewhere else during the time of "the walk" and had cobbled together his tale from what he'd heard others talk about.

Here's a book I read on the case for translation. It answered a few questions about perfect translation and the like. Edith Grossman has translated a lot of literature mostly from Spanish to English. Interesting read.

Also, Japanese like any language is not "exotic." It is merely different. Language and culture are heavily entwined and one often reflects the other, but Japanese is no more exotic thsn any other language.

In my opinion though, if you want a "perfect" understanding of something, you need to read it in its unadulterated form. Once you understand the cultural background of the language, you get a much greater understanding for some things that can't be translated exactly. There are however some absolutely brilliant translators out there that do get awfully close.

The answer is pretty simple. The Bible was written over a period of hundreds of years and in two different languages. There is so much background behind what is written, it would be almost impossible to fully understand the books without some knowledge of this background (e.g., culture, ideas, language idioms, customs, etc). And to get that, you have to read about it (or have someone tell you over the course of one or two semesters) Same thing if you wanted to understand any book, especially one so culturally removed from our own.

In school, did you not read writing about other writings, especially in English class? Or at least listen to the professor say a few things about what you're reading? Yeah, like that.

I am reading How to Read Literature right now, and the author might spend two pages on the opening line of a George Orwell's 1984. It's brilliant and insightful. Highly recommended.

This was an excellent read for me to make some amazing literature connections:
Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books Behind the Hogwarts Adventures

For other tips for reading Wolfe, and general theories and whatnot, there are a few books well worth picking up.

Lexicon Urthus

Solar Labyrinth

The Long and the Short of It

The first book here is by Michael Andre-Driussi and has a foreword by Wolfe. This is mostly a dictionary and etymology-tracer of the words and names and theories in BotNS. Considering Wolfe's endorsement, it feels fairly official, even borderline cannon.

The last two are by Robert Borski and are absolutely great reads. Very imaginative, even if some of his theories seem too wild to be true.

Not an MFA, but we used Dobyn's Best Words, Best Order for discussion during my senior year poetry writing workshop. I am sure my professor used the book with her graduate students as well.

Take your time with it. You can read a chapter a day and never get bogged down. Most of the chapters are pretty short. There are 135 chapters, most of which are about 4-5 pages, the longest is about 20 pages (and there are only a few chapters that long).

Since I've already read it, I tend to just read a chapter a day (I did this with my first read-through of War & Peace's 350+ chapters, though often I'd read more than one chapter a day) and just enjoy the ride and the language. You probably already know the story.

I also really enjoy reading the edition with Rockwell Kent's illustrations.

A good & fascinating chapter-by-chapter guide is Dive Deeper Journeys with Moby-Dick.

Also, realize that it just may not be your cup of tea. And if you realize that, you won't be lacking in good company. William Faulker loved it, but Joseph Conrad didn't. MB divides readers.

The book that had the biggest impact on how I write was Peter Elbow's Writing without Teachers, which introduced the concept of freewriting. The book's central message: "Don't edit while you create!"

The other book that had a large impact on how I view myself as a writer, and the purpose of writing in general, was John Gardenr's On Moral Fiction.

Susie's Bright's How to Write a Dirty Story has great advice on writing in general, as well as writing erotica.

I've also heard that Stephen King's book on writing is pretty good, though I haven't read it.

Ah, yeah that's a great synopsis. And look who wrote it.

I also recommend: the readers guide: http://www.amazon.com/David-Foster-Wallaces-Infinite-Jest/dp/082641477X (although it's a very short read)

And,

Infinite Summer: http://infinitesummer.org/

If you plan on reading it again. You can just make it Infinite Autumn. :)

Crystal is an excellent author of books regarding the english language, read one of his books for linguistic anthropology, http://www.amazon.ca/Little-Book-Language-David-Crystal/dp/0300170823.

This subreddit is nice, seeing a name I've studied content from :).

As an edit, I figured there was an Aeon article that fit well enough: https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages

Basically, why is english so odd and different from othr languages, what led up to it, etc.

But even those animals which haven't been discovered were a part of known branches. Here is a helpful diagram from a CSK post 9 months ago. https://classconnection.s3.amazonaws.com/749/flashcards/1369749/jpg/phylogeny-142DACCB23D6A5FF9A9.jpg

Scientists can look at the genes of the known animals of a branch and have a good idea of what is possible genetically of any members of that branch.

There is no need for a centuries old hoax. The claim that "it's either true" or "it's centuries old hoax" is a false choice.

All cultures tell stories and always have. Why humans tell stories is hugely interesting and there are a ton of resources online about this very topic. There's also a very good book called The Story Telling Animal. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0547391404/?tag=thneyo0f-20. It's available on amazon for less than $3 used.

I've got 95 too! I'm kind of excited about that number simply because it was higher than I thought it would be. There's another dozen or so that are somewhere in my TBR pile.

It looks like the list is from an actual reference book compiled by a bunch of literary critics. This list does seem a little off. I love Jane Austen, but are all her books absolutely must reads? Probably not.

Then, of course, there's this list, and now it's like we have homework and the due date is our dying day. Doesn't get much more definitive than that.

You might want to try 1001 Books to read before you die...

One of my degrees is in English. One of my favorite things to do is read. I'm also old, so I've had many, many, many years to read books. I'm constantly on the lookout for lists such as the one Austin-G was kind enough to compile for us. I've diligently attempted to plow through books found in The Lifetime Reading Plan and 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. I also love listening to Nancy Pearl on NPR and checking out her book suggestions.


Somehow people found this so very offensive that they thought I deserved downvotes for not contributing to the conversation.


TL;DR: Some people are sad, pathetic and petty.


Because of all this, it's not surprising that I've read most of the books that are in the top 200 books that fellow redditors have read too.

The justification is in a book form. http://www.amazon.com/1001-Books-Must-Read-Before/dp/0789313707/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1292706196&sr=8-1

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

1001 books to read before you die

this is where i get a lot of mine from

i've got the actual book. it's got a brief summary of each of the 1001 books

Work your way through 1001 books to read before you die

The link to the actual book

Why Poetry, By Matthew Zapruder.

(A) I can't fully vouch for this book, haven't read it thru and thru yet.

(B) I just picked it up literally 2 days ago.

(C) In the bookstore though, the flap, intro and a few random samplings seemed to make it a reasonable read.

He doesnt' take on an acedemic stance about rhyme and meter and iambic pentameters etc, but talks more about how we tend to read poems, how we've culturally beeen trained to read poems, and offers some strategy on how to break down the language and motifs.

So it seems.

That's all I got for you.