(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best books

People of the Book is almost pornography for bibliophiles. This book had me seriously considering going back to school to learn about document preservation.

I went through a period of wanting to read a lot of books about books about a year ago. I think I even have an old submission in r/books on the same subject. Here are a bunch of books I still have on my amazon wishlist that date to around that time. This will be a shotgun blast of suggestions, and some may be only tangentially related, but I figure more is better. If I can think of even more than this, I'll edit later:

The Man who Loved Books Too Much

Books that Changed the World

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

How to Read and Why

The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Classics for Pleasure

An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the World of Books

The Library at Night

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

Time Was Soft There

I have even more around here somewhere...

Edit: Ok, found a couple more....

Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book-Hunter in the 21st Century

At Home with Books: How Booklovers Live with and Care for Their Libraries

Candida Hofer

Libraries in the Ancient World

The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read

A Short History of the Printed Word

Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption

Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work

The Book on the Bookshelf

A History of Illuminated Manuscripts

Bookmaking: Editing, Design, Production

Library: An Unquiet History

Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms

A Passion for Books: A Book Lover's Treasury of Stories, Essays, Humor, Lore, and Lists on Collecting, Reading, Borrowing, Lending, Caring for, and Appreciating Books

A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

And yet I still can't find the one I'm thinking of. Will get back to you...

Fuck yeah, I found it!

That last is more about the woman who own the store than about books, but it's awash in anecdotes about writers and stories we all know and love. Check it out.

Looking at the early usages of an idea is always an interesting way to first approach that term. You get to see how the idea, in this case metafiction, was first handled in literature and how that idea developed as it was used by different writers in different periods all with different cultural / literary agendas.

So, here are a couple of early examples of metafictional literature:

• The Canterbury Tales: the narrative frame constantly, by its nature, alludes to itself as a piece of writing. The speakers frequently mention how they are telling a tale and why they are telling that tale.
  
• Don Quixote: the hero of the novel reads so many novels he decided to try and enact those novels. There are many scenes where the speaker would alert the reader to the fact they are also reading one such novel.
  
• Shakespeare: There are quite a few moments in Shakespeare where a character addresses the audience and reminds them that they are watching a play. Some of the best examples are the play-within-a-play moments, such as in Hamlet. These are moments where the play meditates on what it means to be acting or watching a play. We might better call this technique metatheatre.
  
• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: If you say pre-postmodernist metafiction this is the novel that most people will think of. It is metafictional is every single sense of the word. Constantly referring back to its own writing process, layering of narratives, etc etc.
  
• Melville's The Confidence Man. This short story discusses how literary techniques are used in earlier chapters.
  
  Then we have postmodernism itself, the literary period that this term is synonymous with. The reason why it is much more important as a critical term here, even though it was being used earlier, is that metafiction for the postmoderns comes to be used as way of interrogating one's philosophical relationship with the world. It is much, much more than the playful layering of narrative that is usually was prior to postmodernism. It came to be for the postmoderns a meditation about how we know something, how we are able to read and write and what the point of those activites are. It was also used to dislodge the idea that there existed some kind of absolute and universal truth. Reality was a construct, a discourse and metafiction highlighted this better than most other techniques.
  
  So, some of the big names in postmodern metafiction:
  
  
• Anything by John Barth
  
• John Fowles
  
• The People of Paper
  
• House of Leaves
  
• Flann O'Brien (not really postmodern, on the cusp of postmodernism)
  
• Brecht (same as above)
  
• Pale Fire
  
• Mumbo Jumbo
  
• Crying of Lot 49
  
  EDIT: Just re-read your question and see that you are more interested in a history of the term and not so much its literary manifestations. Start with an etymological dictionary. This one is very good: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Oxford-Dictionary-English-Etymology/dp/0198611129/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369152716&sr=8-1&keywords=etymology+dictionary.
  
  There are also a couple of very good books that look at metafiction and that also go into the term's history. For example
  
  
• http://www.amazon.co.uk/Metafiction-Practice-Self-Conscious-Fiction-Accents/dp/0415030064/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369152738&sr=1-1&keywords=metafiction
  
  
• http://www.amazon.co.uk/Metafiction-Longman-Critical-Readers-Currie/dp/0582212928/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369152738&sr=1-3&keywords=metafiction
  

Ran said:
> It's a fun metaphor, but to buy into it I'd have to see examples of how the old myths had symbiotic interconnections like species in an ecology, and how the new myths don't.

I will try to expand more and make the parallels further, symbiosis makes sure that not only there will be organisms that will be better adapted for its niche but that they can approach tougher niches, this way different organism fill as much as possible of the living-space.
 
 

Compare that what the organism of a mono-crop becomes: a product, and a product means that his life purpose is to get the attention of the buyer and be consumed as fast as possible.
 
 

If we take a simpler definition that for organisms symbiosis is a mutual improvement in life. For an ecological Mythos(world of myth) we would have a kind of synergy(symbiosis) that improves in meaning for each other.
 
 

From my experience with folklore, Hindu and budhist myths, ortodox christian myths I have a gut feeling that myths improve each other inside these traditions and myths don't get obsolete but just enhanced. Even with that experience I don't have the erudition nor the space to expand this with examples and an exposition.
Keeping the ecological metaphor is harder to see how well was a place ecology until that place is destroyed.
Since is harder to show this synergy(symbiosis) with older myths I will try to appeal to your experience with the modern incarnations of myths: the meme and the mono-myth.
 
 

The meme has the same shelf-life like any product and it competes for immediate attention, it is a modern myth by many arguments and in even in theory and in practice they are found to be selfish and replicate at the detriment of other memes or the bigger picture.
 
 

More reading on mono-myth critique, an ecology of myths and integral(hollistic) "mythos":
 
 

Giambattista Vico (1668—1744)

Wandering God: Morris Berman

Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K Le Guin
 
 

Hello there, first time posting in this sub. I have been reading, learning and following tips here for quite awhile. Ok, onto the book:

Narrative Madness, free (until Monday 12/21, $4.99 regular)

> NM is a nonfiction title and a Master thesis about how our perception of reality is shaped by stories. Our lives, just like Don Quixote, are influenced by the books we read, the stories we are told and all the narrative of media that surround us.


I know that most people here are interested in fiction, but I thought I'd share the book anyways. After reading posts in /r/selfpublish/, I decided to follow some advice:

• join KDP Select
  
• put my book on sale for free as a promotion
  
• optimized the title by adding a subtitle, and
  
• refined the categories the book was listed to rank higher in Amazon listings.
  
  
  I really learned a lot from all I've read in this sub these last months. Any additional advice would be greatly appreciated. Cheers!
  
  (Edit: formatting)

If you're a Nick Hornby fan, here's what you should do - he's got three books that are little collections of the column he writes for The Believer called "Stuff I've Been Reading". They're hilarious, and each one gives you 5 or 6 great suggestions from a guy whose taste is pretty solid.

Start with The Polysyllabic Spree and then go to Housekeeping vs. the Dirt and Shakespeare Wrote for Money.

He's always saying his favourite author is Anne Tyler - I can corroborate, she's pretty good.

This isn't really "literature" but you also might like Mil Millington. He's funny in the same way and even though as I'm reading I'm like "huh.. this isn't that great" his novels are the ones that I end up reading in one 8 hour sitting.

You might like David Sedaris - I'd start with Me Talk Pretty One Day

And someone else said John Irving - he's my very favourite.

A good psychology book (and I'm a major layperson, so it's definitely accessible) is The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks and Mad in America by Robert Whitaker.

The "new" textbook is, in some ways, a very double-edged sword. It offers a lot of benefits, but at times I'm afraid it does so at the expense of real growth in thinking on the part of my students. It lets them get to the quick of the issue faster, but I worry that by removing the hurdles of learning to analyze and parse text critically (who needs to do that? There's a commentary or a link that will just tell me the 'answer'...), we do them a great disservice. Sven Birkerts notes as much in The Gutenberg Elegies. He even addresses the Perseus Project directly as a point of concern. The tools are definitely a boon for those individuals advanced enough in their learning to use them judiciously, but what happens when they become a quick end-around for actually mastering basic material? I'm a huge fan of the digital humanities, but at times I think we're rushing forward for the sake of being able to do so and without consideration for what sacrifices we make in order to obtain our gains. All very interesting questions though. That's for sure.

As @snickersnacks said, we are in proof of concept stage, so there is a lot of work to be done on research and developing the best ways to help parents and kids. While interested parents like you are going to be our most valuable resource, a couple of sources have been helpful and interesting as a starting point for research:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/nov/06/usa.politics

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Matters-Research-Libraries-Community/dp/1591580668

http://www.scholastic.com/content/collateral_resources/swf/i/Reading_for_pleasure.swf

Thanks so much for your feedback! Any other thoughts you on presentation or background as a parent would be much appreciated.

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
  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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