What are 20 must read foundational books...

This is enough for a lifetime.

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wmytmwtj

>One Thousand and One Nights
>The Tale of Genji
>western

The 1001 Nights directly or indirectly influenced Chaucer, Boccaccio, etc., but yes, Genji probably shouldn't be there. What should I replace it with?

Philistine new to Yea Forums here, why is the Bible recommended so often?

Name a more influential text.
Also some writer said that all the books were already conceptualized in the bible, and he isn't wrong.

OP literally never mentioned that the list had to be Western, though.

But a grounding the foundational Western stuff will enable you to appreciate everything else better, even if it's not Western.

Debatable, but okay.

Most of the work discussed here is North American or European, by a huge margin, so I went with that. besides, I'm much less familiar with non-Western canons.

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Depends. You can go Epic of Gilgamesh if you want to talk about works that influenced later western authors. You can also choose a book from Dumas or Don Juan by Byron. There is also Paradise Lost and Utopia

>North American
You mean American, right? Because Canada and Mexico are also in North America. Either way, Bloom includes both in the Western canon.

I've got Milton already, but Dumas might be good, or Hugo--both very important. Utopia's a good thought, too. Gilgamesh is probably the best choice, since it influenced Homer and everyone else (as opposed to, say, Beowulf, which only became read in the 19th century--though it's a fine example of a period and type of literature). A strong case could be made for adding Grimm and Andersen to the list in terms of things everyone should know.

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Beowulf was read (and told) before that and Tolkein's characterization of it as a pure story is the basis of modern fantasy fiction.

is twice really enough for don quixote?

Not really (pre-19th c: you're certainly right about Tolkien, Lewis, Morris, etc.). Beowulf is only extant in the Nowell Codex, and nobody published a full copy of the story until 1815 (in Danish). The first real translations into English, etc., are all Victorian: that's when it became important. Old English as a recognized and imagined period is a fairly new conception. I can expand on that some other time.

Heh, I missed that. Great, a slot for Dumas or Hugo?

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I think I'd vote for Notre-Dame de Paris.

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Les Mis, obviously.

Then there's Frankenstein...

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The Vedas
Tao Ching
Art of War
Republic
The Odyssey
The Aenid
The Divine Comedy
The Tanakh
New Testament
The Koran
Confessions
A Treatise on God as First Principle
The Prince
Leviathan
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Origin of Species
Creative Evolution
Ethics
Critique of Pure Reason
Beyond Good and Evil
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Principia Mathematica
Being and Time
Phenomenology of Spirit
Origin of the Family
Capital
State and Revolution
A Thousand Plateaus
Discipline and Punish
Simulacra and Simulation
Society of the Spectacle

probably missed one or two

Ding ding ding

>A Thousand Plateaus
>Discipline and Punish
>Simulacra and Simulation
>Society of the Spectacle
you were doing so well before this. theyre all good books but come on

>to have read for the purpose of holding a conversation about literature and understanding most literary references

An impressively eclectic list.

What is a good Bible?
German one would help.

>chaucer
f u

imagine being her
god I wish that were me

Tolkien's. Beowulf translation is his best work and so much better than Heaney's.

Great books, but mostly useless for OP's stated purpose.

I think we should fit some russians in there? Also did I miss Freud or was he not in those lists?

>I think we should fit some russians in there?
Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are in there.

I have a half-dozen translations of Beowulf (and can read the original) and Burton Raffel's is one of my favourite for plain-speech literal transliteration of lines.
bpi.edu/ourpages/auto/2017/9/13/42764661/beowulf__raffel_translation_.pdf

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List is for fiction

Who is this Goddess?

sorry mate, there are 21 must read foundational books. can you remake this thread with this changed please

hahahahahahaha

So what's your final list?

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this but with another Don Quixote

So we need three Don Quixotes? Well, if you say so. But why stop there?

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odd but based take on chants of maladoror

How the fuck do Anglos even manage to pronounce some of those names considering English is a mess? "Thucydides". That can have at leat 20 pronounciations.

When in doubt, find a video of an old Oxford don speaking about it, and use their pronunciation.

Sanne Vloet
I don't.

So the consensus seems to be something along the lines of

King James Bible
Dante
Milton
Homer
Aeneid
Graves Greek Myths
Don Quixote
Morte D'Arthur
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Gulliver's Travels
Moby Dick
War and Peace
Don Quixote
Beowulf
Chaucer
Crime and Punishment
Shakespeare
Don Quixote
Faust
The Decameron

That's an excellent list. Nothing is "complete," but those are all major texts and really set you up nicely for understanding and appreciating other literature and references. Even where a text isn't completely essential (Gulliver's Travels, for instance) it's a good representative of a literary period and Swiftian irony/satire was very influential.

Pretty good list but could use something from Cervantes, my recommendation would be Don Quixote.

Not him but how is that debatable? We have very limited access to Eastern works and it is true that Western works prepare you to enjoy art if for no other reason than when you do end up reading some Eastern stuff its inevitably going to be through the form of a Western translation.

have sex, cunt

what's the most poetic one?

>Sanne Vloet
they never look as good when you see multiple pics of them

the second I open their instagram I completely cease to be attracted to them, literally every time.

For poetic style, I admit I favour Heaney usually, but Tolkien did a high and stately job, and of course his depth of understanding of the original language is much greater than Heaney's, though I would consider Heaney the finer poet (Tolkien is more bard than modern poet). Frederick R. Rebsamen did an uneven poetic version back in 1991 which takes some care with alliteration and beat, sprung lines, etc., but commits other sins with meaning and placement of words.

Quran

I have two kids and just had sex with my wife, user. There is time enough in a life for both reading and lovemaking (and collecting and travel and anything else). It's not an either/or situation.

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gay

Just as a warning (or to reiterate) Heaney's translation is far from accurate. He takes poetic liberties all over the place. If you want to read something very well-translated you're better off with prose, and the best overall is Michael Swanton's for scholarly accuracy.

what about raffel's?

Sex is for fags, real men are based celibates like Paul

It's quite strong, sort of a balance between transliteration and poetry. He uses compound words/kennings, etc. like Heaney, and free verse, but he's taking a lot more liberties than Swanton (though fewer than Heaney). Still, he's clear and accessible:

They have seen my strength for themselves, have watched me rise from the darkness of war, dripping with my enemies’ blood. I drove five great giants into chains, chased all of that race from the earth. I swam in the blackness of night, hunting monsters out of the ocean, and killing them one by one; death was my errand and the fate they had earned.”

“The Danish king was lifted into place, smoke went curling up, logs roared, open wounds split and burst, skulls melted, blood came bubbling down, and the greedy fire-demons drank flesh and bones from the dead of both sides, until nothing was left.”

Literally why?

I'd lather that ironingboard with my hot cum.

Why not?

Quran is mostly derivative of the Bible. Else is just Mohammed's autistic ramblings.

Something by Dickens- maybe Great Expectations

There are two mention of Don Quixote in the list already, hence the joke and the ensuing confusion.

Is Principia Mathematica actually worth reading? I like math.

Mohammad was illiterate and couldn't have read the Bible to copy it

You got to give it more credit than that; at the least it is debatable whether it is a literary masterpiece

>Michael Sells, citing the work of the critic Norman O. Brown, acknowledges Brown's observation that the seeming disorganization of Quranic literary expression—its scattered or fragmented mode of composition in Sells's phrase—is in fact a literary device capable of delivering profound effects as if the intensity of the prophetic message were shattering the vehicle of human language in which it was being communicated.[99][100] Sells also addresses the much-discussed repetitiveness of the Quran, seeing this, too, as a literary device.

A text is self-referential when it speaks about itself and makes reference to itself. According to Stefan Wild, the Quran demonstrates this metatextuality by explaining, classifying, interpreting and justifying the words to be transmitted. Self-referentiality is evident in those passages where the Quran refers to itself as revelation (tanzil), remembrance (dhikr), news (naba'), criterion (furqan) in a self-designating manner (explicitly asserting its Divinity
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran#Literary_style

No. Read Apology of a Mathematician, Science and Hypothesis, Psychology of Mathematical Invention and Memoirs of a Mathematician stuggling with his century instead.
There's also Recolte et Semaille but there are only unofficial translations in some obscure websites.

self hater

he didn't have to literally have read the bible for it to influence him. it's derivative of the basic judeo-christian myths and ideas every child is familiar with.
>it's good prose
o-ok? i mean, it's not really. it's extremely repetitive and often incoherent.
>it's self-referential
the combined text of this thread is very self referential. doesn't make it good prose.
but all this stuff is irrelevant as none of it makes the quran culturally influential which was the original point being debated.

None of these look similar to Principia

Considering the religion it was the basis for motivated hundreds of years of crusades even if you limit culturally influential to the west it still ultimately was

The Quran is certainly a crucial book historically, but the use of it in later western fiction is relatively minimal, so I left it out. Biblical references, on the other hand, are constant.

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Yes, because a book similar to Principia would be boring as hell and not very rewardng to boot. Yout best shots in that veon would be Frege's works on the fondation of arithmetic, the Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus, and anygood math textbook on a subkect you like. But all the books in my above ppst were written by top tier mathematicians better known for their contributions to the field, so they're worth checking out.

Bump