Best european literary history books according to redditors
We found 155 Reddit comments discussing the best european literary history books. We ranked the 83 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 155 Reddit comments discussing the best european literary history books. We ranked the 83 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
this, more or less. the Hobbit, in its original conception, is basically Tolkien deconstructing Faerie stories and making his supercut of all the most classic elements. he just happened to slip in a bunch of references to his own world as well to make it sound unique. Then when it took off, and the publisher wanted more "hobbit stories" he tried to sell them the Silm. They weren't having it, so we got LOTR, and he found himself having to wrap a work he'd not intended originally to be in Middle-earth into his world. he ended up justifying the revised second edition as being the "truer" version of events that Bilbo told Gandalf, while the first is the one he told the dwarves, in order to explain why the ring is passed off as just a bauble in the first edition. but the other discrepancies (stone giants, the staggering differences in behavior you see in the elves, etc) you just have to chalk up to how the piece was conceived.
if this is an interesting topic for you, i cannot recommend enough John D Rateliff's The History of the Hobbit which is i think the single most exhaustive and best researched work on the Hobbit. The history of Middle-earth has great stuff on it too, but Rateliff goes into the wider context of how it was conceived as a faerie story, rather that just its place within the context of middle-earth and the various iterations of its development.
edit: i should have replied to OP, as the person i'm replying to probably knows at least some of this.
The rise of "literary fiction" as a genre and belief that it is the sole genre of literary merit can be described by a multi-stage process:
All of these trends together created the genre of "literary fiction" as we know it.
In general, academic philosophy of religion is dominated by theistic philosophers, so there aren't many works defending atheism and atheistic arguments in the professional literature.
But there are still a few notable books:
I didn't add him because others have already mentioned him, but everything written by Graham Oppy is fantastic IMO. He is maybe the leading atheist philosopher in the field of philosophy of religion. A good place to start with his writings is his 2013 paper on arguments for atheism.
I know I must be missing some, but these are all that I can think of at the moment.
Fiction:
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
White Noise by Don Delilo
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
Everything that Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by DFW
Infinite Jest by DFW
Of these, you can't go wrong with Infinite Jest and the Collected Fictions of Borges. His Dark Materials is an easy and classic read, probably the lightest fare on this list.
Non-Fiction:
The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy
Chaos by James Gleick
How to be Gay by David Halperin
Barrel Fever by David Sedaris
Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris
Secret Historian by Justin Spring
Of these, Secret Historian was definitely the most interesting, though How to be Gay was a good intro to queer theory.
I like Camus a lot, but his prose is super hard to read sometimes. I don't really like Nietzsche; he's a massive fucking dick. I like Camus leagues more because Camus explains things and leads you to his conclusion while Nietzsche just preaches and rambles on about how much he hates this or that and how stupid this or that is.
Not all of these called themselves philosophers, but here's some I like:
I'm not stoic by any means, but I love Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. I think it's interesting how someone could write musings that are relevant millennia later.
John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, but he has a ton of prose too. Here's a book full of it along with annotations and modernized grammar. Milton wasn't the most satisfactory person, but his writing is incredible.
I haven't read this myself, but a friend of mine really liked Man's Search for Meaning by Frankl. Some of his friends called him pretentious for reading the book though (I wasn't one of them).
If you like Camus, you'll probably like Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism. Again, I haven't read it myself, but it was also recommended to me because I like Camus.
Jean-Paul Marat was a journalist during the French Revolution, but his writings sometimes crossed into philosophical territory. He was a huge populist, and I love his work when he's not calling for the deaths of hundreds of people. You can read some of it here.
I'm huge into theology, so I love Thomas Aquinas. He wrote a lot about theology and Christianity and was a major Christian apologist. He also dabbled in theodicy. Smart man.
And to mix it up, here's one I haven't checked out but is top on my list: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's Selected Works. She was a writer and a nun from Spain who was self-taught--all qualities you usually don't find in philosophers, so she'll be a unique read.
The Táin is one of our greatest national epics - you can find an excellent translation by Kinsella (a famous Irish poet) online, no problem.
As a more pop-friendly alternative, Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick (the guy who designed the famous Che Guevara image) produced two illustrated volumes of the Book of Conquests - the founding mythology of Ireland. They are the Book of Conquests and The Silver Arm
Irish legends are primary sorted into what are called 'cycles'. There are four: the Mythological Cycle, the Ulster Cycle, the Fenian Cycle, and the Cycle of Kings. Each has a different flavour and revolve around different characters. You may enjoy one more the other. Our most commonly known heroes come from the Ulster and Fenian Cycles.
Here's "The Intellectuals and the Masses," which is just on the opinions of "the masses" by people in the literary world in the late 1800s, early 1900s.
I have a good book edited by Czesław Miłosz that is a collection of a shit ton of Polish Poetry (with some of Miłosz's poetry in it as well). I put an amazon link to it at the end of my post.
Also I really suggest Wisława Szymborska. She and Miłosz are the two most known in western culture - both received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Miłosz taught at UC Berkeley.
One other great one is Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz.
Also Bruno Schulz if you're looking for some prose.
https://www.amazon.com/Postwar-Polish-Poetry-Czeslaw-Milosz/dp/0520044762/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499014974&sr=8-1&keywords=post-war+polish+poetry
Book 4 by Aleister Crowley
The Book of the Law by Aleister Crowley
The Vision and the Voice by Aleister Crowley
Liber 777 by Aleister Crowley
The Book of Lies by Aleister Crowley
Gems From the Equinox by Aleister Crowley and Israel Regardie
The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order by Israel Regardie
The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic by Israel Regardie
The Goat Foot God by Dion Fortune
The Sea Priestess by Dion Fortune
The Winged Bull by Dion Fortune
Moon Magic by Dion Fortune
Zanoni by Edward Bulwer Lytton
The Golden Ass by Apuleius
The Dream of Scipio by Cicero
Pistis Sophia by G.R.S. Mead
Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians of the 16th and 17th Centuries by "a Brother of the Fraternity"
The Golden Bough by Sir George Frazer
The Voice of the Silence by H.P. Blavatsky
The Kybalion by "Three Initiates"
The Corpus Hermeticum by Hermes Trismegistus
The Book of Abramelin
The Three Magical Books of Solomon
Voltaire's Bastards by John Ralston Saul is pretty much based on demonstrating how reason, when place above all other virtues, can lead to terrible things.
The book's main argument is that the virtues temper each other out, and that any one of them pushed to the extreme is destructive. He then proceeds to demonstrate how reason has led to aberrations in many aspects of society, and does so in a very convincing way. It's a long read (took me a year, on and off), but it's worth it.
Volumes I and II were later edited together into a corrected (and slightly expanded) one volume hardback edition published in 2011 (the edition I have):
https://www.amazon.co.uk/History-Hobbit-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0007440820
Which was itself later followed by a paperback edition 'A Brief History Of The Hobbit' which I think contained all the Tolkien writing from the earlier editions, just with greatly reduced commentary and background essays:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Brief-History-Hobbit-John-Rateliff/0007557256/
Perhaps the initial paperbacks were allowed to go out of print after being superseded by later editions?, or simply had smaller print runs?, perhaps you could try contacting Harper Collins directly and inquiring?
(Sorry I couldn't be more help).
Thanks. I actually ordered Meditations right after I read Epictetus. Is this the other book? How do you apply reason when you talk to people and look at tasks you need to do so it's not so overwhelming?
Smilla's Sense of Snow takes place in Copenhagen and features a Greenlander as a main character.
"Journey to the Center of the Earth" features an Icelandic "eider down hunter" as a nearly wordless guide for the Professor and his ward.
There was a pretty good book from years back that I read recently that kinda breaks down the arcing history of how we got to the point where the military has to be maintained because it's become such a part of the economy. Subsidies, factories, employment, contractural employment, research and dev, all kinds of stuff tied to it. This is a chapter or two in the whole book, but goddamn was my mind blown.
Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West by John Ralston Saul
Book
E-book
It more or less takes the history of reason and logic and shows how it's gotten misused.
"What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist-the Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England"
​
It's a reference book of all the mundane info you need to write a living, breathing world. You need to know the rules before you cnasteampunk them.
​
This review describes it nicely: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R15YUTEEGOWF7V/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0671882368
​
https://www.amazon.com/Austen-Charles-Dickens-Whist-Nineteenth-Century/dp/0671882368
Hello. A lot of people are telling you to "read." If that seems like a no-brainer, here are some suggestions as to what you might want to read. if you're really really dedicated, you can self-study into a college-like education (based on my experience as a current student of English).
I hope that helps. I think that's as solid and specific advice as I can give. Although, I didn't list any specific works. If you have any questions or would like suggestions, please ask.
well thats for another time, but the absolute expert on it is John Ralston Saul - Voltaires Bastards https://www.amazon.com/Voltaires-Bastards-Dictatorship-Reason-West/dp/0679748199
Sartre presented a lecture called "Existentialism and Humanism," which can now be found in print as Existentialism is a Humanism. It's almost like an Existentialism manefesto, per se. The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus is a good treatise on existentialism (Absurdism, really, but it'll do).
I would not hesitate to start reading fiction novels that have Existentialist themes. Camus' The Stranger, Sartre's Nausea, and Dostyevsky's Notes From the Underground are just a few that will find your studies well.
As for secondary literature, the only text I can knowledgeably recommend is Existentialism For Dummies, as I'm currently working my way through it. It's actually not as bad as you might think coming from the "For Dummies" series. It doesn't go too in-depth, and ideas are very concise and oftentimes humorous.
I have also heard good things about David Cogswell's Existentialism For Beginners, though I have never read it myself.
If your niece feels comfortable with this level of writing and philosophical examination, it is almost imperative to read Kierkegaard's Either/Or and Fear and Trembling, Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, and Sartre's Being and Nothingness, among others. It is good to have some background understanding of Kant and perhaps have a few essays by Schopenhauer under your belt leading up to the more rigorous academics like Heidegger and Hegel.
Good luck, and happy reading!
I get glimpses of genius from the "Wake". which flatters me to thinking i am the genius, when actually it's Joyce.
the parts i don't understand were something i used to blame on Joyce, but came to realize it's me not being as smart as i thought i was (something everyone eventually learns to deal with).
THIS helped a great deal. it's one man's take on the Wake, and not definitive. but it sure makes a damn lot of sense.
I don't think this is exactly what you're looking for, but At The Bench - A Laboratory Navigator has a 10-page chapter about keeping a lab notebook.
Here's a brief Google Books preview; unfortunately it does not cover the relevant chapter.
This presentation(PDF link) cites a book called Writing the Laboratory Notebook by Howard Kanare, which (based on the Amazon reviews) might be more geared towards industry labs but could still be pretty useful in a general sense. You can find out for yourself, since I managed to find a full text copy online(PDF link). I don't think I'm accessing this through any proxies, so it does seem like it's freely available.
For a more thorough investigation of what's out there, you should consult your institution's library; I'm sure someone will be happy to help track down the exact book you are thinking of, or something functionally equivalent.
edit - here's a PDF link to another presentation, just for fun
Two different tenses. Ich wusste = imperfect, ich habe gewusst = perfect. The perfect is used more day to day (effectively, I have known, but also I knew...), the imperfect in more formal writing as well as the "was ...ing" continuous past sense.
If you're stuck on this, do some more reading on the different uses of the imperfect and perfect tenses. My favourite, the one I refer to all the time and the one I refer my students to, is Durrell's pretty much definitive Using German, which I've used for 20 years but looks quite pricey now sadly.
Here you go
You can get a lot out of it without one. I think I mentioned I read it cover-to-cover twice in a row. The second time I had the pleasure of figuring out one or two of the puzzles on my own.
Later I picked up this by the world-renowned Nabokov scholar Brian Boyd.
But I recommend reading the book itself first a few times. Otherwise it's like seeing the answer key to a puzzle before you have even tried to solve it. You can go, "Oh yeah! That's clever!" but you miss the joy and satisfaction of discovery.
You should read Brian Boyd's analysis of Pale Fire, it really gave me an insight into some of the crazy depth of the book (plus fulfilled the tinfoil itch that /r/asoiaf has given me).
Here's a 19th century guide:
http://www.amazon.com/Austen-Charles-Dickens-Whist-Nineteenth-Century/dp/0671882368
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism
Existentialism is a humanism, by Jean Paul Sartre. Very short, easy to understand, and (speaking personally) quite life-affecting.
"Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards"
—Jean-Paul Sartre
From Existentialism and Humanism (later published in English as Existentialism is a Humanism)
Note: This comes from my interpretation and quotes from "A Commentary on The Stranger" by Jean-Paul Sartre, which can be found in the book Existentialism is a Humanism also by Jean-Paul Sartre.
> In The Myth of Sisyphus... Camus provided us with a precise commentary on his work: his hero was neither good nor bad, neither moral nor immoral. Such categories do not apply to him. He belongs to a very particular species for which the author reserves the name "absurd."
Sartre goes on to explain that "absurd" as used in Camus' work represents both a factual state and the lucid awareness that some people acquire from that state. By this reading, Meursault is Camus' attempt to throw us headfirst into the feeling of the "absurd".
>"For the absurd man, the ideal is the present and the succession of present moments before an ever-conscious spirit." Confronted with this "quantitative ethic," all values collapse. Projected into this world, the absurd man, rebellious and irresponsible, has "nothing to prove."
>And now we fully understand the title of Camus's novel. The stranger he wants to portray is precisely one of those terrible "idiots" who shock a society by not accepting the rules of its game. He lives among strangers, but he is a stranger to them too.
>Meursalt does not seem to be indignant about his death sentence. He was happy, he did as he liked, and his happiness does not seem to have been affected by any inner gnawing so frequently mentioned by Camus in his essay, which stems from the blinding presence of death. His very indifference often seems like indolence, for instance on that Sunday when he stays home out of pure laziness, and admits to having been "a little bored." The character thus remains singularly impenetrable, even from a vantage point of the absurd... He is there before us, he exists, and we can neither understand nor quite judge him. In a word, he is alive, but his fictional density is the only thing that can make him acceptable to us.
I hope some of that helps! I really enjoyed reading Sartre's commentary on The Stranger and I felt as though it made me appreciate Camus's work more than my first reading. Somewhere inside the commentary Sartre explains that Meursalt is much less a key player in the events of the story as an impartial observer and that to truly live the "absurd" is simply to experience it. He likens the events in the book to our looking in on them through a window in which we can see what is happening, but are completely cut off from the context and meaning of such events.
I haven't read The Myth of Sisyphus yet, but Sartre claims that it amounts to Camus's spelling out of his theory of the absurd. The Stranger attempts to expose us to the "feeling" of the absurd, while TMoS attempts to expose us to the "idea" of the absurd in a much more philosophical way. If you're interested in Camus's ideas, I would probably have to second his recommendation.
>I didn't know continental vs analytical terms are outdated.
Dated perhaps isn't the right term, but just know that they do have certain limits.
As for post-WWII philosophy, there's a lot, but I'm going to let you know that much of it can't be well-understood without a basic understanding of Heidegger, much of whose thought was pre-WWII. His best known work is Being and Time, but it's one of the most challenging texts in the western canon. For an easier introduction to prep you for it, I'd recommend some of his early lecture material, such as The Hermeneutics of Facticity and The History of the Concept of Time. This could just be me, but I've found his lectures to be generally easier than his primary texts. If you want to trace the development of his thought, much of which was post-WWII, the Basic Writings anthology has a number of essays by him. While nothing really eclipsed Being and Time, much of his later thought is still studied. I'd say the most significant work of his later career was his Contributions to Philosophy, which took the form of briefer aphorisms and anecdotes, more similar to Nietzsche in style, but still grounded in much of his own thought and terminology.
If you want to move away from Heidegger, some of the big texts would be Gadamer's Truth and Method (Gadamer was a student of Heidegger's, so the former's thought is very deeply influenced by the latter), Sartre's two texts Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism (note the similarity to Sartre's title with Heidegger's Being and Time, and also note that Heidegger would respond rather critically to Sartre's Existentialism with an essay in the Basic Writings), and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (a key feminist work heavily influenced by Sartre and Heidegger).
Beyond this my knowledge is a bit scattered, as I've only just completed undergrad. I really would recommend David West's text as a decent overview that will guide you in what the key texts are, as well as good secondary sources. I've not brought up Derrida, who was also huge, as well as Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Michel Foucault and Charles Taylor just to name a few. On top of those, there's a ton of pre-WWII stuff that's hugely important for understanding these thinkers, such as the ideas of Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, and the whole field of psychoanalysis (Freud, Jung and Lacan). Then there's postmodernism, postcolonialism, the various strands of feminism, and tons more. The more I type, the more I'm just reminding myself how little I know about this area (even though it's the area I'm most interested in).
Let me know if there's anything more you need to know or if you want to know a decent secondary source.
This is probably weird, but the most fun I have is when I am planning something. (An event/party with friends or family, curriculum for a class, a date.) Related, I think, is that I really enjoy experimenting with flavor combinations in foods/baked goods/cocktails. On a more normal level, I like to read, hike, and reddit.
Simple pleasures for me? Sleep, coffee, chocolate. Ooh, and bubble bath. My perfect summer day would be sunny, warm but definitely not hot, spent in a coffee shop with the windows open to a quirky town's Main Street.
Here's a book from my WL, because you've gotta have a book with your coffee!
Pandora's Mystery Summer Box of Goodies
You could also look at the one volume hardback edition, instead of the paperbacks, as an alternative, as suggested by thornybacon.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/History-Hobbit-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0007440820/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1496493727&sr=1-1&keywords=history+of+the+hobbit
The Norton Edition of "The Wasteland" comes with critical commentaries, essays, copious footnotes, and Eliot's own dubious footnotes to the piece. Pretty good if you really want to dive into Eliot's masterpiece.
https://www.amazon.com/Waste-Land-Norton-Critical-Editions/dp/0393974995/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=norton+wasteland&qid=1563976887&s=gateway&sr=8-1
I haven't actually read it yet, but it's burning a hole on my bookshelf and looks really good - Psychogeography by Will Self and Ralph Steadman.
Thank you for the recommendation. I also posted this question to /r/askphilosophy and ended up buying the book "Rene Girards Mimetic Theory" by Wolfgang Palavar. Thread and amazon link to the book are below.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/6dk8dy/recommended_rene_girard_readings_on_mimetic_desire/?utm_content=title&utm_medium=user&utm_source=reddit&utm_name=frontpage
https://www.amazon.com/Girards-Mimetic-Studies-Violence-Mimesis/dp/1611860776
or if you want to kick it up a notch on the occult ladder, may I recommend..
http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Psychology-Brain-Software-Programs/dp/1561840718/
http://www.amazon.com/Not-Two-Peace-Expanded-3rd-Samraj/dp/1570972621/
http://www.amazon.com/Codex-Seraphinianus-Luigi-Serafini/dp/0847842134/
and, goes without saying really,
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Lies-Aleister-Crowley/dp/0877285160/
Burn after reading.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Middle Ages would be my recommendation. It's the book I used when I took a class on Medieval Lit.
My personal favorite, somewhat obscure find: Post War Polish Poetry edited and compiled by Lithuania poet Czeslaw Milosz. This collection completely changed how I write poetry. The Poles have a rich history of punctual experimentation, mind-blowing personification, and plenty else. Here's a taste of some polish poesy: Anna Swir
Ok well I tried harder and I found a few on amazon, I'll share links in case someone else has trouble and googles something like the name of this thread.
Egil's saga in monolingual old norse
A series of dual language sagas I have one of these, It's ok but I should mention that while it's dual-lingual, the languages are not parallel. the Norse version is in the back. Another thing is that some of them are actually modern Icelandic, though that shouldn't make a huge difference because the language used is still archaic, just with updated spellings (og vs ok, hestur vs hestr)
Here's a good one, The poetic Edda in parallel text old-Norse and English That's the version I have and I think it's a really nice, high quality volume, but one thing I should mention is it's a scan of an older edition. Personally I don't mind that, I actually think it's kind of cool, but if that idea bugs you maybe check out this version which I don't have so I can't speak for the quality of it but it seems to be newly printed instead of scanned.
Here's a good introduction:
https://www.amazon.com/Girards-Mimetic-Studies-Violence-Mimesis/dp/1611860776
these are from what i found. i haven't read them yet but i'm getting to them.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Norse/comments/29owe2/book_recommendations
http://www.amazon.com/The-Elder-Poetic-Edda-Illustrated/dp/0692200657
Amazon costs more, this is from publisher:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/eric-wodening/we-are-our-deeds/paperback/product-15978203.html
edit: The Edda saemund sigfusson olive bray, there is a free PDF you can find on google but i don't remember how i got to it.
HA!! i found it!
http://vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/The%20Elder%20or%20Poetic%20Edda.pdf
My gf has
A Handbook of Irish Folklore for college. I don't know if it is really academic or not.
She also has The Táin.
Hope that is useful for you.
Here's a hard copy for $30:
http://www.amazon.com/Road-Hel-Study-Conception-Literature/dp/110763234X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1426279098&sr=8-1&keywords=the+road+to+hel
I found it on Amazon. I'll see if I can send you the link. I /think/ you can get it legally as a free pdf, but I am not 100%
Edit: Amazon Link
https://www.amazon.com/dp/110763234X/_encoding=UTF8?coliid=I1SUCGR33A18YX&colid=306UI30TPLGWI
http://www.bicycles.net.au is one I failed to mention, there's also the other bicycling subreddits - /r/bicycletouring and /r/fixedgearbicycle are my favourite. I'm more interested in the touring side of cycling, so I can recommend a few good touring nooks:
"Full Tilt: Ireland to India by Bicycle," by Dervla Murphy is a great read
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Psychogeography-Will-Self/dp/0747590338 <-- not quite a bicycle touring book, but I know that Will Self rides a brompton and this is a book about travelling
Also, a book called "The rider" by (I think) Tim krabbe. That's more of a racing book, but it is an excellent one.
Click through links, google and generally read around and you'll stumble on more resources. Happy hunting :)
Reed it at your leisure, bon voyage, avec les-yeux, sans visage.
O but mainly unterstand that what it is is what many say it isn't: a real and truly werked out story of the night.
It contrails many entrained trains of thought, but is ultrameantly a cohesive multi-storied single story comprising many ministories, each a storey of our Tower of Bauble.
Real-eyes that eachant effery word/wort/world May or mightn't half/have/halve/haft multi-tipple meanings/minings/linings/leanings, both in Anglish and in other languishes.
And read outside of it a little bit which's been writ about it, and it'll hint at the wit both in it, and the lit which other wits have written in their interpreting of it. viz: Book of the Dark and to wit: Skeleton Key To Finnegans Wake
Pluck it up, and put it down, as required. Shelf it while you muddle or re-read other books. Go back into it from the front, or back into it from the rear.
Be open.
Tough call. Eliot and Emerson are both in my top 20. I think I'd go with the Eliot one though, Pound is way more fun than Nietzsche. Also, I recommend this copy of The Wasteland.
Edit: Fixed link
Writing the Laboratory Notebook is a very good resource, though possibly in excess of what your class requires.
The ACS puts its name on it, for whatever that's worth.
Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg (that's supposed to be the "O" with the line through it, but fuck, I can't be bothered. ;)
Good read.
Just click the other options. You can get a hardcover for $30.
It's a GREAT set if you're interested in this sort of thing.
If you only want it for those three chapters, though, take a pass. Not sure if they're out there somewhere, but I wager someone has scanned them.
I agree with you on the second point you make 100%; and it is a huge failing of the video. But the rise of the middle class after the renaissance and age of reason is more complicated than black death --> church looses its grip. The BD was huge but there was more too it. Nevertheless religion as the 'key' institute did cede to modern systems of governance which if you look at the last 500 years puts the average westerner in a pretty good spot health / wealth / education wise. The fist quarter of Voltaire's Bastards makes a pretty decent account of it (not a bad book IMhumbleO).
Kierkegaard makes for dense reading, real dense.
Existentialism is a Humanism by Sartre is my go-to recommendation for an entrance into Existentialism. It's actually a lecture, so it reads like an essay; it's short, so it is manageable; and it is significantly less dense than Kierkegaard. "Existence precedes essence". Such a simple and wonderful idea that needn't scare or lead to malaise.
Edit (to include links):
Wall of text version
Affordable paperback version
If you are interested in Watts' idea of nothingness you might be interested in the philosophy of Existentialism. If you want this idea put in layman's terms Existentialism is a Humanism is a great place to start. Honestly though, I would steer away from Alan Watts, although he is interesting, after reading a few of his books his philosophy seems rather empty and repetitive... Kierkegaard, Camus, and Sartre are all very interesting reads. Despite our resentful convo you should check them out.
Try this https://www.amazon.com/Using-German-Guide-Contemporary-Usage/dp/0521530008 (check for a newer edition)
I recommend Magick (or Book 4) reminded me of Wilson's writing style even. very accessible.
If you want more of his crazy cool ideas and poetry I recommend Book of Lies
Also this website has everything
He covers so many diverse topics everything is worh checking out!
AS I RECALL, THERE'S A SCENE IN SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW WHERE SHE REPEATEDLY PUSHES HER CLITORIS INTO THE MECHANIC'S URETHRA. SO... KINDA.