What are some books that every T-man has to read before he dies? I know Atlas Shrugged is on the top of most people’s lists, but are there any more?
Fight Club, Arnold:Education of a Bodybuilder, War and Peace (seriously, give it a shot), Thus Spake Zarathushtra, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 years of Western Cultural History. Any three randomly selected books by Ragnar Benson will round it off.
Read the above books and you will understand history, self-sufficiency, and the inner Will.
Lolita, Slaughterhouse V, and Ulysses.
Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa (or get the comic book based on this book, it’s called Vagabond). The Art of War and Musashi’s Book of Five Rings.
Howard Stern’s Private Parts and Miss America. Funniest damn things ever.
Go with “Fountainhead” before “Atlas”. It’s a little easier to digest.
“The power of One”, especially if your a boxing fan.
The Lords of Discipline - Pat Conroy. Fictional book, but loosely based on cadet life (at one time) at the Citadel in South Carolina. Not too deep, but definitely a fun read. There was an older, low budget movie made about it but of course it doesn’t compare to reading the book.
Winter’s Tale, by Mark Helprin; Great fun, magical, with winter descriptions vivid enough to cause shivers on Waikiki beach.
All of the Palaniuk books. If you dont know who that is, he wrote Fight Club. His new book Lullaby hasnt come out yet but I hear its not bad. Since I work at Barnes and Noble I get to read some books before they come out, I am gonna start Lullaby soon. Not sure what else.
Ted Nugent, God, Guns, & Rock & Roll. And Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. Good shit.
I’m with Magnus on this one.
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli.
“The Fight” - Norman Mailer, “The Rum Diary” - Hunter S. Thompson, “Playing the Moldovans at Tennis” - Tony Hawkes. All classic books, all very different and origional in style.
I’d like to point out that Ayn Rand is mostly a non-issue in the philosophy world. No one talks about her, no one writes books or papers on her, and no one takes her seriously. Try and find a college course about her or even her works within a college syllabus. You can’t. Try reading “The History of Western Philosophy” by Bertrand Russell, if you want to read philosophy.
I am with hooker on this one. I hear that Ayn Rand is just a feminist who just kind of went on a tangent and made up her own philiosophy, people felt it was pretty pointless. Once again this is just what I have heard, but I do want to read some of her books when I have some spare time, but the books are pretty thick.
Definitely Musashi as mentioned before, my favorite book of all time. Pat, you also mentioned the Art of War, but I found Bushido, The Way of the Samurai better. Also, if you liked Musashi (I just finished it for the 5th time) try “The Sword of No-Sword” by John Stevens about Tesshu, another famous swordsman who lived after Musashi’s time. Full of great short stories about the most disciplined and determined man ever. It’s now my other favorite book of all time.
For you Ayn Rand-curious people… It gets a bit tiresome and ridiculous in Atlas Shrugged, but The Fountainhead was good and can just be read as a good story without that being lectured over and over feeling. If half of the repetitive lectures were edited out of Atlas, it would have also been pretty good reading.
What hooker is puting forth is what is known in verbal logic as ‘Argumentum ad Verecundiam’ - or argument from authority. For example, environmentalists loudly proclaim that many Nobel laureates have signed on to the Kyoto Treaty on global warming - yet what does a Nobel laureate in English know about the first derivative of the exponential function in one variable? [Hint for non-science types - a scientist studying atmospheric phyics and commenting upon it should know this] Yet many Nobel laureates in non-science related fields have signed on.
This isn’t to say that one might find Ayn Rand a bad author or hate her stuff, but if you are going to ward off folks from an author’s works, you need more style.
[Dr. Russell was a great mathematician, but a bad philosopher/socialist - see Paul Johnson’s ‘Intellectuals’]
-J
http://carpediem.da.ru
“Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.” - Bertrand Russell
“Watership Down,” simply a masterpiece of storytelling.
James Ellroy, Jim Thompson, Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler : very very good hard-boiled crime novelists. Their male characters usually have balls like watermelons.
As said before, “Musashi” bi Eiji Yoshikawa is an all-time great.
Arnold’s “Encyclopedia of modern bodybuilding” is also a must-have.
There are of course many others : “American Psycho” by Bret E. Ellis, “Red Dragon” by Thomas Harris…