Hm. Luckily such a fiction-oriented crowd may be willing to tolerate
several run-on sentences. Am in the middle of a family reunion and
80th birthday party, just time enough to jot ideas down- Couldn't
avoid tuning in for the latest installments though.
Interesting to watch the mentioned books morph from the more
expected - and asked for - fiction "as we know it" through Trollope
and Menand ( a personal favorite of mine also) to Jane Roberts, and
spanning several thousand years of classic and contemporary
investigations of what it means to be human. We all sure love our
books, for their intellectual and caloric content, both.
Which leads me to wonder further at what fiction really means.
At some point 'fiction' becomes so influential to the development of
its culture that it essentially twists time and ends up creating the
future we move into. Becoming the seed of fact.
In that case is it really fiction anymore?
Consider the immense impact on culture behaviours and therefore on
history of the Greek tales.
Consider also the generation or perpetuation of mythologies /
religions, like several books that have been mentioned, from the
Christian bible on down.
Consider also the effect of Rodenberry et al on our global behaviours
- although Star Trek and Star Wars were not books first, their impact
- especially Rodenberry's, who I personally think was sent from
another universe to nudge us gently back into an experiment with
civility and away from xenophobia - on what the future may hold
besides cold-war annihilation.
There are more but the reunion brunch beckons....
?
Tory
ps Also thank goodness to those who've mentioned non-western, non-
male, non-white books. Put yourself in the other person's shoes and
reread these posts.....
On Oct 9, 2010, at 7:19 PM, q...@aol.com wrote:
Greetings, all --
Great to see all the suggestions and conversations around them. One
author with a Santa Fe (and perhaps an SFI) connection not yet
mentioned, I believe, is Douglas Noel Adams (DNA). I'd recommend the
Adams translation of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
As to creating a reading group, the pedagogical technique at St.
John's (sorry to be tedious) is to have the books lead the
discussion, largely by having a person designated to ask an "opening
question" and then encouraging people to focus on the text and have
a conversation about it. After about two hours, most folks are
suffering from caffeine/nicotine withdrawal and agree to discuss it
further over a meal/scotch/cigarette. Works for us...
- Claiborne -
-----Original Message-----
From: Pamela McCorduck <pam...@well.com>
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com
>
Sent: Sat, Oct 9, 2010 9:08 pm
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works
On Oct 9, 2010, at 7:34 PM, Leigh Fanning wrote:
And I (also) say "Why English", why not World Literature or
something
more expansive... and for the benefit of the women on this list...
why
do we (mostly) read the words of "dead white men"? Really?
Without
going all feminist, I'd really like to have more submissions here of
women writers. Until 30 years ago, there weren't that many
published...
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, early 1800s, is a great book. Is it
literature? I'm not
qualified to say, but it's a fantastic story with beautiful writing.
Yes, I certainly think of it as literature. If I were world
literature czar (well, czarina) I would insist every budding
scientist read it.
The male dominated Western educational experience is what most of
us have had.
It's all we know, until we jump to other pools of thought and
nonconform to
the establishment that nurtured (controlled?) us in the tender years.
Some of the most unusual and ground-breaking English literature has
been written by women. I mean in particular, Jane Austen, who was
first to understand that the age of reading aloud was dying, and it
was time to write for the reader who reads alone and in his or her
own head. Before Austen, English novels were written to be read
aloud to a group. She is also killingly funny about human nature. On
these grounds alone, Columbia University's core curriculum admitted
to the canon its first female writer in Jane. If you read Charlotte
Bronte's "Wuthering Heights," the novel not the movie, you will
hardly believe your eyes. Astounding stuff. "Jane Eyre" is the
grandmother of a thousand and one derivatives, but is a stunning
piece in its own right.
So you see how futile a "top ten" is?
P.
"How quickly weeks glide away in such a city as New York, especially
when you reckon among your friends some of the most agreeable people
in either hemisphere."
Fanny Trollope, "Domestic Manners of the Americans"
=
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
-----------------------------------
Tory Hughes
victo...@toryhughes.com
Tory Hughes website
Tory Hughes facebook
------------------------------------
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
