subject:"Re\: \[FRIAM\] The Best 10 Fictional Works"


 What? Nobody mentioned Proust, James Joyce or Woolf? (I'm not going to.)

Grant

Grant Holland
VP, Product Development and Software Engineering
NuTech Solutions
404.427.4759


On 10/8/2010 11:54 PM, Alison Jones wrote:

After 10 years of lurking something I can finally comment on.

In no particlular order:

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Sometime a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann


There are so many more!
Alison
(Yeah, I know it is 11. And you are so right Robert (Holmes), I should 
really say Pevear and Volokhonsky's Karenina ☺)



On Oct 8, 2010, at 1:44 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:

Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and 
would like to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best 
Literary Works I should read.  They have to be works of fiction and 
available in English and not just say of 2009 but of all time.  
Google searches tend to list the best of a year or be listed by one 
particular publisher.   This is a good group to poll since you all 
(most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical bent.  So I 
know the suggestions will be good ones for me!


Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote 
on them.


My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:

   Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac 
McCarthy


Thanks!
Robert C.


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




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



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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

Somebody did mention To the Lighthouse, and I'd agree. I mentioned  
admiring, without particularly liking (except in parts) Ulysses. The  
Scott-Moncrieff translation of Remembrance of Things Past is heavy  
weather; a later translation (sorry; it's on a high shelf) lets  
Proust's humor show through. But you need a lot of sitzfleisch to  
finish the whole thing.


Speaking of the French, I used to teach Malraux's Man's Fate, which  
my undergraduate students loved. They also loved One Day in the Life  
of Ivan Denisovich, because it reminded so many of them of being in  
the army in Vietnam.


Pamela

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




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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-09 Thread Robert J. Cordingley


 Grant,
James Joyce has been mentioned twice, Woolf once... and your top 10 are? 
but you're right about Proust.

Thanks
Robert C

On 10/9/10 8:31 AM, Grant Holland wrote:

 What? Nobody mentioned Proust, James Joyce or Woolf? (I'm not going to.)

Grant

Grant Holland
VP, Product Development and Software Engineering
NuTech Solutions
404.427.4759


On 10/8/2010 11:54 PM, Alison Jones wrote:

After 10 years of lurking something I can finally comment on.

In no particlular order:

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Sometime a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann


There are so many more!
Alison
(Yeah, I know it is 11. And you are so right Robert (Holmes), I 
should really say Pevear and Volokhonsky's Karenina ☺)



On Oct 8, 2010, at 1:44 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:

Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and 
would like to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best 
Literary Works I should read.  They have to be works of fiction and 
available in English and not just say of 2009 but of all time.  
Google searches tend to list the best of a year or be listed by one 
particular publisher.   This is a good group to poll since you all 
(most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical bent.  So I 
know the suggestions will be good ones for me!


Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote 
on them.


My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:

   Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac 
McCarthy


Thanks!
Robert C.


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




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



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



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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-09 Thread Robert J. Cordingley


 The situation so far... in case you are not keeping count:

Given some restrictions, like only accepting the first 10 mentioned by 
anyone ... so far we have 73 submissions, 4 have been recommended 3 
times, 9 have been recommended twice and the rest once.   And just to 
confirm that my literary education is somewhat lacking, I noticed that 
I've read only 4 of them.


Any more recommendations?

Thanks,
Robert C

On 10/8/10 1:44 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:
 Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and 
would like to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best 
Literary Works I should read.  They have to be works of fiction and 
available in English and not just say of 2009 but of all time.  Google 
searches tend to list the best of a year or be listed by one 
particular publisher.   This is a good group to poll since you all 
(most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical bent.  So I 
know the suggestions will be good ones for me!


Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote 
on them.


My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac 
McCarthy


Thanks!
Robert C.


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





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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-09 Thread Merle Lefkoff

I'd add to Jack's criteria:  9) deep exploration of a particular culture 
at a moment in time.  Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.  Hate to say it 
because it's been so over-hyped, but it's that good, right up there with 
Huck Finn and Jay Gatsby.  I think it will  10) stand the test of time.


Merle


Robert J. Cordingley wrote:

 Grant,
James Joyce has been mentioned twice, Woolf once... and your top 10 
are? but you're right about Proust.

Thanks
Robert C

On 10/9/10 8:31 AM, Grant Holland wrote:
 What? Nobody mentioned Proust, James Joyce or Woolf? (I'm not going 
to.)


Grant

Grant Holland
VP, Product Development and Software Engineering
NuTech Solutions
404.427.4759


On 10/8/2010 11:54 PM, Alison Jones wrote:

After 10 years of lurking something I can finally comment on.

In no particlular order:

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Sometime a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann


There are so many more!
Alison
(Yeah, I know it is 11. And you are so right Robert (Holmes), I 
should really say Pevear and Volokhonsky's Karenina ☺)



On Oct 8, 2010, at 1:44 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:

Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and 
would like to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best 
Literary Works I should read.  They have to be works of fiction 
and available in English and not just say of 2009 but of all time.  
Google searches tend to list the best of a year or be listed by one 
particular publisher.   This is a good group to poll since you all 
(most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical bent.  So I 
know the suggestions will be good ones for me!


Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to 
vote on them.


My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:

   Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac 
McCarthy


Thanks!
Robert C.


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




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



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



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




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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works


 Oops...

I'll mention two. Far from great literature, but I still enjoy reading 
it is Journey to Ixtlan - Carlos Castaneda. (I know it is advertised 
as Sociology, but I regard it as Fantasy.)


Another great Fantasy (although held by most as mathematical logic) is 
Kurt Godel's 1931 paper On Formally Undecidable Propositions of 
/Principia Mathematica/ and Related Systems. Part of the alure for me, 
admittedly, is that I find it fantastic, mysterious and difficult to 
understand. But the last sentence of the treatise is plainly spoken, and 
a wake-up call for would-be intellectuals everywhere: That is, it can 
be proved rigorously that in every consistent formal system that 
contains a certain amount of finitary number theory there exists 
undecidable arithmetic propositions and that, moreover, the consistency 
of any such system cannot be proved in the system.


Grant Holland
VP, Product Development and Software Engineering
NuTech Solutions
404.427.4759


On 10/9/2010 8:46 AM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:

 Grant,
James Joyce has been mentioned twice, Woolf once... and your top 10 
are? but you're right about Proust.

Thanks
Robert C

On 10/9/10 8:31 AM, Grant Holland wrote:
 What? Nobody mentioned Proust, James Joyce or Woolf? (I'm not going 
to.)


Grant

Grant Holland
VP, Product Development and Software Engineering
NuTech Solutions
404.427.4759


On 10/8/2010 11:54 PM, Alison Jones wrote:

After 10 years of lurking something I can finally comment on.

In no particlular order:

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Sometime a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann


There are so many more!
Alison
(Yeah, I know it is 11. And you are so right Robert (Holmes), I 
should really say Pevear and Volokhonsky's Karenina ☺)



On Oct 8, 2010, at 1:44 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:

Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and 
would like to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best 
Literary Works I should read.  They have to be works of fiction 
and available in English and not just say of 2009 but of all time.  
Google searches tend to list the best of a year or be listed by one 
particular publisher.   This is a good group to poll since you all 
(most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical bent.  So I 
know the suggestions will be good ones for me!


Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to 
vote on them.


My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:

   Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac 
McCarthy


Thanks!
Robert C.


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




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



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



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

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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works


 Grant -

Thanks for the reminder, I haven't visited Castenada since I was in my 
twenties... perhaps he deserves a revisit.  At the time I slogged 
through several of his works because everyone was raving so much about 
them (not unlike the ravings about Cormac's work)... they just came off 
as weird druggie wishful thinking at the time... though I did like 
things about his writing style.


Another great Fantasy (although held by most as mathematical logic) is 
Kurt Godel's 1931 paper On Formally Undecidable Propositions of 
/Principia Mathematica/ and Related Systems.


Godel I visit more often.  I don't consider him fantasy one bit, but I 
do find him mystical/magical...  and wonderfully dense and obtuse.  His 
writing quality meets my criteria for literature, his storytelling is 
abysmal, but the social relevance is subtle unto sublime.


/That is, it can be proved rigorously that in every consistent formal 
system that contains a certain amount of finitary number theory there 
exists undecidable arithmetic propositions and that, moreover, the 
consistency of any such system cannot be proved in the system./


I may just have to replace my previously favorite tagline of /I know 
you believe you understand what you think I said, but you may not 
realize that what you heard is not what I meant/ with this one!



- Steve

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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works


 Saul -

I love (most of) your list.  Great Ante.

I think you might mean A Scanner Darkly by Dick, but there appear to 
be as many as 5 novels by the Title Through a Glass Darkly 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_a_Glass_Darkly  and then there is 
Sheridan le Fanu's 1872 collection of Gothic Horror short stories titled 
In a Glass Darkly which feels like it might have been Dick's 
inspiration?  Any other PKDick fans in the audience?  I can't believe I 
didn't ante him up for SF's own candidates for literature.


I can do without KerWhack myself... just a bunch of the young and 
reckless driving around being jerks and being proud of themselves for 
it.  Lame, lame, lame storytelling, modest writing, and not my cup of 
tea when it comes to social relevance.  Though I have to say that when 
Tom Leech brought the Kerouac show to the Palace of the Governer's 
Museum, seeing the original typed on a long roll of paper gave me more 
respect for him.  But not so much for the On the Road Story.


I also have to second Alison's and Stephen's suggestion of Kesey's One 
Time a Great Notion, though I have to say I liked the movie with Fonda 
and Newman (even) better.


Ondaatje rocks.  So does Kundera.

And I agree that the ONLY way to read Homer is to let someone else do it 
into a microphone for you, abridged, in translation... I tried some of 
it straight up when I studied Greek in college... harsher than Ouzo... 
and a much nastier hangover.  Not recommended... even for the self 
abusive.  It almost caused the two hemispheres of my brain to fuse 
together (oblique reference to Julian Jaynes book on the topic).

All great suggestions and timely since my library book is due back
tomorrow. I'll add a couple of other suggestions:

The English Patient (Ondaatje)
Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Persig) (not sure if this
counts as fiction)
A Glass Darkly (Philip K Dick)
On the Road (Kerouac)
Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)

and for the Illiad I strongly recommend the audio book with Derek
Jacobi reading the Fagles translation (abridged).

+1 for all Herman Hesse titles mentioned.




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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works


 Stephen -

Good points all.   Most of us went off on a my favorite reads jag with 
only a minor interest in whether it was Literature by any nominal or 
not-so-nominal standard.


It doesn't surprise me that most of us have a collective 
double-standard.  In our own fields of study/expertise we take offense 
when others don't consult or reference the studied origins of the field, 
and yet when we wander out of our field, we think that we can make it up 
as we go along.  Like the NewAge (rhymes with SewAge) of the 80's where 
everything was Laser this and Quantum that...  with hardly a clue what 
any of it meant.


Robert's request *did* suggest that he was interested in his literary 
education and I think your response is much more ... responsive than 
the rest of our interjections.


Though I do have to say I enjoy hearing the clamor of everyone's 
favorites (not to mention shouting my own out and dissing others' 
without regard to any semblance of decorum).


Carry on,

- Steve



 Most of you are PhDs and respond to inquiries from the
non-science type to aspects of your field(s).  So how about asking
a college in the English Lit or World Lit department?

Robert, you mentioned you are going to improve your literary
education, so the works will generally be older because those
have had an effect on the development of literature.  The works
should provide some understanding of the development of the
field as well as being entertaining, insightful, etc.

To make a musical analogy, I thoroughly enjoy Bach Fugues but
if I wish to understand the musical form of the fugue, I also need to
listen to Medieval and Renaissance forms that lead up to it
(the ricercar, fantasy, etc)

Think of the field as having a core trunk and then many branches
at the top.  It sounds like you are asking about the 'trunk' of the 
field.


So maybe you need 10 books to represent the trunk of the literary
tree and then afterward pick 3-5 more works for each branch to
cover the last 150 - 200 hundred years.

Steph T


On 10/9/2010 3:44 AM, Saul Caganoff wrote:

All great suggestions and timely since my library book is due back
tomorrow. I'll add a couple of other suggestions:

The English Patient (Ondaatje)
Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Persig) (not sure if this
counts as fiction)
A Glass Darkly (Philip K Dick)
On the Road (Kerouac)
Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)

and for the Illiad I strongly recommend the audio book with Derek
Jacobi reading the Fagles translation (abridged).

+1 for all Herman Hesse titles mentioned.

Regards,
Saul

On Saturday, October 9, 2010, Alison Jonesalison.jo...@redfish.com  
wrote:

After 10 years of lurking something I can finally comment on.

In no particlular order:

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Sometime a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann


There are so many more!
Alison
(Yeah, I know it is 11. And you are so right Robert (Holmes), I 
should really say Pevear and Volokhonsky's Karenina ☺)



On Oct 8, 2010, at 1:44 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:


Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and 
would like to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best 
Literary Works I should read.  They have to be works of fiction and 
available in English and not just say of 2009 but of all time.  
Google searches tend to list the best of a year or be listed by one 
particular publisher.   This is a good group to poll since you all 
(most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical bent.  So I 
know the suggestions will be good ones for me!


Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote 
on them.


My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac 
McCarthy


Thanks!
Robert C.


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




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



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




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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

 Thanks, Steve. I've noticed that the breadth of you reading is 
exceptional.


Grant Holland
VP, Product Development and Software Engineering
NuTech Solutions
404.427.4759


On 10/9/2010 10:45 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

Grant -

Thanks for the reminder, I haven't visited Castenada since I was in my 
twenties... perhaps he deserves a revisit.  At the time I slogged 
through several of his works because everyone was raving so much about 
them (not unlike the ravings about Cormac's work)... they just came 
off as weird druggie wishful thinking at the time... though I did like 
things about his writing style.


Another great Fantasy (although held by most as mathematical logic) is 
Kurt Godel's 1931 paper On Formally Undecidable Propositions of 
/Principia Mathematica/ and Related Systems.


Godel I visit more often.  I don't consider him fantasy one bit, but I 
do find him mystical/magical...  and wonderfully dense and obtuse.  
His writing quality meets my criteria for literature, his storytelling 
is abysmal, but the social relevance is subtle unto sublime.


/That is, it can be proved rigorously that in every consistent formal 
system that contains a certain amount of finitary number theory there 
exists undecidable arithmetic propositions and that, moreover, the 
consistency of any such system cannot be proved in the system./


I may just have to replace my previously favorite tagline of /I know 
you believe you understand what you think I said, but you may not 
realize that what you heard is not what I meant/ with this one!



- Steve



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

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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-09 Thread David Mirly

I make no claims about being among the 10 Best but here are a few selections 
not previously mentioned.  

Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
Candide - Voltaire
Perhaps something by John Steinbeck?  I guess the obvious is The Grapes of 
Wrath but I hated it for some reason (perhaps because I grew up in Oklahoma?).  
I liked Cannery Row.


and maybe for the kiddies... Captains Courageous - Rudyard Kipling 


aha!  I might have discovered a latent preference for the letter 'C'!  weird.



On Oct 8, 2010, at 12:44 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:

 Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and would like 
 to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best Literary Works I 
 should read.  They have to be works of fiction and available in English and 
 not just say of 2009 but of all time.  Google searches tend to list the best 
 of a year or be listed by one particular publisher.   This is a good group to 
 poll since you all (most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical 
 bent.  So I know the suggestions will be good ones for me!
 
 Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote on them.
 
 My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:
 
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
 
 Thanks!
 Robert C.
 
 
 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



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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-09 Thread Tom Carter

All -

  10??? Oh, well . . .

  When I was a kid, my parents installed this in the living room (you can still 
sometimes find it in used book stores -- saw one a few years ago for $150, 
missing Marx and Freud !).  I learned a lot :-):

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World

  Some years ago, I was asked for recommended reading (by a group of 
students), and I pulled this together:

 Fiction - July, 2001 (html)  (mostly 20th century, but some other stuff . 
. . This needs to be updated :-)

  This semester, in a class I am teaching, we're reading (among other things, 
including Pandora's Hope by Bruno Latour).

 Earth Abides, by George Stewart
 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig
 The Goldbug Variations, by Richard Powers

  In prior years of the class, we've also read A Canticle for Leibowitz by 
Walter Miller, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, Naked Lunch by William 
Burroughs, and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (so we could watch 
Apocalypse Now  :-). I guess if I'm ready to require students to read them, 
I must think they're worthwhile . . .

tom


On Oct 8, 2010, at 12:44 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:

 Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and would like 
 to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best Literary Works I 
 should read.  They have to be works of fiction and available in English and 
 not just say of 2009 but of all time.  Google searches tend to list the best 
 of a year or be listed by one particular publisher.   This is a good group to 
 poll since you all (most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical 
 bent.  So I know the suggestions will be good ones for me!
 
 Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote on them.
 
 My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:
 
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
 
 Thanks!
 Robert C.
 
 
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 Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-09 Thread Leigh Fanning

Here's some in random order.

The Age of Reason, Jean Paul Sartre
The Tale of Genji, Lady Murasaki
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Cervantes, Don Quixote
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges

Leigh

On 09 Oct 2010 at 09:14 AM, Robert J. Cordingley related
  The situation so far... in case you are not keeping count:

 Given some restrictions, like only accepting the first 10 mentioned by  
 anyone ... so far we have 73 submissions, 4 have been recommended 3  
 times, 9 have been recommended twice and the rest once.   And just to  
 confirm that my literary education is somewhat lacking, I noticed that  
 I've read only 4 of them.

 Any more recommendations?

 Thanks,
 Robert C

 On 10/8/10 1:44 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:
  Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and  
 would like to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best  
 Literary Works I should read.  They have to be works of fiction and  
 available in English and not just say of 2009 but of all time.  Google  
 searches tend to list the best of a year or be listed by one  
 particular publisher.   This is a good group to poll since you all  
 (most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical bent.  So I  
 know the suggestions will be good ones for me!

 Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote  
 on them.

 My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:

 Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac  
 McCarthy

 Thanks!
 Robert C.

 
 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



 
 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


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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works


 On 10/9/10 11:10 AM, Grant Holland wrote:
Thanks, Steve. I've noticed that the breadth of you reading is 
exceptional.
And that is just the stuff I'm willing to admit to on-list I'll save 
the really juicy stuff for another forum.


Most places I'm askeered to admit to reading Russel and Whitehead or 
Godel or even the man who introduced me to them (Douglas Hofstadter)...


It is good to be surrounded by other readers with a wide dynamic range!

- STeve

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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-09 Thread Merle Lefkoff

Merle Lefkoff wrote:

Thank you for mentioning Richard Powers. And don't forget Powers' The
Time of Our Singing, an extraordinary imaginative leap into the
complexities of racial identity.

Tom Carter wrote:

All -

10??? Oh, well . . .

When I was a kid, my parents installed this in the living room (you can still
sometimes find it in used book stores -- saw one a few years ago for $150,
missing Marx and Freud !). I learned a lot :-):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World

Some years ago, I was asked for recommended reading (by a group of
students), and I pulled this together:

Fiction - July, 2001 (html) (mostly 20th century, but some other stuff .
. . This needs to be updated :-)

This semester, in a class I am teaching, we're reading (among other things, including
Pandora's Hope by Bruno Latour).

Earth Abides, by George Stewart
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig
The Goldbug Variations, by Richard Powers

In prior years of the class, we've also read A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, The Golden
Notebook by Doris Lessing, Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, and Heart of Darkness by
Joseph Conrad (so we could watch Apocalypse Now :-). I guess if I'm ready to require students to read them, I must
think they're worthwhile . . .

tom

On Oct 8, 2010, at 12:44 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:

Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and would like to know this
group's recommendations for the 10 Best Literary Works I should read. They
have to be works of fiction and available in English and not just say of 2009 but of all
time. Google searches tend to list the best of a year or be listed by one particular
publisher. This is a good group to poll since you all (most) have at least some kind of
scientific/technical bent. So I know the suggestions will be good ones for me!

Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote on them.

My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy

Thanks!
Robert C.

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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-09 Thread Merle Lefkoff


Merle Lefkoff wrote:

Have I missed something?  I don't recall having seen anything by Philip 
Roth on anyone's list.  And now that I think about it, I've been musing 
for some time about the dearth of neurotic Jewish intellectuals in 
Friam--especially noteworthy given our Complexity forefathers:  Murray, 
David, Stu, etc.  Why do you think this might be so, Nick?  Pamela?


Merle


Steve Smith wrote:

 On 10/9/10 11:10 AM, Grant Holland wrote:
Thanks, Steve. I've noticed that the breadth of you reading is 
exceptional.
And that is just the stuff I'm willing to admit to on-list I'll 
save the really juicy stuff for another forum.


Most places I'm askeered to admit to reading Russel and Whitehead or 
Godel or even the man who introduced me to them (Douglas Hofstadter)...


It is good to be surrounded by other readers with a wide dynamic range!

- STeve




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




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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-09 Thread Victoria Hughes


and even us lurkers
(10 !? can't even begin to get it down to ten, thus the absence of  
presence)

are getting a kick
and
learning a lot
from this all...

Tory

On Oct 9, 2010, at 12:41 PM, Steve Smith wrote:


On 10/9/10 11:10 AM, Grant Holland wrote:


Thanks, Steve. I've noticed that the breadth of you reading is  
exceptional.
And that is just the stuff I'm willing to admit to on-list I'll  
save the really juicy stuff for another forum.


Most places I'm askeered to admit to reading Russel and Whitehead or  
Godel or even the man who introduced me to them (Douglas  
Hofstadter)...


It is good to be surrounded by other readers with a wide dynamic  
range!


- STeve

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



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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

Well, Merle: I'm a neurotic Jewish Intellectual:  I just don't happen to be
Jewish.  

Nick 

-Original Message-
From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf
Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2010 1:29 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

Merle Lefkoff wrote:

Have I missed something?  I don't recall having seen anything by Philip Roth
on anyone's list.  And now that I think about it, I've been musing for some
time about the dearth of neurotic Jewish intellectuals in Friam--especially
noteworthy given our Complexity forefathers:  Murray, David, Stu, etc.  Why
do you think this might be so, Nick?  Pamela?

Merle

Steve Smith wrote:
  On 10/9/10 11:10 AM, Grant Holland wrote:
 Thanks, Steve. I've noticed that the breadth of you reading is 
 exceptional.
 And that is just the stuff I'm willing to admit to on-list I'll 
 save the really juicy stuff for another forum.

 Most places I'm askeered to admit to reading Russel and Whitehead or 
 Godel or even the man who introduced me to them (Douglas Hofstadter)...

 It is good to be surrounded by other readers with a wide dynamic range!

 - STeve

 --
 --

 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

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

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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works





On Oct 9, 2010, at 3:28 PM, Merle Lefkoff wrote:


Merle Lefkoff wrote:

Have I missed something?  I don't recall having seen anything by  
Philip Roth on anyone's list.  And now that I think about it, I've  
been musing for some time about the dearth of neurotic Jewish  
intellectuals in Friam--especially noteworthy given our Complexity  
forefathers:  Murray, David, Stu, etc.  Why do you think this might  
be so, Nick?  Pamela?


Merle


I don't think I'll go there. :-)

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




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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

When I hear someone say I never read fiction, I'm a little saddened.  
It comes to my ears like I never look at art. When one starts  
getting all hairy-chested about the greater value of non-fiction over  
make-believe, please be reminded of the books you pull off your shelf  
to make room for new ones. They're often of the genre of  The Coming  
Crisis of 1981. Valuable in its way in 1979, but not so much later.  
Literature lasts, which is why so many of our choices here have been  
oldies.


Why do we read fiction? Any number of reasons, but one major reason is  
to help us see--often, see anew. So one of the things that separates  
literature from a pleasant afternoon's escape (of *course* I read  
thrillers too; I like pleasant afternoons of escape) is that  
literature does make you see anew. It does all sorts of other things  
too, if you're sensitive to its techniques.


One of the best ways of teaching yourself about those techniques is  
James Wood's How Fiction Works. Wood is a staff writer on the New  
Yorker, and a passionate reader. He's not going to teach you how to  
write a novel, but he'll certainly teach you how to read one better.  
He's deliciously opinionated, but makes his arguments lucidly and  
persuasively. It's a small book, and I often toss it in my backpack  
for the subway, open it at random, and start to think as I read it.


Pamela


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




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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

Tom, 

 

You wrote 

 

  This semester, in a class I am teaching, we're reading (among other
things, including Pandora's Hope by Bruno Latour).

 

Can you say a bit more about the context in which you are reading these
things? 

 

Nick 

 

From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf
Of Tom Carter
Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2010 12:07 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

 

All -

 

  10??? Oh, well . . .

 

  When I was a kid, my parents installed this in the living room (you can
still sometimes find it in used book stores -- saw one a few years ago for
$150, missing Marx and Freud !).  I learned a lot :-):

 

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World

 

  Some years ago, I was asked for recommended reading (by a group of
students), and I pulled this together:

 

 Fiction - July, 2001 (html)
http://cogs.csustan.edu/~tom/booklists/Fiction-2001.html   (mostly 20th
century, but some other stuff . . . This needs to be updated :-)

 

  This semester, in a class I am teaching, we're reading (among other
things, including Pandora's Hope by Bruno Latour).

 

 Earth Abides, by George Stewart

 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig

 The Goldbug Variations, by Richard Powers

 

  In prior years of the class, we've also read A Canticle for Leibowitz by
Walter Miller, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, Naked Lunch by
William Burroughs, and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (so we could
watch Apocalypse Now  :-). I guess if I'm ready to require students to
read them, I must think they're worthwhile . . .

 

tom

 

 

On Oct 8, 2010, at 12:44 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:





Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and would like
to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best Literary Works I
should read.  They have to be works of fiction and available in English and
not just say of 2009 but of all time.  Google searches tend to list the best
of a year or be listed by one particular publisher.   This is a good group
to poll since you all (most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical
bent.  So I know the suggestions will be good ones for me!

Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote on
them.

My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:

   Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy

Thanks!
Robert C.


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

 


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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-09 Thread Robert Gehorsam

Hi, I get to claim both lurkership and newbie-ship here, and have enjoyed this 
thread.

This is an interesting idea, Pamela, that literature has endured, more than 
non-fiction.  It feels intuitively true as we look back on various canon(s).  
It does all sorts of 

I come from the opposite direction; for years I read nothing but fiction 
(plenty of science fiction, and I still have a special jonesing for urban 
fantasy), though I spent time in the 80's as an editor of general trade books 
on science and computing.  But recently, just the past few years, I have read 
more and more non-fiction, most recently and belatedly, Collapse, by Jared 
Diamond, which is a masterpiece in its own right.  Great literature clearly 
endures from both its universality and beauty, but I also wonder how long the 
novel will endure as a form.

Which leads me to note that few people have brought poetry to the fore here.  
When you talk about the pleasures that come from being sensitive to a form's 
techniques, there's nothing like poetry, maybe because of the intensity that 
must be brought to bear on each word.  As an undergrad, I wrote a lengthy paper 
on an early and somewhat traditional Yeats poem, The Song of Wandering Aengus.  
It was entirely a formal and linguistic analysis, and I believed then, as now, 
that not one aspect of language -- syntax, semantics, form, phonology, you name 
it -- escaped Yeats' attention as he composed, all serving his specific 
purpose.  He was the master.  Alas, I lost the paper in one move or another.

But here's the poem, and as a bonus, for everyone who loves Ray Bradbury, 
you'll probably see the connection --

I WENT out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,   
And cut and peeled a hazel wand, 
And hooked a berry to a thread;  
And when white moths were on the wing,   5
And moth-like stars were flickering out, 
I dropped the berry in a stream  
And caught a little silver trout.
  
When I had laid it on the floor  
I went to blow the fire a-flame,  10
But something rustled on the floor,  
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl  
With apple blossom in her hair   
Who called me by my name and ran  15
And faded through the brightening air.   
  
Though I am old with wandering   
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,  
And kiss her lips and take her hands; 20
And walk among long dappled grass,   
And pluck till time and times are done,  
The silver apples of the moon,   
The golden apples of the sun.


Robert Gehorsam
CEO
Image-Metrics


On Oct 9, 2010, at 4:27 PM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:

 When I hear someone say I never read fiction, I'm a little saddened. It 
 comes to my ears like I never look at art. When one starts getting all 
 hairy-chested about the greater value of non-fiction over make-believe, 
 please be reminded of the books you pull off your shelf to make room for new 
 ones. They're often of the genre of  The Coming Crisis of 1981. Valuable in 
 its way in 1979, but not so much later. Literature lasts, which is why so 
 many of our choices here have been oldies.
 
 Why do we read fiction? Any number of reasons, but one major reason is to 
 help us see--often, see anew. So one of the things that separates literature 
 from a pleasant afternoon's escape (of *course* I read thrillers too; I like 
 pleasant afternoons of escape) is that literature does make you see anew. It 
 does all sorts of other things too, if you're sensitive to its techniques. 
 
 One of the best ways of teaching yourself about those techniques is James 
 Wood's How Fiction Works. Wood is a staff writer on the New Yorker, and a 
 passionate reader. He's not going to teach you how to write a novel, but 
 he'll certainly teach you how to read one better. He's deliciously 
 opinionated, but makes his arguments lucidly and persuasively. It's a small 
 book, and I often toss it in my backpack for the subway, open it at random, 
 and start to think as I read it.
 
 Pamela
 
 
 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
 
 
 
 
 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


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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-09 Thread Stephen Thompson


 Steve:

There are so many good suggestions I despair of finding the
Classic Comics version of all these books - that's the only way
I will get through them all.  (An HS teacher said when you get to college,
read the first and last 2 chapters then read the classic comic for the 
middle
 - its faster).   But now that the last youngin' is off to college I 
should have the

time to read the full version.

I don't think I have seen mention of ancient Greek/Roman mythology (Edith
Hamilton's translation is visible on my shelf - well worn since 1969) nor
any Norse mythology.

For scifi, my Fahrenheit451 book is Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

Steph T


On 10/9/2010 12:10 PM, Steve Smith wrote:

 Stephen -

Good points all.   Most of us went off on a my favorite reads jag 
with only a minor interest in whether it was Literature by any 
nominal or not-so-nominal standard.


It doesn't surprise me that most of us have a collective 
double-standard.  In our own fields of study/expertise we take offense 
when others don't consult or reference the studied origins of the 
field, and yet when we wander out of our field, we think that we can 
make it up as we go along.  Like the NewAge (rhymes with SewAge) of 
the 80's where everything was Laser this and Quantum that...  with 
hardly a clue what any of it meant.


Robert's request *did* suggest that he was interested in his literary 
education and I think your response is much more ... responsive 
than the rest of our interjections.


Though I do have to say I enjoy hearing the clamor of everyone's 
favorites (not to mention shouting my own out and dissing others' 
without regard to any semblance of decorum).


Carry on,

- Steve



 Most of you are PhDs and respond to inquiries from the
non-science type to aspects of your field(s).  So how about asking
a college in the English Lit or World Lit department?

Robert, you mentioned you are going to improve your literary
education, so the works will generally be older because those
have had an effect on the development of literature.  The works
should provide some understanding of the development of the
field as well as being entertaining, insightful, etc.

To make a musical analogy, I thoroughly enjoy Bach Fugues but
if I wish to understand the musical form of the fugue, I also need to
listen to Medieval and Renaissance forms that lead up to it
(the ricercar, fantasy, etc)

Think of the field as having a core trunk and then many branches
at the top.  It sounds like you are asking about the 'trunk' of the 
field.


So maybe you need 10 books to represent the trunk of the literary
tree and then afterward pick 3-5 more works for each branch to
cover the last 150 - 200 hundred years.

Steph T


On 10/9/2010 3:44 AM, Saul Caganoff wrote:

All great suggestions and timely since my library book is due back
tomorrow. I'll add a couple of other suggestions:

The English Patient (Ondaatje)
Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Persig) (not sure if this
counts as fiction)
A Glass Darkly (Philip K Dick)
On the Road (Kerouac)
Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)

and for the Illiad I strongly recommend the audio book with Derek
Jacobi reading the Fagles translation (abridged).

+1 for all Herman Hesse titles mentioned.

Regards,
Saul

On Saturday, October 9, 2010, Alison 
Jonesalison.jo...@redfish.com  wrote:

After 10 years of lurking something I can finally comment on.

In no particlular order:

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Sometime a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann


There are so many more!
Alison
(Yeah, I know it is 11. And you are so right Robert (Holmes), I 
should really say Pevear and Volokhonsky's Karenina ☺)



On Oct 8, 2010, at 1:44 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:


Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and 
would like to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best 
Literary Works I should read.  They have to be works of fiction 
and available in English and not just say of 2009 but of all time.  
Google searches tend to list the best of a year or be listed by one 
particular publisher.   This is a good group to poll since you all 
(most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical bent.  So I 
know the suggestions will be good ones for me!


Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to 
vote on them.


My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac 
McCarthy


Thanks!
Robert C.


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

Thanks for the Yeats, Robert. He's one of my favorites, and was even  
before I knew there was a tenuous family connection.


P.


On Oct 9, 2010, at 4:56 PM, Stephen Thompson wrote:


Steve:

There are so many good suggestions I despair of finding the
Classic Comics version of all these books - that's the only way
I will get through them all.  (An HS teacher said when you get to  
college,
read the first and last 2 chapters then read the classic comic for  
the middle
- its faster).   But now that the last youngin' is off to college I  
should have the

time to read the full version.

I don't think I have seen mention of ancient Greek/Roman mythology  
(Edith
Hamilton's translation is visible on my shelf - well worn since  
1969) nor

any Norse mythology.

For scifi, my Fahrenheit451 book is Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

Steph T


On 10/9/2010 12:10 PM, Steve Smith wrote:

Stephen -

Good points all.   Most of us went off on a my favorite reads jag  
with only a minor interest in whether it was Literature by any  
nominal or not-so-nominal standard.


It doesn't surprise me that most of us have a collective double- 
standard.  In our own fields of study/expertise we take offense  
when others don't consult or reference the studied origins of the  
field, and yet when we wander out of our field, we think that we  
can make it up as we go along.  Like the NewAge (rhymes with  
SewAge) of the 80's where everything was Laser this and Quantum  
that...  with hardly a clue what any of it meant.


Robert's request *did* suggest that he was interested in his  
literary education and I think your response is much more ...  
responsive than the rest of our interjections.


Though I do have to say I enjoy hearing the clamor of everyone's  
favorites (not to mention shouting my own out and dissing others'  
without regard to any semblance of decorum).


Carry on,

- Steve



Most of you are PhDs and respond to inquiries from the
non-science type to aspects of your field(s).  So how about asking
a college in the English Lit or World Lit department?

Robert, you mentioned you are going to improve your literary
education, so the works will generally be older because those
have had an effect on the development of literature.  The works
should provide some understanding of the development of the
field as well as being entertaining, insightful, etc.

To make a musical analogy, I thoroughly enjoy Bach Fugues but
if I wish to understand the musical form of the fugue, I also need  
to

listen to Medieval and Renaissance forms that lead up to it
(the ricercar, fantasy, etc)

Think of the field as having a core trunk and then many branches
at the top.  It sounds like you are asking about the 'trunk' of  
the field.


So maybe you need 10 books to represent the trunk of the literary
tree and then afterward pick 3-5 more works for each branch to
cover the last 150 - 200 hundred years.

Steph T


On 10/9/2010 3:44 AM, Saul Caganoff wrote:

All great suggestions and timely since my library book is due back
tomorrow. I'll add a couple of other suggestions:

The English Patient (Ondaatje)
Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Persig) (not sure if  
this

counts as fiction)
A Glass Darkly (Philip K Dick)
On the Road (Kerouac)
Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)

and for the Illiad I strongly recommend the audio book with Derek
Jacobi reading the Fagles translation (abridged).

+1 for all Herman Hesse titles mentioned.

Regards,
Saul

On Saturday, October 9, 2010, Alison  
Jonesalison.jo...@redfish.com  wrote:

After 10 years of lurking something I can finally comment on.

In no particlular order:

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Sometime a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann


There are so many more!
Alison
(Yeah, I know it is 11. And you are so right Robert (Holmes), I  
should really say Pevear and Volokhonsky's Karenina ☺)



On Oct 8, 2010, at 1:44 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:


Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking  
and would like to know this group's recommendations for the 10  
Best Literary Works I should read.  They have to be works of  
fiction and available in English and not just say of 2009 but of  
all time.  Google searches tend to list the best of a year or be  
listed by one particular publisher.   This is a good group to  
poll since you all (most) have at least some kind of scientific/ 
technical bent.  So I know the suggestions will be good ones for  
me!


Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to  
vote on them.


My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:

   Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by  
Cormac McCarthy


Thanks!

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-09 Thread Tom Carter

Nick -

  I teach a Junior level course for our Honors Program.  Our program is open to 
students from all majors, so my audience in the class comes from everywhere 
-- majors of students in the class this Fall range across Art, English, 
History, Math, Biology, Business, Teacher Prep, Psychology, Computer Science, 
etc.

  One of the primary objectives of the class is to get them started on / 
excited about doing their Senior Honors thesis (which typically is some form of 
research/scholarship/creative activity in their own discipline).  The title of 
my course is Methods of Discovery . . . so some of it is research methods 
type stuff, but I do quite a bit of interdisciplinary work with them.  
Latour, for example, makes them think hard about how science really works, but 
also how sociology/philosophy of science works . . .

  I like to have them read a reasonable amount of fiction, partly so they can 
develop a sense of the roles that narrative and metaphor play in our efforts to 
understand the world.  I like ending with Richard Powers' Gold Bug Variations 
because it is science fiction in the sense that main characters are 
scientists doing real science (much of the book is set in the 50's in a 
research lab working on making sense of the DNA codon coding system) -- but 
also Bach's Goldberg Variations plays an important role in the book (whence, 
partly, pace Poe, the title :-)

tom

On Oct 9, 2010, at 1:44 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

 Tom,
  
 You wrote
  
   This semester, in a class I am teaching, we're reading (among other things, 
 including Pandora's Hope by Bruno Latour).
  
 Can you say a bit more about the context in which you are reading these 
 things?
  
 Nick
  
 From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf 
 Of Tom Carter
 Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2010 12:07 PM
 To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
 Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works
  
 All -
  
   10??? Oh, well . . .
  
   When I was a kid, my parents installed this in the living room (you can 
 still sometimes find it in used book stores -- saw one a few years ago for 
 $150, missing Marx and Freud !).  I learned a lot :-):
  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
  
   Some years ago, I was asked for recommended reading (by a group of 
 students), and I pulled this together:
  
  Fiction - July, 2001 (html)  (mostly 20th century, but some other stuff 
 . . . This needs to be updated :-)
  
   This semester, in a class I am teaching, we're reading (among other things, 
 including Pandora's Hope by Bruno Latour).
  
  Earth Abides, by George Stewart
  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig
  The Goldbug Variations, by Richard Powers
  
   In prior years of the class, we've also read A Canticle for Leibowitz by 
 Walter Miller, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, Naked Lunch by 
 William Burroughs, and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (so we could 
 watch Apocalypse Now  :-). I guess if I'm ready to require students to 
 read them, I must think they're worthwhile . . .
  
 tom
  
  
 On Oct 8, 2010, at 12:44 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:
 
 
 Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and would like 
 to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best Literary Works I 
 should read.  They have to be works of fiction and available in English and 
 not just say of 2009 but of all time.  Google searches tend to list the best 
 of a year or be listed by one particular publisher.   This is a good group to 
 poll since you all (most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical 
 bent.  So I know the suggestions will be good ones for me!
 
 Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote on them.
 
 My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:
 
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
 
 Thanks!
 Robert C.
 
 
 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
 
  
 
 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


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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-09 Thread Julia Susemihl

Pamela, thank you for the inquiry into fiction. How does it work? Why does it 
move us? Ahhh...the liberation conferred by the art of the storyteller and 
imagination!An additional offering to enhance the joy of reading: Ayn Rand's 
colorful lectures The Art of Fiction.Julia

From: pam...@well.com
To: friam@redfish.com
Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2010 16:27:30 -0400
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

When I hear someone say I never read fiction, I'm a little saddened. It comes 
to my ears like I never look at art. When one starts getting all 
hairy-chested about the greater value of non-fiction over make-believe, please 
be reminded of the books you pull off your shelf to make room for new ones. 
They're often of the genre of  The Coming Crisis of 1981. Valuable in its way 
in 1979, but not so much later. Literature lasts, which is why so many of our 
choices here have been oldies.
Why do we read fiction? Any number of reasons, but one major reason is to help 
us see--often, see anew. So one of the things that separates literature from a 
pleasant afternoon's escape (of *course* I read thrillers too; I like pleasant 
afternoons of escape) is that literature does make you see anew. It does all 
sorts of other things too, if you're sensitive to its techniques. 
One of the best ways of teaching yourself about those techniques is James 
Wood's How Fiction Works. Wood is a staff writer on the New Yorker, and a 
passionate reader. He's not going to teach you how to write a novel, but he'll 
certainly teach you how to read one better. He's deliciously opinionated, but 
makes his arguments lucidly and persuasively. It's a small book, and I often 
toss it in my backpack for the subway, open it at random, and start to think as 
I read it.
Pamela

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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Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works


 On 10/9/10 1:27 PM, Victoria Hughes wrote:

and even us lurkers
(10 !? can't even begin to get it down to ten, thus the absence of 
presence)

are getting a kick
and
learning a lot
from this all...
And no fair submitting 10 (only 10?) Terry Pratchett Novels... though I 
think I have a couple of yours still.


Thanks for Lurking Out Loud, it helps (maybe) buffer my own ravings a 
little.


- Steve


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Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

Robert, 

I hope you are going to compile the list when this is all over.  

Perhaps you could gin up a reading group for the City University of Santa Fe
Spring Coffee House Seminars.  Do we know anybody with a PhD in English who
would lead us?

Nick

-Original Message-
From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf
Of Robert J. Cordingley
Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2010 9:14 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

  The situation so far... in case you are not keeping count:

Given some restrictions, like only accepting the first 10 mentioned by
anyone ... so far we have 73 submissions, 4 have been recommended 3 
times, 9 have been recommended twice and the rest once.   And just to 
confirm that my literary education is somewhat lacking, I noticed that I've
read only 4 of them.

Any more recommendations?

Thanks,
Robert C

On 10/8/10 1:44 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:
  Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and 
 would like to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best 
 Literary Works I should read.  They have to be works of fiction and 
 available in English and not just say of 2009 but of all time.  Google 
 searches tend to list the best of a year or be listed by one
 particular publisher.   This is a good group to poll since you all 
 (most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical bent.  So I 
 know the suggestions will be good ones for me!

 Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote 
 on them.

 My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:

 Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac 
 McCarthy

 Thanks!
 Robert C.

 
 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




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



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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works


 Pamela -
When I hear someone say I never read fiction, I'm a little saddened. 
It comes to my ears like I never look at art. When one starts 
getting all hairy-chested about the greater value of non-fiction over 
make-believe, please be reminded of the books you pull off your shelf 
to make room for new ones.


Well put.  I've always held that Fiction often tells more Truth than 
non-Fiction... Important, fundamental truths about Life, the Universe 
and Everything...   but then so does Poetry...


Not all non-fiction is dated however...  as we still read Plato or 
Archimedes or Lau Tzu or Sun Tzu or Sappho or Galileo with great 
interest and delight and relevance.


Thanks for the reference to Woods How Fiction Works.
I love (good) books on writing.   My current fave is Mark my Words, a 
collection of quotes of Mark Twain on Writing.   Another favorite is 
Stephen King's On Writing.


Writing (much less reading) threatens to become a lost art.   My 30ish 
daughters still write (and read) but few of their peers do.   They were 
born before the VHS tape and suffered under my archaic sense that they 
should not have TV in the house...  They now read (and write and draw 
and make things) while their young men sit in front of a tube (like I am 
now) watching tiny sports-heroes run up and down courts/fields or 
playing computer-games.  At least the young men also play musical 
instruments in front of audiences sometimes... and they can really kick 
my ass at Guitar Hero.


Also realize that some of us hairy-chested bibliophiles don't bother to 
pull books off our shelves, we just build new ones and then when one 
room is lined with books we add on another room and fill *that* with 
shelves and fill those with books!


 I'm currently building a 236 sq ft sunroom on the south of my house 
with about 100 linear feet of wall/window space.   40 of those linear 
feet are heat-mass wall, but I fear they will be covered with 
books/shelves before the winter is out, and by next winter, probably the 
window bays will be filled with books too...  mediocre insulation, poor 
heat mass and lousy windows, books are...


I'm also putting in an airtight stove to make up for the inefficiencies 
of the book-laden windows/walls... and if I play my cards right the 
whole system becomes self-limiting as I burn some of those egregious 
books...   My estimate is that I could probably go through 2 cords in a 
winter...  if my wife keeps bringing them home as fast as she has been 
for 10 years or more now.   I can't read them as fast as she brings them 
home but I'll bet I *can* burn them that fast!  No more hauling firewood 
for me!   The Pulp Mill won't pay firewood prices, so why not?


- Steve


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Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works


 Steph T.


For scifi, my Fahrenheit451 book is Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

I'll see your Lord and raise you a Jack (of Shadows)... Zelazny (our 
own hometown boy) was awesome...  I miss him.  And his works.



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Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-09 Thread Self

On 9 Oct 2010 at 16:04, Nicholas  Thompson wrote:

 Perhaps you could gin up a reading group for the City University of Santa Fe
 Spring Coffee House Seminars.  Do we know anybody with a PhD in English who
 would lead us?

I know that, being unacquainted as I am with the CVs 
of the Friends and Relations of this august body,
I am about to put my foot in my mouth, but I'll do 
it anyway:

Why would you want to ask a PhD in English to lead 
you?  Ph.D.s in English are to the joy of reading 
fiction or poetry as firefighters are to fires.

(Go on, Nick, tell me about all the high old times
you had with Stanley and Ginger and Fern and the gang 
at English House, chewing the literary fat, slicing and
dicing metaphors and leading the animals two by two onto 
the narrative ark.  Doubledogdareya!)

Of course there are exceptions, just as there always
turn out to be a few arsonists in every volunteer
fire department.  (You might call them the Firebug
Variations.)  And I'm sure any FRIAM-related Ph.D.s
in English are just like that!

Lee


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Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works


 Lee -

   /Why would you want to ask a PhD in English to lead
   you?  Ph.D.s in English are to the joy of reading
   fiction or poetry as firefighters are to fires./



I think I understand Nick's need for a PhD-person... (something about 
establishing credibility in the whole City College thing).


But this is the *very same Nick* who just wrote:


   /Out of some, I got wonderful wonderful work, and they went on to
   take charge of their education, rather than to be victims of it. 
   Lord how I miss it./


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...


And responsive to the points made about whence Poetry in this 
discussion... I offer my (latest) favorite Poet...


Her name is Vera, Vera Pavlova http://verapavlova.us/ (She shall tell 
you the truth and the truth shall make you drool!).  She is awesome.. 
and while she *is* white (but not exactly western, certainly not 
American/British) she is not dead and she is not male.

Of course there are exceptions, just as there always
turn out to be a few arsonists in every volunteer
fire department.  (You might call them the Firebug
Variations.)  And I'm sure any FRIAM-related Ph.D.s
in English are just like that!

And they are all named Guy Montag (at least on their blogs).




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Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-09 Thread Leigh Fanning

 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.

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.

Likewise, I am keenly aware as well that we are largely reading only in
Western European and American works.  Can any folks on this list who were 
raised outside this tradition, weigh in?  Additionally, I appreciated the 
sci-fi variant, and would be interested in a fairy tale variant.  I've read 
wonderful tales in the German and Norse traditions, and once found a delightful 
book
of Tolstoy fairy tales.  I know nothing of Eastern ones, among others, 
and would like to remedy this if someone has suggestions along these lines.

Leigh


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Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-09 Thread Stephen Thompson


 Pamela  Steve:

Winging their way to me via the magic of the Internet
and Amazon Books are three books: two recommended here:

1. James Woods How Fiction Works
2. Zelazny's  Jack of Shadows

and one recommended by a reviewer of Wood's book (not a happy review)
Percy Lubbock's  The Craft of Fiction

(Not to mention I am also still working on Menand's The Metaphysical Club
also recommended in this forum)

Now if only you physicists can get that faster-than-light drive working
I can hitch a ride and have sufficient time to read

Thanks,
Steph T






On 10/9/2010 5:51 PM, Steve Smith wrote:

 Steph T.


For scifi, my Fahrenheit451 book is Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

I'll see your Lord and raise you a Jack (of Shadows)... Zelazny 
(our own hometown boy) was awesome...  I miss him.  And his works.



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Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works



On Oct 9, 2010, at 6:49 PM, Steve Smith wrote:


Pamela -
When I hear someone say I never read fiction, I'm a little  
saddened. It comes to my ears like I never look at art. When one  
starts getting all hairy-chested about the greater value of non- 
fiction over make-believe, please be reminded of the books you pull  
off your shelf to make room for new ones.


Well put.  I've always held that Fiction often tells more Truth than  
non-Fiction... Important, fundamental truths about Life, the  
Universe and Everything...   but then so does Poetry...


Not all non-fiction is dated however...  as we still read Plato or  
Archimedes or Lau Tzu or Sun Tzu or Sappho or Galileo with great  
interest and delight and relevance.


Oh, I certainly didn't mean to imply that. Not only do I read all of  
those above (well, Archimedes not so much), but my signature this week  
is from a delightful book called The Domestic Manners of the  
Americans, by Fanny Trollope, mother of novelist Anthony Trollope.  
She lived in the U.S. for a couple of years around 1830, and her  
observations just hit you between the eyes. De Toqueville gets all the  
credit, but my oh my, they saw things eye-to-eye. (De Toqueville  
arrived in the U.S. just as Fanny Trollope was going back to England,  
and it's unlikely either one read the other--yet they both remarked on  
the same things. It would all be quaint, except for how contemporary  
the observations of both are.)


Also realize that some of us hairy-chested bibliophiles don't bother  
to pull books off our shelves, we just build new ones and then when  
one room is lined with books we add on another room and fill *that*  
with shelves and fill those with books!


Sigh. Not much of an option in Manhattan. You've gotta discard.  
Especially when you calculate what it's costing in rent for each book.


Best of luck with the conversion from pulp to firewood!

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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Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

I read Lubbock many years ago, and he's got much good to say, as does  
E. M. Forster on the novel, and even, if I recall right, Henry James.  
But I prefer Wood. Your mileage may vary.


Menand's The Metaphysical Club is good stuff too, but dense, I agree.

P.


On Oct 9, 2010, at 8:29 PM, Stephen Thompson wrote:


Pamela  Steve:

Winging their way to me via the magic of the Internet
and Amazon Books are three books: two recommended here:

1. James Woods How Fiction Works
2. Zelazny's  Jack of Shadows

and one recommended by a reviewer of Wood's book (not a happy review)
Percy Lubbock's  The Craft of Fiction

(Not to mention I am also still working on Menand's The  
Metaphysical Club

also recommended in this forum)

Now if only you physicists can get that faster-than-light drive  
working

I can hitch a ride and have sufficient time to read

Thanks,
Steph T






On 10/9/2010 5:51 PM, Steve Smith wrote:

Steph T.


For scifi, my Fahrenheit451 book is Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

I'll see your Lord and raise you a Jack (of Shadows)... Zelazny  
(our own hometown boy) was awesome...  I miss him.  And his works.



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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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Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works


 Pamela -

Great reference... thanks!  A couple of Trollopes!   I'll mention it to 
my wife, she probably has a copy somewhere  or will find one within a 
week (really, she is *that good*) ...


Sigh. Not much of an option in Manhattan. You've gotta discard. 
Especially when you calculate what it's costing in rent for each book.
Yah!  A friend of mine lived there a year (designing for Gap of all 
things) and rented an apartment about the size of my kitchen for 
$3K/month (probably a bargain today).   But hairy-chested bibliophiles 
*don't* live in Manhattan... for this very reason.

Best of luck with the conversion from pulp to firewood!


I need to make a modification to the modern pellet stove that has a 
little rasp-like grinding device on the north end of the south-driving 
feed-screw so that you can toss books in the hopper instead of bags of 
pellets.  Or maybe couple a wood-chipper to the pellet stove.   Though I 
am a purist, I think pellet stoves are for sissies.


The next addition I think I'll build *from* books.  Stack them like 
bricks, drill holes and drive re-bar...  throw a little mud-plaster on 
the outside, some lime-plaster on the inside and viola!


Jim Rosenaeu of Berkeley has an angle on making bookshelves from 
books... how self-referential is that?


http://www.thisintothat.com/secondeditions.php

- Steve

PS.  Just asked... and damned if Suzanne doesn't claim to have one of 
Anthony's books...  I'll probably have it in my hands before bedtime... 
but it is Fanny I want to get a shot at... next week I'm sure.



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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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Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-09 Thread qef

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












 

=
 

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

 

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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-09 Thread Rich Murray

1. A Course in Miracles, J. Christ, 1975 -- JC through Helen Schucman, 
Columbia University Medical Center research psychologist, in 1965-1972, the 
foundation for post-Christian Christianity -- as a willing victim of this 
relentless subversion of all concepts since August, 1977, I never tire of 
its brilliant symphonic pithy multi-level fractal prose, much of it in 
iambic pentameter -- the first daily lesson, Nothing I see means 
anything. -- nothing like a direct poke in the eye approach for challenging 
common sense, historical religions, and all sciences...


2. The Nature of Personal Reality, Jane Roberts, 1974 -- tiny science 
fiction writer channels big booming emphatic jovial voice of Seth -- we 
each create our own multidimensional reality, in collaboration with our 
other simultaneous lifetimes in real-time present moment interaction with 
past and future selves, as well as selves in equally valid parallel probable 
history streams, within higher dimensional identity levels all the way up to 
All That Is...


3. Island, Aldous Huxley, 1962 -- he saved the manuscript as his house 
burned down -- poor literature brilliantly combines ideal society with 
psychedelic mysticism -- inspired my work as a hospice care giver in Santa 
Fe 1985 to 2005...


4. Narcissus and Goldmund, Herman Hesse, 1930 -- acetic scholar monk and 
life friend passionate artist.


5. The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi),  Herman Hesse, 1943 -- [ Adualisic 
Mysticism/The Instant Zen School
I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of 
the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every 
symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single 
examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and 
innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from 
major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious 
cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that 
flashing moment, if seen with truly a meditative mind, nothing but a direct 
route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation 
between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and 
Yang, holiness is forever being created. Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead 
Game ]


5. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke, 1950, 1953 --  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood's_End


6. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein, 1961 --  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land


7. The Reverse of the Medal, Patrick O'Brian, 1986 -- historical navel novel 
, eleventh in the Aubrey-Maturin series.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reverse_of_the_Medal

8, Ender's Game, Orson Scott Cord, 1985 --  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender's_Game


9.  Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley, 1928 --  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Counter_Point


10. Appointment With Death, Agatha Christie, 1938 --  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appointment_with_Death


11. All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque, 1929 --  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Quiet_on_the_Western_Front


12. The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara, 1974 --  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killer_Angels

___


Rich Murray, MA
Boston University Graduate School 1967 psychology,
BS MIT 1964, history and physics,
1943 Otowi Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505
505-501-2298  rmfor...@comcast.net

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AstroDeep/messages

http://RMForAll.blogspot.com new primary archive

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/messages
group with 148 members, 1,613 posts in a public archive

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartame/messages
group with 1215 members, 24,105 posts in a public archive

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rmforall/messages

participant, Santa Fe Complex www.sfcomplex.org
___





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Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

Steve Smith and Lee Rudolph, and everybody,

 

Why would I want a PhD to lead a discussion on Literature?

 

Because, even though I was a participant in the Berkeley dustup of the
sixties, I still think that expertise has its place in the world.   As those
of you who have participated in one of our Coffee House Seminars know, to me
leadership of a seminar is not lecturing and it is not laying a heavy hand
on the conversation.  But it is, perhaps, being able to call on a long
history of thinking about a subject  to suggest provocative materials and to
undermine any hastily arrived at consensuses.  

 

Academia is not the only source of wisdom in the world by any means, but
among the many sources of wisdom, it contributes something special.  

 

If any of you know of a retired or an underemployed literature professor, I
wish you would have them give me a call.  

 

All the best, 

 

Nick 

 

From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf
Of Steve Smith
Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2010 5:07 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

 

Lee -

Why would you want to ask a PhD in English to lead 
you?  Ph.D.s in English are to the joy of reading 
fiction or poetry as firefighters are to fires.



I think I understand Nick's need for a PhD-person... (something about
establishing credibility in the whole City College thing).

But this is the *very same Nick* who just wrote:



Out of some, I got wonderful wonderful work, and they went on to take charge
of their education, rather than to be victims of it.  Lord how I miss it.

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... 

And responsive to the points made about whence Poetry in this
discussion... I offer my (latest) favorite Poet... 

Her name is Vera, Vera Pavlova http://verapavlova.us/  (She shall tell you
the truth and the truth shall make you drool!).  She is awesome.. and while
she *is* white (but not exactly western, certainly not American/British) she
is not dead and she is not male.



Of course there are exceptions, just as there always
turn out to be a few arsonists in every volunteer
fire department.  (You might call them the Firebug
Variations.)  And I'm sure any FRIAM-related Ph.D.s
in English are just like that!

And they are all named Guy Montag (at least on their blogs).  





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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works


 Don't forget Sound and Sense by Laurence Perrine.

Grant Holland
VP, Product Development and Software Engineering
NuTech Solutions
404.427.4759


On 10/9/2010 6:29 PM, Stephen Thompson wrote:

 Pamela  Steve:

Winging their way to me via the magic of the Internet
and Amazon Books are three books: two recommended here:

1. James Woods How Fiction Works
2. Zelazny's  Jack of Shadows

and one recommended by a reviewer of Wood's book (not a happy review)
Percy Lubbock's  The Craft of Fiction

(Not to mention I am also still working on Menand's The Metaphysical 
Club

also recommended in this forum)

Now if only you physicists can get that faster-than-light drive working
I can hitch a ride and have sufficient time to read

Thanks,
Steph T






On 10/9/2010 5:51 PM, Steve Smith wrote:

 Steph T.


For scifi, my Fahrenheit451 book is Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

I'll see your Lord and raise you a Jack (of Shadows)... Zelazny 
(our own hometown boy) was awesome...  I miss him.  And his works.



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




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



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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

Clairborne, 

 

I absolutely agree with the restraint shown by tutors at St. Johns in
leading discussions, but almost every tutor at St Johns has a phd in
something and, in addition,  has spent more or less of a professional life
time reading and discussing Those Books.  

 

The effect of a few well posed questions in the course of a couple of hours
of discussion can be dramatic.  

 

Nick 

 

From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf
Of q...@aol.com
Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2010 7:19 PM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

 

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

 

 


= 


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

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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-08 Thread Russell Standish

I would have to vote for the Bible. Its arguably not great fiction,
but its probably the most influential work of fiction in the English
language.

Cheers ;).

On Fri, Oct 08, 2010 at 01:44:31PM -0600, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:
  Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and
 would like to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best
 Literary Works I should read.  They have to be works of fiction and
 available in English and not just say of 2009 but of all time.
 Google searches tend to list the best of a year or be listed by one
 particular publisher.   This is a good group to poll since you all
 (most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical bent.  So I
 know the suggestions will be good ones for me!
 
 Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote
 on them.
 
 My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:
 
 Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
 
 Thanks!
 Robert C.
 
 
 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

-- 


Prof Russell Standish  Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Mathematics  
UNSW SYDNEY 2052 hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
Australiahttp://www.hpcoders.com.au



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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-08 Thread qef

Robert --

The St. John's graduate in me says whoopie! Here are 10, in no particular 
order:

Shakespeare: Sonnets
Shakespeare: Romeo  Juliet
Dante: The Divine Comedy
Homer: The Iliad
Tolstoy: War  Peace
Cervantes: Don Quixote
Eliot: Middlemarch
Austen: Pride  Prejudice
Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Melville: Moby Dick

If you're okay with an anthology, The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose is well 
worth a look, as is anything by Wodehouse, I believe.

I'm sure some will quibble with my choices (too Western, too St. John's-y, not 
really fiction), but I'd aver at least some of them qualify in the sense of 
being based on a true story, if not necessarily fiction.

Happy Reading!

- Claiborne Booker -

 

 


 

 

-Original Message-
From: Robert J. Cordingley rob...@cirrillian.com
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com
Sent: Fri, Oct 8, 2010 3:44 pm
Subject: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works


  Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and would like 
to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best Literary Works I should 
read.  They have to be works of fiction and available in English and not just 
say of 2009 but of all time.  Google searches tend to list the best of a year 
or be listed by one particular publisher.   This is a good group to poll since 
you all (most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical bent.  So I know 
the suggestions will be good ones for me! 
 
Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote on them. 
 
My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today: 
 
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy 
 
Thanks! 
Robert C. 
 
 
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 

 

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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-08 Thread Paul Paryski

Take a look at this:




One Hundred Best Books
John Cowper Powys
ISBN10: 1116904438  ISBN13: 9781116904437  
Publisher: BiblioLife, LLC
Format: Paperback
Publication date: 07 Nov 2009




cheers, Paul


-Original Message-
From: q...@aol.com
To: friam@redfish.com
Sent: Fri, Oct 8, 2010 3:39 pm
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works


Robert --

The St. John's graduate in me says whoopie! Here are 10, in no particular 
order:

Shakespeare: Sonnets
Shakespeare: Romeo  Juliet
Dante: The Divine Comedy
Homer: The Iliad
Tolstoy: War  Peace
Cervantes: Don Quixote
Eliot: Middlemarch
Austen: Pride  Prejudice
Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Melville: Moby Dick

If you're okay with an anthology, The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose is well 
worth a look, as is anything by Wodehouse, I believe.

I'm sure some will quibble with my choices (too Western, too St. John's-y, not 
really fiction), but I'd aver at least some of them qualify in the sense of 
being based on a true story, if not necessarily fiction.

Happy Reading!

- Claiborne Booker -

 

 


 

 

-Original Message-
From: Robert J. Cordingley rob...@cirrillian.com
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com
Sent: Fri, Oct 8, 2010 3:44 pm
Subject: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works


  Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and would like 
to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best Literary Works I should 
read.  They have to be works of fiction and available in English and not just 
say of 2009 but of all time.  Google searches tend to list the best of a year 
or be listed by one particular publisher.   This is a good group to poll since 
you all (most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical bent.  So I know 
the suggestions will be good ones for me! 
 
Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote on them. 
 
My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today: 
 
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy 
 
Thanks! 
Robert C. 
 
 
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 

 
 

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

 

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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-08 Thread Scott R. Powell

Good grief, I have that as a Little Blue Book published by E.
Haldeman-Julius, falling apart on high acid content paper.

Scott

On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Paul Paryski ppary...@aol.com wrote:

 Take a look at this:

  [image: ISBN: 9781116904437 - One Hundred Best 
 Books]http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/jsp/id/One_Hundred_Best_Books/9781116904437
  One Hundred Best 
 Bookshttp://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/jsp/id/One_Hundred_Best_Books/9781116904437
 John Cowper Powys
 *ISBN10:* 1116904438  *ISBN13:* 9781116904437
 *Publisher:* BiblioLife, LLC
 *Format:* Paperback
 *Publication date:* 07 Nov 2009


  cheers, Paul

 -Original Message-
 From: q...@aol.com
 To: friam@redfish.com
 Sent: Fri, Oct 8, 2010 3:39 pm
 Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

  Robert --

 The St. John's graduate in me says whoopie! Here are 10, in no particular
 order:

 Shakespeare: Sonnets
 Shakespeare: Romeo  Juliet
 Dante: The Divine Comedy
 Homer: The Iliad
 Tolstoy: War  Peace
 Cervantes: Don Quixote
 Eliot: Middlemarch
 Austen: Pride  Prejudice
 Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
 Melville: Moby Dick

 If you're okay with an anthology, The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose is well
 worth a look, as is anything by Wodehouse, I believe.

 I'm sure some will quibble with my choices (too Western, too St. John's-y,
 not really fiction), but I'd aver at least some of them qualify in the sense
 of being based on a true story, if not necessarily fiction.

 Happy Reading!

 - Claiborne Booker -




  -Original Message-
 From: Robert J. Cordingley rob...@cirrillian.com
 To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com
 Sent: Fri, Oct 8, 2010 3:44 pm
 Subject: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

  Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and would
 like to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best Literary Works I
 should read. They have to be works of fiction and available in English and
 not just say of 2009 but of all time. Google searches tend to list the best
 of a year or be listed by one particular publisher. This is a good group to
 poll since you all (most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical
 bent. So I know the suggestions will be good ones for me!

 Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote on
 them.

 My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:

   Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy

 Thanks!
 Robert C.

 
 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

 
 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


 
 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


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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-08 Thread Hugh Trenchard

The Glass Bead Game, by Hermann Hesse, is a must-read for any 
self-respecting complexity theorist :-)

Hugh

- Original Message - 
From: Robert J. Cordingley rob...@cirrillian.com

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com
Sent: Friday, October 08, 2010 12:44 PM
Subject: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

 Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and would 
like to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best Literary Works 
I should read.  They have to be works of fiction and available in English 
and not just say of 2009 but of all time.  Google searches tend to list 
the best of a year or be listed by one particular publisher.   This is a 
good group to poll since you all (most) have at least some kind of 
scientific/technical bent.  So I know the suggestions will be good ones 
for me!

Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote on 
them.

My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac 
McCarthy

Thanks!
Robert C.

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 

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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-08 Thread George Duncan

Restricting to just novels --

Ulysses by James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Moby Dick (1849) by Herman Melville
The Sound and the Fury (1929)  by William Faulkner
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment: by  Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Atonement (2002)  by Ian McEwan
Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller
The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) by John Fowles
Herzog (1964) by Saul Bellow



On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 1:44 PM, Robert J. Cordingley
rob...@cirrillian.comwrote:

  Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and would
 like to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best Literary Works I
 should read.  They have to be works of fiction and available in English and
 not just say of 2009 but of all time.  Google searches tend to list the best
 of a year or be listed by one particular publisher.   This is a good group
 to poll since you all (most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical
 bent.  So I know the suggestions will be good ones for me!

 Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote on
 them.

 My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy

 Thanks!
 Robert C.

 
 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




-- 
George Duncan
georgeduncanart.com
(505) 983-6895
Represented by ViVO Contemporary

Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward.
Soren Kierkegaard

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Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-08 Thread Robert Holmes

So I take it that our working definition of best is will look good on the
coffee table and impress liberal arts graduates rather than will be read
and enjoyed? ;-)

-- R

P.S. Also: when selecting foreign authors you must specify the translation
if you are going to maximize your pseud points. It's not Don Quixote, it's
the Grossman Quixote. It's not The Brothers Karamazov, it's the Volokhonsky
Karamazov. Collect enough points and you get a merit badge!

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Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works


 I've just been reading a collection of Twain's writings on writing itself.

Therefore I have to offer the classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  
It is the classic American Novel, and not just (though especially) for 
young men.


I squirm at Frank's recommendation of (anything by?) Cormac McCarthy, 
especially Blood Meridian.  Of all his works, No Country for Old Men is 
the closest I would give him to literary quality.  I know several on 
this list are personal friends/acquaintances with him.  No offense... he 
certainly writes of powerful subjects and with strong and serviceable 
style.  If you have to include something from a local and contemporary 
author, go for it, but pick up No Country before Meridian.   In that 
very genre/topic, (the overly romanticized but brutal old west), I 
recommend Larry McMurtry's (strangely enough) Lonesome Dove (the novel 
which was serialized as TV Schlock) where (like Blood Meridian) the 
disaffected riffraff from the defeated Confederate South came West to 
play out their myriad psychoses on eachother, on the native inhabitants 
and on anyone else unfortunate enough to be living west of the Miss.


From the same era I'd recommend  Jack London (short stories over 
novels?) and a Dicken's (Copperfield).
To avoid total male dominance, I'd recommend a Jane Austen (PP or SS 
equally).

For the mystical allegorical journey, maybe some Hesse (Siddartha)
For some token (but grand) Science Fiction, I'd have to give Heinlein 
(Stranger in a Strange Land) and Stephenson (Snow Crash or Diamond Age) 
*some* literary credit.
Stephen King (even his schlocky horror) is literary in his style and 
storytelling... Green Mile and Rita Hayworth/Shawshank come to mind.
How about something deeply classical like Homer or even (sorry, but it 
is more fiction than history or prophecy for me) parts of the Bible? I'd 
also recommend something Sufi, maybe by Rumi (where *is* the border 
between poetry and fiction?).

And a Kipling and a Conan Doyle
Solzhenitsyn's ( A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch)
Recent literary highs for me include
God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)
Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
White Tiger (Aravand Adiga)
Kite Runner (Hosseini)
We Shall Know our Velocities (Eggers)
Motherless Brooklyn (Johnathan Letham)

Am I over ten yet?   So many books, so little time.

- Steve

 Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and 
would like to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best 
Literary Works I should read.  They have to be works of fiction and 
available in English and not just say of 2009 but of all time.  Google 
searches tend to list the best of a year or be listed by one 
particular publisher.   This is a good group to poll since you all 
(most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical bent.  So I 
know the suggestions will be good ones for me!


Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote 
on them.


My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac 
McCarthy


Thanks!
Robert C.


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




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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-08 Thread glen e. p. ropella

Hugh Trenchard wrote circa 10-10-08 02:56 PM:
 The Glass Bead Game, by Hermann Hesse, is a must-read for any
 self-respecting complexity theorist :-)

+1

I was also _very_ fond of Narcissus and Goldmund... Oh!  Oh!  and
Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, as well.

I'd also add the following to the list:

The Magus by John Fowles
The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Shea and Wilson
Mother London by Michael Moorcock
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

What's that... 8?

Hm.

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

There.  That's 10. ;-)

-- 
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com



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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-08 Thread Douglas Roberts

Geeze, doesn't anybody like good science fiction any more?  Larry Nivin's
Ringworld.  Poul Anderson's Gateway series.

--Doug

On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 4:21 PM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com wrote:

  I've just been reading a collection of Twain's writings on writing itself.

 Therefore I have to offer the classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  It
 is the classic American Novel, and not just (though especially) for young
 men.

 I squirm at Frank's recommendation of (anything by?) Cormac McCarthy,
 especially Blood Meridian.  Of all his works, No Country for Old Men is the
 closest I would give him to literary quality.  I know several on this list
 are personal friends/acquaintances with him.  No offense... he certainly
 writes of powerful subjects and with strong and serviceable style.  If you
 have to include something from a local and contemporary author, go for it,
 but pick up No Country before Meridian.   In that very genre/topic, (the
 overly romanticized but brutal old west), I recommend Larry McMurtry's
 (strangely enough) Lonesome Dove (the novel which was serialized as TV
 Schlock) where (like Blood Meridian) the disaffected riffraff from the
 defeated Confederate South came West to play out their myriad psychoses on
 eachother, on the native inhabitants and on anyone else unfortunate enough
 to be living west of the Miss.

 From the same era I'd recommend  Jack London (short stories over novels?)
 and a Dicken's (Copperfield).
 To avoid total male dominance, I'd recommend a Jane Austen (PP or SS
 equally).
 For the mystical allegorical journey, maybe some Hesse (Siddartha)
 For some token (but grand) Science Fiction, I'd have to give Heinlein
 (Stranger in a Strange Land) and Stephenson (Snow Crash or Diamond Age)
 *some* literary credit.
 Stephen King (even his schlocky horror) is literary in his style and
 storytelling... Green Mile and Rita Hayworth/Shawshank come to mind.
 How about something deeply classical like Homer or even (sorry, but it is
 more fiction than history or prophecy for me) parts of the Bible? I'd also
 recommend something Sufi, maybe by Rumi (where *is* the border between
 poetry and fiction?).
 And a Kipling and a Conan Doyle
 Solzhenitsyn's ( A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch)
 Recent literary highs for me include
God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)
Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
White Tiger (Aravand Adiga)
Kite Runner (Hosseini)
We Shall Know our Velocities (Eggers)
Motherless Brooklyn (Johnathan Letham)

 Am I over ten yet?   So many books, so little time.

 - Steve


   Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and would
 like to know this group's recommendations for the 10 Best Literary Works I
 should read.  They have to be works of fiction and available in English and
 not just say of 2009 but of all time.  Google searches tend to list the best
 of a year or be listed by one particular publisher.   This is a good group
 to poll since you all (most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical
 bent.  So I know the suggestions will be good ones for me!

 Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote on
 them.

 My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today:

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy

 Thanks!
 Robert C.

 
 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





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

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works


 R -
So I take it that our working definition of best is will look good 
on the coffee table and impress liberal arts graduates rather than 
will be read and enjoyed? ;-)
I don't think that was the original question.  Is it evidenced in some 
of the answers?  Or is this just Doug spoofing your e-mail address? ;)


I assumed he was asking for good storytelling with high quality writing 
and maybe some allegorical or other added value


   And at the risk of it looking like I'm trying to impress liberal
   arts majors, let me add (well beyond 10 now)  Luis Borges -
   Ficciones (or Aleph)
   and
   Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude


Carry On!
 - Steve

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works


 Doug -
Geeze, doesn't anybody like good science fiction any more?  Larry 
Nivin's Ringworld.  Poul Anderson's Gateway series.
I love that shit (much of SF)... but don't quite want to call most of it 
literature...   great storytelling and exposition of esoteric scientific 
concepts...  but not quite always what I want to call literature...


It is a good question... in this crowd, naturally sympathetic (I 
presume) to Science Fiction. What can pass as literature?   I know a 
few SF authors and many are great at what I said above of your 
suggestions (storytelling exposition)... and some of these works may be 
remembered *as* literary...  with enough perspective of time.


Jack Williamson was a friend and a prolific writer from the golden age 
of SF and beyond (Scientifiction he first called it in 1927 and was 
still cranking things out through the rest of his 100+ lifespan) but I 
know he didn't claim to have been writing literature.  The closest might 
be his post WWII novel the Humanoid Touch.  It was what rescued him 
from a long writer's block after realizing the horrors that technology 
had wrought (in war) when they had been promised as a panacea.  
Including by himself.  It was not his normal pulp-SF adventure/space-opera.


 Until the 60's I don't think I can call out any other SF as Literature 
(though the Pre-SF Scientific Romance period with Verne and Doyle has 
some good entries).  London and Twain dabbled in that realm successfully 
too.


Maybe I'm looking for more/deeper social significance than most SF even 
aspires to (much less achieves)?


Some with literary talent/style:

Heinlein (only with Stranger and maybe a couple of others)
Samuel Delaney
Maybe Clarke and Asimov... barely?
Tolkien (Fantasy, not SF though)
Sterling and Gibson (barely).
Stephenson (barely... maybe if he can nail what he was trying to do with 
his Baroque Cycle)

King (though not so much his SF/Horror)

In our own neighborhood, I might want to nominate (some of) the works of 
Walter Jon Williams, J R R Martin, Laura Mixon-Gould and Sage Walker as 
candidates for having literary qualities.  Steve (SM) Stirling gets a 
maybe... I think he has the talent as a writer and a storyteller and 
there is significance woven through his works but he somehow gets caught 
up more in juvenile/egoist stuff before he gets down to the important 
cool, adult issues.


Margaret Atwood is assumed to be literary while her content is SF.
Ursula LeGuin is sometimes credited with the same.
Vonnegut is almost pure SF and yet he is usually considered contemporary 
Am Lit.  and I grant him (most of) that categorization.


I love the works of the Hard SF folks (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Niven, 
Benson, Bear, Benford, Forward .) and especially those with a 
good solid social message/question (Stranger, Dune, 2001, ...)  But a 
lot of it is mostly escapist (albeit into deep scientific curiosities)...


I personally do not snub SF as literature because of it's subject...  
I'm sure some do.  And I think good storytelling is key to literature 
(and I find much of SF to be good examples of that).  And some SF 
authors are very good writers in the technical sense (though many are not).


I guess the final key for me is the social relevance.  Is the story 
saying something important... not just interesting and not just well 
written.   That is where (by volume) SF (and most popular fiction) falls 
short.  Romances, westerns, crime, mystery, espionage, etc.  all have 
good storytellers and some good writers... but the deeper social 
significance seems too often missing or at least thin.


Maybe I read too much SF at a young age and missed the social 
significance of (much of) it, or maybe I developed a taste for it from 
the few examples I did encounter young...  I'd love to be reminded of 
the many authors and stories I read back when that may very well have 
carried more than grand ideas and fun adventures in space and time (and 
the inner space of scientific ideas).


On re-evaluation (reflection?) I do realize that parts of Anderson's 
Gateway series probably do deserve a literary nod...  and maybe Niven's 
FootFall (though I read it for my love of dystopianism) too.


Among contemporary popular writers, Martin Cruz Smith's work (Stallion 
Gate, Red Square, Gorky Park, Stalin's Ghost, Rising Sun) are exceptions 
to this generality (I'm waay over my 10 sorry).   He tells a good story, 
with good imagery, dialog, exposition and the stories he tells and the 
characters he builds are not just interesting but important to the human 
experience.  I'm not big on character novels but his Arkady Renko 
actually works for me on repitition...  the crazy Russian bastard 
actually makes sense.


Just because I'm not a liberal arts major doesn't mean I don't read 
critically (as well as for informational, educational, informational and 
escapist) reasons.


Damn, I'm having a ramble-y day... sorry to expose all of you to all of 
this... glad you have a

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-08 Thread Pamela McCorduck

Lists like this are always a bit odd. I got dressed down last night  
(gently but firmly) by a professor of English who couldn't believe  
that I thought Brothers K. was the most tedious thing I've ever read  
half of (couldn't drive myself to read the second half). I like other  
Dostoevsky--just not Bros. K.


I can't even name my own top ten favorites. It's such a fluid list .  
There are books I admire without loving, and books I love without  
being able to argue for their admirability. I deeply admire Ulysses  
by James Joyce, but love only parts of it (the parts that remind me of  
my Irish grandpa, plus a few other parts).


But certainly Moby-Dick (George Duncan and I re-read it this summer  
in a small group); certainly George Eliot's Middlemarch, Anthony  
Trollope's The Way We Live Now, and on the admirable-even-if-I- 
didn't-love-it list, War and Peace, which I re-read last summer, and  
realized that Tolstoy was trying desperately to capture complexity as  
we know it now, but he didn't have the vocabulary nor the scientific  
insights to be able to understand that. But he knew *something* was  
afoot in the Napoleonic Wars, and it wasn't just Napoleon on the  
warpath.


Pamela



On Oct 8, 2010, at 7:14 PM, Steve Smith wrote:


Doug -
Geeze, doesn't anybody like good science fiction any more?  Larry  
Nivin's Ringworld.  Poul Anderson's Gateway series.
I love that shit (much of SF)... but don't quite want to call most  
of it literature...   great storytelling and exposition of esoteric  
scientific concepts...  but not quite always what I want to call  
literature...


It is a good question... in this crowd, naturally sympathetic (I  
presume) to Science Fiction. What can pass as literature?   I know  
a few SF authors and many are great at what I said above of your  
suggestions (storytelling exposition)... and some of these works may  
be remembered *as* literary...  with enough perspective of time.


Jack Williamson was a friend and a prolific writer from the golden  
age of SF and beyond (Scientifiction he first called it in 1927 and  
was still cranking things out through the rest of his 100+ lifespan)  
but I know he didn't claim to have been writing literature.  The  
closest might be his post WWII novel the Humanoid Touch.  It was  
what rescued him from a long writer's block after realizing the  
horrors that technology had wrought (in war) when they had been  
promised as a panacea.  Including by himself.  It was not his normal  
pulp-SF adventure/space-opera.


Until the 60's I don't think I can call out any other SF as  
Literature (though the Pre-SF Scientific Romance period with Verne  
and Doyle has some good entries).  London and Twain dabbled in that  
realm successfully too.


Maybe I'm looking for more/deeper social significance than most SF  
even aspires to (much less achieves)?


Some with literary talent/style:

Heinlein (only with Stranger and maybe a couple of others)
Samuel Delaney
Maybe Clarke and Asimov... barely?
Tolkien (Fantasy, not SF though)
Sterling and Gibson (barely).
Stephenson (barely... maybe if he can nail what he was trying to do  
with his Baroque Cycle)

King (though not so much his SF/Horror)

In our own neighborhood, I might want to nominate (some of) the  
works of Walter Jon Williams, J R R Martin, Laura Mixon-Gould and  
Sage Walker as candidates for having literary qualities.  Steve (SM)  
Stirling gets a maybe... I think he has the talent as a writer and  
a storyteller and there is significance woven through his works but  
he somehow gets caught up more in juvenile/egoist stuff before he  
gets down to the important cool, adult issues.


Margaret Atwood is assumed to be literary while her content is SF.
Ursula LeGuin is sometimes credited with the same.
Vonnegut is almost pure SF and yet he is usually considered  
contemporary Am Lit.  and I grant him (most of) that categorization.


I love the works of the Hard SF folks (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein,  
Niven, Benson, Bear, Benford, Forward .) and especially  
those with a good solid social message/question (Stranger, Dune,  
2001, ...)  But a lot of it is mostly escapist (albeit into deep  
scientific curiosities)...


I personally do not snub SF as literature because of it's  
subject...  I'm sure some do.  And I think good storytelling is key  
to literature (and I find much of SF to be good examples of that).   
And some SF authors are very good writers in the technical sense  
(though many are not).


I guess the final key for me is the social relevance.  Is the story  
saying something important... not just interesting and not just well  
written.   That is where (by volume) SF (and most popular fiction)  
falls short.  Romances, westerns, crime, mystery, espionage, etc.   
all have good storytellers and some good writers... but the deeper  
social significance seems too often missing or at least thin.


Maybe I read too much SF at a young age and missed the social

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

2010-10-08 Thread Carl Tollander

 Well, like an exercise program, the best books are the one's one 
actually rereads.


I was that liberal arts major, until I came across computer science, 
then all was lost, then complexity and developmental biology, and all 
was *really* lost...virtually nothing on the English major curriculum is 
still on my bookshelf, hmmm,  'cepting 'Alice' and maybe some Carlyle 
essays, TS Elliot and Coleridge.  Oh, OK, there's some Dante and an old 
Byron, fine, geez.


I agree with Pamela, Dostoyevsky fine to read once, but tedium 
thereafter, maybe even the first time.   Not something I would even keep 
in a box, let alone on 180 feet of bookshelves.  (Oh, harsh, yes - well, 
ok, hmm, I haven't looked through all my boxes for quite awhile, maybe 
it's there, I'm not saying it sucks, just that I never  connected with it).


I wouldn't put these up as 10 best, books in any global sense, but 
they're some I've read in recent years and continue to pull down and 
reread from time to time.   The object would be to have fun reading 
rather than to read 'Great Litrichar?   I try not to read anything 
because I feel I should, or because it's on a bucket list.


Non-Science-Fiction:
The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt.
West With the Night, by Beryl Markham
If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, by Italo Calvino
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Baroque Cycle, Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson (ok, I was kinda 
skimming the second time through)

Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko

Science Fiction - I mostly select books by authors I like:
Greg Benford, just about anything, I liked In the Ocean of Night and 
Across the Sea of Suns, also Foundation's Fear

Gene Wolfe, just about anything, really like the short stories.
Neil Stephenson, The Diamond Age
Bruce Sterling, most particularly Distraction
Greg Bear, most recently Darwin's Radio, but also Blood Music, or 
The Way series.

C J Cherryh, particularly Foreigner series.
Greg Egan, shorter stories, novelettes.
R A Lafferty, Arrive at Easterwine and some of his short stories
Larry Niven, just about anything connected to the Ringworld universe.
Phillip K. Dick, just about anything

I do aspire to read some Japanese classics, e.g. Tale of the Genji, or 
the Kojiki but there hasn't been time, what with not being 
sufficiently good at Japanese, and my music and all.   Note to self, 
figure out a way to live longer.


Carl

On 10/8/10 5:56 PM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:
Lists like this are always a bit odd. I got dressed down last night 
(gently but firmly) by a professor of English who couldn't believe 
that I thought Brothers K. was the most tedious thing I've ever read 
half of (couldn't drive myself to read the second half). I like other 
Dostoevsky--just not Bros. K.


I can't even name my own top ten favorites. It's such a fluid list . 
There are books I admire without loving, and books I love without 
being able to argue for their admirability. I deeply admire Ulysses 
by James Joyce, but love only parts of it (the parts that remind me of 
my Irish grandpa, plus a few other parts).


But certainly Moby-Dick (George Duncan and I re-read it this summer 
in a small group); certainly George Eliot's Middlemarch, Anthony 
Trollope's The Way We Live Now, and on the 
admirable-even-if-I-didn't-love-it list, War and Peace, which I 
re-read last summer, and realized that Tolstoy was trying desperately 
to capture complexity as we know it now, but he didn't have the 
vocabulary nor the scientific insights to be able to understand that. 
But he knew *something* was afoot in the Napoleonic Wars, and it 
wasn't just Napoleon on the warpath.


Pamela



On Oct 8, 2010, at 7:14 PM, Steve Smith wrote:


Doug -
Geeze, doesn't anybody like good science fiction any more?  Larry 
Nivin's Ringworld.  Poul Anderson's Gateway series.
I love that shit (much of SF)... but don't quite want to call most of 
it literature...   great storytelling and exposition of esoteric 
scientific concepts...  but not quite always what I want to call 
literature...


It is a good question... in this crowd, naturally sympathetic (I 
presume) to Science Fiction. What can pass as literature?   I know 
a few SF authors and many are great at what I said above of your 
suggestions (storytelling exposition)... and some of these works may 
be remembered *as* literary...  with enough perspective of time.


Jack Williamson was a friend and a prolific writer from the golden 
age of SF and beyond (Scientifiction he first called it in 1927 and 
was still cranking things out through the rest of his 100+ lifespan) 
but I know he didn't claim to have been writing literature.  The 
closest might be his post WWII novel the Humanoid Touch.  It was 
what rescued him from a long writer's block after realizing the 
horrors that technology had wrought (in war) when they had been 
promised as a panacea.  Including by himself.  It was not his normal 
pulp-SF adventure/space-opera.


Until the 60's I don't think I can call out

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works