Animal farm
Personally one of my favorite books
The Jungle - Upton Sinclaire
Book changed my life in college, but for reasons lemmy will hate.
Never had a shred of work ethic. Reading that book stunned me. “If this man can persevere through that, why am I such a wuss?”
Worked hard at every job since, moved up if there was the opportunity to do so. I soon realized that if you kick ass at your job, you can write your own ticket. Even if it’s not much more money, or a fat promotion, the least you get is a better schedule, acceptance of fuck ups, or whatever it is you want out of the place.
Gain skills and experience, quit, acquire new job, rinse and repeat.
When we moved to Florida 20-years ago, my two friends and I had no family, no jobs, no other friends. One guy started at an oil change place, way below his skill set. He’d work at a place for 6-months or a year, quit when they quit giving him more money, got a better job, rinse and repeat. He finally chilled after 10-years or so and settled into a job as a service manager for a major car dealership, $100K+, probably $150K today.
War and Peace.
When they successfully finish they can graduate.
Passion and Reason, by Richard and Bernice Lazarus. It’s a very accessible book about the connections between thoughts and emotions. Understanding what’s covered in it would save a lot of people a ton of confusion and social hardship in life.
Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. If nothing else, it might help some people learn to recognize scams.
I found this in a bookstore end-cap near the fantasy/sci-fi section. Thought it was going to be a novel when I picked it up. Can’t remember if I read the jacket before I left with it.
Destroyed my faith in religion. I highly recommend.
Going against the grain here a little, I don’t like required reading in schools.
I really loved reading growing up, always had a book (sometimes more than one) that I was reading, read well above my grade level, chose books that challenged myself, etc.
My high school really pushed reading, lots of classes assigned books for us to read, I think even some of the math classes had novels they were supposed to read. For our homeroom period once a week we had to do mandatory SSR (Sustained Silent Reading) where we had to be reading something, we couldn’t do homework or go see our teachers for help, or anything of the sort, we had to be seated at our desks reading silently. I often was juggling 2 or 3 assigned books along with my other school work, activities, and hobbies, which didn’t really leave me much time for the books that I chose to read for myself.
And the pacing was terrible, we’d often spend weeks on a book, analyzing it to death, doing packets of worksheets, writing reports, doing that accursed “popcorn reading” in class, etc. for books that I could have read in a matter of days if not hours.
I think we spent nearly a month on Of Mice and Men, it’s only around 100 pages, it can be read in an afternoon.
The whole experience really killed my love of reading. I resented a lot of the books I was made to read, and now almost 2 decades later I’ve never quite been able to get back into the same kind of reading habit I used to have.
I’ve made an effort since then to go back and reread some of those assigned books I hated back in school, and the wild thing is that, overall, they were really good books, strong stories, well-written, solid lessons to teach, different points of view to consider, etc. I totally understand why they were assigned reading.
But when I first read them I was just going through the motions, I just wanted to get the damn books out of the way so that I could read what I wanted to read.
And I think the key is to make kids want to seek out those books. Don’t assign them 1984 (for example,) make them want to go out and read 1984 for themselves.
I don’t know what the best way to do that is, but it’s not just telling them to read those books. If anything, it might be telling them not to read them. I can only speak for myself, but I know that personally seeing a display on “banned books” at a book store or library always made me way more interested in those books than any amount of recommendations from friends or reviews online or any other form of marketing.
Totally fair experience. I was also a voracious reader growing up and hated assigned reading. But I certainly wasn’t required to read as much as you! In fact, one of the things I hated about the classroom reading is I would have to stop reading the book (if I enjoyed it) and wait to discuss or do worksheets on it when all I wanted is to just continue reading it!
But what we have to remember is there’s kids out there from families that don’t encourage reading. Or even ones that actively discourage reading! If not for assigned reading, they might never read a single book from their adolescence onward! At least this way, they actually get the knowledge from a few books in them. But really, I don’t know what the answer is either…
I happened to enjoy most of the assigned books. I’d have the same issue in class with the amount of time given on each book, but I’d use it to my advantage. I’d usually just read each book twice on my own, chill out and more or less slack off while in class, and still answer any questions or do the work better than anyone else because I knew the subject matter better than any other students. I’d ready something like the oddesey a couple times over a weekend and then have a month where I didn’t have to use any effort at all in that class.
I give my grandma props to my reading. I went over to Grandma and Grandpa’s a lot and from the age of like 1 she would read me childrens picture books. Many times I’d ask for the same one again and again and shed lovingly read it to me. I could follow along looking at the words (she’d point with her finger at each word as she read) long before I learned sounds each letter would make. I could just recognize a word by what the word looked like in the book. I could read at a 5th grade level in first grade, and by 5th grade I tested out to its max of 12+.
Thanks, Grandma. Miss you.
So how do you study literature without having the class all read the same book? Can’t really have a discussion on the themes of a work if the class isn’t all reading the same thing.
This is important. My first solution reading the comment was to just focus on number of books and let the kids pick their own to get the love of reading. However this would be very difficult for a teacher to maintain if they wanted to do any analysis.
So maybe have a short list of a variety of books, and the material could be prepared to discuss themes. Maybe also having students present/teach others what they learned?
There would have to be one or two books at least in a year that were an assigned read for the whole class to get deeper into the text.
Reading might actually be bad for you. The psychic equivalent of footbinding. Leaves you deformed and incapable of seeing leprechauns.
Dungeon Crawler Carl. Young people need to learn that all books don’t have to be boring and peachy. Sometimes a book can be fun and bat shit insane and that’s an ok use of your time. Learn to love reading first, then discover philosophy.
Catch-22.
Promethea by Alan Moore
Lohnarbeit und Kapital - Karl Marx
For a good fifth to quarter of the world it’s already a reality, but certainly the Qur’an.
Marmaduke: The Riverside Collection.
Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by Dr. David Burns. Look, if we can teach the kids chemical formulas, surely we can teach them the basics of emotional regulation? No?
It was recommended by my psychiatrist, and I’m glad I read it, but I hated Feeling Good.
It’s got good advice, and the the techniques are sound, or supposedly clinically backed or whatever. But Burns’ style of presenting a patient and then solving all their problems with one quirky treatment really rubbed me the wrong way.
Legally, I’m sure each patient in his book is probably a composite of patients with similar problems. And I’m sure that it’s probably more narratively pleasing to show each trial as a success. But I don’t know, it just felt so dismissive of the actual struggles of my life and I worry that it gives unrealistic expectations to people who need help.
I felt like I had to try a dozen techniques before I found one that seemed to help. And when I did, it wasn’t the overnight cure to my anxiety that he presented, it’s been a slow, gradual thing. It was hopeful to find something that helped, but overall I think the book was discouraging because it made me feel like there must be something wrong with me that I’m not having the immediate success that Burns seemed so confident of.
So I don’t know. Overall I think it’s a useful book, I just wish it was presented differently. I also worry that if it was required reading, you’d get this influx of well-meaning but dismissive people who think that any problem can be solved by whatever the thing their teacher vibed most with. For a lot of people, until they go through their own struggle with mental health it’s like it doesn’t exist for them. Perhaps doubly true for teenagers with an undeveloped sense of empathy.
Aside, I liked Dr Faith Harper’s Unfuck Your Life series. It’s got the same bones as Feeling Good, but it’s more modern, her style is more grounded, and I think it’s important that she sets expectations by telling the reader that not everything in psychiatry is a magic bullet solution.
I also think the Unfuck series is neat because each book is smaller but tailored to a specific focus. Unfuck your Anxiety has different exercises than Unfuck your Depression. I think that makes it more accessible for people who are going through it, although perhaps it does lessen the depth that a required reading list would need from a single book. Not that they’d ever teach Unfuck your Life in school because swear words are bad even though teenagers literally wouldn’t care.
Anyway, long story long, I think they absolutely should teach this stuff in school but gosh I hate that specific book
CS Lewis, ‘The Abolition of Man’.
Well maybe not for kids themselves to read but, since its all bout teaching kids, a required read for all of us the ‘adults’. For anyone one wanting to ‘have’ children, for any one pretending to teach them anything, for anyone pretending to vote laws concerning the education of those children. Well, for all of us adults. Allow me to explain.
It’s a short book (a collection of a few conferences he gave to British bomber pilots, sometime in 1943) in which he reflects on the consequences of all the reforms and wishful thinking that was already going on in the educative system of back then, and how the moral relativism that was being promoted (one should read the book to understand how he defines it) was threatening to destroy… our humanity, our ability to feel and to stand for some ideas, as well as our… individuality/ies. One should keep in mind Lewis was talking ‘the danger of moral relativism’ to young men (fresh out of school, barely older than kids) that were about to go die en masse while bombing (and killing en masse) Nazi Germany.
Lewis reflects on how this moral relativism is turning kids (and therefore all of us) into mere sheep in the hands of a few powerful people that will know how to manipulate those ‘relativist’ values in their own exclusive interest, not in the kid’s best interest, and that includes convincing those kids to do the most stupid and (self-)destructive shit. Any semblance with our days and age may not be a coincidence.
This book could and should still be read today as an almost perfect description of how our respective educative systems, at least here in the West, are failing everywhere at teaching kids anything of value. Not just any useful practical knowledge but more importantly any… compass, any firm ground. Lewis talks of this system creating ‘men without chess’ (once gain he says that to young people that are about to go kill and die in a war).
He says that not only that they are failing at teaching kids but he reflects (rightfully so, imho) that it may even become their very purpose to fail at teaching kids anything (and making sure they can’t learn much anywhere else, I would add).
CS Lewis is probably most well know for being the author of the ‘Chronicles of Narnia’. More than a movie adaptation it’s a series of books that is also worth reading, this time by kids too ;)
Also, knowing a lot of people around here are hostile to that, I prefer mention Lewis was a Christian thinker. But, by any mean, don’t let that stop you from opening his book.
As an atheist myself, I think it is one book that we should all read closely and then (calmly) discuss it. Like I said, maybe kids themselves should not be reading it (don’t think many of them would get much out of it but some undoubtedly would and, with any luck, they would trigger the alarm and help other kids around them realize how badly they’re being screwed in the name of wishful thinking), but definitely all parents should read it and, in a perfect world, all teachers too and all our representatives. The ones that are responsible for this mess. The ones that are asking for always more reforms in our educative systems, the ones that are voting them and, doing so, the ones that are destroying any hope to raise children decently, and failing to give them any chance to stand on/for something. While allowing a few powerful people use that failure as an opportunity to treat those kids as mere sheep.
Not a bad book. By not a stupid man.
I’m also an atheist who loves C.S. Lewis. He has an incredible way with words. He packs so much into so small a space.
Perfectly Legal
The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich–and Cheat Everybody Else
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/291700/perfectly-legal-by-david-cay-johnston/
Can non-fiction be a trilogy? 🤔
Free Lunch
How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/300246/free-lunch-by-david-cay-johnston/
The Fine Print
How Big Companies Use “Plain English” to Rob You Blind
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/305192/the-fine-print-by-david-cay-johnston/
Adding to this, I really thought Bad Science was a great book that more people should read. It explores alternative medicine, where it comes from and its efficacy (or lack thereof). It helps that Ben Goldacre is equally critical of the medical industry and their practices.
