Required reading.

[Donkey]

There are many books that I have enjoyed (alas, fewer, since I discovered the internet and college made me hate to read, both of which I am slowly recovering from), and also a few that I classify as "important." What I mean by that is that they are books (or readings) that inform my view of how the world, natural and social, works. I'm sure we all have them, and I wouldn't be surprised if at times they overlap.

I'll start with one the most relevant and influential Academic books I've ever read: Orientalism by Edward Said.

A VERY brief synopsis:
My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness....As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge(Orientalism, p. 204).

Said meant it as a discussion of the Euro-North American view toward the Middle East, but I think its lessons and sociological concepts are applicable to any two cultures, or smaller subculture of a larger one. I literally can't think of a single work that has clarified the muddy, messy world that we live in (at least from a sociological perspective), so it gets to lead this thread off.

[dilettante]

I can't think of Said's Orientalism without immediately remembering a book I read at about the same time and which might also have a place in this thread: Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins of Nationalism.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21Fsqcfw%2B6L._AA115_.jpg

Some quotes:

"...I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion..." (6)


“the very possibility of imagining the nation only arose historically when, and where, three fundamental cultural conceptions, all of great antiquity, lost their axiomatic grip on men’s minds.” The first of these was the idea that a particular script-language offered privileged access to ontological truth, precisely because it was an inseparable part of that truth…Second was the belief that society was naturally organized around and under high centres – monarchs who were persons apart from other human beings and who ruled by some form of cosmological (divine) dispensation.…Third was a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable, the origins of the world and of men essentially identical.” (36)

Anderson has certainly come in for criticism over the years, but it was still a path-breaking book and remains a staple of any discussion on the historical origins of the nation. And for me personally, reading it was a key moment in the process of really realizing (in more than a purely abstract intellectual sense) that even peoples' basic conceptions about how the world works are subject to change over time.

[Michael]

Hmmm... maybe I should ressurrect my old "Western Canon" thread.

Actually, I suppose I'd have to recreate it since I created that thread so many years ago at USPO.

That being said, :thumbsup: for Said's Orientalism. It definitely was the beginning of my study of Middle Eastern history (well, after Runciman's History of the Crusades in three volumes which I consider the definitive work on that topic).

[nanacat]

There are many books that I have enjoyed (alas, fewer, since I discovered the internet and college made me hate to read, both of which I am slowly recovering from), and also a few that I classify as "important." What I mean by that is that they are books (or readings) that inform my view of how the world, natural and social, works. I'm sure we all have them, and I wouldn't be surprised if at times they overlap.

I'll start with one the most relevant and influential Academic books I've ever read: Orientalism by Edward Said.

A VERY brief synopsis:


Said meant it as a discussion of the Euro-North American view toward the Middle East, but I think its lessons and sociological concepts are applicable to any two cultures, or smaller subculture of a larger one. I literally can't think of a single work that has clarified the muddy, messy world that we live in (at least from a sociological perspective), so it gets to lead this thread off.


Edward Said. Good for you. He also wrote a wonderful, albeit more sentimental book (with photographs by Swiss artist, Jean Mohr) called After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. that brought me PAST the political, and to the very personal experience of a people in lonely, proud exile.

(And don't worry about the not reading after college stuff. It'll pass. Were you an English major? That can be particularly crippling. I didn't read squat again until I was almost thirty. Then I read like I was starving, still do.)

[Non Sequitur]

I would say that anything Said wrote is required reading, but I think the man is a genius

[Greendruid]

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four. It changed my life. I think it might have had something to do with when I read it rather than anything else but it was a majorly influential book on developing my critical thinking as a teenager. Perhaps it fueled a little bit of my paranoia and distrust of authority too :shrug:

Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Another life altering book for sure. Perhaps this one was more influential on my understanding of my father's generation than on the intended topic of the author but it has some great lessons about life, getting ripped off, friendship, love and the all important ... jazz! Reading this book in a little coffee house called the Bauhaus Café pursuing nothing but my undergraduate education was perhaps the perfect mix of timing and literature. Getting the Complete Beat Reader later that year was icing on the cake.

I'll leave it at this for now as my sleepy time is calling me.