Big Intellectual Books You Own and Would Really Like to Have Read

[Extollager]

The Bible Honestly have tried to read it, but always crashed and burned. Possibly it's not a good idea to start at the start and go through it line by line?

VB, if it would be of interest, here's something I posted elsewhere on Chrons recently, in response to someone who'd referred to "the weird and cryptic nature of most holy texts" including the Bible -- for what it's worth:

I very much like what Paul Johnson wrote in A History of the Jews (Harper, 1988):

"The Bible is vibrant because it is entirely about living creatures; and since God, though living, cannot be described or even imagined, the attention is directed relentlessly on man and woman. ...The Jews were the first race to find words to express the deepest human emotions, especially the feelings produced by bodily or mental suffering, anxiety, spiritual despair and desolation, and the remedies for these evils . . . . hope, resolution, confidence in divine assistance, the consciousness of innocence or righteousness, penitence, sorrow and humility."

That is my experience of reading the Bible, too. For a first-time reader, I might suggest that one start with the calling of Abraham in Genesis 12 and to read all of Genesis from there, and then right on into Exodus to the account of Moses at Sinai. Then, stopping at Exodus 20:20, skip the detailed ceremonial regulations and pick up the narrative with Exodus 39:32 to the end of the book. Then skip to Deuteronomy 34 (the death of Moses) and go from there into the Book of Joshua and read the first six chapters, then skip to Chapter 24 (the final chapter). I'll stop with the suggested reading at that point except to say one could read selectively in the Book of Judges and then in the two books of Samuel and the two books of Kings, etc. What you'll find, I think, is a coherent, familiar and unfamiliar narrative, and not very much that's cryptic. I don't mean by my somewhat breezy suggestions to disparage what I suggest for skipping, but I think for a first-time reader especially it can be helpful to get a grasp of the great narrative before wrestling too much with some of the more alien passages. Of course one should read Job and at least selected Psalms.

If nothing else I'd urge a good dip into the Book of Proverbs, because what will strike you there isn't how weird and cryptic it all is but how commonsensical and shrewd those maxims generally are.

.....I didn't say anything about the New Testament. The Book of Revelation is weird and cryptic, especially if one tries to read it "cold." (It's actually very intelligible if one's willing to put in the time to get a sense of the imagery-world that's being worked with. I recommend Farrer's A Rebirth of Images for that; which will nudge you to read some passages in the Book of Daniel, the Book of Ezekiel, and the ("apocryphal") Book of Enoch... I confess I have only started the Farrer... But the rest of the New Testament will generally seem, I think, deceptively familiar, to most readers. But the Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament really needs to be read, for its own sake and also for that of getting a grip on the New Testament, in my opinion.

 

[BAYLOR]

The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan. Sitting on my shelves for years. Have attempted it countless times, but to no avail.

Also have a gorgeous, six volume set of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This I dip into every now and again but I am horrified to admit that I have never fully read the work.

Melville's Moby Dick also sits there unread.

Moby Dick is definitely worth the effort. Its a great read.

 

[Extollager]

But back to our topic:

These GoodReads folks liked the John Lukacs book that I mentioned earlier today, and that I propose to get into soon. Wasn't thinking of it when this discussion began and am glad to be reminded of it.

Historical Consciousness

How about y'all? Has there been some friend, teacher, reviewer who got you interested in a pretty thick intellectual book (not work of fiction) that you went ahead and read? Or was it just some book you happened to see that somehow seemed interesting? Was it a good experience, if so?

I'm not sure I can claim a big (i.e. long), dense (in a good sense) book. Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances was too short really to quality, only a couple of hundred pages or so, which doesn't feel like a "big" book to me though it was a learned, wide-ranging, stimulating thing.

For this topic I'm not thinking of simply long nonfiction books, e.g. some works of history that might be quite long and interesting, but not exactly what we'd usually think of as "intellectual" and deeply learned.

 

[2DaveWixon]

Anyone have an interest in Toynbee or in Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (I don't have anything by these gents, but you seem to run across their names a lot).

I actually read the Spengler when I was in college, but that was much too long ago for my memory to hold much of it yet...
Toynbee, though: would it count to say that although I have it in two different abridged versions, I've never been able to find an unabridged? (not that I've been looking very hard in the last few decades...).

But to the point of this thread: Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and a huge two-volume compendium of the writings of Thoreau (the latter was left to me by a deceased author friend -- in fact, he had both of those books, and liked to just open one or the other and read a couple of pages as he eased down toward sleep...). (I do the same, but then I'll skip a night, and then two...)

 

[2DaveWixon]

I've got:
The City of God - St Augustine (over 1,000 pages)
and
The History of The High Authority of the European Steel and Coal Community (over 700 pages).

Do I get a prize?

That second one made my eyes cross and then glaze over, and I'm nowhere near the book! As far as I'm concerned, you win the prize!

 

[galanx]

Gibbons. I always prided myself on having read "Decline and Fall", but discovered later it was just a one-volume condensed version.

 

[galanx]

Ooops- guess I don't own that.
"Purgatory" Got it after getting though "Inferno" but never go into it.

 

[aThenian]

That second one made my eyes cross and then glaze over, and I'm nowhere near the book! As far as I'm concerned, you win the prize!

Hooray! I knew it had to be good for something.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

What a super thread this is!

 

[Extollager]

But back to our topic:

I'm not sure I can claim a big (i.e. long), dense (in a good sense) book. Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances was too short really to quality, only a couple of hundred pages or so, which doesn't feel like a "big" book to me though it was a learned, wide-ranging, stimulating thing.

For this topic I'm not thinking of simply long nonfiction books, e.g. some works of history that might be quite long and interesting, but not exactly what we'd usually think of as "intellectual" and deeply learned.

Sorry -- "qualify" is what I meant, not "quality."

 

[SilentRoamer]

No the 'Biggest'* intellectual book I've got is a translation of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I've read it, I remember that. But I really can't tell you it's conclusions. Or much else that was described in it. I'm not sure I have the brain cells left to attempt a re-read. I should probably just stick to pulp SF.

------------------------------------------------------------
* I think Roger Scruton wrote that most philosophy books are painfully worded and difficult, but thankfully most of them, like this one, are quite short.

I have Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

Tried as a teenager to read it and it made my head hurt. Maybe I could revisit it as an adult but I have no real desire to.

 

[Extollager]

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. I've had this set forever.

Evelyn Waugh, "Literary Style in England and America" (reprinted in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, p. 479): "Style is what makes a work memorable and unmistakable. We remember the false judgments of Voltaire and Gibbon and Lytton Strachey long after they have been corrected, because of their sharp, polished form and because of the sensual pleasure of dwelling on them. They come to one, not merely as printed words, but as a lively experience, with the full force of another human being personally encountered -- that is to say because they are lucid, elegant and individual."

 

[MWagner]

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. I've had this set forever.

I have a six volume set as well. I've made it through most of the first book. The funny thing is, I thoroughly enjoy Decline and Fall as I'm reading it. Gibbon is a great stylist, and the subject matter is fascinating. But for some reason, maybe it's a lack of a propulsive narrative, I don't have any problem setting the books down and neglecting them for years on end.

The Golden Bough by James George Frazer - I've got an abridged version that just about works and is fascinating in its way, but the full 12 volume final set must be a real hard slog. About a billion examples to make his point. At least.

Yeah, the abridged version was all I could handle. Can't imagine 12 volumes on corn harvest rituals in the Crimea.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Most of my library is non-fiction, and I thought I'd read it all. But no! I couldn't read The French Revolution by Georges Lefebvre.

 

[galanx]

Evelyn Waugh, "Literary Style in England and America" (reprinted in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, p. 479): "Style is what makes a work memorable and unmistakable. We remember the false judgments of Voltaire and Gibbon and Lytton Strachey long after they have been corrected, because of their sharp, polished form and because of the sensual pleasure of dwelling on them. They come to one, not merely as printed words, but as a lively experience, with the full force of another human being personally encountered -- that is to say because they are lucid, elegant and individual."

Given it's Waugh, one would be tempted to reply "Takes one to know one"

 

[BigBadBob141]

The three volume "Feynman Lectures On Physics" by the late great Richard Feynman!
These a lovely set of large format paperbacks I bought some time ago.
I really must get stuck into these one day, but I've got to brush up on my Algebra, Trig. & Calculus first.

 

[Extollager]

Sir Ernst Gombrich's Art and Illusion: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1956 (my Princeton paperback's dated 23 Nov. 2007). I've had this one for nine years then and have read only some of it so far. It's copiously illustrated. The "history and psychology of pictorial representation." Ancient Greeks, Leonardo, Rembrandt, cubists, and tricks of commercial artists too.

(Recommended: "Botticelli's Mythologies: A Study in the Neo-Platonic Symbolism of His Circle" in Gombrich on the Renaissance: Volume 2: Symbolic Images.)

 

[Extollager]

Not really a very big book....about 500 pages with index....Gertrude Himmelfarb's Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959). TLS: "A thorough and masterly book punctuated with a delicate sense of humor....Until he has read, marked, learnt and inwardly digested this authoritative volume, no one should presume henceforth to speak on Darwin and Darwinism." Yale Review: "An illuminating contribution...a dramatic story."

 

[dask]

The first three volumes in Will Durant's Story Of Civilization. Stopped part way through the fourth because of the copious killings of mankind. Just got to be too much. May return to it though, sometime. The writing is top-notch, virtually unbeatable. Durant has got to be the most quotable author this side of Shakespeare.

 

[Steve S]

A History of Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch - I want to read it, it's been on the bookshelf for a while, but at 1000 pages +, it's going to be quite a commitment!