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Approved readings of your favorite pieces?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhzNTSMBlag

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What did you think /lit/?

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I want to major in L A cultural studies but have no idea what readings to do

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ITT: Favorite books thread
>Girl With the Dragon Tatoo
>Hichhikers Guide
>Harry Potter
>11/12/63

Pic possibly unrelated

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What is /lit/'s opinion regarding ex libris?
Do you have one?

inb4: kindlefags

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How would you rank Steinbeck's works, /lit/?

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Who will play him in the inevitable biopic?

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What are some essential pieces of literature with an "epic" scope? I want to get lost in a story with huge proportions. Currently reading murakamis Wind Up Bird Chronicle (new to reading for fun) and I love how big it feels, I guess. Any suggestions?

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Hi /lit/. Tonight I will be hanging out and drinking with some classmates from uni. I probably won't get laid, so I predict I will get tired after some hours and I'll read for a while sitting on the street before I go home. The question is: what of these books should I start?
>Under the Volcano
>Canterbury Tales
>Fathers and Sons (Turgenev)
>Dubliners (my first Joyce)
>Some short tales by Conrad
Comment too long. Click here to view the full text.

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Going to my first fiction workshop at a uni near me. What do you guys think of workshops? Not like an MFA, just a mix of people. Stories?

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What philosophers/philosophical works should I read before I'm allowed to move about freely within philosophy?

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>Sam Harris must pay for his crimes. We will send him to the gulag, and every night he will be brutally raped and so on, and we execute him on his birthday with all the old Foucauldian, you know tie his hands and feet to horses and so on you know

What did he mean by this?

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I want to learn all about Communism and Socialism.

What's a good reading order? I don't know what to read after the Communist Manifesto.

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What does /lit/ think?

>Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on the phrase "I am not too sure."
HL Menken by the way.

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How do so many people miss the point of this? You don't need to read Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done? to understand it, but I'm beginning to think a lot of people should. People seem to think the Underground Man is some sort of caricature of /r9k/ types, when in fact he isn't because he's the one who is making his life into the caricature...that is, he is willfully and consciously pathetic, he isn't pathetic because he tries to be "literary", he tries to be "literary" because it is pathetic. That is why he intentionally ruins his very "literary" opportunity with the qt, because if he didn't ruin it, then he would cease to be pathetic. The entire point is being pathetic and foolish and doing what is against one's interests, is sometimes precisely what is in one's own interests. It's not about the lifestyle of the Underground Man, it's about the affirmation of the Underground Man: he is going against his own interests precisely because it is against his own interests, and the feeling of freedom this engenders is more valuable to him than anything else.

To quote a passage from The Way of the Pilgrim

>It happens that I myself was once a witness of a similar case. Near our village there is a very deep and steep-sided ravine, not very wide, but some seventy feet or more in depth. It is quite frightening to look down to the gloomy bottom of it. A sort of footbridge has been built over it. A peasant in my parish, a family man and very respectable, suddenly, for no reason, was taken with an irresistible desire to throw himself from this little bridge into that deep ravine. He fought against the idea and resisted the impulse for a whole week. In the end, he could hold himself back no longer. He got up early, rushed off, and jumped into the abyss. They soon heard his groans and with great difficulty pulled him out of the pit with his legs broken. When he was asked the reason for his fall, he answered that although he was now feeling a great deal of pain, yet he was calm in spirit, that he had carried out the irresistible desire which had worried him so for a whole week, and that he had been ready to risk his life to gratify his wish.

Dostoevsky's premise, his philosophy here, is driven by the Trinity, the one essence is preceded by the foundation of the three existences (the Greek word for existence, generally translated as "person" in relation to the Trinity, literally means the foundation of something). The Underground Man has existence but is in a struggle to find his essence. And he intentionally afflicts himself with the most irrational essence there is, as an expression of existentialist freedom. Dostoevsky isn't saying to live like that or not live like that, these ideas would defeat the whole point of the story.

Also, here is an Orthodox reading list and FAQ for atheists, Catholics, Jews, etc.: http://pastebin.com/bN1ujq2x