I am uncultured and dumb. Which books should I read to slowly start bettering myself ? I've seen /lit/ starting guides, but I think they lack works that would help me get a better general culture before tackling more serious literature.
>>7797201
Scopenhauer's On Women
Mein Kampf
The Culture of Critique Series by Kevin McDonald
SPengler's Decline of the West
The Bell Curve
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (A woman, but exception to the rule)
>>7797215
Actually a really good list.
make it goal-oriented instead of list-oriented
make a it goal to be able to talk confidently one literary tradition or modern western literature in reasonable depth, say at the level where you would seem well-read to an academic (read most/all relevant major works, a good smattering of medium/minor works, and enough secondary material to have a good contextual knowledge)
then make it a goal to be able to talk confidently about some period or aspect of history, using the same strategy
etc.
spend a few years doing that and it'll start to mesh together into being well-read
The Greeks and Joyce. That's it really.
>>7797201
>I am uncultured and dumb
And you always will be. Intelligence is not acquired.
>>7797201
Start with these two books:
Education and the Significance of Life by Jiddu Krishnamurti
Masks of the Illuminati by Robert Anton Wilson
>>7797648
Also, make sure to read the following essays:
How to Build a Universe that Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later by Philip K. Dick
Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword by Jack Parsons
Jesus Christ I know all the above posters are memeing but why not help someone out who has good intentions and isn't acting like a retard?
OP, being cultured doesn't necessarily mean having read XYZ books. It's multidisciplinary, and has to do more with recognizing what's shit than having read/seen what's good (after all, being cultured is a bourgeois construct).
If you're looking for actual self betterment, start off with Plato I'd say. Read on Wikipedia what ancient Greece was like, then start off with one of his shorter dialogues (shorter isn't necessarily easier but it's less daunting for a first-timer). I recommend Meno, which will introduce you the important concept of "arete".
>>7797260
This x10. The greeks aren't a meme, they're the foundations you need to fully understand a significant portion of literature.
>>7797669
Will i be able to fully appreciate greek literature if I lack general knowledge? I studied History in college a long time ago but years of having a job made me forget almost everything I learned when I was a student.
>>7797201
Start here Anon...
>>7797706
I took a class on it but they basically explain all the themes in the hundreds of epithets that appear in the dialogue, so it's probably fine.
>>7797201
If you don't read much, start with some relatively easy stuff, like the works of Lovecraft, Kafkha, Gaiman, and Orwell, and maybe Nabokov if you're feeling cocky.
If you want a brief western canon to work through, then there's a lot of shit you could work through, but the shortlist would probably look like:
The Greeks, from Homer to Aristotle.
The Aenid.
The Bible (this will take a whiel to do properly)
Dante's Inferno
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (this will also take a while)
Paradise Lost - Milton
after that, you should understand most literary allusions that writers are liable to make. Though, there are much longer and more thorough canon's out there. If however, you want to understand philosophy, then a shortlist would be:
Pre-Socratics
Plato
Aristotle
The writings of Epicurus.
The Bible/Apocrypha
The City of God/Confessions, by St. Augustine
(Probably some other people here, but my knowledge of this period in the history of philosophy is far from ideal)
The Ninety-Five Theses - Martin Luther
Meditations - Descarte
The Works of David Hume. All of them.
The Works of Immanuel Kant. All of them.
The Science of Logic/philosophy of right - Hegel
After this, there's just too fucking many of them (even this is an extremely short list), the biggest ones to checkout from this point would be Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Russell, and Zizek (if only for a laugh).
After all that, some 'patrician' literature, would be the works of Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, and
>>7797806
That looks like a translation
>>7797706
Grab the lectures from The Great Courses series that accompany the major works and listen to them as you work your way through the source material.
Just don't get lazy and think that listening to the course substitutes for reading the book.
not OP but also a dumbo who's just now getting into literature. what's the best translation of Notes From Underground?
>inb4 native russian
>>7799020
>The Great Courses
Paid shit? Pass
>>7799035
Just download it you tard
Anyone got more rec ?
>>7797201
Everything by Stephen King
>>7797215
>Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
garbage
>>7797201
Seriously, start with this.
>>7799001
> No mention of El Ingenioso Hidalgo de Don Quijote de la Mancha
it's like you want to be a pleb
>>7799945
I second this
>>7799945
Will def. be looking into it. I also plan on getting The Greeks by Kitto and the Illiad and the Odyssey tomorrow. Are those good choices?
