[pbradley]

Yes! Nietzsche!

I loved The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra

[cassidy]

 

it may sound cliche, but i read it when i was super young & i related to a lot of aspects of alice & her life, & as i got older i reread it many many times & i have related to it more & more. it has helped me thru some tough ass times.

[cassidy]

my boyfriend has read a lot of Nietzsche & so i have picked up many of his books & read em & they are very good. in a not so happy way tho. but yeah. great writer.

[max]

King is good. No "Stine for grown ups". Check out THE RUNNING MAN (R. Bachman).

[SynthethicalY]

The Perks of Being a Wallflower- It made me sad, and also i can relate to most of what he wrote. The ending made me cry, and oh so angry. I finished it two days ago, and had the same feelings sad and angry.

[atari 2600]

Originally Posted by musicfallinglikesnow

That's right, he was a beautiful soul. Reading "Thus spoke Zarathustra" almost killed me. He was a giant.

His best book is his prose poem, Thus Spake Zarathustra, yes.

Neitzche himself said that "among my writings my Zarathustra stands to my mind by itself," in the preface to Ecce Homo.

He has a few little aphorisms borne of madness here and there, but in the realm of true philosophy, he's more contradictory than any religion he holds up to ridicule as hypocritical.

Bottom line: Neitzsche was a mad, poetic genius. Here's a generalization that may not be correct, but (to ramble a bit) I just came up with it: Kierkegaard (super ego), Dostoyevsky (ego), and Nietsche (id).
{Freud=who the little analogy is based on of course from roughly the same period as well}.
They were all contemporary and part of the same zeitgeist. Dostoevsky approaches Neitzsche's thought in some of his nihilistic characters. ((loosely) Raskolnikov is quintessential, yes, but has the arc of sorts...Stavrogin from The Possessed, in particular....D's place "in the middle" is exemplified in the "split" in The Brothers Karamazov with the three brothers.)
Kierkegaard explores a dark side in many of his pseudonymous writings (as opposed to his Edicts).

Neitzsche was the sufferer though to be sure. His father died when he was pre-school age or so and he was raised by women relatives. He had a horse accident when he was young that made him ill all the time with migraines and rheumatoid arthritis. He had to go into mandatory service and contracted syphillis soon after being away from home. He also had a second horse accident and was pretty much an "outsider" mentally from then onwards. The only long-term relationship he ever had with a woman is rumored to be one he incestually had with his anti-semetic sister, Elisabeth.

Now, I know you didn't ask for my opinion, !@#$%!, yet there it is. Weird how life never fits your expectations, isn't it? He's still a fairly brilliant writer, just some times a whole lot less than others.

[Torn Curtain]

Originally Posted by lucyrulesok

The Outsider was a big one for me too, particularly in that it was precisely his honesty that got him condemed to death, and that gave me a lot of food for thought.

Ditto.

[Silent Dan Speaks]

After much deliberation, I've decided it's James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

[musicfallinglikesnow]

Originally Posted by Silent Dan Speaks

After much deliberation, I've decided it's James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

That one too. It's great how Joyce's alter ego Stephen Daedalus goes on and on peeling himself from all that he's learned until he finds himself raw and pure. His esthetic theories too.
Anyway, James Joyce was totally insane. Add that to the "Ulysses" too.

[Silent Dan Speaks]

Yeah, he was out of his mind. Ulysses didn't make near as much of an impact on me, but I intend to re-read it again sometime. Perhaps with a guide/companion/whatever you want to call it. I still liked it though.

Finnegans Wake on the other hand, that book just intimidates me far too much. I'm not sure I'll ever read it.

[musicfallinglikesnow]

Originally Posted by Silent Dan Speaks

Finnegans Wake on the other hand, that book just intimidates me far too much. I'm not sure I'll ever read it.

If you ever try "Finnegans Wake" (it's worth the effort I think, although I haven't touched the book in some time now) the best guides are "Our Exagmination round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress" by the likes of Samuel Beckett, William Carlos Williams and some others (twelve), and the ideal guide is "A Skeleton Key for Finnegans Wake" by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson (mostly Joseph Campbell's ideas though.)
I began reading it just because of the challenge, and then I began enjoying the task. You never finish it though. If you want to say, "OK, I did it," that's practically impossible. But it's an entertaining enterprise, if you take it calmly...

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by musicfallinglikesnow

That's right, he was a beautiful soul. Reading "Thus spoke Zarathustra" almost killed me. He was a giant.

yes! funny, ive never liked zarathustra, and i don't want to say why. "beyond good and evil" is the book for me. oh that book that book it forever blew my mind, and i have read iti don't know how many times. i'm happy to say i don't feel i need it anymore though... it did its work, and it was good medicine, but it's not enough.

[Daddylikes]

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

Thank you big guy.

[Bunbury]

Reading Kathy Acker's chapter on plagiarism in Great Expecations changed my life.

[krastian]

The Dharma Bums

[LifeDistortion]

 

I love this book, I bought this book at a library a few years ago. Since I've read it I've tried finding more novels by him but I can't find this or any of his other stuff in bookstores.

 

This is much easier to find, and its a great mammoth novel.

[atari 2600]

SIGN OF THE APOCAPLYSE #394391

“We realised that life is too short to read all the books you want to and we never were going to read these ones.” Research confirmed that “many regular readers think of the classics as long, slow and, to be frank, boring. You’re not supposed to say this but I think that one of the reasons Jane Austen always does so well in reader polls is that her books aren’t that long”.

The first six titles in the Compact Editions series are Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Moby Dick and Wives and Daughters. Each has been whittled down to about 400 pages by cutting 30 to 40 per cent of the text. Words, sentences, paragraphs and, in a few cases, chapters have been removed.

“We realised that life is too short to read all the books you want to and we never were going to read these ones.”
posted by four panels at 9:12 PM

[NWRA]

In Search Of Lost Time (Proust) deserves a mention. Probably my favourite novel of all time.

Also, after reading it was the only time that I've read a novel and then been obsessed with finding out as much about the author's life as possible (conclusion: he was a bit weird).

[demonrail666]

I read Swann's Way but none of the other ones. Really loved that one though. Definitely a book to obsess over.

[littlepriest]

Hunger by Knut Hamsun. I fasted on and off for a while after that.