help me become better read.

[Paula Sims]

The term in Ukrainian is розриваний - well read, well cultured. I feel sorry am to a point (I read many foreign papers in their original language), I speak 7 languages (not klingon) and have travels some but because of health an money issues, not as much as hubby and I would like.

That said, what do you thing a well rounded person should have read. I'm thinking
Mein Kampf (know thy enemy)
Catcher in the Rye
The stranger
Slaughterhouse Five
Steppenwolf
The Tao of Pooh/ Tea of Piglet
Anything on the banned book list

Other Thoughts??

Help me become the antiDonnie.

Thanks

[lapucelle]

1. Slave narratives

the poetry of Langston Hughes
Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)
MacBeth

[DawgHouse]

2. There are many but I would add:

To Kill a Mockingbird
1984
The Kite Runner
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

[Warpy]

3. Good ones, but "Huckleberry Finn" is better for adults

Twain was a nasty old bastard and his sendup of all the hypocrites around him was highest with Huckleberry. For kids, it's a rollicking adventure story. Adults want to ban it all over the place.

[TheDonnasRule]

4. Biography of Malcolm X

[applegrove]

5. "A Fine Balance" by Rohinton Mistry

[Hamlette]

16. second this suggestion

[Squinch]

6. Try some Dickens. They're great stories. To Kill a Mockingbird.

Lord of the Flies

The Shining

The House of Mirth

Pride and Prejudice

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

The Maltese Falcon

Autobiography of Malcolm X

... and a million others!

[TheDonnasRule]

7. Atlas Shrugged (so you will understand the depraved "Libertarian" mindset)

[Buckeye_Democrat]

12. If the OP wants the condensed version...

... a better choice might be "The Virtue of Selfishness" by Ayn Rand.

She puts her naive and dangerous ideas more out in the open.

[longship]

8. You've got the right idea with "Slaughterhouse Five"

Try out "Cats Cradle"

And just hope that you aren't born in Indiana, i.e., that you are a Hoosier.

We are all Bokonon adherents here.

[Adsos Letter]

9. "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution."

By Bernard Bailyn. A classic, and a seminal work.

[major debacle]

10. Anything by Mark Twain

Anything By Frederick Douglass
Catch 22
Les Miserable
Crime And Punishment
War And Peace
Things Fall Apart
One Hundred Years Of Solitude
Moby Dick
Don Quixote
The Great Gatsby
The Grapes Of Wrath
Brave New World
Slaughterhouse-Five
Invisible Man
All Quiet on the Western Front


Not necessarily in that order and not to exclude works not mentioned

[Buckeye_Democrat]

11. Here's some...

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
The Trial, Franz Kafka
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
1984, George Orwell
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Frontiersmen, Allan Eckert
The Bible, GOD
The Koran, GOD

Okay, the author of the last couple books was a joke!

I'd also recommend a variety of science, history and economics books if you REALLY don't want to be like Trump!

[sofa king]

13. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

It will change your life to learn what basic resources are necessary to build a complex civilization.

[bhikkhu]

14. Our Better Angels, Steven Pinker

Its non-fiction in the best sense, and bears entirely and unrelentingly towards the AntiDonnie. The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan is also an indispensable classic.

And everything by Tuchman, a great historian. The Proud Tower and The Guns of August are probably the most important and relevant these days, but A Distant Mirror has always been my favorite - again non-fiction, but real page-turners, as we say.

[First Speaker]

15. Try some H.L. Mencken...

...he's very funny, very smart, and amazingly relevant for someone who wrote in the 1920s...everything he attacked and laughed at remains a force in America. He foresaw both the Tea Party and Trump 100 years ago, and wouldn't have been shocked in the least by either of them. You won't always agree with him, but we're all tough enough to take some opposing views, especially when they're as well-written as this...

[RexDart]

17. More of a history reader

Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Poisoners Handbook
The Guns of August
Shattered Sword - The Battle of Midway
The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks
Ishi - Last of his Tribe
Burning Tigris
Battle Cry of Freedom

[KMOD]

18. I met a beautiful young woman from Serbia a few weeks ago

She was 22 years old. She majored in management and took her skills to plan a trip to the US with 49 other friends.

Her command of the English language was awesome. She got there by dropping herself into the culture and somewhat forcing herself to learn the language. She made us laugh with her story of the young Russian guy who was in their group. He wanted to learn English, but she wanted to learn Russian.

Reading is the best. But simply posting here could be beneficial as well.

Good luck. You seem to be doing wonderfully so far.

[betsuni]

19. Here are some of my favorites.

Classic American: Huckleberry Finn; The Great Gatsby; The Legend of Sleepy Hollow; Breakfast at Tiffany's; On the Road, Edgar Allen Poe's stories.
Voltaire, Candide.
Kafka, The Metamorphoses (I love the Kafka Diaries, when the day's entry is "Nothing happened" or he complains about noisy neighbors)
Dickens, A Christmas Carol, American Notes for General Circulation
Sartre, Nausea
Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism
Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment
Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Knut Hamsun, Hunger
The Diaries of Anais Nin
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Book of the Thousand and One Nights
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon
The Letters of Vincent Van Gough
Flaubert, Sentimental Education
Ibsen, Peer Gynt
The Letters of Oscar Wilde
Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
Gogol, Dead Souls

[Princess Turandot]

20. A few more..

As I Lay Dying: William Faulkner
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: James Joyce
Shakespeare's Tragedies: Julius Caesar, Othello, Macbeth etc.
Gulliver's Travels: Jonathan Swift
A Streetcar Named Desire: Tennessee Williams (And the rest of his plays)
The Godfather: Mario Puzo. It's not very well written, but it inspired two of the greatest films ever made, which have also become part of popular culture.
'Winds of War' and 'War and Remembrance': Herman Wouk's sprawling story of the events leading to WW2 and the war years themselves. 'Winds' takes the reader from Hitler's earlier days in power, to the attack on Pearl Harbor.


There's a website that has a very large collection of ebooks in the public domain, gutenberg.org. You should take a look at their 'top book downloads for the last 30 days', as well as their 'top author downloads for the last 30 days'. They include several of the books mentioned in this thread, as well as others from (mostly) English literature that you pretty much can't go wrong with:

http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top#books-last30
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top#authors-last30

[moondust]

21. Dante, Dickens, Voltaire, Vonnegut,

Dostoyevsky, Twain, and others.

[Gabi Hayes]

22. The two funniest books ever:

Lucky Jim

Moby Dick

[Gabi Hayes]

23. coming from the eastern bloc, you might enjoy anything by

alan furst, who writes espionage related stories, based on historical incidents

Night Soldiers, which begins the eponymous series. if you like this sort of fiction, he's considered among the best....I like him better than LeCarre.

[bravenak]

24. The Color Purple

Anything by Bette Bao Lord, Amy Tan, and Maya Angelou