Anyone has an idea for a book that ticks the following boxes?
- straightforward language accessible to a non-native English speaker who is very smart and curious and interested in philosophy (esp Nietzsche) but doesn't have systematic education and isn't used to reading in English
- should be a bit "dark," so Richard Bach or Eckhart Tolls or anything leaning toward new age or self help is not it
- could be either fiction or philosophy or anything else you can think of
This set of criteria is both pretty restrictive and insanely broad. There are no wrong answers and it's a judgment-free zone. Don't assume something is too obvious to name: for example my knowledge of Camus is somewhere between limited to nonexistent. Just say whatever comes to mind.
Camus does come to mind, Vonnegut too
Quote from: Marie Monday on Jul 27, 2023, 10:09 AMCamus does come to mind, Vonnegut too
Do say more. I've reread the stranger recently but not sure I've ever seriously tackled anything else by him. The plague bored me so I stopped midway. Maybe Sisyphus or Rebel would be good? I need to ask her if she knows them already
Haven't read anything by Vonnegut, is he accessible language wise?
Maybe a volume of Kafka's aphorisms is a good idea
Oh Kafka is good yeah
Vonnegut is easy linguistically and especially Breakfast of Champions has some philosophically inclined bits. Not nearly as much as Camus though. I've read the stranger and the Fall, both are nice although I do think he's a bit overrated, but it certainly ticks the easy language and philosophy boxes. I think I found the Fall more overtly philosophical and also more amusing, although th Stranger was more moving as far as I recall
Maybe it's me, but I found J-P Sartre's novel,
Nausea, to be an easier book to read than Camus or Kafka, both of whom can be a bit of a struggle I think.
For some light relief from those philosophical heavyweights, "The Philosopher's Stone" by Colin Wilson is an exciting page turner: an adventure with various bits of CW's ideas squeezed in along the way. (Customer reviews: On MB, Grindy really liked it when I recommended it to him, also this guy's opinion:-
QuoteClifford P. Bendau wrote : "The human striving for an inept management of freedom is, once again, the issue in The Philosopher's Stone. ... The Philosopher's Stone is a story that is a teaching; but it is also a teaching that is a story. It remains one of Colin Wilson's best novels to date."
Thanks Lisna! Was hoping you'd weigh in as you're an English teacher if I remember correctly
Forgetting the whole dark and philosophical business for a moment, which books would you recommend to someone whose English is limited and who wants to improve through reading?
That's right, jadis, I am, though I just teach language, not literature. Still, I'm happy to mention a couple of books that are easy to consume, but also give a sense of substance or satisfaction. My first tip is to keep well away from those lists of "100 Greatest Books In The English Language" because they usually focus on long and difficult "classics".
One author is justifiably famous though: George Orwell, who made it his mission to write in clear simple English. His Animal Farm is a short book which is at one level very moving, but at another level is an analysis of Stalinist Russia. Perhaps you know it already. After that, it might be best to look for some of his Collected Writings and read some of his essays. They are mainly about British culture in the 1940s, but because they take a clear-eyed look at life, they are still interesting today imo.
Another writer with a straightforward journalistic style like Orwell is the American, Jon Krakauer, and his shortest, most approachable book is Into The Wild, the true story of a young man's search for a lifestyle. Written in 1996, it became popular when it was made into a movie some years later.
Personally, I like real-life stories and travel writing; but there are so many of those that it's difficult to know where to begin. P.J.O'Rourke is amusing and his Holidays In Hell has the advantage that you can just pick the chapters about the places that sound interesting.
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes is an unusual novel written in the form of a diary, and it becomes clear on page one why the vocabulary throughout the book is going to be really simple, while the story it tells is very moving.
Well, those are just a couple of ideas. As I'm sure you know, the fundamental question in choosing a book is: Does this subject/time period/person interest me? I wonder what your preferences are, besides philosophy ?
Quote from: Lisnaholic on Jul 27, 2023, 07:32 PMThat's right, jadis, I am, though I just teach language, not literature. Still, I'm happy to mention a couple of books that are easy to consume, but also give a sense of substance or satisfaction. My first tip is to keep well away from those lists of "100 Greatest Books In The English Language" because they usually focus on long and difficult "classics".
One author is justifiably famous though: George Orwell, who made it his mission to write in clear simple English. His Animal Farm is a short book which is at one level very moving, but at another level is an analysis of Stalinist Russia. Perhaps you know it already. After that, it might be best to look for some of his Collected Writings and read some of his essays. They are mainly about British culture in the 1940s, but because they take a clear-eyed look at life, they are still interesting today imo.
Another writer with a straightforward journalistic style like Orwell is the American, Jon Krakauer, and his shortest, most approachable book is Into The Wild, the true story of a young man's search for a lifestyle. Written in 1996, it became popular when it was made into a movie some years later.
Personally, I like real-life stories and travel writing; but there are so many of those that it's difficult to know where to begin. P.J.O'Rourke is amusing and his Holidays In Hell has the advantage that you can just pick the chapters about the places that sound interesting.
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes is an unusual novel written in the form of a diary, and it becomes clear on page one why the vocabulary throughout the book is going to be really simple, while the story it tells is very moving.
Well, those are just a couple of ideas. As I'm sure you know, the fundamental question in choosing a book is: Does this subject/time period/person interest me? I wonder what your preferences are, besides philosophy ?
Thanks for the recommendations! To make sure we're on the same page, this is not for me but for someone I know. I want to encourage her to start reading in English without putting my lecturer hat on (I'm a college teacher) and make her feel patronized. So on the one hand I want the book I'll gift her to be something that would resonate with the stuff she's already interested in like Nietzsche but it can't be something where she'd have to look up five words in each sentence cause that's no fun.
Now that I think of it, I might just buy her an English edition of Nietzsche and be done with it. She's never read him in English that's for sure. Probably Human All Too Human cause it's a collection of short aphorisms in the manner of La Rochefoucauld and you can dip in and out of it for fun, just like Nietzsche thought his work should be read.
Yep, your suggestion sounds much more appropriate, because, of course, you know the person.
Quote from: Lisnaholic on Jul 28, 2023, 03:31 PMYep, your suggestion sounds much more appropriate, because, of course, you know the person.
But it's always good to bounce ideas off other people!
Btw interesting that you found Nausea easier going than Camus (wonder which book). In French it's usually the other way around, The Stranger is standard reading for intermediate students in French classes while Nausea is more demanding. Personally I think both are important works. Though Camus hasn't really retained his reputation at least as far as academic criticism is concerned, while Sartre remains an "incontournable" even if most would admit they've never plowed through Being and Nothingness
I think I read The Stranger when I was too young to appreciate it, then some time later The Fall, which I enjoyed more. I liked how it conjured up a strange atmosphere of slow-moving, other-wordly doom in that coastal city whose name I forget. On the other hand, I thought Nausea had a more graspable, easier to imagine narrative: the lonely misfit mooching around a city and explaining his day-to-day experiences.
After Nausea I attempted the Iron In The Soul trilogy - if about 30 pages counts as an attempt. I don't think I've tried Being and Nothingness though, as I don't read books on philosophy as a rule.
But I should congratulate both you and your friend for reading any books in a language that's not your mother-tongue. For me it's one of many things I feel I should do more of. :(
Quote from: Lisnaholic on Jul 28, 2023, 05:53 PMI think I read The Stranger when I was too young to appreciate it, then some time later The Fall, which I enjoyed more. I liked how it conjured up a strange atmosphere of slow-moving, other-wordly doom in that coastal city whose name I forget. On the other hand, I thought Nausea had a more graspable, easier to imagine narrative: the lonely misfit mooching around a city and explaining his day-to-day experiences.
After Nausea I attempted the Iron In The Soul trilogy - if about 30 pages counts as an attempt. I don't think I've tried Being and Nothingness though, as I don't read books on philosophy as a rule.
But I should congratulate both you and your friend for reading any books in a language that's not your mother-tongue. For me it's one of many things I feel I should do more of. :(
It's insane how prolific he was... I don't think I've ever even registered the existence of this trilogy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_to_Freedom) even though I know his work relatively well.
Tbh for me it's more of a struggle to read in my mother tongue these days. There are a couple of 20th century poets I dip into often but overall reading in Russian is a habit I lost. Mostly read in English and French these days.
As for her, getting to a level in English where she can pick up a book and read would be a much more impressive achievement than any of mine. I grew up in a house crammed with books, where education was prized above all other things. With her it was the kind of situation where social workers get involved, or at least should have.
Ever read Louis-Ferdinand Celine's
Journey to the End of the Night? It's filled with quite a bit of nihilism and is one of my favorite novels of all time. It's chock-full of ideas and feelings, both wonderful (but not for their optimism) and frightening. Here's the Goodreads summary:
QuoteLouis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.
I don't think you'd have trouble reading it as a non-native English speaker, it's not really a tough read, from my memory at least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_End_of_the_Night
Quote from: SGR on Jul 31, 2023, 03:15 AMEver read Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Journey to the End of the Night? It's filled with quite a bit of nihilism and is one of my favorite novels of all time. It's chock-full of ideas and feelings, both wonderful (but not for their optimism) and frightening. Here's the Goodreads summary:
I don't think you'd have trouble reading it as a non-native English speaker, it's not really a tough read, from my memory at least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_End_of_the_Night
I was picking a book for someone else, whose English is pretty limited. Ended up deciding against the whole thing for now, cause if I give her the book then there will be some anxiety on her part to meet my expectations and she's gonna feel shit about herself every time she doesn't understand something. Instead I'm encouraging her to watch the true crime garbage she loves watching anyway with English subtitles and rewatch episodes she enjoyed several times so that more words and phrases stick in her head. Repetition repetition repetition! After she does that for a while she can probably mvoe up to true crime podcasts...
Yeah the Celine novel is great. In French it's relatively difficult btw because there's a lot of slang from that era that no one knows today or at least a millennial from Montreal doesn't. Some of his other stuff is truly shocking. Like, criminal.
@jadis or anyone else who knows: I've never read a book by Angela Carter and I should change that, which one should I pick first?
Quote from: Marie Monday on Aug 03, 2023, 08:42 AM@jadis or anyone else who knows: I've never read a book by Angela Carter and I should change that, which one should I pick first?
^ If my experience of reading one of her novels
* is anything to go by, the first thing to do is dial back your expectations.
(
* I can't remember which, but judging from the list on Wiki, I bet I chose
Heroes And Villains because of the title.)
Quote from: jadis on Aug 02, 2023, 03:57 PMI was picking a book for someone else, whose English is pretty limited. Ended up deciding against the whole thing for now, cause if I give her the book then there will be some anxiety on her part to meet my expectations and she's gonna feel shit about herself every time she doesn't understand something. Instead I'm encouraging her to watch the true crime garbage she loves watching anyway with English subtitles and rewatch episodes she enjoyed several times so that more words and phrases stick in her head. Repetition repetition repetition! After she does that for a while she can probably mvoe up to true crime podcasts...
So few of my students read books for pleasure in their own language that I don't recommend books to them, but you're right: countless hours of listening practice is essential, so I recommend they explore tv progs and songs in English. These days, though, I'm careful to only make specific recs if I am asked to, as I don't want to come across as superior or patronising. After all, Spanish, and Lat America, has its own cultural heritage - much of it translated to English.
In fact some of my best students have acquired their English skills from computer games, or engaging with "gringoes" through Discord. Perhaps you should be looking for computer games based around Existentialism, jadis ;)
EDIT:
"So few of my students read books for pleasure in their own language..." Actually that's not entirely true, but they have different aspirations in reading compared to the kind of thing that motivates me. It's as if reading is an adjunct to their social nature: they read well-known books that they can talk about with many people, so they don't venture much off the cultural mainstream:
Lord Of The Rings, Game Of Thrones, Gabriel García Márquez - those are the names that come up spontaneously in any discussion of books.
Quote from: Marie Monday on Aug 03, 2023, 08:42 AM@jadis or anyone else who knows: I've never read a book by Angela Carter and I should change that, which one should I pick first?
I'd start with short stories (Rushdie, a fan, friend and disciple, thought she was at her best in short fiction and I humbly concur). Her most celebrated book by far is The Bloody Chamber, a very very clever and skillful feminist reworking of a few traditional European fairy tales.
My personal favorite is Black Venus, a collection of short stories cum essays mostly about historical women like Baudelaire's Caribbean muse Jean Duval or Lizzie Borden (of the "Lizzie Borden took an axe, And gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one" rhyme fame). I find she's at her very best when the line between fiction and cultural criticism is blurred. The one about Lizzie Borden really is amazing. Also it has Peter and the Wolf, which might be my favorite piece of short fiction by her. Very moving.
A colleague who really likes fantasy very warmly recommended The Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson. I'll probably pick it up.
Any of you guys read it?