How to Good-bye Depression
This book changed my life.
Virgil’s Aeneid … in Latin.
When I was 13 or 14 my parents gave me The Unabridged Jack London for Christmas. It was all of London’s Arctic and sea stories and novels in one volume, 1143 pages.
It sat unread on my shelves for twenty-plus years. Every time I reached for it I recoiled, because dude, it’s 1143 pages!
I finally got serious about reading it in 2001 and finished it last year.
I still get a flush of satisfaction now when I glance at its spine in my library.
I’m not sure whether I admire you for being able to do this, or pity you for all the needless pain. After two pages, I could pretty much tell what was coming and bailed.
I am proud in a twisted way of having the bloody-mindedness to read all of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind At least, I think I read it all; I may easily have blacked out for a couple hundred pages here or there without missing much. If nothing else, it’ll give me something to talk about if I ever meet Neal Stephenson. (“Hey Neal, not only have I read your first book, but I read the book it was based on!”)
War and Peace. My effort was aided when they started showing the Russian movie version on TV. Still took a while: The original movie was about 8 hours long and the TV version cut into weekly 1.5 hour episodes (plus commercials). So that took about 2 months to show the whole thing. I started reading the book about a months before it started showing on TV, and was still reading it long after it had completed.
Les Misérables unabridged.
What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson.
Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard
Interview With A Vampire by Anne Rice
As for Interview, I am proud I finished that piece of crap. My girlfriend at the time was all about Anne Rice and wanted me to read them. I finished Interview while I was working nights as a security guard during college. I couldn’t belive that this book was that big a stinking pile of turds.
My apologies to Anne Rice fans, but shudder.
War and Peace by Tolstoy, which I read just for the heck of it. One day I’ll try Joyce, or maybe even Kant. For now, I’ll just say that if you’re drunk, or just have a contact high, try reading just the chapter titles from Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and the Sickness Unto Death. My mother and I fif this and we were breaking up. You can get the same reaction reading the chapter titles of the Niebelungenlied (“How Gelpfrat was slain by Dancwort”)
I somehow managed to finish Battlefield Earth, too, but I’m not exactly proud of it. What can I say? I was desparate for something to read.
A couple that I am proud of, though: The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, and Euclid’s Elements. We were assigned a few short selections from Boethius in high school English, and I thought it was fantastically rational for a philosophy book, so I finished it (and got some extra credit when I alluded to it in a later assignment). As for Euclid, it was sitting on our bookshelf as part of the Britannica “Great Books” collection, and I figured I might as well give it a go-through. One of these times I plan to slog through Newton’s Principia Mathematica, too, but not yet. And I’d love to read Galileo’s Dialogues on the Two Chief Worldsystems (the book that got him arrested), too, but I haven’t stumbled across a copy.
The Gulag Archipelago, all three volumes, as soon as it came out in paperback.
I don’t think it would have the impact today, though.
Oh, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea when I was in second grade - but more because of the shock value than the quality of the book.
I am actually a big fan of that book. Hubbard, Scientology, the movie, and everything else he has ever written can suck an egg, but Battlefield Earth was a brilliant book.
Hey, they had Scotsmen. Can’t go wrong with a horde of Scotsmen.
Ulysses. Start to finish.
Twice.
cough, cough
Why yes, how’d you guess?
Also: V. Easily in my top three favorite books, ever. I feel like a bitch recommending it to people because everyone wants a quick read. But I savored every moment of it.
Still haven’t tackled Gravity’s Rainbow or Finnegan’s Wake. I should make them my goals for this summer. Along with curing the common cold and reversing the greenhouse effect.
The Bible- I"m on my second trip though.
John Julius Norwich’s three volume history Byzantium.
Lord of the Rings
Illuminatus
Oh, and I just started St. Augustine’s City of God last night.
Dishonorable mention- I’ve read the first eleven books of the Left Behind series, and will be reading The Glorious Appearing and reporting back to y’all sometime soon. Hey, somebody has to take the bullet for the SDMB, and I have a fairly high tolerance for… well whatever it is, I have a high tolerance for it.
Crime and Punishment. We had to read it for 10th grade English, and I was the only one of my classmates who made it all the way through, albeit with Cliffs Notes.
I am also proud that I made it all the way through American Psycho without vomiting. I did recoil in phantom pain, and I was bored to tears during the album review chapters, but I never vomited (which I was nervous I might do).
Jane Eyre. Really long, florid language, and strange plot. I finished it in a week. Without Cliffs Notes 
.
The Divine Comedy. In one 24 hour day. No, didn’t sleep much, but Paradise did take an ethereal, hazy quality for me, which was actually pretty neat.
Wordsworth’s “The Prelude”
Churchill’s unabridged “A History of the English Speaking Peoples”
Beowulf in the original.
David Brin’s Earth.
No big deal, you say?
It started out okay. Interesting plot (artificial black hole falls into the earth and begins to devour it from the inside), but after about 75 pages, it began to bog down. Then it got painfully (it literally hurt my brain to read it) slow and boring. Still, I was determined to finish. I read it off and on over a three week period, rarely reading more than 3-4 pages at a time.
When I finally finished, I wanted to find Mr. Brin and punch him the nuts. The ending was unsatisfying and definitely not worth the effort.
I’m proud of the fact that I didn’t go insane.
I had never read his stuff before and I probably just picked the wrong book to start with.
This has happened to me more than once. When I first started reading movie reviews on the Internet, I liked the stuff from a fellow on an obscure Chicago (!) newspaper called Roger Ebert (the fellow not the rag). Mmm.