|
Scott's Recommended Reading List:
|
|
Cryptography Computer Systems Shakespeare Beckett Mac Wellman Len Jenkin Other Playwrights Literary Fiction Science Fiction Capitalism Communism Cooking Reading List
This reading list is a little out of date. My Amazon
Wishlist is probably more accurate, since I go through and
make sure it's up-to-date before Christmas and birthdays. ;-).
But most of these books I would still recommend...
Crypto will save the world. Really. [Use
PGP or
just read about it!]
Some important reference books for that shelf by your machine...
Such a deal! These Dover
Thrift Editions are all priced between $0.80 and $1.50!
Samuel Beckett's command
of image and his ability to leap to the transcendant will forever
enthrall me.
As the
Los Angeles
Times says: "one of the contemporary stage's premier
masters of syntactical scat."
I highly recommend seeing a Jenkin play in NYC if you ever get the opportunity.
This is the catch-all for must-read plays.
- Clifford Odet's The Flowering Peach.
Actually, I couldn't find a copy of this still in print.
The closest I found was
Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays
, which contains Waiting for Lefty, Awake and sing!,
Till the day I die, Paradise lost, Golden
boy, and Rocket to the moon.
Still fine reading, and recommended.
- Tom Stoppard's
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
- Caryl Churchill's
Mad Forest
- Vaclav Havel's
The Garden Party and Other Plays
- Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz's
Madman and the Nun & the Crazy Locomotive:
Three Plays (Including the Water Hen)
-
Sam Shepard : Seven Plays
and
Fool for Love and Other Plays
.
- Tennessee Williams's
Camino Real
and
Orpheus Descending (in Four Plays)
- Athol Fugard's
Valley Song
,
Master Harold
, and
Blood Knot and Other Plays
.
Books for well-rounded people, written by starving artists.
I'll assume you've already read
Farenheit 451,
Brave New World,
1984,
Animal Farm,
Neuromancer,
Snow Crash,
and The Diamond Age,
as well as
Tolkien
and
C.S. Lewis. The books listed
here are slightly more obscure.
As noted
elsewhere (by jc@chiasmus.reno.nv.us),
history has basically taught us that neither pure capitalism nor pure
communism is viable as an economic system. The workable solution that
has emerged is wholesale redistribution of somewhere between 25% and
75% of every person's income. In the US, the figure quoted is about
45%.
This section contains books addressing some of the lessons we still
haven't learned from the Dickens and the Industrial
Revolution.
Three cookbooks I wouldn't be without...
These are books I've bought & read, but haven't gotten a chance to
sort, review, or comment intelligently on yet. Oh, to be a literature
major...
These are the books on my personal reading list: either not yet
purchased, or purchased but not yet read. They've been recommended to
me, and so I recommend them to you.
-
The Orwell Reader : Fiction, Essays and Reportage
; George Orwell
-
Burmese Days
; George Orwell
-
The Rebel Angels
; Robertson Davies.
-
Underworld
; Don DeLillo.
-
The Annotated Lolita
; Vladimir Nabokov.
-
Toxic Sludge Is Good for You!
; John C. Stauber, Sheldon Rampton.
-
Candide
; Voltaire.
-
Chicago Poems
; Carl Sandburg.
-
The Metamorphosis and Other Stories
; Franz Kafka.
-
The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City
; Robert Sullivan.
-
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
; Jared Diamond.
-
Quarantine
; Jim Crace.
-
Alternating Current
; Octavio Paz.
-
Symposium and Phaedrus (Dover Thift Edition)
; Plato.
-
Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett
; James Knowlson.
-
The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder
; Thornton Wilder, Donald Gallup, A. Tappan Wilder, John Guare.
-
True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor
; David Mamet.
-
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
; Aldous Huxley.
-
Love in a Dead Language
; Lee Siegel.
-
Story : Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
; Robert McKee.
-
Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War
; Leo Marks.
-
The Ultra Secret
; F. W. Winterbotham.
-
The Glass Bead Game
; Hermann Hesse.
Recommended to me by David Stawinski after he read my
Salon article. Looks like mighty fine reading to me.
-
The Devil's Cup : Coffee, the Driving Force in History
; Stewart Lee Allen.
-
The English Patient
; Michael Ondaatje.
-
Love in the Time of Cholera
; Gabriel García Márquez.
-
Ada or Ardor a Family Chronicle
; Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov.
-
The White Goddess : A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth
; Robert Graves.
-
Lila : An Inquiry into Morals
; Robert M. Pirsig.
-
Code : And Other Laws of Cyberspace
; Lawrence Lessig.
-
Fight Club
; Chuck Palahniuk.
-
Trout Fishing in America, the
Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In
Watermelon Sugar
; Richard Brautigan.
Recommended by Katie
Jeffreys. Despite her not eating meat, I think I trust her taste.
-
Mrs. Dalloway
; Virginia Woolf.
Also recommended by that
Jeffreys chick.