For those who love to read and who find themselves nostalgic for their days of academia when a book was read and discussed, or who feel their brains are atrophying by overexposure to stock quotes, please come join us here in the Literary Sauna .
We read to know we are not alone.
C.S. Lewis
Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking.
Edward Gibbon
And still I am learning.
Michelangelo Buonarotti
As a starting point, we'll be using a reading list from a USC course on the concept of "The Other", a topic which has arisen lately on several threads and seemed to create discussion. The list includes resource recommendations for those compulsive learners who feel led to research or dig into the topic in depth. (But most of us will probably feel lucky to get the book read in the allotted time.)
From the course description:
We will test the notion that we define ourselves (what is normal, decent, reasonable) by constructing and using the abnormal, the indecent, and the unreasonable. Our culture, at its most hysterical and repressive,creates images and stories of excess and repulsion and then enacts those stories through us. The result is that we define our world and our being by way of these outrageous figures on the margin: the inside is there only because it forces an outside.
The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think.
James McCosh
Tis the good reader that makes the good book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Since the course uses current events and movies as well as reading, and because the idea of "the other" is so increasingly pervasive in our society, let's allow latitude for any pertinent material in our discussion.
The list of books:
Camus. The Stranger
Dickey. Deliverance
Abbott. In the Belly of the Beast
Buford. Among the Thugs
Didion. Play It As It Lays
The Trials of Oscar Wilde (ed. H. Montgomery Hyde)
D.M. Thomas. The White Hotel
Capote. In Cold Blood
Welsh. Trainspotting
Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God
Kaysen. Girl, Interrupted
Oates. Foxfire
Elison. Invisible Man
Gilman. The Yellow Wallpaper
Sedaris. Naked
Smith. Twilight: LA 1992
Hwang. M. Butterfly
Movies: Blue Velvet, The Monster (French)
As on the parent thread, The Sauna, clothing is optional, kindness and respect is mandatory.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Jorge Luis Borges
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