/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>38240249
I'll second Hojoki. It's a short poetic work that you can read in 45 minutes and it's the best piece of Buddhist literature I've ever read.

>>33901616
It's decent, but reading it straight through is sheer endurance. In total, it's over 2,000 pages worth of English. The interest level varies greatly from one book to the next. For example, some book are absolute drags to read, like the one where Pliny lists every single town and village in the Roman Empire at the time of writing (c. 70 AD), or the one where he lists literal thousands of (mostly magical and superstitious) remedies, most of which read something like this:
>To cure dropsy, take three drachmae of frankincense dissolved in wine. An amulet to prevent ophthalmia is a bat's wing worn around the upper right thigh, smoked over a fire of fresh pine before the rising of the dog star.
However, there are parts that are extremely interesting. For example, the Romans had visited with the people in modern-day Sri Lanka, and they were amicable with them. There are also some remarkable astronomical facts reported in another book, like how the Greeks had calculated the circumference of the Earth within 95% accuracy.

Overall, I will be glad to have read it, as the entire work is important in the history of encyclopedias and the history of Rome. It's one of the first works where someone tried to compile ALL the knowledge of a given civilization. While a lot of it is inaccurate to the point where there is quite a bit of literal gossip and hearsay published in it, the fact Pliny undertook such a massive project 1,500 years before a concept of scientific organization had arisen is really astounding.