/lit/ - Literature

Which edition/translation of Plutarch's Lives should I read? Been meaning to give it a read.

>>21963133
what's your tiktok

>>21963133
>necessary to be considered literate.
>posts translation
ngmi

>>21963175
The one in the OP
>>21963202
Cope

I listen to this when I sleep. I'm always waking up to something interesting. Last time it was about how Pompey dealt with the pirates with purple sails, golden masts and silver oars.

It's all profoundly meaningless. Merely find what brings you the greatest enjoyment and stimulation; perhaps to the point of causing you to create works of your own.

The 12 must-read humanities works

Plato (complete)
Aristotle (Organon
Aristotle( Metaphysics)
Plutarch (Parallel Lives)
Augustine (City of God)
Aquinas (Shorter Summa)
Descartes (Discourse on Method)
Spinoza (Ethics)
Hobbes (Leviathan)
Hume (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding)
Kant (Critique of Pure Reason)
Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations)

12 Literature

The Bible (Robert Alter for OT, Lattimore for NT)
The Iliad (translated by Merrill)
The Odyssey (same)
The Aeneid (translated by Ahl)
The Metamorphoses (translated by McCarter)
The Divine Comedy (translated by Hollander)
Gargantua and Pantagruel (translated by Frame)
Don Quixote (translated by Ormsby)
Shakespeare, complete
Paradise Lost
Faust (translated by Atkins)
Eugene Onegin (translated by Nabokov)

12 Opera

Mozart: Don Giovanni
Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro
Mozart: The Magic Flute
Rossini: The Barber of Seville
Verdi: Rigoletto
Verdi: La traviata
Wagner: The Ring Cycle (four operas)
Bizet: Carmen
Puccini: Madama Butterfly

12 Ballet

Adam: Giselle
Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty
Delibes: Coppélia
Minkus: La Bayadère, Don Quixote
Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night's Dream
Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella
Strivinsky: Firebird, The Rite of Spring

>>21963321
Truly awful

>>21963133
What is the history of thousands of years of kings and poets in the face of God? Nothing I tell ye.

>>21963321
>not the Lattimore translations of Homer
awful.

>>21963337
Compare verses to demonstrate your point

>>21963202
I think Plutarch's Lives gets a pass because 1) it was translated by Dryden; and 2) Shakespeare read an English translation.

>>21963367
It doesn't need to get a pass from you or any other pseud. Shut the fuck up.

>>21963321
what a massive larp

>>21963321
>no On the Soul from Aristotle
>aquinas
>spinoza
>hume
>adam smith
This is hilarious. Typical /lit/ pseud who never even read what he's copying from other pseuds.

>>21963202

Learning a new language consumes a great deal of time even if one's naturally and situationally inclined. One can double that to achieve enough proficiency that they'd internalize more and more accurately by reading the original text rather than merely a good translation. As much as it would give you the corresponding bragging rights among bibliophiles that watching subs gives otaku, it's not actually literacy, it's posturing.

>>21963402
Why shouldn't Aquinus be there?

>>21963402
I limited it to 12 titles. It is a starting list, not intended to be comprehensive but something for getting going with

>>21963433
Why should it be? It's just catholic theology entirely rejected by both orthodox and protestants. It's Aristotle fanfic.
>>21963446
It's a shit list. You can have a good list of 12 titles, yours is crap.

>>21963461
>It's just catholic theology
Yes, his work is a crucial part of the theology of one of the most culturally significant religions in the world. He most certainly belongs on that list.

>>21963479
>He most certainly belongs on that list.
You NEVER read Aquinas. Stop larping cringe faggot

>>21963461
Taste is subjective. I went by titles which were most influential and relevant to engaging with other works. If you don’t like Aquinas that’s perfectly valid, I am not myself a Christian. I included him because the shorter summa gives a very lucid articulation Catholic beliefs and their basis, some of it is even Aristotle’s Metaphysics but made cleverer (I would like to read his commentary on Aristotle some day), and the dogma he talks about was tremendously influential on philosophy and literature. If you are going to read Dante for example it is more useful have read Aquinas than Jay Dyer

>>21963495
>I don't like him, so he doesn't belong on a list of culturally significant literature!
Embarrassing

>>21963499
But made *clearer

How come none of you ever bring up Tertullian when coming to Christian theologians? It seems like you guys just retort the same reading list

>>21963499
>I am not myself a Christian
No shit, you sound like a clueless teenager.

>>21963507
I don’t understand why you think that. Catholic theology has had enormous impact on even secular thought and literature, think of Ulysses for example which though not Catholic literature is filled to the brim with allusions to Catholic thought, ritual and thinkers

>>21963537
>I don’t understand why you think that.
Because every single post of yours demonstrates it.

>>21963373
Basado
>>21963367
>>21963202
Cringedo

bup

>>21963312
you can't enjoy reading more than having real sex. Hedonism is a wrong strategy for reading because it leads to consummerism and low instincts

>>21963133
There are no such "necessary" books, imo. But here's what I think is *sufficient* for literacy (taking your question literally):

>1. Any reputable child's / young adult's encyclopaedia consisting of multiple volumes.

Proper encyclopaedias are getting difficult to find since the advent of Wikipedia (even libraries don’t have them anymore). Versions for children or young adults are preferable because they’re shorter and designed specifically for the illiterate and the curious (but only if more space is devoted to words than to pictures). A full encyclopaedia can be 30,000 pages of tiny writing about obscure facts (hence why a shorter child's encyclopaedia is sufficient imo). A child's encyclopaedia can still be 5,000 or so pages. Britannica encyclopaedias have been around since the 18th century.

>2. Several books on the history of the world.

Before such a feat, it would be helpful to read a history of the world (or several). Gombrich, Wells, Nehru, and Unstead are enjoyable. Don't get bogged down in details (that's what the encyclopaedia is for). I'd personally avoid most history published post 1980s, because it has been distorted by the social "sciences" and can be lacking in all-important cultural context (which is what actually makes history History, imo). It's easier to see the biases inherent in older works (which is a good thing). Gombrich, Wells, and Nehru’s history books are pre-WW2 and still being widely read (but you probably also want a post-WW2 book like Unstead's).

For bonus historical literacy, Durant’s 12 volume Story of Civilisation and Hobsbawm’s four volumes of modern history might be worthwhile (published starting in 1930s and 1960s respectively, and still widely read). You should probably read a book about the history of your own country.

>3. Calculus

A working acquaintance with calculus is worthwhile if you want to have scientific or mathematical literacy. Infinite Powers by Strogatz might be an interesting first encounter, maybe followed by Calculus Made Easy by Thompson. Thompson’s calculus book was first published in 1910.

>4. A dozen or so works of classic literature

This is what your question is really asking about, I gather. Well, Michael Dirda has a helpful list in "Book by Book" called “The Knowledge Most Worth Having”. It’s about 20 books. GreaterBooks also have two excellent longer compilations online. The "Lifetime Reading Plan" by Fadiman is something of a classic in its own right, as is Bloom's Western Canon.

>Final note

I don’t consider myself literate. This is my best attempt at quantifying the gigantic holes in my own "education". Acquaintance with general knowledge, acquaintance with calculus, some sense of how world history has unfolded, and familiarity with some of the best works of classic literature. Probably not what you are looking for but there’s nothing about reading dusty canonical books which necessarily imparts literacy, imo (especially in the 21st century)

>>21965414
Reading is a very different kind of pleasure than sex and they’re not fungible. Definitely a loss of ability to read would make many of us would feel a huge loss in quality of life even with sex, a loss of a huge pleasure

>>21963373
Said the monolingual pseud who, by lacking the least of self consciousness, thinks he has the dignity to frequent and engage on a literature board.

>Plutarch's Lives
>bla bla some faggot fucked boy bla bla he went to sicily and died by an apple falling on his head

>>21965414
>you cant enjoy reading more than fuckking
Yeah you can. Bad lays are worse than bad books.

>>21963133
Can’t even find this book on amazon with how much self-published schlock is on there where every retard trying to make a few pennies just spammed Dryden’s work from project gutenburg to amazon

>>21963321
>opera
>ballet
No

>>21963133
>120 days of sodom
it stood the test of time

>>21966183
Keep quiet pseud