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Bleak House – Dickens
The Tin Drum – Grass
Mrs Dalloway – Woolf
Generation X – Coupland
Persuasion – Austen

If God fails, let us guide ourselves.

Dear Blaze,

TLDR.

God

I find marijuana helps when reading philosophy. It allows me to be open to ideas that I disagree with and interested in them, without being so easily influenced as to completely change my view of the...

If you feel like reading some more modern philosophy, Milan Kundera's books are good. I like Immortality. I also like Shea and Wilson's Illuminatus, but I might be accused of taking the piss for...

Take All Quiet on the Western Front and get Things Snowball by Rich Hall to clear your head and refresh you when you've had enough Remarque for the time being.

I betrayed my wife.
I betrayed myself.
I killed men. I ordered men to be killed.
I killed—I ordered the death of my brother.
He injured me.
I killed my mother’s son. I killed my father’s...

From Persuasion:

"Walter," cried Charles Hayter, "why do you not do as you are bid? Do not you hear your aunt speak? Come to me, Walter, come to cousin Charles."

But not a bit did Walter...

Me too. I have a framed picture of Emperor Norton on my wall

No-one loves pissing Discordians off, because our god is nuts. :eek:

I say that sometimes. I know it's inaccurate, but I just love pissing off pagans.

Most Christian denominations don't consider making sacred images idolatrous, provided it is God, not the images, actually being worshipped. Catholics push this doctrine to its limits with saint...

Forgive me for my lack of clarity. Any more was meant to modify want, not free: that is, you still want to be free, don't you, even if you aren't? I'm not going to venture an opinion on whether...

Not a Christian or believer in the afterlife, but to quote somebody: "Because George Bush has done evil things that you deplore in the name of Freedom, does that mean you don't want to be free any...

They're a bit blokish perhaps, but Christopher Brookmyre's thrillers are a good, light read without patronising the reader. The Sacred Art of Stealing is probably his best.

Why write a sentence as pompous as this? Really, what is the point?


It's wonderful.

NOT TRUE. The Bible is one of the greatest works of literature ever written. I read it as a mix of allegorical myth and historical novel, and I LOVE it.

I'm with Sam.

I'd say Ernest Hemingway, but since I read Franny and Zooey I'm seriously beginning to think it may have been J. D. Salinger.

Actually, no, what am I thinking. Virginia Woolf.

Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility is quite a good scoundrel. Like Mr Darcy without the redeeming qualities.

Or Tyler Durden in Fight Club

What's to explain? Paul and Moses were raging misogynists, like most men of their respective eras. To his credit, Jesus appears to have bucked the trend by not making any pronouncements about women...

The Bible says yes, it is all bad: "There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who...

If it's the King James Version (which is the version I prefer), the archaism of the language. In any version, the length and the long passages in books such as Leviticus and Numbers setting out laws,...

Love the Dostoevsky.

"He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the...