Favorite Nonfiction Literature

[mortalterror]

Montaigne's Essays, The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld, and Plato's Republic are all on my top shelf with my favorite fiction. Thoreau's Walden is somewhat lower, but it was a book that changed my life many years ago. Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is still sitting on my "to be read" shelf because it's very long and I haven't gotten around to finishing it. But yeah, it's the sweet spot.

What do I like about each of them. I suppose I liked the way Montaigne would synthesize information, the turn of his mind, and the friendly good humored nature of his voice. You felt a real warmth and intelligence communicated to you through the essays, in a way that you wouldn't get from another essay writer such as Bacon. La Rochefoucauld was a sharp observant customer, kind of like Bacon, but even more succinct. He manages to distill his argument and point of view down to a few well chosen words, and his sentences sparkle like diamonds. The only other book that impressed me in quiet the same way as Plato's Republic was Dante's Divine Comedy. Dante obviously modeled his structure on Plato, and you can see how one part builds methodically on top of the previous sections and each subsequent part incorporates all that's come before into itself. You start to see the ways Plato is developing meaning across a number of different levels, and then it hits you, this book is a road map for the last two thousand years of history. Then it's got this ending which is shear literary artistry. I started reading Gibbon because I have a thing for ancient societies and the Romans especially, but his sentence structure is unlike anything I've ever seen. It has this balance, and flow, and weight that's magnificent. I'd like to take it apart sometime and see how he does it. Thoreau I've already mentioned.

[stlukesguild]

Certainly among my favorite reads I would include Montaigne's Essays, Walter Pater's essays (especially The Renaissance), J.L. Borges non-fictions, Rousseau's Confessions, Emerson's Essays, Boswell's Life of Johnson and Tour of the Hebrides and Johnson's Essays and Journey of the western Islands of Scotland, Goethe's Italian Journey, and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholia. There are any number of other wonderful works of non-fictions of which I am also fond: Andre Malraux's The Voices of Silence, Vasari's The Lives of the Artists, Paul Valery's Degas, Dance, Drawing, Robert Hughes The Shock of the New, John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice, Modern Painters, etc..., Sir Kenneth Clark's The Nude and Civilization, Alberto Manguel's History of Reading, Octavio Paz' essays, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, etc... Clearly I would have no problem with placing non-fiction among my list of the greatest books written. We have brought up the issue of the dominance... or rather the assumption that when one is asked to name his or her favorite book many immediately list a series of novels... but rarely ever non-fiction, or theater (outside of Shakespeare), or even poetry. I think there is a similar bias in the visual arts. When asked to list ones ten favorite works of art the list are invariably a collection of paintings... and maybe sculpture... no prints, textiles, book arts, glass, or even architecture.

[Kafka's Crow]

One book I missed to mention is Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. This along with the two Hugh Kenner books I mentioned earlier can give a very solid basis for a good understanding of modernism. Anybody interested in this period must start with Wilson's book for a better overall picture, specially the importance of the French influences and move on to Kenners books to bring focus on to modernism in more familiar literature with special reference to Ireland and the US.

I am surprised that Axel's Castle is still in print. Read the customer's reviews on Amazon page. It seems it, still, has a strong following:

http://www.amazon.com/Axels-Castle-I...9734750&sr=8-1

[mortalterror]

One book I missed to mention is Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930.

I took that one down off a shelf a few weeks back while I was reading Proust. I've got to say, I wasn't impressed.

[Kafka's Crow]

Written in 1931, this book was far ahead of its time in terms of the understanding of its subject. I would still recommend it as the starting point to an understanding of modernism. Last time I read it was in 1996 (having it read in early 90s for the first time). I might find it too basic if I revisit it now but it did do the job of directing me towards modernism nicely. I revisited The Story of Philosophy after 22 years recently. It seemed wordy and bombastic but back in my early youth, it implanted the love for philosophy in me very effectively. Our preferences and standards change over time.

[mortalterror]

The Story of Philosophy after 22 years recently. It seemed wordy and bombastic but back in my early youth, it implanted the love for philosophy in me very effectively. Our preferences and standards change over time.

I like Durant. I read his The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time two or three months ago. It was a pleasant read. He has excellent style, and knows his material very well. I took out a copy of his The Story of Civilization: II The Life of Greece about that time and couldn't get into it though. It's thick, dense, weighty. I got thirty pages in and he was still talking about the Minoan civilization. What I really wanted to read about was Socrates, Plato, Aeschylus, Pericles. A similar thing happened when I cracked open The Story of Philosophy. He's primarily a historian and that's where he starts. I'm getting all of this history, and wondering when the philosophy will start. I tried to cut my teeth on Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy around the same time, and I found that he too dealt more in history than in concepts. Everybody recommends these books for an introduction to philosophy, but I find the primary texts to be so much more engaging.

I shouldn't blame Durant and Russell though. What I'm really looking for is more of a textbook style. I'll probably just get one of those used books from some college philosophy class.

[ballb]

I recommend the collected essays of both Michael Foot, the English journalist & politician and those of Virginia Woolf.

The English prose works of John Milton, particularly Areopagitica, stand out as literary works of the highest order.