19th birthday

Norton Critical Edition, tons of secondary texts. It's great.

t. Ignatius J. reilly

wtf edition of heart of darkness is that

What the fuck your family is great. When I was 19 my relatives were still trying to get me to read YA shit.

I already have a girlfriend, but thanks for the recommendations.

if you're a 19 year old american you probably won't like far from the madding crowd
which is a pity because it is flippin awesome

If fitzerald stories includes the great gatsby then read this at first. If not: Heart of Darkness

...

Catch-22 is excellent but an acquired taste
Dubliners can be dull if you don't know/see the contextual parallels
A Confederacy of Dunces has an interesting publication history and has more straightforward humour than Catch-22
The Great Gatsby is also good. Not great.

>Catch-22 is excellent but an acquired taste
How exactly does one acquire bad taste

>How exactly does one acquire bad taste
By thinking Catch-22 is a bad book, obviously

Oh user...

Oh look, another scene where ignatius pretends he’s Aquinas in a city full of wacky Cajuns!

It’s embarassing the book was ever published or entered the public consciousness.

Also I didn’t read it. Stopped at p 200 because I nearly died from cringing

Oh my God! The novel is a disgrace to all measures of Taste and Decency! Dispose of that filth immediately and purchase a copy of the Consolation Philosophiae before my valve bursts open again!

You’ve mastered it. Every fucking paragraph, for 400 pages.

It is artless, its worldview is adolescent at best, the writing is incompetent, especially in the dialogue between the identically voiced Abbott and Costello sock puppet characters, and the humor which is the only thing it might have going for it gets old after a hundred pages. It might have worked had he instead made a novella of ~the first hundred + last fifty pages. It is probably the worst book in OP's stack.

This but unironically unironically

As you can see, Veeky Forums is full of shit. Just read them. None of them are completely worthless. Unless you intend to start with the Greeks and have autism, you don't have to read them in any particular order.

In any case, they're all worth reading. But in the case that you received them as a gift from your family means it's a more tasteful selection than it was probable to be. The fact that it's not pop scifi or thrillers or litfic du jour is one thing, but on top of that they're actually solid books by great writers. A poetry collection let alone a good one, that's a based family

I think your family missed your 16th birthday and are trying to get you on course. Read the lot, you deserve the Hemmingway and Fitzgerald because you've not read any of the others by now and might be permanently retarded like your family fear. Also, if you have a girlfriend, they think she's both shit and too good for you.

get off the computer little baby

Great list of books. Read it all. You're at a perfect age for all of these, and all these books are important in their own way. Dunces is fucking hillarious. Read it.

>I already have a girlfriend
W-...
Then why are you reading?

Babbit is a great read, something I believe should be more popular. Lewis was one of the most popular American writers for a time. Funny, well-written, enjoyable book.

because chad can do whatever he pleases

>thinking the end all be all of life is pussy

A brainlet in his natural habitat, everyone.

>English "lit"
>relevant

its just a joke dude

>thinking the end all be all of life isn't pussy
Stop living right now, you're a disgrace to every living being.

No user....
it's love.
and i love little girls

ITT people who were gifted books by readers that only finished what was assigned to them in school 35 years ago.

You have a good family - be grateful.

That list looks too US-centric for me personally.

Read Dubliners, The Lost Decade by Fitzgerald, maybe Catch-22 Heart of Darkness and move on to some better shit.

Listen to all of these people, OP. I haven't read all of these books but enjoyed those I have read. None are the type of books you should dismiss without having read them. Someone took the time to choose books for you, personally. That's a very thoughtful gift, and at the very least you'll be able to talk to your family about what you've read. Don't listen to Veeky Forums pseuds trying to one-up each other.

Dont listen to this pseud

Read them all, OP. They're all worth the time. Leave Dunces and Catch-22 until later, and maybe Hardy and Conrad as well if older prose bogs you down. The Fitzgerald would go down better after Gatsby, but the Hemingway you can jump on, and Lewis, etc. Thank your family for trying to exercise your brain.

It would be better to buy 3 hardbacks instead of 9 paperbacks as a birthday present, but it seems your parents are brainlets

It is pussy. if there was no pussy everyone would stop existing.

not an a priori fact

What

Timeaus is one of the worst dialogues and a horrible introduction to Plato. Read Plato’s Gorgias, Republic, and Theatetus along with Leo Strauss’s City and man, Natural Right and History, and What is political philosophy.

Kojeve is pretty good but ultimately just a smart arse condensing the thought that was popular during his time, nevertheless a great introduction to ‘historicist’ thought but ultimately not good to read without reading Leo Strauss alongside to give you the other side of the philosophical argument.

You're missing the point of both

Cool family OP. I only ever got science kits and later vidya, because noone in my family is much inclined towards literature. Be grateful.

That's a nice collection, especially if it's from your family. They clearly have a good idea of fun, accessible yet influential works. Most families don't even read.

What? That doesn't make any fucking sense, unless you have a hardcover fetish. He has three times the reading material this way.

>Complete short stories of Ernest Hemingway
When I got this for Christmas when I was 15, I read the whole thing cover to cover in one night. I take it with me everywhere, it's just so fucking good.
>This side of paradise
7/10 bretty good
>Heart of Darkness
Overrated, not very entertaining.

You could do worse. It's a decent start. You have your reading set up if you ever take a college lit course.

Why is Heart of Darkness so thick? My copy is 79 pages long and claims it is not abridged. My copy of Dubliners is much thicker than my Heart of Darkness copy. What's going on around here?

it's a Norton Critical Edition which probably means multiple forwards, a fuckload of appendixes, photographs of emaciated africans, and whatever completely irrelevant shopping lists of Joseph COnrad's they had to shove in at the end

Gotcha thanks, that was bugging me for whatever reason.

Seems a pretty solid reading list at any adult age.

worst book I ever read in my opinion

what an absolute waste of time

Hemingway's short stories are a treasure.

The gave you too much too fast. You're intimidated. Read Catch 22 first

>Kojeve's lectures on Phenomeology of Spirit
why on earth would you recommend this to someone who hasnt read Hegel