6 most powerful books to study intensely

Flaubert said "What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books."

What 6 books, if studied very intensely, would give someone the best understanding of literature? What about 6 books that would best educate someone overall?

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I haven't read much so someone please let me know what changes you'd suggest for mine:

For literature:
>Homer's Iliad & Odyssey
>Shakespeare's Complete Works
>Paradise Lost
>Divine Comedy
>The Brothers Karamazov
>The Complete Novels of James Joyce

Overall:
>Plato's Complete Works
>Aristotle's Complete Works
>The Bible
>Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
>The Brothers Karamazov
>The Complete Novels of James Joyce (which I say only because Joyce was better read than almost any other writer and the innumerable lessons in his works, and the pursuit of completely understanding his works, are highly beneficial according to many reputable sources)

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>overall
>Meditations

It certainly shows that you haven't read much.

>Meditations
My (white) nigger (yes I did use ''the hard r'' and no I'm not apologizing).
Don't forget 12 Rules for Life and my diary desu :)

>Iliad AND odyssey
>anthology of like 50 works
>the complete novels of ___

it says SIX BOOKS NIGGA

The Republic
Moby Dick
Either/Or
Duino Elegies
Hamlet
Collected Kafka ;>)

No

"no"

The Mahabharata
The Koran
The Bible
The Odyssey
The Republic
The Daodejing

Pretty nice.
Naive.
Pseudish.

Any list without the Bible on it is shit. It's inarguably the single most important work in regard to Western civilization.

What would your list be?

Plato's Complete Works
Basic Works of Aristotle
Aquinas - Summa Contra Gentiles
Spinoza - Collected Works
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
Marx - Capital

nicomachean ethics
in search of lost time
ulysses
da bibble
moby dick
war of art by steven pressfield if youre a writer

Why not throw in the whole of Britannica's great books while you're at it.

bumping for validation is this one good?

so close
it's alright. Can't speak for War of Art. Ethics is my favorite Aristotle but it's also the most easily understood.

>Shakespeare Works
>Plato Works
>Montaigne Essays
>Holy Bible
>The Critique

Bible
Iliad
Divine Comedy
Don Quixote
Hamlet
War & Peace

spotted the nazi

>>anthology of like 50 works

Which can easily be and often are fit into a single book since they're plays...

itt: poorly read idiots

>The Koran

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This and the Bible

>6 books
>Complete works of joyce
you are pretty dumb, having read so much refined literature, pal

>Micheal J Fox wiggling faster than the camera's shutterspeed
>because Parkinsons

Where's JP Donleavy?

good one

found the shitskin

Yes, that's the joke

Infinite Jest
House of Leaves
Gravity’s Rainbow
Mistborn: the Final Empire - Oxford Annotated Text
Ulysses
12 Rules for Life

> Fanged Noumena
> Revolt Against the Modern World
> The Prose Edda (or the Song of the Nibelungs)
> Mein Kampf
> Sex and Character
> Culture of Critique

These books pretty much will make you a god.

this french guy told me if i read 6 books i'd be a good scholar, so i stopped after 6.

Spinoza's Ethics
The Bible
The Republic
Critique of Pure Reason
Nicomachean Ethics
Montaigne's Essays

only brainlets read kant

Delete this, fatass.

>only brainlets read kant

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>saying is pretty nice

Four of them are from the 19th to 20th centuries, it's fucking worthless to have 4 books from such a short and recent time period with comparatively little influence/which we can't fully gauge the influence of yet. Ultimate definition of pseud

Stay assmad

LOL.

>the Koran
>the Mahabharata but not the Upanishads, Puranas or Vedas
>The Odyssey
this board is so gay man

Mein Kampf
Atlas Shrugged
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Ready Player One
The Communist Manifesto
The FATAL RPG handbook

I'm 100% serious

>If you are American
Lonesome Dove
The Creature from Jekyll Island
Complete Works of Cicero
Beyond Good and Evil
Sophocles Oedipus trilogy

> Magic mountain
> Man without qualities
> Difference and Repetition
> Metaphysics
> Faust
> Being And time

Let me give an honest answer here and not the default "le great books meme" one that everyone else is giving.

1. A comprehensive history of western civilization.
2. A comprehensive history of philosophy.
3. A comprehensive history of music (with accompanying recordings)
4. Norton Anthology of Western Literature.
5. A comprehensive history of theology.
6. A good study Bible.

Someone who really studied thoroughly and memorized the content of those books would be so much more better educated than someone who read Shakespeare and Moliere or some shit.

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Was going to post this exact same list, well done

>the Mahabharata but not the Upanishads, Puranas or Vedas
I had to choose one of them.
Koran is important for knowing what about 1.6 billion people believe in and others in these regions/cultures are heavily influenced by
Odyssey as a nod to more literary than philosophical/religious, one of the founding texts of Western literature, countlessly referenced and just an extremely influential and great story

>What 6 books, if studied very intensely, would give someone the best understanding of literature?
None. Understanding of art is built on relationships and comparison. You can't rip six books out of context and pretend you understand them fully. If you wished to understand them, you'd have to read the works that came before them and, if you want to understand their influence as well, the ones that came after. You'd have to study the different approaches to studying of those six books. In the end, you'd be studying literature in general.

Btw, people who list complete Shakespeare, Homer or any other writer deserve to suffer in hell.

Bible
Anatomy of Melancholy
Shakespeare
Homer
Plato
Montaigne

Hamlet, Twelfth Night, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Collected Stories of Henry James, and Remembrance of Things Past

A Thousand Plateaus - D&G
Finnegan's Wake - Joyce
Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika
The Book of Chuang Tzu
Science and Sanity - Alfred Korczybski
Civilization and Capitalism - Fernand Braudel

This is for overall education. Top 6 for understanding literature would be:

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey
The Bible (and understanding of its historical context, relationship with other Abrahamic faiths, and the apocrypha)
Mahabharatha
Shakespeare
Anatomy of Criticism - Northrop Frye
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature - Erich Auerbach

Why Finwake and not Ulysses? Genuinely curious

half pleb, the Bible and Not the Vedas is garbage
Finnegan’s Wake is a mandala of the human Oversoul, its a sacred book. Joyce was a hermeticist
extremely good taste

Damn I gotta put finwake in my queue

Iliad
Meno
Phaedo
John
Faust
Moby Dick

How dry is Braudel? I really enjoyed Delandas reading on him.