If you were a father who had to pick out a book for your teenage boy to read, which would it be?

If you were a father who had to pick out a book for your teenage boy to read, which would it be?

Start him with the Greeks or else he'll end up a pseud

Training and Maintaining Your Boipucci for Dummies

I'll just go ahead and say On Women by Schopenhauer and Mein Kampf by Hitler so that someone else doesn't try and fill the thread up with bait

The Iliad

/pol/

Confessions of a Mask

Symposium, obviously.

The meme trilogy, but edited together in one huge book by James Pynchon Wallace

The Discourses by Epictetus
Kek.

Lovecraft for philosophy, Poe for love.

Maps of Meaning

siddhartha

concise and relatable for someone growing up

Crime and Punishment

Death in Venice

I think if I'd read this during my early adolescence it would have had an even greater effect on me, like that really electric sensation of youth on the cusp of something dark and exciting. Symbols and images were quite vivid then. At the same time I wonder if reading things that would have painted such an evocative portrait of what I was going through would steal the magic of my own experiences and crudely systemise them. Besides, the book is itself an exercise in reflection and confession, and I think I could appreciate it more reading it in early adulthood.

The whole point of having a Veeky Forums kid is that you dont have to pick books out after a certain point. I would recommend him or her Remains of the Day since teenagers dont have a good perspective on a wasted life.

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Bone by Jeff Smith. It's a fun fantasy adventure that gets very real very fast. It'll introduce the values of family, love, friendship, community, how politics isn't always black-and-white, race, prejudice, etc, while also providing a fun fantasy adventure full of humour. Thinking back to your childhood, surely you'd want a book like Bone read to you.

I would also read Watership Down. Another adventure, but has immense details showing thorough research into rabbits mating and communal habits, while also providing detailed characters that young children would probably be able to relate to/pick their favourites/ etc. Imagine your daughteru-chan or son-kun hugging their rabbit plush toy while listening intently to what might happen to Bigwig in Efrafa if he's caught for being a spy. Also the comfy English countryside setting is beautiful.

KEK
If you've actually read this user, can you give me a quick summary of what you thought? Does it live up to its claims at all?

These are teenagers user

Oh, my mistake, I somehow missed "teenager" in OP's post, I thought it was a thread about reading to your kids. My bad.

Holocaust and Other Lies

Lolita.

kek

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

Farenheit 451.

Plato!

Frankenstein/ The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelly

boccaccio, the decameron

get sex while you've got a springy young dick and downy little balls son

bitches want it but if you're a late blooming doofus like me you won't realize all the opportunities you missed until you're in your 20s so smarten up and get on that shit fast

Thomas Foster Joyce

first I'd ask him what he's interested in.
you gotta be careful and stoke that love not smother it.

The Belgariad, by David Eddings.

It's a real fantasy epic, none of this harry potter emo faggitry or lord of the rings bore fest.

Theres a bit of tits 'n' ass (hi ce'nedra), theres shape shifting cunts fucking shit up (none of this twilight bullshit, were talking man bears ripping people apart). theres wit, theres drama, there's a real exploration of morals and truths.

this is a great start to an interest in literature, and will make sure he cant go back to reading shit-tier pop-genre-fiction without feeling ripped off.

>that actually sounds fun
>look it up on amazon
>first book is Dawn of Prophecy
>Wait one goddamn second
>It can't be
>It is
>I stole it from a clinic years ago
>still have it on my shelf
very excellent

When I was an edgy teenage emo faggot my dad threw a copy of catcher in the rye at me and told me to read it. I instantly called him a faggot and told him to get the fuck out of my room. I put it on my shelf where it sat for a year. Then came the massive blackout of 2003? And I couldn't play CS all day. I was fucking livid.wtf is a person to do if they cannot play counterstrike all day? The book was the only thing in my room that didn't require electricity. So I read it. At first I was like damn this holden dudes a faggot. Then I was like woah hold up this faggot is a lot like me! Then I realized I was a giant faggot and at the end when holden is in the nut house I realized I've been acting like a giant crazy faggot. Book changed my life senpai. I gave up that edgy emo shit where I hated all mainstream society and just became a regular person because I didn't want to seem crazy. So I'd give my kid that.

So you completely missed the point of catcher in the rye like a huge faggot. I see you haven't changed much.

Harry motherfuckin' Potter.

All the MGTOW/pseuds/permavirgins ITT are choosing for their hypothetical kid to gratify their egos. My son will have access to my library, but I won't *make* him read Greeks. He either wants to or not based on my example. Potter, at least, is relatable and teaches lessons for surviving 21st century adolescence.

What was the point?

And ends with a baby boomer wet dream. No thanks. The Tortall series is much better.

I thought the point was if you act like a stupid faggot you will end up in the nut house ? Holden was deranged. Thinking that adults corrupt kids and fuck up their innocence. He was a stupid faggot..... just like me...

>Fantasy novels and Arthurian legend were the base of the worlds she thought up as a girl, and later she added contemporary issues like youth crime, cholera outbreaks in Africa and mistreatment of females by the Taliban.

Get the fuck out of here with that.

The Once And Future King


it's got everything a teenager could want

pussy
slaying
gandalf-like magic wizards complaining about Hitler
knights
personal growth

The whole book was an essay about teenagers being afraid of becoming adults. The whole time Holden just sees all these adults that he thinks are unhappy and he's afraid of being unhappy, of the responsibilities, of losing who he is. He's afraid so he's fighting it. Like every other teenager on the whole fucking planet. His perceived immaturity isn't a problem. He isn't punished at the end for not growing up. It's just a shit turn.

How funny was merlin and king Pellinore.

No fucking way. They're awesome books and they're better than harry fucking potter for sure.

How funny was merlin and king Pellinore. Oh I got that. That's a very basic part of the book. That's like the most base thing in it lol. I like my interpretation better though. The one where he's just a bitch emo faggot that's a nut bar

Yeah, my favorite interpretation of star wars is that luke is a male prostitute with a maladaptive daydreaming disorder.

Do go on...

either yurope1 or the brothers karamazov

>be 18
>reading Lolita right now
kek

Joyce Wallace Pynchon

The Sound and the Fury to teach him not to wrestle with his sister while laying down.

Your kid will shoot up a school.

...

My Twisted World

I have 5 sons and we home school.
Here is part of the reading list:
Gorgias
Nicomachean Ethics
On War
The Prince
The Iliad
The Aeneid (in Latin)
Beowulf
The Meditations
The Confessions
The Divine Comedy
Paradise Lost
Don Quixote
A Princess of Mars
Tarzan of the Apes
1984
Brave New World
Moby Dick
Angels in Iron
A Tale of Two Cities
The Scarlet Pimpernel
Tom Sawyer

They read a lot, so....

Your children are going to be absolute patricians when they grow up. In addition to teaching them Latin they're also learning Greek right?

Classical Greek, of course.

God bless you. And God bless your family.

Works and days, obviously.

The Holy Bible.

Symposium or Notes from the Underground

tfw this was my favorite book in 6th grade :)

I'd pick Brave New World for my son

I read both of those as an adult, so...

Well, ok, Bone was a fun fantasy adventure, but could never stand up to the brilliance of its beginning.

Watership Down, on the other hand, I will defend with my life. It may be as much of a children's book as you want, but it's still one of the best books I've read.

Poe stories, Walt Whitman, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. That's what I read when I was a kid, and I still love Poe and Whitman to this day. I prefer Dickens to Twain though.

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The truth is you have never read Mein Kampf

Dies!

stop memeing for once

...

this

if not, have fun with your weak and wicked son

...

Iliad and Odyssey not even memeing

Yeah, they are very good, I read them as a teenager and Belgarion and Polgara were kinda of annoying at first but you end loving every one of them.

Also I Would add Jack London call of the wild and Lord of the Flies.
The Edge Chronicles, the Hobbit too, for entertaining pleasure better than tv for sure.
Then historical books of great battles like gates of fire, War and peace and perhaps try to coax him to read easy western history books, myths and that stuff (I loved them as a kid). Then if he responds well that him books like rebellion in the farm, 1984, Brave new world, Fahrenheit...

here's a book for you

This isn't a bad option, every western man should understand the bible and its effect on our history and culture.
A lot of great literature practically requires some biblical knowledge to fully understand them as well.

"The Tiger" by Nael

Finnegans Wake, you better read it cover to cover you little shit, or no dinner

The Merck Medical Manual
Dianetics
or
Around the World in Eighty Days
Depending on whether he is outgoing, insufferable, or neither respectively.

>Written before the fall of Rome
>More than 500 pages of plot
>Thomas Mann
Imagine a teenager who will read any of that!

any semi-literate boy should enjoy the iliad

If you said the Odyssey I would agree with you. Not many people actually enjoy the Iliad.

...

The Sowell meming is getting old. One gets the impression that those constantly posting it aren't too familiar with economics.

>meming
?

>common sense
Into the dustbin of history it goes

Fuck off. You may as well give him Mein Kampf or Two Hundred Years Together.

Are you dumb?

What's the best Iliad and Odyssey translation?

You sound like the perfect father to my children.

Those are good suggestions too, thanks.

Watership Down

The Wasp Factory. He would learn how great a family we are, also how not to kill his siblings/cousins.

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I was going to post this. Really is the perfect choice.

It's a shame most single-volume editions contain Book of Merlin, which aside from a few small quite nice bits, is honestly awful.

Not that guy, but I bought it. The problem with Aaron Clarey is that if you're smart enough to realize he's right, you're also smart enough not to need his advice -- it's pretty basic stuff and I wouldn't waste time buying it unless you consider yourself of below average intelligence

Also, his career advice is incredibly misinformed and not at all applicable unless you to go a no-name state school in a dying part of the country

God bless you and your wonderful family, dear sir.

yes
YES
Your kid's a dropout

-Art spiegelman - Maus
-1984
-animal farm
-lord of the flies
-The Hobbit / LotR

All good entry-tier books for young children to get into more serious books.

Underrated

The Gay Science

or just some Bataille really fuck em up good