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Status Anxiety - Alain De Botton
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Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
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Protagoras and Meno - Plato
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Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
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The Contenders - John Wain
It’s very hard to pick a mere five. In terms of having an impact on my life, these would have to be my top picks.
Status Anxiety - Alain De Botton
QUICK OVERVIEW:
Basically, Status Anxiety is exactly how it sounds, delves into the fixation of being present and known - worrying about what others think of us; whether we’re a success of failure, a winner or loser.
LESSONS LEARNT:
If we train our eyes on eternal verities, or rather eternal doubts, we will learn to stop worrying about our public reputation; but it finishes by recommending that we simply spread our risks and take advantage of the vast variety of ways in which success and failure can be defined.
I learnt that public perception should not alter personal principles and that I should always hold true to what I believe is right. Conforming to societal norms is dooming yourself for a life of mediocrity. Actually, my old Headmaster put it nicely: “don’t lick the lollipop of mediocrity”
NOTABLE BOOKS BY AUTHOR:
-Essays in Love
-Consolations of Philosophy
-The Consolations of Philosophy
-Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion
AGE:
13 - 30
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
QUICK OVERVIEW:
Lolita, generally considered Nabokov’s greatest novel, unites wildly grotesque parody, farce, and pathos with two powerful, shocking subjects: the passionate feelings of a grown man toward a pubescent girl and the complex nature of romantic love, which is not only tender and generous but also ruthless and even totalitarian.
The novel’s middle-aged, middle-European narrator “writes” this book as his confession while in a prison cell awaiting trial for murder. His double-talk name, Humbert Humbert, sets the tone of punning parody that pervades the text. Humbert Humbert traces his sexual obsession for “nymphets”—girls between the ages of nine and fourteen—to a case of interrupted coitus when he was thirteen years old; he and a certain Annabel Leigh had the beginnings of their first affair, forever aborted by her premature death of typhus.
Here Humbert discovers Lolita, a twelve-year-old, gum-chewing, Coke-gurgling, comic-book-addicted, blatantly bratty schoolgirl. They ultimately end up together in a relationship, fuelled by lust and perceived love. This story however, doesn’t have a happy ending.
LESSONS LEARNT:
I used to read as a form of escapism, however this is the first book that I read in a more analytical, thoughtful, way. The book was (and is) a literary masterpiece and opened my eyes to real literature.
NOTABLE BOOKS BY AUTHOR:
-Pnin
-Pale Fire
-Despair
AGE:
18 -
I realise I’m yet to do discuss the other three books in my list, I’ll come back and edit this post tomorrow. It has taken a little longer than I initially expected.
3 & 4 is Philosophy; and 5 is Fiction.