Penguin's Great Ideas
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17 Oct 2008, 13:11
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Journals
My order for Penguin's Great Ideas has finally been shipped after more than a week of waiting. I've also ordered Penguin's Epic collection, and I'm hoping that won't take as long.
Great Ideas 1
* Seneca - On the Shortness of Life
* Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
* St Augustine - Confessions of a Sinner
* Thomas à Kempis - The Inner Life
* Niccolò Machiavelli - The Prince
* Michel de Montaigne - On Friendship
* Jonathan Swift - A Tale of a Tub
* Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract
* Edward Gibbon - The Christians and the Fall of Rome
* Thomas Paine - Common Sense
* Mary Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Women
* William Hazlitt - On the Pleasure of Hating
* Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - The Communist Manifesto
* Arthur Schopenhauer - On the Suffering of the World
* John Ruskin - On Art and Life
* Charles Darwin - On Natural Selection
* Friedrich Nietzsche - Why I Am So Wise
* Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own
* Sigmund Freud - Civilization and its Discontents
* George Orwell - Why I Write
Great Ideas 2
* Confucius - The First Ten Books
* Sun-tzu - The Art of War
* Plato - The Symposium
* Lucretius - Sensation and Sex
* Cicero - An Attack on an Enemy of Freedom
* The Revelation of St John the Divine and the Book of Job
* Marco Polo - Travels In the Land of Kubilai Khan
* Christine de Pizan - The City of Ladies
* Baldesar Castiglione - How to Achieve True Greatness
* Francis Bacon - Of Empire
* Thomas Hobbes - Of Man
* Sir Thomas Browne - Urne-Burial
* Voltaire - Miracles and Idolatry
* David Hume - On Suicide
* Carl von Clausewitz - On the Nature of War
* Søren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling
* Henry David Thoreau - Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
* Thorstein Veblen - Conspicuous Consumption
* Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus
* Hannah Arendt - Eichmann and the Holocaust
Great Ideas 3
* Plutarch - In Consolation to his Wife
* Robert Burton - Some Anatomies of Melancholy
* Blaise Pascal - Human Happiness
* Adam Smith - The Invisible Hand
* Edmund Burke - The Evils of Revolution
* Ralph Waldo Emerson - Nature
* Søren Kierkegaard - The Sickness Unto Death
* John Ruskin - The Lamp of Memory
* Friedrich Nietzsche - Man Alone with Himself
* Leo Tolstoy - A Confession
* William Morris - Useful Work versus Useless Toil
* Frederick Jackson Turner - The Significance of the Frontier in American History
* Marcel Proust - Days of Reading
* Leon Trotsky - An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe
* Sigmund Freud - The Future of an Illusion
* Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
* George Orwell - Books v. Cigarettes
* Albert Camus - The Fastidious Assassins
* Frantz Fanon - Concerning Violence
* Michel Foucault - The Spectacle of the Scaffold
Penguin Epics (pictured)
* The Epic of Gilgamesh - Exodus
* Odysseus Returns Home - Homer
* Xerxes Invades Greece - Herodotus
* 'The Sea, The Sea' - Xenophon
* The Abduction of Sita
* Jason and the Golden Fleece - Apollonius
* The Destruction of Troy - Virgil
* The Serpent's Teeth - Ovid
* The Fall of Jerusalem - Josephus
* The Madness of Nero - Tacitus
* Cupid and Psyche - Apuleius
* The Legendary Adventures of Alexander the Great
* Beowulf
* Siegfried's Murder
* Sagas and Myths of the Northmen
* The Sunjata Story
* The Descent into Hell - Dante
* King Arthur's Last Battle- Malory
* The Voyages of Sindbad
Cost £60.90 altogether. If I bought them directly from Penguin it would've cost £291.40. Buying from Amazon would've been slightly cheaper (than Penguin) but they don't have all the books.
The 'Epic set cost £19.99 instead of £100. So, it's safe to say I got myself a bargain. Discuss!
Great Ideas 1
* Seneca - On the Shortness of Life
* Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
* St Augustine - Confessions of a Sinner
* Thomas à Kempis - The Inner Life
* Niccolò Machiavelli - The Prince
* Michel de Montaigne - On Friendship
* Jonathan Swift - A Tale of a Tub
* Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract
* Edward Gibbon - The Christians and the Fall of Rome
* Thomas Paine - Common Sense
* Mary Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Women
* William Hazlitt - On the Pleasure of Hating
* Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - The Communist Manifesto
* Arthur Schopenhauer - On the Suffering of the World
* John Ruskin - On Art and Life
* Charles Darwin - On Natural Selection
* Friedrich Nietzsche - Why I Am So Wise
* Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own
* Sigmund Freud - Civilization and its Discontents
* George Orwell - Why I Write
Great Ideas 2
* Confucius - The First Ten Books
* Sun-tzu - The Art of War
* Plato - The Symposium
* Lucretius - Sensation and Sex
* Cicero - An Attack on an Enemy of Freedom
* The Revelation of St John the Divine and the Book of Job
* Marco Polo - Travels In the Land of Kubilai Khan
* Christine de Pizan - The City of Ladies
* Baldesar Castiglione - How to Achieve True Greatness
* Francis Bacon - Of Empire
* Thomas Hobbes - Of Man
* Sir Thomas Browne - Urne-Burial
* Voltaire - Miracles and Idolatry
* David Hume - On Suicide
* Carl von Clausewitz - On the Nature of War
* Søren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling
* Henry David Thoreau - Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
* Thorstein Veblen - Conspicuous Consumption
* Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus
* Hannah Arendt - Eichmann and the Holocaust
Great Ideas 3
* Plutarch - In Consolation to his Wife
* Robert Burton - Some Anatomies of Melancholy
* Blaise Pascal - Human Happiness
* Adam Smith - The Invisible Hand
* Edmund Burke - The Evils of Revolution
* Ralph Waldo Emerson - Nature
* Søren Kierkegaard - The Sickness Unto Death
* John Ruskin - The Lamp of Memory
* Friedrich Nietzsche - Man Alone with Himself
* Leo Tolstoy - A Confession
* William Morris - Useful Work versus Useless Toil
* Frederick Jackson Turner - The Significance of the Frontier in American History
* Marcel Proust - Days of Reading
* Leon Trotsky - An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe
* Sigmund Freud - The Future of an Illusion
* Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
* George Orwell - Books v. Cigarettes
* Albert Camus - The Fastidious Assassins
* Frantz Fanon - Concerning Violence
* Michel Foucault - The Spectacle of the Scaffold
Penguin Epics (pictured)
* The Epic of Gilgamesh - Exodus
* Odysseus Returns Home - Homer
* Xerxes Invades Greece - Herodotus
* 'The Sea, The Sea' - Xenophon
* The Abduction of Sita
* Jason and the Golden Fleece - Apollonius
* The Destruction of Troy - Virgil
* The Serpent's Teeth - Ovid
* The Fall of Jerusalem - Josephus
* The Madness of Nero - Tacitus
* Cupid and Psyche - Apuleius
* The Legendary Adventures of Alexander the Great
* Beowulf
* Siegfried's Murder
* Sagas and Myths of the Northmen
* The Sunjata Story
* The Descent into Hell - Dante
* King Arthur's Last Battle- Malory
* The Voyages of Sindbad
Cost £60.90 altogether. If I bought them directly from Penguin it would've cost £291.40. Buying from Amazon would've been slightly cheaper (than Penguin) but they don't have all the books.
The 'Epic set cost £19.99 instead of £100. So, it's safe to say I got myself a bargain. Discuss!
I think for pure story-telling it's easily one of his best books. Definitely up there with The Hobbit.
http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780140912005,00.html?strSrchSql=Penguin+Epics/Penguin_Epics_Boxed_Set_Various (Penguin Epics)
Basically collections of important, famous and culturally significant work. Might be essays or books. Penguin also do other series based on travel, love and horror I think.
Or someone else's, dont know if other people recommended it aswell
<3 Machiavelli
/me loves quizzing <3
Have fun sifting through the obscure pseudo-intellectual bollocks in the 'Great Ideas' collection by the way. Most of them are good books but there's a good bit of shite too.
Uni: Alice's adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll), Treasure Island (Stevenson), My Antonia (Cather), Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway), Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Blake - poetry).
My own: To killing a mocking-bird (Lee), Selected Writing (Hazlitt), Poetics (Aristotle) and I bought Palgrave's Perspectives on the English Language. A series of three books on language. And, of course, the stuff mentioned above.
The Contextual Studies 2 unit is a sort of creative writing unit mixed with post-modern theory. Trying to apply some of the themes into practice basically. To be honest, I couldn't see myself doing a unit involving cinema or any nonsense like that. And, I did a creative writing unit last year, and I'm glad it's progressed to add more theory.
Creating Childhood focuses on how literature for children developed, and issues surrounding it. Eventually, it finishes with more contemporary novels like Northern Lights, Harry Potter and Exodus. It's actually a lot more enjoyable than I first thought it would be. It's the unit which makes me think the most. And, I'm actually reading a book which my lecturer wrote at the moment.
The others are quite self explanatory I guess. Romanticism and English Literature are focusing on poetry at the moment, but Romanticism moves onto novels like Frankenstein, Sense and Sensibility and some others after Christmas. English starts to look at plays by Shakespeare, Rowley and Jonson later on. Easily the worst unit to be honest.
For this term my classes are Rennaissance Literature (which seems to be what you're doing too, I just finished The Duchess of Malfi this morning), 19thC Literature, Scriptwriting, Film Studies, Political Economy & Globalisation, and Critical Theory. I'm 'currently' reading The Duchess of Malfi, Madame Bovary, The Definitive Guide to Screenwriting, The Cinema Book, The Cultural Studies Reader & Heart of Darkness for each of them respectively - and that's just for this week. :( I've got a disgraceful amount of reading to do this term...
I did Romanticism last year, and while I thought it was pretty good, I thought the motifs got a tad repetitive. Frankenstein is a good read, it was written by the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote 'A Vindication of the Rights of Women' which is in that Great Ideas collection (and is also a load of bollocks, enjoy it)!
I shared your opinion on cinema some time ago, but after getting into it now I can safely say it's my favourite class. There's a lot more to it than meets the eye.
Hope you're enjoying the poetry! I fucking hate(d) it, I'm not really into overly abstract things. Coleridge is pretty absurd.
It's kinda annoying because the only two essays that have to be done before Christmas are on poetry. A 2000 word essay on Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience for Romanticism, and a 1500 word essay on sonnets (I assume) for literature.
Your reading list looks quite heavy! At the moment I only have to read new novels for two units, and that's only every fortnight. I finished Treasure Island a couple of hours ago, and that means I've got the whole weekend to read Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway). Though, I'll try and get some more reading done obviously.
Your course sounds interesting. Though, I'm not sure whether I'd like to study journalism or film formally - despite having a strong interest in both. I'd rather read a book by Harold Evans, or the newspapers themselves. Or, talk to the editors and writers themselves.
My interests in English are mainly theoretical. I've a passion for linguistics which is completely separate from the course but my lecturers appreciate the “real world” references I tend to make to prove things. I also like travel writing, and I'm becoming fond of reading essays.
Welcome to Uni :P
that's basically the case with any book any of my profs tell us to read
Would've sold you my copy, got no use for it :\
good books though - ill stick to my library card.