Jump to content
Unofficial Mills

i want to be well read


E*F*4L

Recommended Posts

i have read book on & off for years, but in i dunno the past twelve months i have been reading a lot more, autobiography's, physics & quantum mechanics books, normal fiction books, Shakespeare through to Jezza Clarkson.

however i often see on quiz shows questions that come up about a book or author & when the contestant gets the answer correct, i think "how the hell did they know that" because it just seemed so obvious to them & they give the impression that everyone should know the answer, so i was talking to a chap i work with & he said they are probably "the classics" & have had to read them at uni etc, are there such book as 'classics' & if so what are they as i would like to read more older type books but the good ones, anyone have any opinions on this or advice :)

:)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

At this moment in time I can recommend Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell. Oh, and JD Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye. Superb.

Hey you! You're not allowed to pinch The Catcher in the Rye. My alias is infact J.D. Salinger! Seriously though Emma's right, it is a classic. I don't read many books more than once, but I've read this at least five times. It's an easy read too - albeit pretty emotional. My copy of it was 'acquired' from the school library around 20 years ago. 'Tis very dog-eared indeed.

'To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity'.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My favourite classics would include:

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre

Hard Times - Charles Dickens

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I really should read more classics as well, trouble is I never get the time to actually do any reading that isn't related to my uni course. I started reading On The Road by Jack Kerouac a few weeks ago but I've been so busy lately that I haven't picked it up in about 2 weeks.

So save the last dance

For me my love 'cause I

I see you as an angel freshly fallen from the sky...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

thanx peeps :)

this is the list i have made so far;

The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger

Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell

1984 - George Orwell

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

£33 from Amazon, are they a good selection ? :)

& i also saw this :shock:

loads of cheap books on amazon look at all them & only £2 !

my aim is to put Steven Fry to shame when it comes to knowledge of books :P

:)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's not a classic as such, but Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss is a very interesting read, as are some of Steven Pinker's books.

You could also check out William Golding's Lord Of The Flies as I'm pretty sure that could be considered a "classic". Oh, and then all of the obvious classics like Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

Alouette...deployer les ailes;

Alouette...plumerai les ailes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Books/authors I've really enjoyed most recently:

Jonathan Coe - What a Carve Up. Think Serin might like this too.

English Passengers - Matthew Kneale, this book simply blew me away!

Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

John Irving - esp Son of the Circus, The Cider House Rules and The World According to Garp. This chap is such a good story teller - he's a modern day Dickens.

Michael Chabon - Wonder boys (funnily enough the film of this is pretty good too) and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

William Goldman - The Princess Bride. totally I adore this book.

Older/Classics:

Dickens - Hard Times, Great Expectations, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities and many others.

Shakespeare - You have to decide what you're looking for; Do you want a comedy, tragedy, Roman play, History etc.? I adore the comedies, so I'd recommend Much Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night. However Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello and Coriolanus are also well worth checking out. You have to act them out in your head as you read them though, even better if you read them out loud. Not to be advised on public transport!

Chaucer - a bit trickier, but The Canterbury Tales are absolutely priceless.

Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice and Sense and SEnsibility esp.

Oscar Wilde - anything. I think he was a true genius, all of my UM quotes are from him.

This may take me some time. I haven't even finished on the literature and I'm already starting to think about poetry!

I'm going to have to get back to you on this.

Edit: Very good selection so far Alan.:)

'To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity'.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Definitely agree with Oscar Wilde, I read The Picture Of Dorian Gray last year and loved it.

Thinking back to the books I did for GCSE English Lit, I'd recommend Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck as something everyone should read at least once before they die. Something else we did in school that I really enjoyed was The Canterbury Tales, some of them are surprisingly rude but they're all very funny. As a sort of 'alternative' classic I'd also recommend A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess - amazing film, amazing book, and one that'll really get you thinking.

So save the last dance

For me my love 'cause I

I see you as an angel freshly fallen from the sky...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ooh I second The World According To Garp. Proper love that book.

Thomas Hardy - The Mayor Of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure and Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Amy Tan - The Joy Luck Club

JM Coetze - Disgrace

Chuck Palahniuk - Fight Club. Far far better than the film.

Monica Ali - Brick Lane.

Elizabeth Gaskell - North and South

Cosi by Louis Nowra is a play and ver' good. As is any play by Willy Russell, especially Blood Brothers.

If you want poetry then Thomas Gray is good.

Oh and I always recommend Wuthering Heights, for I luff it.

There/ They're/ Their. Different words.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

thanx peeps :)

this is the list i have made so far;

The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger

Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell

1984 - George Orwell

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

£33 from Amazon, are they a good selection ? :)

& i also saw this :shock:

loads of cheap books on amazon look at all them & only £2 !

my aim is to put Steven Fry to shame when it comes to knowledge of books :P

they arrived today :D

got the bits for my bookcase also & will start it this weekend :)

:)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You could try E.M Forster. I'm studying two of his books for AS level English Lit - "A Passage to India" and "Howard's End". They're extremely well written classics, but have remarkably little plot! Forster seemed to like to write books discussing the times he was writing in, rather than writing a book with a thrilling plot/story, whatever you want to describe a plot as. They're a bit boring sometimes, but then you come across a passage which is incredibly well written, usually a little bit of sarcasm, or, in some cases, a lot of sarcasm, as I say, they're very well written.

I'm also reading some H. G Wells stuff. Whilst they're also classics, I find them really different from others, a bit more sci-fi, but also talking about human nature etc. Good reads really, probably more entertaining than Forster, but probably less brilliant at the same time, if it makes sense. I suppose you'd have to read some E.M Forster to grasp what I'm on about :P

The poster formerly known as Robbo

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Good choices Alan! One of my favourite books is Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, I would definitely regard it as a modern classic.

Oooh I think that was also a radio drama, hehe. And a film! I think the film came after the book, shall have to check them out!

Alouette...deployer les ailes;

Alouette...plumerai les ailes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Brighton Rock was also a song by Queen if my memory serves me correctly. But that's slightly off-topic.

If you REALLY want to be well-read then you could try ploughing your way through James Joyce's Ulysses, it's widely considered one of the greatest masterpieces in English literature. But it's horribly long and will probably take you a good few weeks/months to get through in its entirety. I should read it myself one day really... after I'm done with uni though, haha.

So save the last dance

For me my love 'cause I

I see you as an angel freshly fallen from the sky...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

See I don't really find most of these 'classics' that interesting or readable myself. I've read Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, which is pretty readable and has a good story to it as well as being very culturally significant given the number of terms in use in modern society that are from it. It's quite short and definitely worth reading.

On the other hand, I ploughed my way through D. H. Lawrence's Women In Love last year because my mum thought I should read it since it's set sort of round here. It was very very hard going with really long chapters where nothing really happened but he just described people's personalities and pasts. Most of the action was pretty slow too. So I'm not so keen on reading something just because it's "a classic".

I like more contemporary literature. Perhaps even postmodern. My favourite author is Douglas Coupland.

'Forget happiness I'm fine, I'll forget everything in time'

Link to comment
Share on other sites

im reading Falling Off the Edge: Globalization, World Peace and Other Lies - Alex Perry

This is an exhilarating journey to some of the planet's remotest and most dangerous places to explore the sharp end of globalization.Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, international corporations and governments have embraced the idea of a global village: a shrinking, booming world in which everyone benefits. What if that's not the case? Alex Perry, award-winning foreign correspondent, travels from the South China Sea to the highlands of Afghanistan to the Sahara to see first-hand globalization at the sharp end - and it's not pretty.Whether it's Shenzen, China's boom city where sweatshops pay under-age workers less than $4 a day, or Bombay, where the gap between rich and poor means million-dollar apartments overlook million-people slums, or on the high seas with the pirates of southeast Asia who prey on the world's central trade artery, or South Africa, where Mandela's dream for a Rainbow Nation is being crushed by a new economic apartheid, Perry demonstrates, vividly and chillingly, that for every winner in our brave new world, there are hundreds of millions of losers. And be they Chinese army veterans, Indian Maoist rebels or the Somali branch of al Qaeda, they are all very, very angry."Falling Off the Edge" is an adrenaline-charged journey through the developing world, which reveals with clarity that globalization starts wars. Far from living in a time of peace and prosperity, Perry suggests, the boom is about to go bang.

very good book, especially if you are at Uni & doing poiltics or economics, if not its a very interesting book & a eye opener :shock: to say the least.

:)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

im reading Falling Off the Edge: Globalization, World Peace and Other Lies - Alex Perry

very good book, especially if you are at Uni & doing poiltics or economics, if not its a very interesting book & a eye opener :shock: to say the least.

It sounds like an interesting book. I'd like to point out that it's all in the realm of Geography.

No Logo by Naomi Klein is an interesting book about the negatives of globalisation that I read last year for one of my modules.

'Forget happiness I'm fine, I'll forget everything in time'

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Posts

    • When Scott and Chris announced their departure from R1, I remember there was lots of speculation about who would take over the 1pm slot. Matt and Mollie were talked about a lot on here, and at the time I really didn't rate them as a replacement. A few years on, I see that I was totally wrong. They are such a good pairing, and it's the same kind of duo as Scott and Chris, in that they are real life friends, who spend time together in their real lives, which really does come across on air. True friends having a laugh together, and everyone is invited is how it feels to me now. I never thought about it before, but I agree with @coffeeandgin that Mollie is the Scott of the duo - pop obsessed and maybe a litte ditsy, but so funny, and in need of someone to anchor to or bounce off.  It seems that Matt is the kind of Chris of the duo then in that comparison, the one with the ideas, but also needs another person to make the magic happen. I know I'm outside of the R1 demographic, and maybe Dean and Vicky were meant to be younger and fresher, but I'm sure in my younger years I would have preferred to listen to two people who had a genuine connection and could really make each other laugh, as well as have the listeners laugh along. That was the Scott and Chris factor for me, and I think the only pair that come close to that now are Matt and Mollie.
    • Find Noah Kahan is just busker music. I mean I was pleasantly surprised that Ezra collective were in session for Jack Saunders on his new shoes and he is playing their latest track wouldn’t have thought few years back that at 6pm in the evening jazz music would be played. I hope if can get the green light and launch the 00s/10s station that the focus is on more new music be it pop mainstream and alternative genres on the main 1
    • Scott's show is perfect for the office. If Matt and Mol have a podcast I'd listen to that. All the fun without the Gen Z rappers. 
    • Similar to SZA’s Kill Bill, the word “kill” had been initially cut out of Taylor Swift’s Fortnight. But it seems like they are now playing an unedited version.
    • Also hopefully won't get my head bitten off for this but I'd say of the current Radio 1 DJs the one arguably most similar to Scott Mills's latter time on Radio 1 would be Mollie. I'm not saying she's as good as Scott was to be clear but she is that sort of vibe. 'Future Pop' is exactly the sort of music Scott would be championing and you can tell Mollie has the same passion for it that Scott did. There's that Party Anthems link too - a show Matt & Mol do that previously Scott did and they bring a similar energy to how Scott did that makes it a fun listen. Matt & Mollie seem to just have that natural connection with the listeners that Scott & Chris did that you can't manufacture.
    • I find at the minute I'm a bit of a nomad when it comes to radio stations. Often the Radio 1 playlist really doesn't appeal to me these days and I did wonder is it just me tiring of new music but then I'll listen to Future Pop and Party Anthems and there's loads of tunes on there that I love and they're excellent listens but just too few of those make it to the playlist. Radio 2 may arguably be more to my taste music wise but also often feels too rooted on the past. Plus much of the content just doesn't appeal to me and verges on the 'mumsy' side. Plus Radio 2's new music can feel very 'middle of the road' - just because I don't enjoy some of the Radio 1 new stuff it doesn't mean I want Take That & Will Young as 'new music'. For me currently if I'm tuning in for radio it'll be Jordan North on Capital Breakfast, on Radio 1 Matt & Mollie, (if Jamie is off)  Going Home and Sam & Danni plus there's also Capital Dance and Mistajam. They all hit the mark for me in a way other shows don't.
    • Matt & Mol for me. For those that enjoyed Scott's Radio 1 show, Matt & Mollie are the natural successors (even more so than Scott's Radio 2 show) - two best mates doing a fun show packed full of content For one thing Matt & Mol inherited two of Scott's ex producers in Amy & Helena. Some Matt & Mollie features you could easily imagine Scott doing e.g. Matt vs Mollie and some feel near identical (can see 'Battletracks' taking the old 'Bangers' slot as it feels heavily based on that feature). Also while this may be down to being a weekend show Matt & Mol's show does seem to lean in a more pop direction and seems to deviate from the playlist more than some other shows- which helps as the Radio 1 playlist can be quite marmite and get samey very quickly. Something just doesn't hit the mark for me with Scott on Radio 2. It feels like it's aimed at somebody about a decade older than me and relies heavily on Noughties nostalgia. Scott too I feel works best with somebody else to work off and is missing that fun element he had with Chris and previously Chappers. It's fine but not something I'll go out my way to listen to.  
    • Random idea time: condense all the throwback shows into one three hour show from 10am to 1pm on a Saturday, get Katie Thistleton back to host it (as Charlie does with Dance Anthems on a Saturday), call it “Radio 1’s Bottomless Brunch with Katie Thistleton” and just have 3 hours of throwbacks from across the decades, not just 00s or 10s, just a mix of everything. The occasional 90s anthem, tunes from the early 2020s, just 3 hours of pure feel good
    • I think it's great the amount of choice out there right now. I could happily listen to Greg or Jordan in the morning, Going Home or Huw Stephens in the evening, or Scott and Matt and Mollie in afternoons.  Still a few times when I'm channel hopping but maybe that's healthy to check out what's around.  As that research pointed out, Scott is good for minimal distractions. If you want some chaos I dare say it'll be Matt and Mollie offering that.  Plenty of my friends say it's the Radio 1 playlist that puts them off, even if they like the DJs. So Radio 2 is more preferable. 
    • I quite quickly gave up on Scott’s show on R2 as I realised it wasn’t my kind of vibe. I do listen to the Scott Mills weekly to catch up, because I still think Scott is great, but there is just something missing (for example, he played out some clips recently of the old sleep recording app from the R1 days, and didn’t play ‘go and open the window Garry’ - or if he did, it didn’t make it to the podcast.) I don’t see them changing it now or making it any ‘younger’ than it is.   Matt & Mollie in the afternoon is something that I’m really looking forward to. They are such an interesting and funny listen. It has given me a different dilemma though, as 1pm has been the perfect time for me to catch up on the Capital breakfast show and takes me perfectly to the end of my working day, so now I’ll probably have to forego listening to that and stick with R1 for Matt & Mollie. These shows need podcasts because it’s already giving me fomo. 
    • Even for the older Radio 1 listeners (of which there are still quite a few) Scott’s show doesn’t feel quite right.  (That’s nothing on Scott who sounds good but more the station sound and content). Since moving to Capital Breakfast I haven’t been listening to much Radio 1.  I always found the shows outside of Breakfast and Drive more wallpaper due to my working day and the show content of RMC and Dean and Vicky so Capital is just background noise to me after enjoying Breakfast.
    • I love Scott but if you're a 20 or 30 something that enjoyed his last few years of Radio 1 the Radio 2 show just doesn't translate. Stars from Neighbours or 90s singers just aren't my cup of tea and I can't get enthused about some has been at Radio 2 in the Park or some country music countdown.  Until that changes I will probably more likely listen to Matt and Mollie.  The Steve Wright fans think Radio 2 has turned into Radio 1 but it has a long way to go to win over the older R1 audience. 
    • Radio 2 brought in Scott to bring the afternoon audience age down, but I feel with Matt and Mollie replacing Dean and Vicky they're going to be competing for a similar audience. Will Scott's show evolve to bring in more listeners or do you think they will be comfortable with the audience they currently have?
    • Yes I'm the same with 6Music. Huw Stephens offers something different. 
    • They are an answer. I do listen to 6 Music quite a bit but kind of feel like it isn’t for me unlike the New Music Fix Daily, Huw Stephens who I’d happily listen to. Think it’s a generational thing and music preference. But it’s like how 1 Xtra cut down Snoochie Shy’s nightly show to just Monday and with Wednesday and Thursday with just playlist programme. I just miss the days of having more choice of that time of night.
×
×
  • Create New...