ngl this is not what I expected by the title "adult" books lol
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Haha my mind went the same direction as yours. A couple sickos.
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I almost embarrassed myself by admitting to having read the novelization of Long Dong Silver.
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Oh whoops. Maybe could have disambiguated with adult-age book?
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My go to term is “grown up”
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Oh that's good!
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Once a runner by John L Parker jr. I ran in college and our team loved the book and guys got tattoos with quotes from it
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great one
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A Clockwork Orange - I dunno why, but I screenprinted the cover afterwards. Pretty iconic though.
Loved the invented language, with unexpected glossary at the back, and how it somehow empathizing with Alex and his world & love of Beethoven.
The ultraviolent film of Alex and his droogs, directed by Kubrick, really didn't go down well with author Burgess.
I saw it produced on stage and was the only one in a theater of hundreds who stood and clapped - the players appreciated it as if only one stands it officially counts as a standing ovation.
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Great first adult read! I read it as a teenager on my own, then later as a high school senior. All the iconic books of that period seemed to have an anti establishment bent, and this one was maybe the best. I know Burgess didn't love Kubrick's take, but I did.
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The Vampire Armand by Anne Rice. Then a Kurt Vonnegut book...I can't remember which one. The Sirens of Titan?
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My first was Lord of the Flies by William Golding,
An older sibling had the book prescribed at university and told me it was "about kids on an island". Well, I was a kid and it sounded like fun, so I read it.
At 14, I didn't want to believe that kids would actually behave the way Golding described it. Sort of a rude awakening for me.
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Lord of the Flies was actually one of our novel study books in my grade 10 (15-16 year olds) English class. I really enjoyed reading that book. Those boys really went berserk on that island.
Come to think of it, my grade 9 and grade 10 English class teachers were pretty hardcore back then. We read To Kill a Mocking Bird, Watership Down, Romeo and Juliet, in grade 9 (14-15 year olds); and we had McBeth, Lord of the Flies, and one other novel that I forgot about in grade 10. I think it was always 2 novels and 1 Shakespeare for the year in terms of literary studies.
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Cosmos by Carl Sagan. I read it when I was fairly young and didn't understand 99% of it at the time, but that book planted the seeds for my career in physics and probably influenced my life more than any other.
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I read parts of it too, I really liked it, Sagan does a great job showing the beauty in the world through science.
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Does Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park count as an adult book?
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This was mine. I must have been about 12.
Years later I found out that my parents had some concerns about my aptitude in school around this time. When a teacher asked what I was reading and they said Jurassic Park, the teacher said I was fine.
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The Godfather by Mario Puzo. I believe page 29 of the paperback had the big sex scene. Of course that was more impactful to an 8th grader than the violence.
BTW, Keyan's first two were very good. Impressive taste for a 14 year old.
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As a new immigrant from China, my English level was limited, so naturally, my first few "adult" books were in Chinese. My dad had bought some classical Chinese novels and I started to read them initially to try to impress him, but ended up really enjoying reading them.
First book was Journey to the West which I read at 10. I had no clue what the classical poems were talking about, but the Monkey King was just awesome to read as a kid.
Second was Heroes of the Marshes / Water Margin, which had a lot of violence and really caught my attention as a 12 year old.
Third was Romance of the Three Kingdoms which I read at 13. The novel was based on historic characters and historic events during the late Eastern Han dynasty when different warlords were trying to first control the emperor at the time, then eventually fought to become emperor of China themself. It had amazing battles, duels, strategies, deception, heroics, loyalty, betrayal, plot twists and turns and so much more. Because of this novel, I'm still in love and fascinated with the Three Kingdoms Chinese historic era till this day.
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I'd read and enjoyed Journey to the West too (but in my early twenties) - it really is a classic. Roughly the same time I'd read Herman Hess' Sidhartha.
Somehow I don't remember Journey as poetry per se - but prose instead (completely lost in translation from Chinese to English no doubt).
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This is an example of these poems. This one describes a mountain.
There were many many poems, or at least sections of text written in poem form in the original Chinese text, describing scenery, mood, monsters, characters, mood, fights, weapons, etc. etc. Basically anything you can imagine. It seems to be the way the ancient Chinese novelists like to write, because there were lots of these poems in other Chinese classical novels as well. Maybe the translator did not translate the poems in the version that you read?
I actually read Journey to the West 2 more times when I was older, once in my late teens and another time in my mid twenties, where I was able to further appreciate and enjoy the writing, the character building, the story telling, and the wisdom.
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Thanks for the page - that's beginning to ring a bell with me now. I was beginning to wonder if the original was completely written in poem form - both to aid anyone wishing to memorize it and as a way to show if it has been changed - an early sort of checksum hash if you will.
The translation that I read was Waley's abridged translation BTW.
I often wonder if the imagery conveys hidden, esoteric meanings - I know that many religious texts do this; however, I'd imagine that as this combined many elements of comedy and satire, I'd imagine it would be a long stretch for the author to be so multi talented to land that one too.
I'd imagine that the authors of the 16th century, such as Wu Cheng'en and Shakespeare, are streets ahead of any author in our time - I wouldn't be at all surprised if that they could hide such hidden gems in plain sight.
There's an obvious asymmetry to me here that poor readers, such as myself, can't appreciate their mastery - as much as I try.
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I was beginning to wonder if the original was completely written in poem form
No, the original was not completely written in poem form. There were certainly a lot of poems in the book, but most of the text were in paragraph form. Although, the way they write back in the day is different from modern literature; just like how old English texts are different than modern English literature.
Below you can see the same page of the English and Chinese versions and I've highlighted corresponding sections with different colors. As you can see, although these poems gets imbedded into the text, they are all distinct and separate from the texts in paragraph form. Also, a mistake on my part from the previous reply, that poem on the page was talking about a cave, not a mountain.
And yes, I do agree these literary masters from back then were extremely talented, no matter it was Wu Cheng'en or Shakespeare. We don't get a lot of these nowadays, maybe because there are so many distractions around us and it is hard to stay solely focused to produce masterpieces like the classics.
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Phew, the difference between length of the poem's English translation and the original Chinese really is apparent.
I'm trying to imagine how a written language whose characters are glyphs could change a reader's experience.
For instance, would reading a poem written by a bilingual English/Chinese speaker be enhanced when it is written in Chinese (over that same bilingual author's English version)?
However, could there be a negative in that both reader and writer need to know the same pallette of traditional or simplified characters in order to fully benefit?
Though this might be no different from an English speaker utilizing an English dictionary when confronted with an unfamiliar word though.
I'm really finding the whole concept of Chinese characters really fascinating.
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For glyph character languages, I think visually, because every character is the same size and every character is a syllable, it becomes easier to see when a line has more or less characters, or if a line has more or less syllables. That is especially apparent if each line is separated by a line break, where you can just look at a poem and see if each line has the same number of syllables. Compared that to English, I have to read each line to verify the same thing. Also, visually, it looks more uniform with each line being the same length for glyph languages.
Another thing I find interesting is rhyming. When you rhyme in English, you rhyme the last syllable; but when you rhyme in Chinese, you not only rhyme the last syllable, but you also rhyme the tone, because Chinese is a tonal language. As a result, dialects with more tones (i.e. Cantonese with 9 tones) becomes harder to rhyme than dialects with less tones (i.e. Mandarin with 4 tones).
In terms of traditional or simplified characters, stick with the traditional set. To me, traditional characters is the standard and the truth. Simplified characters is just an abomination created by the dictatorial CCP to try to central plan language with their hubris. The CCP successfully created a character set that had shed the traditional wisdom and history, where the characters evolved over time from pictograms; just like how they shed the traditional wisdom and history of Confucianism.
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Linguistics seems to be a really wide subject doesn't it.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge. It's great for me to expand (and really appreciate) my world - and also the world of others...
Thanks for taking me down this fascinating rabbit hole gnilma 😃
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Siddhartha. Was very good read as a 14 year old and even better as an adult.
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The Three Musketeers
I was young (around 10) and was curious can I read 300+ pages book at all
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I think it was ''Steppenwolf'' by Hermann Hesse. Amazing experience
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I have great memories of reading that one.
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Aaah... it really is a deep one. I love Klingsor's last summer even more.
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Does the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy count?
I read so much sci-fi when I was young I honestly can't tell you which was the first grown-up one.
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Rich dad poor dad, richest man in Babylon, think and grow rich, watched the hidden secrets of money all 4 created the foundation
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The Tao of Pooh
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The People of the Deer by Farley Mowat.
I loved his YA fiction and wanted to read Never Cry Wolf which had been made into a movie but my local library didn’t have a copy. People of the deer was in a similar vein so…
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If you mean "grown up" book it was "Papillon". I found it so enthralling, the prose in the first person and the style more like an oral narration, and knowing it's a real story! I guess I was always into stories about freedom. This could be included in a good bitcoiner bibliography.
But it you mean adult like most of you sickos read, it was "Los pecados de Inés de Hinojosa" which was good too. I read that one after watching the tv series with the 2 hottest actresses at the time 😆. The book is fine, but not like the tv series.
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I just wanted to say Margaret Atwood rules. The whole Flood series is awesome. Also forgot about Kavalier and Clay! Another great one. I'll have to read Everything is Illuminated.
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"Introduction To Algorithms" by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein. It was dope.
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Boom, Bust & Echo by Dr. K Foot.
It's a book about demographics.
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one up on wall street - at age 14.
changed my view on money, investing, and how companies work.
yes I ended up working in finance as a result of this book :/
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Good practical advice for a young guy.
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Everyone should read this, not just about war, but how to be a strong leader as well.
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