If I were to choose 10 fiction and 10 non-fiction books to read within the next year to make me a better, more well-rounded conversationalist (for argument's sake, let's say within a college-educated professional audience), what books would give me the most bang for my buck?
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posted by dynamiiiite
on Apr 23, 2013 -
37 answers
Recommendations for Chinese literature that presents average Chinese citizens in context of a modern Chinese urban setting
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posted by TheOtherSide
on Aug 12, 2012 -
4 answers
F. Scott FitzgeraldFilter: "Everyone's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness." I've seen this quote attributed to F. Scott. Did he actually say it?
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posted by toomuchkatherine
on Nov 28, 2011 -
4 answers
In order to prepare a competitive examination, I've got to delve deep into North American counterculture history. What should I read ?
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posted by nicolin
on Feb 8, 2011 -
26 answers
A job for the hive mind: I'm looking for cultural references to antidepressants and other psychoactive drugs (Ritalin, Adderall, etc) from the '90s and '00s: stuff along the lines of Tony Soprano using Prozac in
The Sopranos.
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posted by toomuchkatherine
on Jan 5, 2011 -
32 answers
What are good resources for magazine/journal literacy, maps of the terrain of the periodical world?
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posted by RogerB
on Oct 7, 2010 -
3 answers
Sacrifice, speech, writing and art: I am interested in the different ways in which a sacrifice, a sacrament, a spoken word and a written word act as signifiers. The notion for instance that the sacrament, at the point of its acceptance, is understood as
becoming the signified. What can you tell me / what has been written about the notions of sacrifice and their relationship to speech, art and the technologies of writing?
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posted by 0bvious
on Feb 24, 2010 -
8 answers
I spend a lot of time reading for both work and pleasure yet I have a hard time translating this to my everyday life, for example being able to remember key quotes or even retaining main points of books I have read. Do people here have any tips for retaining and utilizing content read in books, especially novels?
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posted by the foreground
on Jan 8, 2010 -
18 answers
I am looking for writings on
mimesis in regards new, digital, hypertext and hypermedial technologies and cultures.
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posted by 0bvious
on Feb 16, 2009 -
7 answers
Literary Darwinism: A relatively new field of evolutionary psychology / literary theory. What has recently been written in argument
against it?
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posted by 0bvious
on Jun 3, 2008 -
7 answers
What one book will allow others to gain the truest insight into the soul of each city or region
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posted by reenum
on May 6, 2008 -
16 answers
Can anyone reccomend good books, or documentaries, about Australia (history, culture, politics) written by people from outside Australia?
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posted by Jimbob
on Feb 7, 2008 -
11 answers
Wikipedia posits the mid- to late-1800s as the time when we first started seeing time travel in literature. Are there older examples? Is there an analog from antiquity -- some similar concept articulated in an ancient culture or mythology? A folk tale?
posted by blueshammer
on Nov 20, 2006 -
13 answers
Twins of the world! This is a question for you: what media (books, movies, documentaries, poems, photographs, paintings etc), fiction or non, do you feel best expresses your own experience as a twin? All lengthy anecdotes welcome :-) [Here's your opportunity to deny or confirm the suspicion that all twins love the
Polish Brothers.]
posted by ibeji
on Nov 29, 2005 -
22 answers
