Any good author?

[Philosophos]

So I've been reading lately (a lot) and I understood like half of what I read. It's not like I'm reading Nietzsche-Kant-Descartes combined work, it's something quite simple, but still they just don't make sense.

Anyway any good reads that you read lately or you generally like?

Also if it's not a big deal for you write the most detestable author, the one that whenever you read him/her you want to kill yourself. (just wanting to check something :grin: )

[BIXX]

So I've been reading lately (a lot) and I understood like half of what I read. It's not like I'm reading Nietzsche-Kant-Descartes combined work, it's something quite simple, but still they just don't make sense.

Anyway any good reads that you read lately or you generally like?

Also if it's not a big deal for you write the most detestable author, the one that whenever you read him/her you want to kill yourself. (just wanting to check something :grin: )

Wait, haven't you said before that English isn't your first language? Cause if that's the case then I'd be pretty damn happy to understand a whole half of the shit I read.

[slum]

are you looking for philosophy specifically? seneca, marcus aurelius, boethius, and augustine are all great reads. all i can recommend from later periods is spinoza or nietzsche since i havent read much otherwise

just in general fantastic authors include: cormac mccarthy, james joyce, roberto bolano, voltaire, goethe, joseph conrad, kafka, herman hesse, sherwood anderson, italo calvino.

kafka is the most detestable author.

[Sasha]

i never read a Neil Gaiman book that i didnt like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Gaiman
i'm a total fanboy

[Philosophos]

Wait, haven't you said before that English isn't your first language? Cause if that's the case then I'd be pretty damn happy to understand a whole half of the shit I read.

Yeah english is not my first language but I can understand some things and I've practised a lot here so I believe I understand lots of things (or at least the main idea of what the author has to say).

[Philosophos]

I forgot to add that I'm not just interested in philosophy. You can write about modern politics too (communist of course not liberals or anything like that :grin: ). I hardly find some good authors for politics that use scientific method on what they say and analyze things properly.

[Ceallach_the_Witch]

I recently read The First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and it's a really great book. Solzhenitsyn was probably one of the greatest authors of the 20th century (as far as I'm concerned) and it's a very interesting depiction of a prison/laboratory and its prisoners in late-40's USSR. There are also chapters where Stalin himself is the main character, and it offers an interesting view of what stalin's thoughts might have been like.

[zoot_allures]

So I've been reading lately (a lot) and I understood like half of what I read. It's not like I'm reading Nietzsche-Kant-Descartes combined work, it's something quite simple, but still they just don't make sense.
Advice for reading philosophy:

You have to appreciate that philosophy is an academic subject, and like any other academic subject you're probably not going to be able to just jump into it blind. If you want to start reading philosophy, it's best to start off with a modern introductory book that gives a general overview of the whole subject. Of course, just which introductory book you pick up will depend on your interests. However, a good idea no matter what you ultimately want to pursue might be to buy a guide designed for use on college courses. Any intelligent layperson should be able to follow a good A-level guide. For example, AQA's "Understanding Philosophy for AS Level" (Christopher Hamilton) and "Understanding Philosophy for A2 Level" (Keith Maslin et al) in the major fields of modern Western philosophy. They also include in-depth analyses of Nietzsche's "Beyond Good & Evil" and Descartes' "Meditations", among others.

There are quite a few problems with not doing this: (1) many of the terms used by philosophers have very particular, specific definitions, which can be easy to misinterpret; (2) almost all of philosophy is a response to earlier work - and depends on knowledge of that earlier work to a greater extent than does something like science - so you need to have a good grasp of the historical background; (3) philosophers write for other philosophers, not for laypeople, so they tend to not bother explaining the stuff I noted in (1) and (2); (4) much of philosophy, like any academic subject, is really quite difficult.

It doesn't help that philosophy isn't really one thing. There are many philosophical traditions, with significant differences between them. I adore analytic philosophy; I'm interested in ancient philosophy for purely historical reasons; I don't care for Eastern philosophy; I find most continental philosophy to be not just bad but often literally incomprehensible.


Also if it's not a big deal for you write the most detestable author, the one that whenever you read him/her you want to kill yourself. (just wanting to check something :grin: )
I never read fiction. I could list pretty much any fictional book here.