You put the Bhagavad Gita under fiction? That's rather offensive.
It wasn't meant to be. In fact, its presence in the list is a mistake.
I began by composing a list of books in general. I tried to cover as many genres as
possible, since someone inevitably complains that something is missing...
and because it's fun to have interesting choices. Amongst the titles on the original
list were Gödel, Escher, and Bach, The Bible,
Programming Perl, A Brief History of Time, The Federalist Papers,
and Manufacturing Consent, each of which I imagined would be of interest to some
significant number of people here.
Allowing for non-fiction, though, really threw the gates too wide. History, Philosophy,
Art, Religion, Psychology, and innumerable other fields all deserved representation, many
of which were too difficult to represent succinctly in any case.
So, not long before I posted the poll, I began to consider how to bring it back under
control. After chatting with ailie for a bit (who also was very helpful in bringing
balance to the list) I chose the word 'fiction', elided a bunch of choices, and posted it.
As is now clear, I missed a few. While I don't think anyone's likely to take strong exception
to Njal's presence on the list, I would really be inclined to remove the
Bhagavad Gita. However people have already voted for it, which makes that awkward, too.
I could, I suppose, change the poll topic... but I'm not yet sure to what. 'Epics' certainly
doesn't describe the whole list, and a fair number of people have already said, 'Ew!' to fiction.
In any case, more than a few of these were chosen because, as well as being good representatives
of a genre, I like them... including the two you mention. I suppose I may have slipped on
The Gita because I tend to think of it as I do The Iliad... as an epic.
Of course, it's considerably more than that for many of its readers. My intention was to
bring a good piece of literature up for discussion, not to disparage it.
If I have offended anyone, I apologize. I am open to suggestions as to how best to handle this
faux pas. Perhaps this clarification will suffice. Perhaps not. It's yet early in the life of
this poll, and all things are possible.
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Thanks for the explanation. I wasn't that offended. (Well there is a difference between "stern letter to the editor" offended and "burn your house down" offended. :-) You're right epic doesn't cover the whole range. Gravity's Rainbow in particular is an an anti-epic. How about just literature?
Incidentally two really imaginative and thought-provoking short story collections I''ve read recently are collected works of Jorge Luis Borges and Phillip K. Dick. I'd heartily recommend to monks looking for a good read.
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I am reading the Borges collection now (I'm assuming you mean the Collected Fictions translated by Hurley and published by Penguin) and it is great stuff - although I did have to ask a co-worker to explain a little. It's disconcerting at first to see fiction presented in such a non-fictional manner.
I gave my Dad the Philip K. Dick collection for Christmas this year, and promptly borrowed it to read for myself. Good stuff. The book design is nice too - peek under the dust jacket.
Mea culpa too on The Bhagavad Gita - Petruchio ran the list by me and we both missed it (although I had earlier made him take the Bible off the fiction list!)
(For the record, I voted for Gravity's Rainbow.)
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