- Obadiah
- Jonah
- Micah
- Nahum
- Habakkuk
- Zephaniah
- Haggai
- Zechariah
- Malachi
- Matthew
- Mark
- Luke
- Hosea
- Joel
- Amos
- Obadiah
- Jonah
- Micah
- Nahum
- Habakkuk
- Zephaniah
- Haggai
- Zechariah
- Malachi
- Matthew
- Mark
- Luke
Roseanna, by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo
Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler
The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945-1953, by Robert Dallek
Germinal, par Emile Zola
Nothing to Lose, by Lee Childl
The Koran, translated by N.J. Dawood
Follow Me Down, by Shelby Foote
A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, par Marcel Proust
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
One of these days I should write something about the similarities and differences between the Bible and the Koran. I have a number of the sacred books of various civilizations: The Bible, The Koran, The I Ching, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Theogony, and The Epic of Gilgamesh. I'm not entirely sure that the last book counts as sacred, and I'm not entirely sure that Virgil's Aeneid doesn't. I could easily enough get a copy of The Book of the Dead (the Egyptian one) or some of the Hindu works, such as The Rig Veda or The Bhagavad Gita. The old staple direction to "compare and contrast" is still an excellent starting point for an essay.
2 comments:
Does the Iliad count as sacred text? What's your definition?
Interesting point, Agim. I've read a couple of books on Plato's philosophy, one of them by Iris Murdoch, which go into why Plato was critical of poets (see the Ion for an example), and even banned them from the Republic. It seems that, yes, the Iliad and the Odyssey were both used as sacred texts. The Eleusinian Mysteries apparently consisted in large part of chanting passages in unison.
That was Plato's objection. You cannot think critically about a text you have memorized and are recited with a crowd of hundreds to the sound of a lyre or drum. (One could make the same argument about the manner in which medressa students learn the Koran.)
For the ancient Greeks, down to Plato's time, the Iliad was as sacred as the Bible was to the ancient Jews. The big difference is that the Bible contains explicit compilations of law, while the Iliad teaches by example.
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