Hello, I thought this might be useful. After scratching my head for gift ideas on education, and scrolling a raft of Amazon pages, I finalised on this Penguin 20-book box set titled "Great Ideas" to gift a geeky teenager. I liked the variety in the compilation. Each book is around 100 pages which is a decent introduction to classic and modern works. And the price for the bundle is reasonable. I lightly skimmed and reviewed (not read) and was satisfied with the collection. Also, Hazlitt's essay on "On the Pleasure of Hating" and Berger's "Why look at animals" were very unique. That Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise - Jorge Luis Borges and On the Nature of War - Carl von Clausewitz would introduce to fascinating authorial voices. I have trawled the Net to gift a world-class referential collection with must-read works before one finishes studies so that they do not grow up like their boorish aunt who struggles much to understand all those literary references of her friends. In return, I might hear "wow, Aunt Ira" or "you are so boring, Aunt Ira." I loved the collection so much that I wish someone had gifted me when I was in school/college. Thought it might be useful if anyone is searching for fun and intense gift ideas for kids. In case you know other publications, please add to the thread.
Series One 01. On the Shortness of Life - Seneca 02. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius 03. Confessions - Augustine 04. The Inner Life - Thomas à Kempis 05. The Prince - Niccolò Machiavelli 06. On Friendship - Michel de Montaigne 07. A Tale of a Tub - Jonathan Swift 08. The Social Contract - Jean-Jacques Rousseau 09. The Christians and the Fall of Rome - Edward Gibbon 10. Common Sense - Thomas Paine 11. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Mary Wollstonecraft 12. On the Pleasure of Hating - William Hazlitt 13. The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 14. On the Suffering of the World - Arthur Schopenhauer 15. On Art and Life - John Ruskin 16. On Natural Selection - Charles Darwin 17. Why I Am So Wise - Friedrich Nietzsche 18. A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf 19. Civilization and Its Discontents - Sigmund Freud 20. Why I Write - George Orwell Series Two 21. The First Ten Books - Confucius 22. The Art of War - Sun Tzu 23. The Symposium - Plato 24. Sensation and Sex - Lucretius 25. An Attack on the Enemy of Freedom - Cicero 26. The Revelation of St John the Divine and The Book of Job 27. Travels in the Land of Kublai Khan - Marco Polo 28. The City of Ladies - Christine de Pizan 29. How to Achieve True Greatness - Baldesar Castiglione 30. Of Empire - Francis Bacon 31. Of Man - Thomas Hobbes 32. Urne-Burial - Sir Thomas Browne 33. Miracles and Idolatry - Voltaire 34. On Suicide - David Hume 35. On the Nature of War - Carl von Clausewitz 36. Fear and Trembling - Søren Kierkegaard 37. Where I Lived, and What I Lived For - Henry David Thoreau 38. Conspicuous Consumption - Thorstein Veblen 39. The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus 40. Eichmann and the Holocaust - Hannah Arendt Series Three 41. In Consolation to his Wife - Plutarch 42. Some Anatomies of Melancholy - Robert Burton 43. Human Happiness - Blaise Pascal 44. The Invisible Hand - Adam Smith 45. The Evils of Revolution - Edmund Burke 46. Nature - Ralph Waldo Emerson 47. The Sickness Unto Death - Søren Kierkegaard 48. The Lamp of Memory - John Ruskin 49. Man Alone with Himself - Friedrich Nietzsche 50. A Confession - Leo Tolstoy 51. Useful Work versus Useless Toil - William Morris 52. The Significance of the Frontier in American History - Frederick Jackson Turner 53. Days of Reading - Marcel Proust 54. An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe - Leon Trotsky 55. The Future of an Illusion - Sigmund Freud 56. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - Walter Benjamin 57. Books v. Cigarettes - George Orwell 58. The Fastidious Assassins - Albert Camus 59. Concerning Violence - Frantz Fanon 60. The Spectacle of the Scaffold - Michel Foucault Series Four 61. Tao Te Ching - Lao-Tzu 62. Writings from the Zen Masters - Various 63. Utopia - Thomas More 64. On Solitude - Michel de Montaigne 65. On Power - William Shakespeare 66. Of the Abuse of Words - John Locke 67. Consolation in the Face of Death - Samuel Johnson 68. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? - Immanuel Kant 69. The Executioner - Joseph de Maistre 70. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater - Thomas de Quincey 71. The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion - Arthur Schopenhauer 72. The Gettysburg Address - Abraham Lincoln 73. Revolution and War - Karl Marx 74. The Grand Inquisitor - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 75. On A Certain Blindness in Human Beings - William James 76. An Apology for Idlers - Robert Louis Stevenson 77. Of the Dawn of Freedom - W. E. B. Du Bois 78. Thoughts of Peace in an Air Raid - Virginia Woolf 79. Decline of the English Murder - George Orwell 80. Why Look at Animals? - John Berger Series Five 81. The Tao of Nature - Chuang Tzu 82. Of Human Freedom - Epictetus 83. On Conspiracies - Niccolò Machiavelli 84. Meditations - René Descartes 85. Dialogue Between Fashion and Death - Giacomo Leopardi 86. On Liberty - John Stuart Mill 87. Hosts of Living Forms - Charles Darwin 88. Night Walks - Charles Dickens 89. Some Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Charles Mackay 90. The State as a Work of Art - Jacob Burckhardt 91. Silly Novels by Lady Novelists - George Eliot 92. The Painter of Modern Life - Charles Baudelaire 93. The 'Wolfman' - Sigmund Freud 94. The Jewish State - Theodor Herzl 95. Nationalism - Rabindranath Tagore 96. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin 97. We Will All Go Down Fighting to the End - Winston Churchill 98. The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise - Jorge Luis Borges 99. Some Thoughts on the Common Toad - George Orwell 100. An Image of Africa - Chinua Achebe
Whooo. I want one for myself. Wonder where I can find one at! I found this on amazon and it isn't the same but I would buy the kindle version if that was available!
Hi Iravati, I always admire your language skills and general knowledge . can you please suggest some good books for english grammer and written communication. Thanks in advance
Whoo hoo hoo to you! The "Great Ideas" box set may not be available in your region. Don't go for the classics set. Is anyone reading classics like the Dickens and Eliot these days? In the past, we skimmed those books because of populism. You must read Dickens, from a bespectacled teacher karke! Then in some book club everyone raves about Olive Schreiner, ken? I wanted a collection of books whose characters and premises are a trite in social discussions. Books whose themes and tropes are still softly prevalent and not too pretentious. I liked this ragbag because of the variety. Not too starchy, not too frivolous. I don't know how to put it. Say books which will lend themselves very well with resounding liners that can be ingratiated in nice-sounded college essays for B-schools. Crooked Aunt Ira!
Hello, sweetsmiley! First, not out of humility, but of candour, let me refute your impression of me. I am the loud cockatoo who writes pretentious and Erasmian tracts in a social forum. My language is noticed not that it is fetching but it is rattling. When others sensibly foregather, I howl in a corner in a swoonish tongue. I appropriated this social forum as my wanton slate to dump my erratic thoughts. So the difference in language is imputed to my intent. I scratch wild whereas others are sober and discreet. My language froths and welters and whatnots ...because ...because I write gibberish stuff and you can write such stuff only in a possessed tongue. My language skills stand out because they are feral and unglossy. Re: Grammar, I don't know many Grammar books. I was NOT a studious kid. I passed, good enough. However, I enjoyed and learnt from television — be it language or trivia or a bad joke. In general, I would not recommend dry grammar books to the kids of this generation. Rather invest in broadsheet media like Slate and Guardian which are renowned for good language. Cultivate the habit of scanning good blogs and responsible media in kids. Language is rarely instilled, but absorbed. Read good stuff to mirror the good language acquired with selective indulgence. Also, grammar books flash all the rules and guidelines and make me giddy. I use grammar books only as a reference when in doubt. That way I would remember the consulted rule with a context. 476 rules in one go will fry my brain! For adults, I would recommend Daily Writing Tips as a lazy activity. Swish ..swish ...during the commute. The English I learnt back in India was formal and stodgy. I dub it "customer service" English because only customer service crew use the flat and formal English. I fancy the lively and hopscotched corporate English where one is not beheaded for a missing punctuation mark or a grossly inflected noun. Corporate English in my firm is vibrant and fluid. Language should avoid enslavement by the grammar rules written by dodgy mavens as a rigid baseline but be seeded in contemporary vibes and fluent standards. I don't want to mislead you hence I have fewer recommendations on language at large.
Keeping an eye on the release of plausible box set of Steven Isserlis. Loved both this witty books on grand composers. Across both these books, he spills beans and stew about Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Stravinsky, Haydn, Schubert, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Faure. I loved the structure of each chapter. Section 1 - Introduction Section 2 - What to listen to Section 3 - Facts of life (trivia and fun facts) ... the reason I favored these books over other children's books is the narrative. The facts are not strewn incoherently but are held together by a narrative which makes those facts easy to recall. I wish the mewling babies in my family grow up soon as their Aunt is readying to spank them: 'listen you punters, it is pronounced moats- art and not moz-aart! Got it? Why Amadeus? "Mozart’s parents took their choice of names seriously; Mozart’s full name was –take a deep breath –Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. So that they wouldn’t waste hours just calling him in for tea, his parents just called him ‘Wolfgang’ –or ‘Woferl’ for (even) short( er). Later, Mozart replaced the Greek name ‘Theophilus’ with one meaning the same (‘ Beloved of God’) in Latin, ‘Amadeo’. From about 1770, he made himself sound Italian by calling himself ‘Wolfgango Amadeo’, and then from 1777 he went a bit French, styling himself ‘Wolfgang Amadé’! Nowadays he’s usually referred to as ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’…" -- "Why Beethoven Threw the Stew: And Lots More Stories About the Lives of Great Composers" by Steven Isserlis