Well, I only read Mein Kampf at the request of a close friend, and to be honest, I was sorely disappointed; I had expected to encounter some great revelation or some truth that had evaded me for some time but the whole thing came off as one big ramble. When I mentioned this to her, she said that it sounded much better when read in German (a fat lot of help that was to me!), and that the English translation was horrid. I guess I'd better learn the language so I can see whether this book stinks in English *and* German!
Heh...go ahead and read it if you want. After you've done that, never again will you be able to look at Hitler in the same light; he will be forever tainted and he will always be that racist imbecile who can't write worth a damn.
Good ol' Karl may have had a few 'issues' of his own but at least you *know* that the guy had it where it counted (I mean, the guy was a veritable library of knowledge! Too bad his knowledge of human nature apparently wasn't quite up to par...).
Like Marx, when I didn't have a job a couple years ago, I used to mooch off of my parents and I'd spend entire days at the local library; I'd just grab books off the shelves, almost at random, and read them. I'm sure I'd learn more from actually attending classes at a college or university, but you just can't beat the thrill of taking some novel or biography off the rack, perusing it, storing the knowledge, and spending a good deal of time reflecting on what you've just read. I remember blowing two weeks trying to read the Talmud and another one looking at Polish poetry (and 2 months looking at folklore and classic literature from various european nations); to be sure, I was being almost entirely unproductive, but I'm pretty sure that I learned something from the whole experience...well, I hope I did anyhow *
I'd love to head off to college at some point and get a real education...
not yet, but I'd like to...I just managed to read his biography before I started looking at other stuff (I'm very disorganized with by book-reading; I'll often start reading one thing, and then I'll open another one before I've finished the first, and I'll keep doing that until I'm reading 7 books at the same time and none of them get finished). I just finished LoTR and Sturluson's Edda so I might get started on that pretty soon, if I can find a copy of it at my library (and why shouldn't it be there? with all the overzealous patriotism going on around here, most people probably wouldn't be caught dead carrying around a book written by a "commie"
.
I'll read almost anything about philosophy, religion, or politics...some of that stuff is just so interesting to me for some unknown reason (and for another unknown reason, I intensely dislike numbers and mathematics).
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