You know, almost all professors in college of literature recommend Wellek's Literary Theory as a required reading for China students. But I spent a long time reading this book intensively in my freshman year, and then I was extremely depressed about literary theory. It is hard for me to understand why this book with so little information is expressed in such an incomprehensible way, and it will be named as a classic in literary theory and recommended again and again. It took me a long time to understand that there are not only academic background, but also translation reasons and cultural background elements.
For undergraduates, Zhao Yiheng's second-hand Collection of New Criticism is more informative, easier to understand and easier to inspire students' confidence.
You will often hear some books on the Internet, in communication with others, and in the teacher's class, such as Huang Renyu's Fifteen Years of Wanli, Wang Xiaobo's Trilogy of Times, Haruki Murakami's Articles, Calvino's Literary Memorandum for the Next Millennium, Bloom's Western Canon, Freud's Introduction to Psychoanalysis, and even many people will hold them.
Similarly, you will still see 100 required reading recommended by HKU, economics 100 required reading, books recommended by sociology professor Peking University and so on. Reading and sharing are huge.
But in fact, these book lists, which only give the title of the book but don't give any book information, are useless to most people. Yes, those terms and nouns are good and fresh, and those titles and ideas look profound, but as a result, they just think they are smart and don't understand, but they aim too high. Or even the tongue is not bright, give up halfway, and finally only increase your self-confidence.
The very bad thing about most book lists is that they will put some entry-level books and extremely professional books under the same framework for you to choose from, and will not give you any reading order. People who are really interested in learning will find that such a list of books is really useless.
What should a really good book list look like? These three criteria should probably be met: 1. Have a basic introduction to the information of the book, 2. Tell you what reading ability you have to read this book, and 3. What can you get after reading this book? Instead of simply listing books.
Many fields of humanities have their own discourse system. If you haven't entered this discourse system before, I'm sorry, it's hard for you to understand what this book is talking about.
People who understand science will naturally think that "people who don't even understand gravity can't understand quantum mechanics", but for the humanities, many people always think that they can reach the sky in one step. Unfortunately, this is wrong. Many people think that no matter what books are recommended, readers can easily dabble in the humanities field, but I can only say that this idea is unrealistic. If you read Kant's Critique of Practical Reason without knowing anything about the background of western philosophy before, you may not understand what this book is talking about, what problems it is trying to solve and why.
A bad book list will not lead you into other fields, or they will confuse your eyes with those seemingly abstruse theoretical terms. Or you will feel extremely frustrated after spending a lot of time and energy, and you will get nothing.
Let me share my experience, and you can also be your own fitness instructor-WeChat official account "Chen Bailing's soy sauce table" ID: soychen 0 1.