Saturday, November 22, 2008

Bohemian Must Reads


One of the pre-reqs of being a boho is literature. Even for those bohos whose primary art is not writing, reading is a M-U-S-T.

The lovely Laren Stover of Bohemian Manifesto includes a section of books that all bohos must read. Because of this crappy economy and the crappy libraries in my area, I can't find/buy a great deal of these books so I turned to the ever lovely Gutenberg! No, not the guy who made the printing press and the Bible. I fell in love with the site Gutenberg because it has a ton of hard to find classics for free. *squee*

Sooo, to save you all the trouble, I found some of Stover's boho must reads & a few of my own.

Scenes de la Boheme - Henry Murger This isn't an optional read!!

The Devil's Dictionary - Ambrose Bierce (If you haven't read it already, I recommend An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge. Soooo haunting!)

The Communist Manifest - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (Everyone should read this; not just bohos.)

Therese Raquin - Emile Zola (Stover recommends Nana as well but Gutenberg didn't have an English translation.)

Les Fleurs du Mal - Charles Baudelaire (Even if you can't read it in French, do so anyways. The beauty of the poems in their original language cannot be found in the translations.)

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (I recommend Hernani as well.)

Anything by Poe.

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

Anything by Byron.

Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

Candide - Voltaire

The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

Cousin Betty - Honore Balzac

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

Wasteland - T.S. Eliot

What is lamentably missing from this list is the works of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Rimbaud. Gutenberg currently does not have any of their works.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008