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Position:Home>Books & Authors> What essential books should every home have ?Question: What essential books should every home have !? Thesaurus!. Science!. Arts!. Religion!. Philosophy!. Gardening!. History!. Atlas!. Factfinder!. Humour!. What specific books would you recommend!? (I'm thinking reference books, but there might be a piece of fiction that's essential!.) Www@QuestionHome@Com Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Thesaurus Dictionary Bible Atlas Either The Joy of Cooking or From Julia Child's Kitchen Book of Home Repair Book of First Aid Sun Tzu's The Art of War The Kama SutraWww@QuestionHome@Com Those that you mentioned are great, don't forget a dictionary!. As for fiction goes: all of John Steinbeck's, Animal Farm, Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a good collection of Greek Mythology, The Divine Comedy, To Kill a Mockingbird, a solid collection of Edgar Allen Poe's work!.!.!.I could do this all day, so I'll stop!. Oh, and if you're at my house I've got every book that Christopher Moore has ever written, he's one of my favorites!.Www@QuestionHome@Com I have a complete set of Encyclopedias which I would be lost without also my Dictionary and Thesaurus!. Reference books are always handy but If you want the Classics such as The complete works of Shakespeare or Charles Dickens novels etc!. as well, then you had better get a big bookcase to store them all on!Www@QuestionHome@Com In the internet age you don't need many but I find I need a few key cookbooks (I like Paula Deen, Better Homes and Gardens, and Better Crocker), and I have to have the Jane Austen complete works, Some Charlotte Bronte, The Harry Potter Series, Classics like Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll etc!. I like to have a little Sci Fi, Madeliene L'Engle and Ursula Le Guin and maybe to top it off Stephen King for Horror!.Www@QuestionHome@Com - Bible - The Bhagavad Gita - Don Quixote - The Apology of Socrates - The Complete works of Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Edgar Allen Poe - Grimm's Fairy Tales - The Encyclopedia of Creative Cooking - Finding Darwin's God - a good dictionary - the A Wrinkle in Time Series by Madeleine Le'Engle - The Illiad and the Odyssey - The Epic of Gilgamesh - BeowulfWww@QuestionHome@Com Nonfiction: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Gibbon The Golden Bough - Frazer Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Nietzsche The Bible The Bhagavad Gita The Hero With a Thousand Faces - Campbell The Republic - Plato Relativity: The Special and General Theory - Einstein The Histories - Herodotus The Art of War - Sun Tzu Fiction: The Iliad and the Odyssey - Homer Metamorphises- Ovid Don Quixote - Cervantes The Divine Comedy - Dante Paradise Lost - Milton Ulysses - Joyce The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky Complete works of ShakespeareWww@QuestionHome@Com A set of Jane Austen books!. A dictionary!. A few "For Dummies" books are a must!. They're life savers!. The occasional child's book, just in case!. An encyclopedia!. Maybe a few manga volumes!. Harry Potter!.!. And a reliable cookbook!.Www@QuestionHome@Com Good Housekeeping Cookery Book is an excellent basic book!. Chambers Biographical Dictionary will tell you all about pretty much any person of note who ever existed so is a great source of info!. Those are my 2 suggestions!. Www@QuestionHome@Com The Bible!. a set of Encyclopedias!. If there are kids; like one of those kid encyclopedias!. Www@QuestionHome@Com Anything which has pages the consistency of toilet paper!.Www@QuestionHome@Com First Aid Book Dictionary & Thesarus Cooking books DIY Book Www@QuestionHome@Com Bartletts Familiar QuotationsWww@QuestionHome@Com DICTIONARY!!!!Www@QuestionHome@Com Complete works of Shakespeare!.Www@QuestionHome@Com Cookbooks, dictionary Yellow Pages!. Oh, and one to hold the door open!.Www@QuestionHome@Com bible dictionary 1st aid book Www@QuestionHome@Com Mark Twain's and Charles Dickens' books!. And a really good cookbook!.!.!.!.!.Www@QuestionHome@Com If you are a Christian then it is The Holy Bible!.Www@QuestionHome@Com The Tao Te Ching, The Art of War, The Art of Peace, The Book of Proverbs and the Song of Solomon (just those two, everything else sucks), The Analects of Confucius, The Writings of Mencius, Yoga; For Men Only, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Book of Five Rings and finally, Training Manual of the Dragon Style, by Yang Ming!. It doesn't exist yet but it might! I think, there should be a complete martial arts training manual, that covers everything!. From basics, to forms, to body toughening drills, with a disclaimer at the begining stating that the person should seek instruction!. In China's past, there HAVE been cases where men learned Kung Fu entirely from studying manuals, and became masters in fact, the real reason martial artists in China did not like to put together manuals, was three fold; 1) Knowledge of Kung Fu, in a time when guns did not exist, was dangerous!. Even armed with a sword, the then equivalent of a police force, was not much of a match for someone well trained in Kung Fu!. Manuals were not written, because if the knowledge was stolen someone who was clever enough could become proficient enough at the martial art to cause trouble, but not so proficient as to beat someone trained by a master, thus running the risk of giving the style a bad name!. 2) To keep it from being stolen!. Knowledge stored in your head, no one can take from you!. Knowledge stored in books, is easy to steal!. There is a famous story, regarding the first temple, where the monks thought that they should have manuals!. In the interest of preserving knowledge!. A thief broke into the temple one night, and stole them, and because he was particularly clever, he taught himself Shaolin Kung Fu!. Before you knew it, he was causing trouble, and passing himself off as a Shaolin monk!. He did everything from rob, to rape, and was giving the temple a bad name!. Because he trained fanatically using the information on the manuals, he became more and more dangerous, finally, the temple dispatched one of their newly "graduated" students, someone who had completed the 10 years of required training, to deal with him!. Although the thief put up a fight, in the end he was outmatched!. To ensure that such a thing would not happen again, the temple burned all manuals, and ever since then the Shaolin temple has not kept training manuals of any kind!. As to the exact details of the story I'm not too sure of, but I know it was the reason the Shaolin temple does not like manuals!. also, to the thief it proved worthless; surely enough he could more than handle himself against other Kung Fu schools, and people who did not know what they were doing, however against a fully trained Shaolin monk, although he did put up a fight, he was still handily dispatched!. The moral of the story being, if you practice a martial art under an instructor, you should keep a training manual, but keep it locked away!. You need to understand, back then in China they had no television or video games, no distractions, and given enough time on their hands ANYBODY can learn a pugilistic art from a manual!. They did not write manuals in China, or at least the masters did not like to, because of the real danger of the knowledge falling into the hands of criminals!. In other words those Kung Fu movies you see about secret martial arts manuals are a myth; because of that incident, the Shaolin temple burned all martial arts instructions manuals and their libraries, all they had, was Buddhist teaching!. Do not forget that some Kung Fu styles were invented from watching animals; it is not impossible, therefore, to learn from a manual, if you live in Tang dynasty China!. Especially given how clever some Chinese can be!. Can you learn martial arts from a manual!? Some, but not all of it!. That bandit was beaten by a Shaolin student, one of their new "graduates," because the Shaolin student was fully trained, whereas the bandit was not!. Ultimately though, the other point of this story; martial arts manuals, the well written ones, are such excellent instruction manuals that they are worth having just for their own sake!. I own the instruction manual written by Sun Lu Tang, on the Sun style of Tai Chi, but I just read it for reading's sake, I have never seriously attempted to actually learn from it!. It is however, still good reading!. So no house should be without one! Www@QuestionHome@Com |