How to become an educated person (with pictures)

2024 Author: Samantha Chapman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 09:13

If you want to become an erudite person, as William Faulkner states, you have to "read, read, read. Read more …" You can start from scratch or just tick off a multifaceted list of books you want to read. It's important to select books that are lively, challenging, and that broaden your horizons. If you want to get educated, here are some tips and recommendations to get you started.

Steps

Part 1 of 3: Reading the Classics

Step 1. Read the classics prior to 1600:

is the first thing you need to do to become cultured. If you want to build a solid cultural foundation with the books you have read, then you cannot avoid reading some very early plays, poems and those oral stories that have never lost their importance. Remember that the novel didn't really become popular until the 18th century, so you won't find this genre on this list yet. Without reading Homer's poetry or Sophocles' plays, you won't be able to call yourself a scholar. Here is a list to get you started:

• Epic of Gilgamesh (unknown author) (18th - 17th century BC)
• Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (850 - 750 BC, 8th century BC)
• Oresteia of Aeschylus (458 BC)
• Oedipus King of Sophocles (430 BC)
• Medea of Euripides (431 BC)
• Aeneid of Virgil (29 - 19 BC)
• Thousand and One Nights (unknown author) (700 - 1500)
• Beowulf (unknown author) (975 - 1025)
• The Story of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (11th century)
• Dante's Divine Comedy (1265 - 1321)
• Boccacio's Decameron (1349 - 53)
• Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (14th century)

Step 2. Read the classics from 1600 to 1913

Although a great deal of material was produced in these only 300 years, by reading the books written in the time period from the novel's birth to the beginning of the First World War, you will understand how the novel and other works progressed during the Romantic and Victorian periods. You will also learn about realism, which was the traditional approach of the novel, then evolved with the advent of Modernism and with the disillusionment that came from the First World War. Here is a list to get you started:

• Don Quixote by Cervantes 1605 (part 1), 1615 (part 2)
• Othello, King Lear and Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (1609, 1608, 1603)
• Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
• Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813)
• Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1832)
• Papa Goriot by Honoré de Balzac (1835)
• Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (1842)
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861)
• War and Peace and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1869, 1877)
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
• Crime and Punishment and The Karamazov Brothers by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866, 1880)
• Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871)

Step 3. Read the classics written from 1914 to 1995

This time period covers the advent of Modernism, an experimental form of fiction and rebellion against traditional narrative modes. Reading the classics of this historical period will help you gain an understanding of the incredible transformation of 20th century literature. Here is a list to start from:

• In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913 - 27)
• Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
• Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924)
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
• The trial of Franz Kafka (1925)
• Mrs Dalloway and Virginia Woolf's Trip to the Lighthouse (1925, 1927)
• William Faulkner's Scream and Fury (1929)
• The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
• Ayn Rand's Wonderful Source (1943)
• 1984 by George Orwell (1949)
• J. D. Salinger (1951)
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)
• Fiesta (The Sun Will Rise Again) and The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1926, 1952)
• The Lord of The Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (1954, 1955)
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
• Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo (1955)
• The Collapse of Chinua Achebe (1958)
• Run, Rabbit by John Updike (1960)
• Harper Lee's Darkness Beyond the Hedge (1960)
• Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook (1962)
• The Glass Bell by Sylvia Plath (1963)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)
• Slaughterhouse No.5 by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

Step 4. Read contemporary classics from 1980 to today

Even though these books have not stood the test of time, as they cannot yet be counted among the classics, there are still a number of contemporary novels so popular that it seems that everyone has read them. In fact, the more you hear about these books from people, the more reading them will make you feel cultured. Here are some books to start with:

• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
• The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1984)
• Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)
• The Bird That Turned the Screws of the World by Haruki Murakami (1997)
• American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997)
• The God of Little Things by Arundhati Roy (1997)
• Shame by J. M. Coetzee (1999)
• White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000)
• Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001)
• The Fantastic Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (2001)
• Everything is Illuminated by Johnathan Safran Foer (2002)
• Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides
• The Kite Runner by Kahled Hosseini (2003)
• The Known World by Edward P. Jones (2003)
• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2004)
• The Short Fabulous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (2007)
• 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (2008)
• Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (2011)

Part 2 of 3: Becoming Erudite in Different Kinds

Step 1. Read the stories:

they are a very special fantastic genre and, if you really want to become cultured, then you have to read the classic ones, as well as some contemporary ones. When it comes to short stories, it is more important to devote yourself to the works of a specific writer than to read a collection of various authors. So here's a list of classics and more recent writers you might do well to check out:

• Masters of the classic tale (1600 - 1950): Edgar Allan Poe, Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway, Borges, Kafka, Isaac Babel, John Updike, Katherine Mansfield, Eudora Welty and Ray Bradbury.
• Masters of the contemporary story (1950 - today): Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme, Tim Oddo, George Saunders, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, Z. Z. Packer, Joyce Carol Oates and Denis Johnson.

• Collections of classic short stories:

  • In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (1925)
  • A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor (1953)
  • What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver (1981)
  • Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson (1992)
  • The interpreter of the ailments of Jhumpa Lahiri (1999)

  

  Step 2. Read the plays

  If you want to get some culture, then you must also read the works of classical playwrights. Although Shakespeare is the quintessential playwright, he has already been listed above. However, there are other works, contemporary and otherwise, that you must read if you want to call yourself cultured. Take a look at the following:

  • All by Shakespeare, including Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing (1606, 1597, 1599)
  • Hedda Gabler and Henrik Ibsen's Doll's House (1890, 1879)
  • The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (1895)
  • Cyrano di Bergerac by Edmund Rostand (1897)
  • The Cherry Garden and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (1904, 1897)
  • Shaw's Pygmalion (1912)
  • Our Town by Thornton Wilder (1938)
  • Death of a Salesman and Arthur Miller's Crucible (1949, 1953)
  • Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1949)
  • The word to the jurors by Reginald Rose (1954)
  • A Streetcar Named Desiderio, The Glass Zoo Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams (1947, 1944, 1955)
  • Behind Closed Doors by John-Paul Sartre (1944)
  • … and Man Made Satan by Jerome Lawrence (1955)
  • The Long Journey into the Night and Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (1956, 1946)
  • A Bunch of Sunshine by Lorraine Hansberry (1959)
  • Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee (1963)
  • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (1966)
  • Harold Pinter's Betrayals (1978)

  

  Step 3. Read the poem

  While people around you may be unwilling to talk about poetry unless they are in cultural circles, it is important to familiarize yourself with classical and contemporary poets in order to participate in the conversation. Here are some books to start with:

  • The Sonnets of William Shakespeare (1609)
  • Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667)
  • All the poems of John Keats (1815)
  • The Canzoniere by Francesco Petrarca (1336-1374 ca)
  • The Songs of Giacomo Leopardi (1818, 1836)
  • Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855)
  • Collection of poems by Langston Hughes
  • Poems by Robert Frost
  • Collection of poems by Emily Dickinson
  • The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
  • Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda (1924)
  • E. E. Cummings: Poems, 1904 - 1962 by E. E. Cummings
  • The Scream and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg (1956)
  • The Complete Poems, 1927 - 1979 by Elizabeth Bishop
  • Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 by Seamus Heaney

  

  Step 4. Read also what is not fictional, that is non-fiction

  If you want to be truly cultured, don't just read pre-made, fictitious products. You will also have to dedicate yourself to what happens in the political and historical sphere, in scientific dissemination and to whatever else is happening in the world. Here are several types of non-fiction that you need to be familiar with:

  • History
  • Politics
  • Magazines
  • Memories
  • Biographies
  • The news

  

  Step 5. Read widely popular books, whether they are fictional or realistic

  If you really want to know what everyone is talking about, don't just sit and read Virgil! You also need to know what is happening in the modern world and know what people typically do on the beach or on the plane or talk about in Oprah's literary living room. What do you have to choose? Well, look at what people read on the plane, on the beach, etc., and also check out the New York Times bestseller list to see what books are on the list. Here are some very popular examples that have all been published in the last twenty years and that almost everyone has read:

  • The Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
  • Fifty Shades of Gray by E. L. James
  • Any Nicholas Sparks novel
  • Any John Grisham novel
  • The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins
  • Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code
  • Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities
  • Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
  • Joan Didion's year of magical thinking
  • The poignant work of a formidable genius by Dave Eggers
  • Freakonomics. The calculation of the incalculable by Steven Levitt
  • Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
  • Star Player. Natural history of success and the critical point. The Great Effects of Malcolm Gladwell's Small Changes
  • Stephanie Meyer's Twilight Series
  • The alchemist of Paolo Coelho
  • Steig Larsson's Millennium Series
  • The Lord of the Rings trilogy by John R. R. Tolkien
  • A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin

  Part 3 of 3: Making Reading More Fun

  

  Step 1. Set goals

  How can goals make reading more fun? Well, because you will feel good about yourself if you accomplish something, here's why! Start by setting small goals - for example, reading one book a month. Then you will switch to a book every two weeks. When you are definitely into reading, you will be able to read a book a week … or even two. Make a list of books and stick to them - you'll find yourself reading more and more in no time.

  By setting goals you will avoid wasting your time on less productive endeavors. Let's suppose that you have decided to finish "Ulysses" on the weekend, but that the reality show "Bad Girls Club" is also broadcast continuously. Goodbye bad girls, hello culture

  

  Step 2. Check out all the top 100 bestseller lists:

  The Modern Library, Amazon, Time Magazine, and The New York Times offer a few that can make you feel even more inclined to read. You will feel extremely cultured if, scrolling through a list, you find every book you have already read. See these lists for further references:

  • The Modern Library Top 100 list of modern books.
  • Time Magazine's list of the best books of all time.
  • The Guardian's All-Time Top 100 List.
  • Read books by Nobel Prize-winning authors. See the list of authors here:
  • List of The Village Voice with the best books of the previous decade, divided by genre.

  

  Step 3. Listen to the audio books

  Open an account at Audible.com or start listening to books you've borrowed from your local library. Listening to audiobooks is a great alternative when you are too tired to grab a book and read. You can also listen to them in the car, which is perfect for a long commute, or on your iPod while you are taking a walk. Suddenly you may be looking forward to that long business trip instead of finding it unbearable, because you can finish your favorite plays!

  Before buying or borrowing the book, check if you can listen to a sample to make sure you like the voice of the reader. If you feel that the person has an annoying voice, you risk perceiving the reading as boring and consequently the book will also seem heavy

  

  Step 4. Buy a Kindle

  While a Kindle can cost more than $ 100, you can quickly make up for it when you start buying discounted works. Many classic novels, such as the works of Henry James, can be purchased for less than a euro, and contemporary ones can be purchased for 10-25% off what you pay in-store, depending on the type of book. A Kindle also allows you to instantly download a file when you feel like reading, instead of waiting for the time to go and buy it in the store.

  When you have a Kindle, you can also look at a book chapter before buying it - it's like flipping through it a bit

  

  Step 5. Reward yourself with fun books

  While being educated is important, so is having fun while reading. Whatever book you enjoy reading, don't stop dedicating yourself to it just to throw yourself at Charles Dickens. On the contrary, reward yourself: for every classic or essay, read yourself a thriller, a romantic beach book or that particular genre you love the most.

  

  Step 6. Join or join a book club:

  not only will it help you make friends with other educated people, it will open you up to a wider variety of topics. You will have to follow strict deadlines to finish the readings and will take the time to reflect on what they mean to you. A book club will keep you from switching too quickly from book to book without stopping to think about its meaning.

  In most clubs, you will have the option to choose a book to share one of your favorite authors with other members

  

  Step 7. Open a Goodreads account:

  you can make a list of all the books you have finished or want to read, review and review the books and interact with other reading lovers. A free account will connect you with more books and more readers. And most importantly, it will make you more excited about reading - that's why you need to open an account today!

  

  Step 8. Become a top Amazon reviewer

  If you aren't already, start reviewing all those famous books you've read and sign up for an account on Amazon. Once you have reviewed many books and written interesting and thoughtful comments, you will reach "top reader" status. By becoming one, you will have many advantages, including some discounts and the ability to read the books in preview, that is, before their official publication date.

  And even if you don't become a top reader, time spent perusing the books will help you reflect on their content

  

  Step 9. Confront other educated people

  Build relationships with people who love to read, whether they are your colleagues or members of your book club - it will open your mind about which books to read next and give you a more realistic sense of the popularity of your reads. There is no reason to be cultured if you cannot use your knowledge to have interesting discussions with other people.

  

  Step 10. Listen to podcasts

  You can download free podcasts, like KCRW's New Yorker Fiction or Weekly Bookworm, to hear writers read their favorite stories or hear authors discuss their new books. You can also hear the news and hear everything from Chekhov's stories to classic speeches in American history, such as the Gettysburg speech. Try these podcasts to become more cultured without reading a word:

  • The New Yorker Fiction podcast
  • KCRW's Bookworm Literary Conversations
  • The episodes of Selected Shorts by PRI (Public Radio International)
  • This American life of the WBEZ of Chicago
  • America Abroad of the PRI (Public Radio International)
  • LearnOutLoud's Great Speeches in the History Podcast
  • The New York Times podcast on book reviews

  Advice

  • Read everything.
  • Don't be afraid to show others what you read. Books offer an opportunity for a good conversation where you can demonstrate your new knowledge.
  • If you hate reading and it will always be like this, but still want to get educated, you would do well to focus on Sparknotes, Google and Wikipedia, where you can read summaries without ever having to deal with a real book.
  • Don't be afraid to read children's books.
  • If you want to have fun reading, choose specific books for your reading level, but at the same time, if you want to improve your skills, you can always try to read and understand a more difficult book.
  • Reading something to look smart isn't the best idea - you should read for fun.
  • By reading you also expand your vocabulary.