might be interesting to see how you compare it to Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison - similar idea

Try Carrion Comfort, by Dan Simmons, and The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings, by Tolkien... be interested to see what you think!

I know nothing about the guy except what little I read (past tense) about him on Wikipedia. I just looked over his 12 rules as they are presented there and a couple of things seemed pretty clear.

First, these aren't ACTUALLY 12 rules for life, they're 12 rules for creating a community he's comfortable with. He's trying to build the US into the community he wants it to be. As are we all, right? Not a moral hazard, just something to be aware of going in. Except that by calling it 12 rules of life, he's broken his 8th rule, that is if he is self-aware enough to see what's really going on.

Second, people have a long history of coming up with rules for living that actually shed no light on the basic problem, which is that we - humans - cannot tell right from wrong. The Bible's Ten Commandments are another example of such a list; no doubt there are many others. This problem is the real reason slavery managed to persist for so long, why people can see no problem with invading countries who have done nothing to them, why people allow it to become illegal for homeless people to shelter themselves et cetera. There are many examples of this blindness. Until our rules for living actually include as their primary goal the determination to investigate and develop a way to tell right from wrong reliably, nothing else will really matter very much.

Finally, rules 6 and 7 seem problematic to me. Pursue what is meaningful - this is the kind of advice people give who don't themselves know what is meaningful, and are hoping you will figure it out without them having to admit their ignorance. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world - this is a recipe for never criticizing anyone or anything, and never making progress on any problematic issue. Hypocrisy and deception are central to humanity. If we must eliminate them to move forward, we might as well just commit suicide right now. Thankfully, we don't have to do that. We have shown that we can make progress despite widespread hypocrisy and deception.

(I know, I'm SUCH a know-it-all!! Sorry lol)

I know, right? You read a book you love, you look forward to the movie, and then half the book - always the better half - is just missing. I mean, the reason is clear - you can't actually get everything INTO a two hour movie - but it's frustrating as hell. On the other hand, how many books did you actually love so much you really wanted to SEE every little detail in the movie? You have to have an almost religious attitude to a book to love it that much.

geez... I hate to say it, but Schimmel is an idiot. Drop it and move on. We have bigger problems than the so called seven deadly sins. If each of us individually committed one of the seven deadly sins every day - and no OTHER sins - we'd be so much better off as a people. Humanity would be so much better off. Read Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, instead - Twain had real insight.

...well... I would say that, while emotionally very effective, the book was not very useful, in that it didn't provide any analysis, any suggestions or directions for how to make things better. In that sense it's a lot like Uncle Tom's Cabin and not so much something from which we can learn. Things actually are better now than they were - no doubt partly due to the book and how it was received, all of which had much more to do with the international situation at the time than with the actual conditions on the ground - but unfortunately we're not actually less racist; we have only learned to APPEAR less racist. Even that is a good thing, of course; but much more progress is possible, and we seem to be stagnating, as the murder of George Floyd kind of indicated. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a much earlier work, actually provided a much more useful analysis of the moral issue, and something from which we all can still learn a great deal if we will (we won't, I know, but we could). You noticed that Mockingbird is not actually a children's book; neither is Huckleberry. Give it a try, if you haven't as an adult, and see what you think.

congratulations - this one is special!!

...yeah, I'm with you both barrels on Dracula... not so much the other two. I loved Haggard when I was 13... went back to him when I was 23 and thought it was awful. Testosterone-laden crap for jerking around kids who don't know any better. Sorry. I prefer to be jerked around in a more adult fashion lol... Rebecca I read when I was a goodeal more mature and afterwards wasn't sure whether it was really worth the time. Not the sensation I look for in a novel.

I was trying to find an example of Lovecraft that I could add and couldn't think of one - but he built strange new worlds, I'm sure you're aware. Wasn't The King in Yellow his? And Chthulu?

Well, and Poe. The Cask of Amontillado was perfect. For modern horror, probably Moby Dick, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lord of the Flies, Hilberg's book Destruction of the European Jews and Gitta Sereny's Into That Darkness... those last two are not works of fiction, but what they discuss is far enough in the past that we have bigger worries now...

...ah, it's really indescribable... sorry. Anything I could say about it would give you the wrong impression, I'm sure. Part of the fun is its decidedly 20th-century (that is, premodern) view of evil - as though if we just defeat the Nazis we'll have nothing further to worry about. Kind of like sinking into an easy chair cause you know we DID defeat the Nazis, so we're fine, right? ...right? lol ...hollow laughter...

Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort: a louche pleasure but a pleasure

Bram Stoker's Dracula: still wonderful after all these years

I know I shouldn't admit this, but it's just the reverse for me... in fact, I don't even know if our school HAD a girls dorm... but the library? THAT I remember well.

...just want to add, the date of translation makes a difference too... a book that was translated yesterday will certainly use English differently from one that was translated in 1900.