I left most of my books with my parents when I moved out and haven't gotten around to collecting them yet, so the only ones I have with me now are:
- A collection of ancient Bible fanfiction, if that counts
- Book of Mormon
- Zhuangzi
- various secondary literature around the Constitution, which totally counts
As for the rest of the list:
- Daodejing
- Analects
- Mencius, Han Feizi, bits and pieces of the Xunzi in PDF form but I really ought to get the whole thing
- something about Krishna that I don't know how I ended up with
- Principia Discordia
Ryusenshi wrote:
- the Tao Te Ching (now that's a confusing book if I've ever read one)
Far less confusing than most books in its reference class, I think. A lot of the confusion is added by bad translation -- it might help to read translations in parallel, and try to come up with a gloss for the original Chinese. The distance between the original language and the languages it's translated into seems to hurt here even more than usual.
[not that I could explain it now; it's been like eight years]
Then again, I have a hard time with translations in general. I can read Mishima in translation without wanting to check the original text, and Chinese philosophical texts as long as the translation isn't garbage (most translations of the Analects are garbage but once you get to the second-tier literature [which is more worth reading anyway; I can't get anything out of the Analects, probably because the point of it is that it's just the seed of the interpretive tradition that constitutes Confucianism, but I've found Xunzi to be worth reading, and Han Feizi scooped Goodhart on his eponymous law by what, 2300 years?] the translators generally do alright), but not much else. I keep trying to study the Bible and giving up halfway through Genesis because come on, I'm an adult, I can handle a fucking footnote, can we be
serious here
(Heaney's Beowulf, incidentally, isn't even fit to be used as toilet paper)
I should sit down and read the Mahabharata etc. at some point but see above; then again, I should sit down and learn Sanskrit