i want to get smarter than all the other kids at high school

I should edit this to say everything written by Shakespear and Dickens

 

Dostoevsky is arguably the best novelist ever(crime and punishment is a good one to start with before reading the brothers karamazov, as i've been told by my professor. he deals with the human mind and intellect, and internal issues) and tolstoy is also good (social issues)

these are both russian authors, btw.

oh yeah, i don't know if i mentioned this before, but i HIGHLY suggest getting critical editions of novels, with a modern translation so they're more easily understood and all that... there's always lots to be learned looking at the context and historical background and stuff...

okay good luck

 

read some Foucault and Nietzshe if you really wanna school them at philosophy, although its pretty odd that your goal is to be smarter than kids at your school.. thats no fun

 

or read some marx... plato's republic too.. max weber perhaps?

 

Read George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.


I must also take issue with the notion that reading doesn't make you smarter. While I will grant that reading alone has limitations, it is such an essential component of learning (both in and of itself through acquisition of knowledge, and through the brain development that takes place because of the practice) that it can never be dismissed as unimportant. But even reading on its own has tremendous power to increase intelligence--Malcolm X copied pages of the dictionary when he was in prison to be productive with his time. This practice of merely reading and copying entries from the dictionary gave him immeasurable knowledge of the world through the increase of the words he had to think and communicate about it. In 1984, the government was eliminating huge portions of the official language spoken by its citizens--why? To control what its citizens could think about and understand by limiting the words they had at their disposal to do so. The philosopher Wittgenstein said, "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world." The power of language is unlocked every time anyone reads anything (or nearly so); and with that power, the brain changes and becomes more than it was before.

 

Read, read, read. It gives you an opportunity to pick up all kinds of facts.

If you are looking for non-fiction, I would recomend Asimov's non-fiction work about anything and collections of Gould's biology shorts. Read history books.

 

ethnographies and cultural studies are great non-fiction books too, anthropology stuff can teach you about social issues and other cultures...