I have been an audible member for 6 1/2 years.
I have listened to 228 audio books in that time.
I'm just about done with Robert Wilson's "Spin" trilogy (spectacular, mediocre, dreck - thanks for asking) and was all set to embark on a dreary exploration of the Spanish Flu epidemic when _refugee_ fucked with my mojo.
Read Harriet the Spy. Great book. Read To Kill A Mockingbird. Great book.
Have not read The Feminine Mystique.
Have not read Silent Spring.
Am currently reading The Second Self (1 audiobook, 1 kindle book, ideally at least one of them is fiction). Have, at various times, decided I need to read The Koran, The Golden Bough, and bought the first seven Toynbee books at great expense on eBay.
So here's the question -
All those books? The ones that everyone always uses in arguments? The ones that shaped culture, policy, society? The ones you liked reading?
Yeah, gimme those. After a six-month binge on geopolitics I'm ready to do something other than crap deus-ex-machina grey goo pulp sci fi.
Of the "Great Books" I have read: Moby Dick by Melville: I read it as a treatise on passion. One of my favorite classics. It makes for a poor adventure tale. Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter: A well-deserved Pulitzer, it has no equal. It's not just a book. It is art. War and Peace by Tolstoy: I enjoyed it much more than Anna Karenina. Tolstoy knows the mind of his characters. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco: The only other Eco I have read is Focault's Pendulum. This one was much better. A fantastic mystery novel with a setting soaked in character. The Gadfly by Ethel Lilian Voynich (yes that Voynich): Revolution in 1840 Italy, and the minds of revolutionaries. Just a unique read that stuck with me. In Our Time by Hemmingway: This convinced me that Hemmingway was a short story writer that also wrote novels. If you like it also read The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, in whatever collection it resides. The Once and Future King by T.H. White: A singular book of Arthurian fantasy. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov: You must have read it. If you haven't you must. A courageous work. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller: War as the madness it is. In Vietnam, my father once tackled a guy that threw a grenade into the officer's mess, then terrorized the camp with a shotgun. They transferred him. Great Expectations by Dickens: I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. If you really like what Dickens is all about, Bleakhouse is all that and more. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving: I fucking hate the message, but love the book. Broca's Brain by Carl Sagan: The subtitle says it all: "Reflections on the Romance of Science". It inspired me in my early 20's, and is probably part of why I am a scientist. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow: Not a great, but a short read that is well worth the afternoon it will take. To Reign in Hell by Steven Brust: Also not a great, but it's about the revolt of Lucifer in Heaven, and he pulls it off.
I'll put "To Reign in Hell" on my list. The only thing I've read by Brust was long ago, several of the Vlad Toltos books, which I remember enjoying a lot. I believe at the time I read them there were only 5 (apparently there are 13 now!). Haven't thought of those books in many years; worth a re-read.
Mmm, really loved the movie, did you ever hear Describe The Door?The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco: The only other Eco I have read is Focault's Pendulum. This one was much better. A fantastic mystery novel with a setting soaked in character.
The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz Droll Stories by Honore de Balzac Candide by Voltare FANTASTIC FABLES -Ambrose Bierce The Parenticide Club -Ambrose Bierce Crown of Feathers - Isaac Bashevis Singer Cain - Jose Saramago Imaginary Magnitude - Stanislaw Lem Nine Humorous Tales – Anton Chekov War with the Newts - Karel Čapek The Anxiety of Influence - Harold Bloom Theory of the Leisure Class - Thorstien Veblen The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde
Dune - my favorite fiction book, hands down. To science fiction what Lord of the Rings is to fantasy. Brave New World - an excellent complement to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Oppression thru pleasure instead of pain. Flatland - a quick read about both politics and mathematics. Great way to introduce your brain to a higher plane of thinking about the physical universe. Jennifer Government - a capitalist dystopia. A well-written response to the myriad socialist dystopias. Freedom From Fear - a collection of Aung Sang Suu Kyi's speeches and essays. The second part especially is filled with astute insights into democracy and freedom. The eponymous speech is brilliant. Starship Troopers - nothing like the movie! A Heinlein Juvenile, it has some fascinating political ideas related to the military; a quick read. Anansi Boys - concerns how mythology and stories shape humanity; great humanist fiction. Really, you could replace this with any Neil Gaiman book. They’re all about life and culture and stories and humanity. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - if you’re not a software engineer or mathematician, this is probably of no interest to you. If you are, it is revolutionary, ground-breaking, life-altering. It will completely change the way you think. Especially if you were taught in the Object Oriented and Imperative style that 95% of universities teach these days. The Heart of Aces - indie fiction by and about asexuals. The writing is unprofessional, but enlightening if you want to learn about asexuality from those who are. Edifying, if you’re into that kind of thing. I’ll leave you with my Amazon lists, if you like:
Nonfiction - probably the most interesting list to you. Lots of stuff that sounds intellectually stimulating.
Professional - mostly software engineering, but a many are more generic, like business and typography.
Fiction - some sound intellectually stimulating, others just entertaining. It’s hit-or-miss.
Religion - I mostly identify as Progressive Christian these days; the less you share that ideology, the less interesting you’ll find these.
So are you a Berkeley or MIT kid?Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - if you’re not a software engineer or mathematician, this is probably of no interest to you. If you are, it is revolutionary, ground-breaking, life-altering. It will completely change the way you think. Especially if you were taught in the Object Oriented and Imperative style that 95% of universities teach these days.
- Thought Dune was okay. Tried Messiah; hated Frank Herbert forever. - Have read Brave New World a good half-dozen times. - Have read Flatland at least three times. - Read Jennifer Government once. Meh. - Added Freedom From Fear to the reading list. Not available as audio. - I should read this. I've read every other Heinlein juvenile and enjoyed nearly all of them (Citizen of the Galaxy being my favorite). My family worships Heinlein like a god, though, and my family annoys me. - Will start with American Gods. Aversion to Gaiman from a psycho ex-girlfriend that obsessively collected Sandman comics. - Not a software engineer or mathematician. Learned to program in Turbo Pascal and Fortran. Talk about a waste of time. - Not keenly interested in asexuals. I would need to be convinced. Comment saved. Thanks.
Also by Sussman, The Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics is a great physics book if your background is in computing or math.Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - If you’re not a software engineer or mathematician, this is probably of no interest to you. If you are, it is revolutionary, ground-breaking, life-altering. It will completely change the way you think. Especially if you were taught in the Object Oriented and Imperative style that 95% of universities teach these days.
East of Eden is probably my favorite book ever. It makes The Grapes of Wrath look like it was written by an 8 year old in comparison, in my opinion. Good luck with the Quran. I'm of the mind that it's really only possible to get the full experience by reading it in Arabic. Our vocabulary is more verbose, some sentences only make sense in the language. I'd suggest listening to it in Arabic too, if you can. If you're looking for something more, innocent, I suppose, I suggest Brave Story. Very few books make me cry, that book was one of them.
East of Eden is my favorite book too. I'm a huge fan of Steinbeck though so I'm a bit biased towards his works. I've been slowly trawling through Team of Rivals and while it's not a policy setting book or anything of that nature, it's a fascinating look book at Lincoln, Seward, etc. and how they managed to work together. For other fiction books, The Crying of Lot 49 is a great post-modern book by Pynchon that will at times screw with your head.
Both incredible books, seconded. And Crying is only ~150 pages, though since it's Pynchon every word means something and it's not as fast a read as you'd expect. And of course East of Eden is a masterwork.I've been slowly trawling through Team of Rivals and while it's not a policy setting book or anything of that nature, it's a fascinating look book at Lincoln, Seward, etc. and how they managed to work together. For other fiction books, The Crying of Lot 49 is a great post-modern book by Pynchon that will at time screw with your head.
Off the top of my head - not always deep, just good reads : "A Confederacy of Dunces" - John Kennedy O'Toole.
"A Prayer for Owen Meany" - John Irving.
"A Song of Ice and Fire" - George R.R. Martin. Better than the show, and the show is good.
"Slaughterhouse Five" - Kurt Vonnegut (hell, all Vonnegut, okay?)
I'm probably forgetting some really good stuff though. "Godel Escher Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter is interesting and fun, but it gets really deep in later chapters; deserves a re-read, but the first 1/2 or so is pretty accessible. I really liked "V" by Thomas Pynchon but I couldn't say exactly why, and I know a lot of the more subtle stuff in there went right over my head.
I'll enthusiastically second A Prayer for Owen Meany as well as "All Vonnegut."
- Confederacy of Dunces has been on my list for a while. Gracias. - Owen Meany I've heard I need to read. - I named my daughter Arya. - Not all Vonnegut. Bluebeard was pretty rough. - My dad really digs GEB. Which has always annoyed me. I need to let that go.
GEB is something I would reluctantly recommend. There are gems in there, for sure, but I probably should re-read and re-evaluate, because I felt like a lot of the second half was BS. But that could entirely be on me. I have not read Bluebeard. Rough in what sense?
Bluebeard is possibly Vonnegut's best book and my favorite 'history' of the american abstract expressionist movement.
Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior -- changed how I thought. There's a book review.
I know I gots Veblen on the brain but this is pretty much the thesis of TotLC although Thorstien calls in the emulative impulse because he is that kind of guy. (and is from 1857)
The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. It is about the Ebola virus, its beginnings, and research that was done with it. It follows a person who researched the disease, and tells the story of the outbreak that was within 15 miles of Washington DC. This is easily my favorite book ever. Fair warning, the beginning is extremely graphic. It dies down quickly though, if I recall correctly. I haven't read the book in a while. Another great book was The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. This book is about a black woman in the 1950s who had cancer. Her cancer cells, after being taken out of her body, still replicated an astounding rates, doubling daily. The book tells of Henrietta's story, the financial struggles her family faces today, and the industry that has been made from Henrietta's cells. The cells are still sold today, and the Lacks family has not received any money from sales of the cells.
I read The Hot Zone when it was new. Totally blew my mind. If you haven't seen And the Band Played On you should. they're spiritual brothers. Interestingly enough I just read about Henrietta Lacks this morning, and how her kids are now on the ethics board that determines who gets to use the cell line. Added.
Ebola outbreak in Africa. It has reached the capital of Guinea, and possibly spread to Seirra Leone. news.yahoo.com/ebola-epidemic-spreads-guineas-capital-173304833.html
The Concept of Mind. If any one book killed cartesian dualism, this was the one book that killed cartesian dualism.
Laszlo Mero, Moral Calculations. Both for why you might want to do ethics with game theory, and as an example of why you want to resist the temptation.
Robin Hartshorne, Geometry: Euclid and Beyond. Coxeter made geometry a respectable subject again, but this is the modern geometry book.
Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer. This is the book I loan people who think all horror is schlock.
William Goldbloom Bloch, The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel (and, implicitly, the Library of Babel itself). No reason other than I enjoyed it.
E.T. Jaynes, Probability: The Logic of Science. Ignoring that if not for Jaynes we probably wouldn't have Less Wrong, and the world would be a better place, this is both an excellent explanation of the logical interpretation of probability by the master and why many newly minted Bayesians (and not-so-newly-minted charlatans) act like they just got religion.
This is a great non-fictiony book, best of the three in this set (author made it into a kind of trilogy). As long as you don't mind reading a little gore at times. It is non-fiction vignettes about events that occur to the author during his years interning at a hospital as he learns to become a doctor, if I recall correctly. This is hands-down the book I recommend the most when people ask for one. Many people haven't read it but it's amazing. Complications by Atul Gawande If you want something by the same guy that is more potentially-world-change-y, here is The Checklist Manifesto which I also really liked.
If you want one that people use in arguments read Michael Pollan's the Omnivore's Dilemma. It will change the way you think about the food industry in America. I like Pollan a lot.
For more fiction-y stuff that steers away from the for-sure-obvious picks I like Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase. This book will fuck up your head a little bit but it's not Infinite Jest length.
Have you ever considered Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid? I haven't read it but it seems like it might be up your alley. I think it is on the long-term to-do list for me.
I would suspect you have already read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.
A list of my great books (some I've read many years ago and I'm not sure if rereading them would still make me feel they're that great, but younger minds can more easily be overwhelmed by a book thana cynic old one): "The Piano Teacher" - Elfriede Jelinek "The Golden Pavilion" - Yukio Mishima "The Island of the Damned" - Stig Dagerman "Cloud Atlas" - David Mitchell "Foucault's Pendulum" - Umberto Eco "1984" - George Orwell "Poison" - Kathryn Harrison "The Sandman" - Neil Gaiman "Accelerando" - Charles Stross "Chasm City" - Alistair Reynolds "A Catcher in the Rye" - J.D. Salinger "The Satanic Verses" - Salman Rushdie "The Shadow of the Wind" - Carlos Ruiz Zafon "Mythago Wood" - Robert Holdstock "Dirty Weekend" - Helen Zahavi "Imagica" - Clive Barker
The only books I've read that I could recommend to you are either Dutch literature or already named (e.g. Kahneman). Thanks for recommending Drive, I'm nearly halfway and quite enjoying it. Most books I get bored of too quickly, especially when they take so long to actually go through meaningful information / plot (i'm looking at you LOTR) but I quite like this one. Question for you: what book(s) have been the most important to you so far? Not the ones that shaped society, but the ones that shaped you as a person.
It's fair to say that Kundera's The Joke reshaped a lot of my philosophy. William Gibson's Neuromancer revised my tastes for fiction. Gaddis' The Cold War: A New History reshaped my understanding of geopolitics. I owe my understanding of the Internet to Sherry Turkle's Alone Together. My conception of society and civilization owes a lot to George R Stewart's Earth Abides.
Some books I enjoy: Candace Milard's The River of Doubt -A nice historical account of Roosevelts trip down the Amazon. Awesome fella. Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell -historical fantasy at its best IMO. My advice for you as someone in to audio/sound/music/history:
(Inre: Toynbee, what do you think about this sentence from the Wikipedia page: "Yet Toynbee's work lost favor among both the general public and scholars by the 1960s, due to the religious and spiritual outlook that permeates the largest part of his work. His work is considered today controversial and is seldom read or cited." I don't know exactly what is meant by that. I certainly don't have a problem with someone's spirituality permeating through their work -- especially when humanity's spirituality permeates its history, but you're the one that can't stand Lewis.)
'k. So THING 1: Toynbee is the Matterhorn. It's 13 volumes, a gajillion pages, took the dude 35 years to write. The '60s coincide with the abridgement of those 13 volumes into 2, primarily by eliminating all the examples used to prop up the arguments. To no one's surprise, nobody reads the 13-volume version anymore (hasn't been published since '61). THING 2: The religious and spiritual outlook is valuable to me for reasons that may or may not become apparent within the next 12-18 months. More than that, he said mysteriously, I prefer not to say. THING 3: All anthropology is bullshit and all anthropologists eat their own. Having watched Chagnon and Diamond fall in to and out of favor just since I've finished college I don't give a flying fuck what modern "scholars" think is nifty these days. The entire field of evolutionary psychology convinced me that modern anthropologists have lost their way just as thoroughly as modern architects have. I think that there are certain fields that can't demonstrate they're moving forward unless they burn the books they learned from in school. Anthropology is one of them. There's a great quote at the beginning of Spycraft. It's from GK Chesterton: Old, obsolete ideas are still useful. You just need to know how to use them.History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.
This is the sort of thing Muhammad would have said post-desert isolation and pre-public evangelism. But I'm drunk. Anyway yeah give it a hundred years before you judge a historian, or more. I imagine I'll put Toynbee on the dinner plate at some point, when I'm less tied up.The religious and spiritual outlook is valuable to me for reasons that may or may not become apparent within the next 12-18 months. More than that, he said mysteriously, I prefer not to say.
I think that last thing I've listened to was The Lost City of Z and The Devil and Sherlock Holmes Pretty great, extremely entertaining, not too much mindfuckery or smart shit. All around great stories. You can read some of his work found in Devil and Sherlock Holmes online. The book is basically a compilation of his greatest long reads from The New Yorker. My favorite was about the giant sea squid.
I read War and Peace and just couldn't get there. I gave it 300 pages and gave up. Also read 100pp of Notes from the Underground and couldn't make it any further. I've read parts of The Prince and I read all of Beyond Good and Evil - not a Nietzsche fan. The rest of it I'll definitely consider.
Since you poked the question of how people die the other week, The Emperor of All Maladies (2011) is a pretty widely acclaimed book on cancer. I personally liked Natural Obsessions (1999), but it's more from the lab researcher's point of view, and a little bit dated now.
Nothing wrong with dated. Second Self was written in 1984 and the insights it has into human-computer interaction are not only fresh, they're new simply because they're now foreign. My favorite book on the NRO, Deep Black, was written in 1986 when the NRO didn't officially exist. I read it with Wikipedia open to compare the conjecture in the book with the realities that have since been declassified. It teaches you your blind spots. I also have a book on the Soviet space program written in 1987. Read that one with Wiki open? Holy fuck. Talk about a learning experience. The best books are the ones you can enjoy from many perspectives.
What's foreign is reading the book and afterwards visiting the places mentioned. They talk in it about when the Whitehead institute was constructed at MIT. I got to visit yesterday and it's a dwarf compared to the following institute they put up right next door. Weird, too, seeing the river next to the campus, knowing that a researcher took their life walking across the ice because they had been screwed one too many times by academia... If you want a pitch, it's a book on the process of cancer research written by an anthropologist, an outsider (but accurate) perspective on how lab scientists navigate the waters of funding, politics, and actual scientific problems and the many characters that pop up along the way.
Adam Smith's " An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" or just "The Wealth of Nations" could be really useful in an argument if you haven't read it. Marx's "Das Kapital" as well. Though I have a feeling you've at the very least perused both of those. Alex Ross' "The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century" has been recommended to me several times. Charles Ives' "Essay Before a Sonata" is a good read, especially if you have listened to or are interested in his Concord Sonata (Don't ask me why I love this piece. I haven't figured out yet).
add to that the secret third volume of formative economics Theory of the Leisure Class - Thorstien Veblen he subverts and rejects both classical and Marxist economics.
Here for free on Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/833/833-h/833-h.htm
No one has an excuse for not reading now. (other than the fact is is feckin long and full of some of most opaque text in the english language but it is also funny as hell)
God fucking dammit I should have remembered Adam Smith. Yes, I need to read that. Or listen to it for free. I've heard Das Kapital is a meandering wreck. Nonetheless, I'm intrigued. Yes, have read parts. Have not encountered the monster in its native environment. Will now listen to some music.
I don't know that I can recommend anything that shaped culture, policy or society that you haven't read, but a while back I did mention Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I'm still reading it, but the ideas are pretty striking, (for me anyway).
It's at the top of the list. Confession - I've been pretty fucked up by this recently. I've read a bunch of cognitive psych books; How We Decide had some interesting stuff in it that sticks with you. A lot of it was kind of... out there, though. Nonetheless, it incorporated into my cosmology. Shit, some of it made it into the novel. And now there's a flag on the play - shit's made up. How much of it? Who knows. Enough that Penguin pulped the book. So all those little anecdotes that make up my understanding of cognitive psych? ALL under a cloud. I probably should read this one next. I'm just feeling a little burned by pop psych at the moment.
There was a pretty good expose wherein Lehrer commented that he liked the rush of being read, while the author pointed out that for real journalists, the rush of being read without getting it right would be like a quarterback getting a Heisman trophy without playing football.
I know you listen to a lot of audiobooks; did you get this one in audio too? I've never really done the audiobook so I wonder, do you find that it's as easy to retain the information as when you read? I'd imagine that it would take me some time to adjust.
Li'l secret - I retain information so well it's embarrassing. As in, has caused me chagrin at parties. People confuse it with intelligence. It's not. Do I retain it as well as reading? Fair to say I do, but I had to think about it. I've read Rendezvous with Rama maybe three times; I've listened to it once. The experiences are comparable, except that reading I can do other shit at the same time (like set up 24TB worth of NAS). I'm 1/6th through this book and I started yesterday. In the time it took me to ride my bike to AAA to pick up Aquarium tickets and drive into Hollywood and back, I've covered 4 hours of it. if I'd purchased it to read, I would have had to pick at it in the 10 minutes before I go to bed.
I think I experience this kind of retention, though I don't think it's to the same degree. I think I have some idea of what you mean. This is what I'm doing. I've had it for a couple of weeks and I'm only on chapter 29. I downloaded Audible one time to get a copy of Samuel L. Jackson reading Go the F*k to Sleep. I think I'll give a bigger book a try next time around.Li'l secret - I retain information so well it's embarrassing. As in, has caused me chagrin at parties. People confuse it with intelligence. It's not.
if I'd purchased it to read, I would have had to pick at it in the 10 minutes before I go to bed.