Recommend Six Must-read books.

[Tee Kay]

A world atlas.

Open it, flip through the maps, follow the roads and the rivers with your finger, imagine the landscapes, the cities and the people.

Do this preferably with a torch under a clear starry night sky.

 

[Cutlass]

Originally Posted by Antilogic View Post
What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe

I've been working my way through this for some time. I'm an incredibly slow and easily interreptable reader (3 small kids can do that to you). Just completely awesome.

Same here. Have had it out of the library for more than a month now. Interesting, but huge and dense. Best taken in small bites.

 

[peter grimes]

I'll break mine up into sections:

Biology:
The Ancestor's Tale by Dawkins:
A sort of family history of all life on earth, showing how we have come to know what we know about evolution, development, and science in general

Physical Science:
Paradigms Lost by john Casti:
This book examines what makes humans special by looking at the question from several different lines of inquiry - AI, ET, and others.

US History:
The Howard Zinn Reader by Zinn.
This is a look at US history from what it was like to be a common person. This is not at all the history I learned in High School 25 years ago. Opened up my eyes in a profound way. I'd say this book alone has had a larger impact on the way I view contemporary issues than any other book.

Literature:
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Anyone who says this book is boring or sucks is an idiot. I hated reading stuff in high school, but when I finally came around to this one 5 years ago I was entranced. This book explains so much about the American character, and how we got rich. But before diving in check out the Studio360 episode:
http://www.studio360.org/2009/nov/27/

I'm going to end my list here, since I'm late for work

 

[Thoughtful Thug]

Theaetetus - Plato

On Interpretation - Aristotle

Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Nietzsche

The Fixation of Belief -Charles Sanders Peirce

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - Max Weber

Philosophical Investigation - Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

[Integral]

I'm gonna expand on my lists...

1. Read economics. There is a lot of bad pop-econ out there. I'm not a fan of Freakonomics-type stuff. I recommend:
- Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior
- Dixit, Thinking Strategically
- Clark, A Farewell to Alms
- Irwin, Free Trade Under Fire
- Landsberg, The Armchair Economist (far better than Freakonomics)
- Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (more ideological)


2. Read philosophy
- Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
- Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
- Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
- Kant, Foundations for the Metaphysics of Morals
- Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism (dense, difficult, absurdly important)
- Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

3. Read history
- Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution
- See Dachs

4. Read the Bible. But not all of it.
- Genesis
- Exodus
- Mark
- Acts
- Romans
- James

5. Read classics
- Plato, Euthyphro and Apology
- Aurelius, Meditations
- Thucydides

...Will add more and provide justifications later.

 

[Flying Pig]

If we're going with non-fiction, then:

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
History of the Peloponnesian War - Thucydides
The Bible
Serve to Lead, if you can get hold of it. If not, Xenophon's Anabasis is probably the closest widely-available equivalent; 18 Platoon by Sydney Jary MC is better, but difficult to find.
Some sort of philosophy probably wouldn't go amiss - Foundations for the Metaphysics of Morals by Kant seems a reasonably popular one
And, as already said, a decent atlas.

Honourable mentions, in that they're not exactly world-changing but they are fantastic, to Simon Singh's Fermat's Last Theorem, The Last Fighting Tommy by Harry Patch, and The Histories, but Thucydides gets the nod for being a far better analyst.

However I can't help but think you need to read some actual literature as well as non-fiction. May I advance:

Lord of the Flies- William Golding
The Great Gatsby- F Scott Fitzgerald
Moby Dick- Herman Melville
I, Claudius- Robert Graves
Shakespeare, at least most of it
A good volume of collected English classic poetry, although I'm not sure how easy it will be to find a reasonably short general volume which covers all or most of the greats.

Honourable mentions to The Sherlock Holmes Stories, by Conan Doyle; Oliver Twist and Hard Times by Dickens, and Asimov's work - Foundation and the following books are excellent.

 

[Lillefix]

If we're going with non-fiction, then:
The Bible

In Norway a new translation of the bible just came out, and it topped the lists in the fiction category actually.

Anyway. A few non-fiction books I've enjoyed that nobody else has mentioned yet:

The Keys of Egypt: The Race to Read the Hieroglyphs
First half of "Elegant Universe"
The Unfolding Of Language
The Lost Chronicles Of The Maya Kings

 

[aronnax]

Can I list plays? They are in book form!

- Death of A Salesman - Arthur Miller
- Doll's House - Henrik Ibsen
- Persepolis - Marjanne Satrapi (I know it is a comic book but then, it is a great story about struggling with one's self, one's place in the world, of growing up and the responsibility and duties that everyone can relate to. I'll love to read a novel version of this.)
- The Rise of Modern China - Immanuel Hsu (A great book on China's modern history)
- Anything by Roald Dahl but especially, Maltilda. (Nothing fired my imagination more as a child than Dahl's books, and even as an adult, you cannot read them without feeling a childlike glee in them)
This WWII book that I cannot remember.

 

[luiz]

Instead of listing international classics that most people have heard of (though you should absolutely read those books!), I'll recommend some Latin American classics that you may or may not have heard about.

-The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, also known in English as Epitaph for a Small Winner, by Machado de Assis.
Machado is perhaps the greatest shakesperian writer ever (not counting Shakespeare himself, naturally), so it's a pity that he is not better known in the Anglosphere. Harold Bloom called him "the greatest black writer in history" (even though in Brazil he was not considered black, being the son of a mulatto father and a white mother), and everyone should check him out. This book, together with Dom Casmurro, is his greatest literary achievement. It's a great, easy and quick read and a nice summary of Machado's pessimism and misanthropy. The greatest Brazilian writer by a long shot.

-The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, by João Guimarães Rosa. The title is actually a bad translation from the Portuguese original, a more accurate one would be "Great Backlands: Tracks". This was probably the most inlfuential Brazilian novel of the 20th Century (there is actually a National Park in tribute to the book!), and deals with themes of universal appeal. Having said that, a good part of it's revolutionary impact was caused by it's innovative use of the Portuguese language, and thus a good part of the appeal will certainly be lost in translation. If you speak Portuguese, though, this is a must read.

-The Aleph, by Jorge Luis Borges. A writer far greater than a bunch of those mediocre ones that won the Nobel, he never did because of his politics (Borges was a right-winger who supported the Argentine military junta early on, even though he would later become a critic of their brutality). It's hard to overstate how good a writer Borges was. The Aleph is a good choice because it's one of his most well known works and has several of his antological short stories, but really, read anything by him.

-The War of the End of the World, by Mário Vargas Llosa. Llosa certainly became better known internationally after recently winning the Nobel (a long overdue Nobel, again because of his political leanings. The boring García Márquez got his prize more than two decades earlier, a disgrace). This book is not his most famous work (La Ciudad y los Perros and Conversación en la Catedral are), but it is his favorite and also mine. I think it's his most "complete" book, like Brothers Karamazov is Dostoievki's most complete book, for dealing with a wider array of subjects and motifs. A great read and a page turner.

-Canto General, by Pablo Neruda. As Borges said, Neruda may have been a very mean man (a dirty Stalinist), but he was the greatest poet of his generation, perhaps of the 20th Century. The Canto is his longest work, in which he attempts no less than to tell the whole history of Latin America (through his myopic marxist eyes). It's full of beautiful poems and is an absolute must read.

 

[Laurencius]

The Illuminatus Trilogy - Robert Shea, Robert Anton Wilson.
Das Kapital - Karl Marx.
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy- Noam Chomsky.
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent - Eduardo Galeano.
Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism - Cornel West, Ph.D.
Stupid White Men ...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore.

 

[Hygro]

Hegel's Philosophy of Right is the one book that's getting recommended to me.

 

[katipunero]

Critical Theory since Plato - H. Adams
Fooled by Randomness - N.N. Taleb
The God Delusion - R. Dawkins
Danny, the Champion of the World - R. Dahl
Our Inner Ape - F. De Waal
Cosmos - C. Sagan

 

[CommonKnowledge]

Earth Abides by George Stewart - easily the best post apocalyptic novel I've ever read and a really powerful read

Descartes Meditations - quite a cop out in the end but in terms of thought provoking I haven't found an equal yet.

Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon - the recent history is a bit weak but everything else is just fantastic and other than "Of First and Last Men" I can't think of anything else like it. The book basically covers the history of the universe in a single moment of one persons consciousness.

A scanner Darkly by Philip Dick - my personal favourite of Dicks work, maybe not his most well known (Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep probably scoops that honour) but by far the most powerful in my opinion.

Dantes Divine Comedy - only just recently finished reading it but it really blew me away.

Secrets and Lies by Bruce Schneier - completely changed the way I thought about computer security. Maybe not that interesting if you're not into computer security though.

 

[Antilogic]

I've been working my way through this for some time. I'm an incredibly slow and easily interreptable reader (3 small kids can do that to you). Just completely awesome.

Same here. Have had it out of the library for more than a month now. Interesting, but huge and dense. Best taken in small bites.

The reason why it didn't make the short list is that I am also still reading it (just finished the part about the bank crises in the 1830's, I think I passed the half-way mark). Solid analysis, you can really get a feel for the politics of the time and how it might relate to today's situation, but he doesn't beat you over the head with it by forcing analogies where they would be inappropriate--nobody modern is even mentioned.

Lord of the Flies- William Golding
The Great Gatsby- F Scott Fitzgerald
Moby Dick- Herman Melville

I'm almost strictly a nonfiction reader now, but I was happy to see three pieces of classic literature I enjoyed all together on one list (I would add 1984). Usually, though, the high school summer reading I was forced to do was terrible (more like the easy omissions category I made), which pushed me into nonfiction. I disagree with your categorization of the Bible, though.

- Anything by Roald Dahl but especially, Maltilda. (Nothing fired my imagination more as a child than Dahl's books, and even as an adult, you cannot read them without feeling a childlike glee in them)

I have tons of memories as a kid of staying up late at night reading Dahl's books (Matilda, The BFG) with a flashlight. I approve.




I'm really happy about the philosophy lists being posted--that section is a little light in my library. When I looked back at my selections, I have 4.5 history books recommended and 1.5 philosophy ones (I count The "S" Word as 50/50). The honorable mentions are two modern media critiques, one on science, and several more histories. Seems a little unbalanced.

 

[Flying Pig]

(I would add 1984)

I preferred Animal Farm, both as a work of literature and as a cautionary tale, but have to say that I didn't much like Orwell at all.

I'm almost strictly a nonfiction reader now, but I was happy to see three pieces of classic literature I enjoyed all together on one list (I would add 1984). Usually, though, the high school summer reading I was forced to do was terrible (more like the easy omissions category I made), which pushed me into nonfiction. I disagree with your categorization of the Bible, though.

A very charged point, but my logic is that if books of philosophy or the links of Mein Kampf, Das Kapital and so on are non-fiction, then the Bible has to at least fit in there on that respect.

 

[Whiskey_Lord]

The Bible is fiction because it is a mythical narrative.

 

[Antilogic]

I preferred Animal Farm, both as a work of literature and as a cautionary tale, but have to say that I didn't much like Orwell at all.

I can't believe I didn't put Animal Farm in my list of recommendations! I think that's the only book I read more than Who is that Masked Man Anyway? as a kid.

A very charged point, but my logic is that if books of philosophy or the links of Mein Kampf, Das Kapital and so on are non-fiction, then the Bible has to at least fit in there on that respect.

There was a smiley there for a reason!

 

[Flying Pig]

There was a smiley there for a reason!

Oh, of course, don't worry! I thought it was a point worth addressing anyway: it is certainly a very valid one.

The Bible is fiction because it is a mythical narrative.

Well, parts of it are, certainly - leaving aside the view that it's all perfectly historical, which I think is frankly laughable. But does that mean that a bad history book should go in the 'fiction' section, because it chronicles events that didn't happen?

 

[.Shane.]

I preferred Animal Farm, both as a work of literature and as a cautionary tale, but have to say that I didn't much like Orwell at all.

I can't believe I didn't put Animal Farm in my list of recommendations! I think that's the only book I read more than Who is that Masked Man Anyway? as a kid.

In terms of being a more accurate predictor of what life would be like I think Brave New World has 1984 beat. Animal Farm is more allegory to me, so its in a bit of a different categoy (albeit still a great work).

 

[dusters]

1. Bible
2. Satanic Bible by Szandor Anton LaVey
3. Sidharta by Herman Hesse
4. Illusions by Richard Bach
5. Master and Margarita by Bulgakov