"Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn
This philosophy of science masterpiece illustrates how a community evolves its mental model or paradigm - from a long-accepted world view, to a crisis caused by evidence that contradicts the prevailing model, and then at last to an acceptance of a new paradigm.
not that i understand mathematics that well, but this book gave me many ideas of how an abstract/complex thing like mathematics can evolve through history, i found that exciting
- when i was a teenager i liked a couple of books by Martin Gardner
I like how GEB ties together everything with 'strange loops'.
The concept of how small pieces of something can form into something else entirely, is fascinating. How does a bunch of your cells form into you? How do a bunch of notes from a song form something so grand? How does a collection of 'inanimate' material form something animate?
Unfortunately I can't read fiction too much, I feel like what I read must directly help me with what I do, so I feel a lot better reading either technical stuff or business related (I love business). Since we are excluding technical, most of the following are business related, or helps you in dealing with people and solving problems)
Netscape Time - Jim Clark (very educational for those interested in startups, good piece of Internet history, interesting insights to the culture of the first Internet companies)
How To Win Friends And Influence People - Dale Carnegie (found it through YC recommendations, THANK YOU. one of the best educational books I have ever read, it will teach you how to make friends, be a good leader, get along at home, encourage people, make them follow you and so much more...)
Founders at Work - Jessica Livingston (I found it relevant to what I am doing, good lessons, and interesting insights)
Getting to Yes - Roger Fisher, William L. Ury (teaches you how to negotiate and how to get the best out of each situation for yourself and the other part, will be useful both at work and personal life, a bit dry)
Winning - Jack Welch (great advices on leadership, might be more useful to someone that is running a big company)
Leadership Is an Art - Max Depree (great leadership advices, it will give you the right mindset of how to be a great leader)
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Animal Farm (George Orwell), Alchemist (Paulo Coelho), Interpreting Your Dreams(Freud)
Why GEB? I read the original Godel paper and I studied on the subject, and I read a lot of related material... so I found GEB to be rather boring when talking about Godel (and pretty repetitive), and when not talking about it, I found it to be almost unscientific: unfocused, always going into unproved conjectures (or shallow theorems), and very little times explaining about stablished and scientific work that has proven to be useful.
So I could never understand this... why all the hype with GEB? What's the big thing with it?
I know it's not a paper, but I'm not sure it's a science divulgation book either. Sometimes I read it and I found it fun (as a sophisticated book-game of science), but most of the times it makes me nervous, for the reasons I pointed above, and because I feel it's taken as a book a lot more serious than what at least I feel it is.
Maybe it's a mistake in my appreciation of the book, but I can't help it. What do you think about it?
i think it's a great book, not a "serious" book, whatever that means
as i mention in another comment, I'm willing to call it mental-masturbation, in the sense of exciting one's mind (the nerdy mind anyway), so in a way I'm probably not too far from your vision of the book
i also think this kind of excitement is the basic motivation of the nerdy minded persons, and any text/experience that can get you in that state is something to appreciate.
lastly it exposes the reader to many topics, the reader may get interested in some of those topics and make some further investigations on its own, and at least in that sense it is a science divulgation book (it's more important for science divulgation to get you interested in the topics that to give you some raw facts)
the McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (Not a book per se, but
very enjoyable)
Shakespeare (Everything, I'm surprised he's only been mentioned once so far)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
Shogun by James Clavell
Then, of course, the regular hodgepodge of Card, Asimov, Adams, Gaiman, Pratchet, Stephenson, Feynman, and that LOTR guy, Tolkey or sommat. (In all seriousness, though, all of these authors are phenomenal, if well-known for being such)
It is hard to say what my favorite book is. But the book that impacted my life most was Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Read it.
My favorite authors and playwrights are (in no meaningful order) Michael Lewis, Carl Sagan, Siddhartha Gautama, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, Ayn Rand, Patrick Marber, Arthur Miller, and Shakespeare.
A few sort of random selections from my bookshelf (in no particular order):
* GEB:EGB - Hofstader
* The Pragmatic Programmer - Hunt / Thomas
* Peopleware - DeMarco / Lister
* The Mythical Man Month - Brooks
* Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming - Norvig
* Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind - Miyazaki
I'm sure his other books are good, too, but this is the only one I've read. I've never seen anyone else able to extrapolate the consequences of entire races advancing past the Singularity and how mortals manage to get by in such a galaxy (if you're able to accept faster-than-light travel as a premise, but he has a very interesting take on even that). A ton of innovative sci-fi ideas in one novel.
Same, and with special emphasis on The Diamond Age.
Also Douglas Adams, Vernor Vinge, Richard K. Morgan, and all kinds of other stuff. I like to read almost as much as I like to program.
Best nonfiction I have read in a while: "Leaving Microsoft To Change The World" by John Wood. A Microsoft VP leaves to pursue his dream of changing the world with books, and ends up founding Room to Read (http://www.roomtoread.org/ .) Highly recommended.
Hmmm. Diamond Age didn't do it for me for some reason. I liked it but not nearly as much as Cryptonomicon. But I have had several people tell me the same thing that you did wrt DA, so it just must be me.
House of Leaves is so good! I have yet to come up with a good description of what it's about, but I always try when I tell people about it.
I usually describe it as a story about a guy who finds a manuscript. The manuscript is a collection of essays that detail a documentary that was made about a house that randomly changes rooms.
So at the center of the novel, you have this really creepy story. But there are all the layers above that storyline that you have to read to get there. There's the storyline concerning the people who make the documentary. Then there's the storyline of the guy who wrote the manuscript ABOUT the documentary. Then you have the storyline of the guy who's reading the documentary.
Then there's you. You're reading about a guy who is in turn reading a manuscript about a documentary which was made about a house. It was so well done that at the end, I found myself not really sure what the hell I was reading anymore.
I'm still not sure what the book is, but it's certainly a stroke of genius.
- The Time Machine (still holds up very well, and seems strangely eerie and prescient in places)... (H. G. Wells)
- Dune (Frank Herbert)
- The Hobbit (and LotR) (Tolkien)
- Neuromancer (William Gibson)
- Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties (I picked up Idoru first, so I haven't yet read Virtual Light) (also Gibson)
- The Difference Engine (Gibson, Sterling)
- Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)
- Cryptonomicon (" ")
- Circuit of Heaven, End of Days (Dennis Danvers)
- All of the "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" stories and novels. (Fritz Leiber)
- The Earthsea trilogy (Ursula K. LeGuin)
- 'salem's Lot (Stephen King)
- Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain)
- the Coldfire trilogy (C. S. Friedman)
- various Cory Doctorow short stories
- Kamikaze L'Amour (Richard Kadrey)
- Lightpaths (Howard V. Hendrix)
- A Canticle For Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller, Jr.)
- Moonwar, Venus (Ben Bova)
- the Stainless Steel Rat series (Harry Harrison)
- Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)
- Ringworld (Larry Niven)
- Cthon (Piers Anthony) -- Trippiness level approaching Philip Jose Farmer ;-)
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series (Douglas Adams)
- The Black Company (Glen Cook)
- there's one particularly good post-cyberpunk series that takes place in a world in which Canada emerged as a major world power, but for the life of me I can't rememeber the title.
- the 1632 series (Eric Flint)... see also S. M. Stirling's Nantucket series ("Island in the Sea of Time", et al.), and H. Beam Piper's novel Kalvan of Otherwhen
Non-fiction:
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume)
- the surviving words and works of Epicurus, and Diogenes the Cynic
For sheer enjoyment (measured in how many times I've re-read them, at least at various times in my life): Heinlein's _The Door into Summer_. Connie Willis' _Bellwether_ (these can be funny, right?). Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_ (more in my youth than today, but I can probably still recite passages by heart).
You reminded me of a great little book published a long time ago which is still very relevant: "The Ugly American"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_American). A recent really good read was Le Carre's "The Mission Song"
This Perfect Day by Ira Levin (out of print, yet much more worthwhile in my opinion than other dystopic novels)
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
The Books of the Fey by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer
The Deathgate Cycle by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis
This is a great book. It delves into the psychology of how we think about and use the built world and explains why some things are simply hard to use as compared to other, better designed things.
- Hyperion by Dan Simmons
- 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear and all the other Zamonien books (only know german version)
- Pollen by Jeff Noon
- Otherland by Tad Williams
- Ubik by PK Dick
This philosophy of science masterpiece illustrates how a community evolves its mental model or paradigm - from a long-accepted world view, to a crisis caused by evidence that contradicts the prevailing model, and then at last to an acceptance of a new paradigm.
http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/Kuhn.html