Good Reading Material?
I've been looking for better ways to spend my random blocks of freetime lately, and I think reading might be a good place to start. I've never been much of a reader, and I could probably name every book that I've ever read in under a minute. With the exception of all of those childhood novels, comics, cartoons, and all of that stuff, of course.
Do you have any general suggestions? I'm interested in anything that's good reading, on any topic whatsoever. Philosophy, psychology, religion, drama, romance, action, mystery, fantasy, anything. Let's try to compile a good list here and the next time we're at the library or book store or browsing Amazon.com we might have some specific ideas.
Following each book with a short blip of what it's about would be nice.
Do you have any general suggestions? I'm interested in anything that's good reading, on any topic whatsoever. Philosophy, psychology, religion, drama, romance, action, mystery, fantasy, anything. Let's try to compile a good list here and the next time we're at the library or book store or browsing Amazon.com we might have some specific ideas.
Following each book with a short blip of what it's about would be nice.
posted by Ted Miin at 3/28/2007 05:36:00 PM
6 Comments:
-The Essential Ken Wilber: An Introductory Reader, by Ken Wilbur. Simplified version of otherwise verbose full texts about consciousness, mystical experience, meditation, body/mind/soul/spirit, all that stuff. Ken Wilbur writes about the kind of stuff that I've never been able to communicate effectively with words.
-The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey. I'm not finished with this book yet, but so far it's been a pretty good read. The target is people that are facing personal and professional issues of satisfaction and fulfillment.
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (David Graeber)
The Geneology of Morals (Nieztsche)
The Beautiful Ones are Not Yet Born (Ayi Kwei Armah)
These are all freaking amazing.
David Boehnke
The Kindness of Strangers by Mike McIntyre -- It's a non-fiction written by a journalist who travels penniless across America.
The Outsider by Albert Camus
Angela's Ashes and 'Tis by Frank McCourt
Shantaram (Gregory David Roberts)
"At the start of this massive, thrillingly undomesticated potboiler, a young Australian man bearing a false New Zealand passport that gives his name as "Lindsay" flies to Bombay some time in the early '80s. On his first day there, Lindsay meets the two people who will largely influence his fate in the city. One is a young tour guide, Prabaker, whose gifts include a large smile and an unstoppably joyful heart. Through Prabaker, Lindsay learns Marathi (a language not often spoken by gora, or foreigners), gets to know village India and settles, for a time, in a vast shantytown, operating an illicit free clinic. The second person he meets is Karla, a beautiful Swiss-American woman with sea-green eyes and a circle of expatriate friends. Lin's love for Karla—and her mysterious inability to love in return—gives the book its central tension. "Linbaba's" life in the slum abruptly ends when he is arrested without charge and thrown into the hell of Arthur Road Prison. Upon his release, he moves from the slum and begins laundering money and forging passports for one of the heads of the Bombay mafia, guru/sage Abdel Khader Khan. Eventually, he follows Khader as an improbable guerrilla in the war against the Russians in Afghanistan. There he learns about Karla's connection to Khader and discovers who set him up for arrest. Roberts, who wrote the first drafts of the novel in prison, has poured everything he knows into this book and it shows. It has a heartfelt, cinemascope feel. If there are occasional passages that would make the very angels of purple prose weep, there are also images, plots, characters, philosophical dialogues and mysteries that more than compensate for the novel's flaws. A sensational read, it might well reproduce its bestselling success in Australia here."
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Douglas Hofstadter)
A book exploring the nature of self-referentialism (in the form of "strange loops"), a topic of critical importance to Gödel's Incompleteness proof and an interesting component of Escher's art and Bach's music. Ties in content from diverse things like math, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, genetics... and ant farms, maybe more too. Long, but very interesting and a good read.
The Dilbert Future (Scott Adams)
Not a Dilbert comic book. Scott Adams writes about his predictions for the future based on what he considers the 3 immutable qualities of mankind - selfishness, stupidity, and horniness. Some things are kind of dated since the book came out like a decade ago, but still interesting. Some of his deeper things in the last chapter (when he "turns the humor off") are perhaps of questionable accuracy, and for this crowd the reaction might be "yawn", but interesting to read.
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