If you're looking for a list of books with an entrepreneur focus, there's a good list over on Quora: http://www.quora.com/What-books-should-entrepreneurs-read
Ask HN: Good books?
11–20 of 170 posts
Re: Ask HN: Good books?
#12"Will to Power" by Friedrich Nietzsche, who you'll probably love if you like Rand.
"A Thousand Plateaus" by Deleuze & Guattari. A psychedelic philosophy of complexity. Not exactly an airtight philosophical system, but it will blow your mind several times per page.
"Being & Time" by Martin Heidegger. An intense, logical investigation of individual existence. A deeply nuanced philosophical take on death, being, and temporality. This is the book to grapple with your inevitable annihilation.
Re: Ask HN: Good books?
#13Alan Kay's reading list: http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp. I think you can find what you are looking for. :)
Re: Ask HN: Good books?
#14If you're looking for something different then check out The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. It's is an eye-opening book in a very nontraditional sense.
You may remember Pausch as the computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon who was told that he had but a few months left to live (cancer). This book doesn't stray from its topic: "What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance?" If you're looking for motivation and an "out of the box" approach to analyzing daily life then this is it.
Here's the book: http://www.amazon.com/Last-Lecture-Randy-Pausch/dp/140132325...
Here's the famous speech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo
Re: Ask HN: Good books?
#15See here: http://jseliger.com/2010/03/22/influential-books-on-me-that-... for a list of influential books on me. I actually have a half-written post on books I wish I'd read when I was younger; here it is:
1. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
2. The Guide to Getting It On by Paul Johannides [sp?]
3. The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature by Geoffrey Miller
4. Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham
5. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
6. Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
In all cases, I think these books profoundly shaped how not only I think, but I think others can learn to think too. All suddenly revealed new connections and ideas about the world I'd never experienced or expected to experience before.
Granted, no book can be removed from its context, and its possible that if I'd read some of the books above as a younger person I wouldn't have been ready to appreciate them. But Flow seems by far the most valuable of the choices listed above because it engulfs more of the content of the others than any other choice.
Steven Berlin Johnson's new book Where Ideas Come From looks promising: http://www.amazon.com/Where-Good-Ideas-Come-Innovation/dp/15... .
Re: Ask HN: Good books?
#16Fiction:
Phillip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, Scanner Darkly.
If you really love reading - Orhan Pamuk - Black Book and My Name Is Red. ^_^
Re: Ask HN: Good books?
#17See here: http://jseliger.com/2010/03/22/influential-books-on-me-that-... for a list of influential books on me. I actually have a half-written post on books I wish I'd read when I was younger; here it is: 1. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 2. The Guide to Getting It On by Paul Johannides [sp?] 3. The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature by Geoffrey…
I'll have to second #3, the Mating Mind. It put a lot of stuff about dating into context.
Re: Ask HN: Good books?
#18A while back I read The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton, and enjoyed it immensly. de Botton has a real philosophical bent, and profiled a number of different occupations, and makes a lot of really insightful observations about the modern workforce. Can't recommend it highly enough.
Re: Ask HN: Good books?
#19http://goodreads.com is suppose to help you solve the problem of "What should I read next?"
Re: Ask HN: Good books?
#20The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes, is the best book I've read this year. It profoundly changed the way I look at things. I also found Sperm Wars to be very enlightening, ditto Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.