81–90 of 270 posts
I love all the recommendations here but please say a word or two about why you recommend said books. Sell them to me, don't make me do the work. Dumb lists of titles are so uninteresting.
Principles of Neural Science by Kandel et al Molecular Biology of The Cell by Alberts et al Janeway’s Immunobiology Robbin’s Pathologic Basis of Disease All of these books are extraordinary in their sheer ability to organize thousands of small details into thematic narratives of how life operates. They also reveal how hard we humans try to narrate life into tidy, comprehensible themes. These books are all of an era (…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maths: Rudin's Real and Complex analysis. Yes!! Rudin kills it, but you need a year or two to get through this gem. A course in university will go too fast for sure.
I often hear Rudin is too challenging to be an introduction to analysis. You need to be very comfortable with relevant proofs already. Then what's so good about it? I'm not doubting it's great because I do hear it lauded, but it's hard to imagine. It is just a collection of mathematical obscurities for super-nerds? I've been ever-so-slowly self teaching higher maths. Right now halfway through Hammond's book of proof…
Principles of Neural Science by Kandel et al Molecular Biology of The Cell by Alberts et al Janeway’s Immunobiology Robbin’s Pathologic Basis of Disease All of these books are extraordinary in their sheer ability to organize thousands of small details into thematic narratives of how life operates. They also reveal how hard we humans try to narrate life into tidy, comprehensible themes. These books are all of an era (…
This is a commonly cited book about “strategic thinking”. But despite that, it’s one of the few business books that I actually read every page (as opposed to spotting fluff and selectively skipping pages), and it had a notable impact on the way I think/write/communicate.
I spend a lot of time thinking about philosophical-ish stuff, so here are some books that have had the strongest residual effects (whether that's changing how I think, changing what I think about, changing my values, or simply getting the thought ball rolling faster):
Ishmael (Daniel Quinn)
1984 (George Orwell)
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
Godel, Escher, Bach (Douglas Hofstadter)
The Republic [imp. "the allegory of the cave"] (Plato)
The Genealogy of Morals (Friedrich Nietzsche)
The Social Construction of Reality (Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann)
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (L. Wittgenstein)
Dissemination [imp. "The Pharmakon"] (Jacques Derrida)
The Quest for Reality (Barry Stroud)
Languages of Art (Nelson Goodman)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn)
Concepts (Jerry Fodor)
The Web of Life (Fritjof Capra)
Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco)
Naming and Necessity (Saul Kripke)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig)
There are others, and a lot of essays (by thinkers like Bertrand Russell, Carl Hempel, Hilary Putnam, WVO Quine, Karl Popper, Alfred Tarski, Gottlob Frege, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Mikhail Bakunin, CS Peirce, and David Hume, among many others), but these seem apropos as they most readily came to mind.