71–80 of 211 posts
Here is the start - https://brajeshwar.com/books/
I don't really read books, but I've really enjoyed reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes lately. The stories themselves aren't that interesting but the way Holmes collects, processes and works with data assisted by his methodical and almost pedantic approach to draw relevant conclusions from said data using his extensive knowledge of previous cases is extremely engaging. Now that the 21st century is entirely data driven,…
As for me, I can't really say that any single book was worth it in the sense - if I didn't read it, would I have been in the worse position or would I have missed some crucial and/or unique (only in that book) knowledge? Probably not.
PS: just not to sound entirely negative, I can recommend two ideas.
Idea 1: there are marks in Wikipedia, which denote especially good articles. And there is a meta page with a list of top10, top100, top1000 and so on pages. I made myself a personal project to read eventually through top1000 articles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles
Idea 2: find a good in-depth history channel on youtube or a streaming service, explaining in-depth certain historic evens and the whole timeline. I wager a lot of things will turn out not quite as you may have remembered or imagined. It teaches a lot about social conflicts, wars, money etc. I can recommend a series of streams but they are in Russian. Don't have an English equivalent at the moment.
(The title may sound gimmicky, but it's actually very relatable in general.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Bible is not exactly .. readable? Embarking on actually reading it all the way through and understanding the references is a serious project of literary archaeology, even armed with a concordance and a Greek lexicon. Then you run in to the various hapax legomenon: the words for which we have exactly one example in one sentence in the Bible, and are forced to guess the meaning of the word from context. Then three…
You're not meant to read it like a regular book, front to back, like it's a romance or text book. Is something you're meant to read through out your life, not in one sitting. >then what what what?
Meant by whom? The original authors of the Torah? The various prophets and Kings? The original authors of the New Testament? The Jewish scholars who compiled the Tanakh? The Christian scholars who combined the Septuagint and the New Testament into a single work? Pope Innocent I who ratified the choice of Gospels?
Then to fulfil the curiosity I would often read lot of blogs, articles on same topic. If I still feel that I am still not satisfied then I pick book on the topic.
I usually read around 20 books in an year and all are shortlisted [1] as per the above method. Last 3 books that I have read
- Code Breakers (I found the mRNA vaccine and gene editing fascinating) - How the world really works (To really understand that if the green future is really possible) - Natural Language Processing in Action (To understand how text models like GPT-3 really works
[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/23156763-anmol-saini?s...
I'm in the slow process of reading through Peter Adamson's A History of Western Philosophy without any gaps. Going through his Classical Philosophy volume, he contextualizes how the philosophers were responding to each other and developed their ideas from each other and their society, and gives easy, simple examples to illustrate these ideas. I could empathize with how in context those ideas were awesome and powerful…
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius Republic - Plato Laws - Cicero National System of Political Economy - Friedrich List Man and Technics - Oswald Spengler The Bible
The Bible is not exactly .. readable? Embarking on actually reading it all the way through and understanding the references is a serious project of literary archaeology, even armed with a concordance and a Greek lexicon. Then you run in to the various hapax legomenon: the words for which we have exactly one example in one sentence in the Bible, and are forced to guess the meaning of the word from context. Then three…
If that's too challenging (he does talk very fast, and there's a lot to take in), an even easier route to follow is Nicky Gumbel's Bible In One Year [1].
Of course, they both come from a believer's perspective - one Catholic, the other evangelical protestant - but after following them you will get a good idea of what adherents claim the Bible is about (i.e. the people for whom it was written) and then you are in a much better position to make sense of any archaeological/literary-analysis approaches to deconstructing it. Also, a visit to any art-history gallery will take on so much more depth because you will understand the stories behind pictures that depict Biblical themes.