The books you mention can be of any genre and from any discipline of life. The important criteria is that they were helpful to you in whatever way you think.
Fiction: Jurassic Park by M Crichton. Just for the world build up and writing
Non-Fiction: The Machinery of Life by David Goodsell. I fell in love with biology again after reading this book. The wonderful illustrations make the book come alive.
It's excellent for those of us who aren't atheists, too. I've picked up the recent University of Chicago translation of these, and cultivated the habit of reading a letter or two every morning with my coffee. It's an excellent use of time.
I also found Seneca's "On the Shortness of Life" completely recalibrated my thinking about the passage of time and how I spend the time allotted me.
Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner is probably the best nonfiction book I've ever read. It not only contains profound philosophical insights, but presents them in a concise and approachable manner. Every chapter ends with a recapitulation of the chapter's contents (why isn't this standard?). The book is short and deals with a single topic. It gets to the point rather than beating around the bush, and completely avoids invoking metaphysical explanations or political implications. I truly cannot praise it enough.
Each one of these were worth every minute of read/listen.
Edit to add: The world around us feels like it was created as we see it today. But these books and the podcast, combined, show us how we got here, where we are today. Wars, long periods of peace, pandemics, evolution, human adaptability, luck, there are so many things that brought us where we are today. It's not a given, and we can lose it all and be pushed back to stone age, or further back, if we take our current progress for granted.
The Selfish Gene is great. The portions on Evolutionary Stable Strategies are particularly interesting. It shows how Darwinism can lead to a "steady state", where a population contains individuals with competing characteristics (selflessness VS selfishness), and why this not at odds with selection.
The jaw-dropping moment for this point is the section about bees, even if the author himself said it was very hard to understand. It reframed my understanding of a 'queen' bee at least.
Yes it is certainly a classic, I think it belongs to a category of books that really changes how society at large reasons about things. There are not that many books of that kind.
I would take a lot of the unevidenced narrative in 'Sapiens' with a huge pinch of salt.
Both the book and the author have been criticized, rightly in my opinion, the former for elevating the theories of a very specific and ideological branch of anthropology to facts, and the latter for being a grifter who does not know much about anthropology.
Every now and then, one hits odd statements in Sapiens that make one wonder about the rest. He writes as if he does not know the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; he suggests that in the 1860 presidential election a majority of Americans voted for abolition, etc.
Agreed, I found that writing also chose to use quite manipulative, or even emotional language to subtly get the lean towards the author's way.
Which is completely fine if the book were presented as "Here's just my opinion on what may have happened", rather than presenting it as "Scientific history of mankind" - this aspect is what bothered me the most.
But we suppose the group who would fall for this kind of strategy is the exact audience the author was going for.
From the pov of my career: Designing Data-Intensive Applications is the only technical book I've ever read that I felt was worth the time it took me to read it. It's excellent - I learned a ton, I keep going back to it, and if I'd read it as a fresh graduate it could have saved me a lot of trouble.
I've read a few other of the popular programmer books eg Clean Code, Refactoring, the Pragmatic Programmer, Working Effectively With Legacy Code, and I didn't get much value from any of them. They're not bad, it's just that they didn't teach me much that I hadn't already picked up on the job, and I didn't feel like a book was the best way to learn their lessons as opposed to just picking up what you need to know from Google, colleagues, etc, over the years as you gain experience.
"An Algebraic Approach to Non-Classical Logics" by Helena Rasiowa was an eye-opener for me. Before that, "A short introduction to intuitionistic logic" by Gregory Mints is a great read which introduced me to Kripke models (and made me see that intuitionism can be understood classically in an intuitive way), but Rasiowa's book just unlocked how I saw logic from then on.
Speaker for the Dead. It is a second book in Enders game franchise so you will probably need to read the first book first or watch the movie, but second book is mostly independent of the first one.
As one of the great books of science fiction and just plain excellent story-telling, don’t do yourself a disservice by watching the movie. It is so very bad. Just read the book. It is worth it.
If I were to choose three fiction, those would make the cut.
Fiction:
The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem - It shed light on me in regards to microelectronics, swarm intelligence. Nothing ever eased my learning curve more for genetic algorithms like this short novel! It is also a good read in general. It also taught me that the difference in scientific vs force vs emotional approach to unknown. Would recommend as a springboard from a day-to-day acitivities.
Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky - a Soviet sf classic, I've read it 3x already. It tells a story about a closed zone where 'aliens' left their artifcats, and how that changed people around them.
Ender's Game - I don't think there is an explanation needed. It is a total classic. It helps a lot to understand outsiders, not just aliens but a humans too.
I'd not heard of The Invincible, but Solaris had a transformative effect on me and you've convinced me to read the first two items on your list. Didn't Roadside Picnic become Tarkovsky's Stalker?
Did you also like the rest of the books? It got pretty deep into religious nutcase territory eventually. I didn't actually know all the religious controversy around the series before I read the books, so I got to experience that solid increase of "wtf??" moments as the trilogy progressed. The first book is pretty darn good though, won't argue that!
Of the Ender series books, I've read the whole quintet - Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, Ender in Exile.
I've enjoyed all five of them, although the quality drops which each of the instance. Speaker for the Dead is worth the time for sure, the other three I'm not entirely convinced. Speaker won a Hugo award in 1987.
Of Card's novels, the Shadow Saga, is a pretty good read thou. I've enjoyed it more than the Ender's one. It is set in the same universe, and focuses on Bean - another child from the Battle School. It drifts towards political fiction.
For me Ender's game was completely ruined when I learned about the controversy around the author, because to me, homophobia goes completely against the message of the books. So it no longer works for me.
+1 for Roadside Picnic. I love how unbelievably melancholy that book is. The amount of smoking and drinking in every scene is kind of amusing too. It definitely hits that noir sci-fi vibe. Like what if the future goes kind of wrong, but not necessarily dystopian.
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 years later you emerge blinking into the sunlight with a deep understanding of the spirituality of the European Iron age .. then what?
The Bible, directly and indirectly, is one of the major contributor to Western Civilization. While most of them has been secularized, large amount of ideas that we take for granted or consider common in the Western Civilization, such as equality of all man and inherent dignity of human, could be traced back to The Bible. A good understanding of The Bible would give you an understanding on the process of how Western Civilization is formed as it is today.
Stanford Western Culture class had Book of Genesis and New Testaments as part of required reading [0].
I don't think that this is really correct. For around 1500 years, most philosophical, political and religious thought in Europe had to be justified by referring back to the Bible. Therefore the arguments that equality, liberalism, democracy, and so on have their roots in the Bible are well rehearsed but they are not falsifiable nor, for the most part, true.
The political philosophy underpinning the stories in Genesis (much older than the Torah), is very different from that of the Babylon era when the Pentateuch was compiled. The Second Temple Era is very different from both of these. The historical context, and the political content of Christianity in Christ's era (or in the era of the early Gospels) is yet again different, and the context of the later, Pauline Christian books yet again another thing. Modern (post-Lutheran) scholarship sees each of these eras as a development or a refinement moving towards a better fulfilment of God's word, however the contemporary view was that many of these developments were revolutionary, iconoclastic, or heretical.
The Bible is undoubtedly an extremely rich historical document. However, the work of understanding its meaning and its legacy on some modern cultural and ethnic groups is not straightforward. Someone who reads widely through the Bible from the Pentateuch to the New Testament and believes to discern a single unifying philosophical theme or a coherent message to humanity either has not really understood most of it, or is schizophrenic. (Note that reading the Book of Genesis and the New Testament is a very different thing to reading the entire Bible. Many people who think they are able to comment on 'The Bible' really only know the Gospels + Genesis + Exodus, or some other subset such as the Gideon 'Bible'.)
Of course, 'Western Civilization' is somewhat synonymous with a culture that takes the Bible seriously and attributes a sort of mystical energy to it, while not necessarily honouring the stated precepts of Christianity (or Judaism). This makes the fact that the Bible is widely read and referred to something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, sometimes combined with jingoistic innuendo that people without a Christian-inspired culture are not capable of democracy, or tolerance or creative thought, or some other shiboleth of 'Western Civilization'.
There are much less obscure texts, roughly contemporary with the Bible, which discuss humanistic values such as might be associated with 'Western Civilization'. Some of these have been treated as holy by various religious groups including Early Christians, or as of a quasi-religious importance in the organization of society and its institutions. Many of these were widely read throughout the Christian era and are much easier to see as having influenced 'Enlightenment' and 'Modern Secular' values. For example, Plato's Republic. Any suggestion that the Bible is more important than that or similar works to gain "an understanding of the process of how Western Civilization is formed as it is today" just seems to me to be a hangover from Christian apologetics and bigotry.
tl;dr Placing an importance on the Bible because it's a founding text of 'equality of all man and inherent dignity of human' is no different than condemning it as a founding text of the transatlantic slave trade, or of Nazism.
While I broadly agree, I don't think you're disagreeing as strongly as I think you think you are with dsr3 — Genesis and the NT are just two of the items on the given Stanford link alongside Plato's Republic, and it recommends several other pre-Christian texts in the subsequent list.
I am not arguing that one should not read biblical texts. Just that the recommendation to read 'The Bible' is really a recommendation to read the central texts of Judaism, the central texts of Christianity plus hundreds of pages of not particularly edifying and largely irrelevant historical and spiritual marginalia, which were collected into a specific text known as 'The Bible' for fairly arbitrary reasons.
If the OP had said to read 'Genesis, Psalms and the Acts of the Apostles' it would have made some kind of sense to me. But dsr3's use of the fact that the Stanford course includes Genesis and the NT as support of the recommendation to read 'The Bible' is just sophistry.
Saying 'you should read every single thing Aristotle wrote, the important philosophy along with the archaic geometry and the incorrect biology' is on the face of it quite a lot less silly then saying 'you should read The Bible'.
Thanks for the additional comments and correction. At first, I don't see the need to be super-specific at first because, using the analogy you mentioned, most people (that I know, at least), don't mention they have specifically The Republic or Apologia or Phaedo, they will just simply mention I read Socrates. But after some thought, I do agree that I should have been more specific on this case.
But I would still argue that The Bible (or to be more specific in this context, Genesis and NT. I will continue to use The Bible as a term for the sake of brevity.), have significant contribution to the contemporary ideas in Western Civilization. Or at least, the thoughts that is derived from it. [1] argues that the Western idea of identity is born out of Luther and [2-3] has an extensive chronology about how The Bible influences Western thinking. For starter, directly quoting from [3], "The Greco-Romans despised the feeble, the poor, the sick, and the disabled; Christianity glorified the weak, the downtrodden, and the untouchable; and does that all the way to the top of the pecking order". I think Nietzsche also share the same sentiment about how the ideas started in The Bible caused the West to become 'weaker' compared to the original, dominant Greco-Romans values.
[1-3], and of course Nietzche, are secular source that does not rely on the claim that The Bible is divinely inspired. I also would not claim that The Bible itself is not influenced by outside thinking, especially Greek philosophy. [2] directly writes that in the Paul labors, there is a fusion between Jewish morality and Greek philosophy. As a matter of fact, these external influences is probably why the NT canon is so successful.
I also have to note that I do not claim that The Bible is 'the' contributor to the current thinking in the West, my main arguments is that it is 'a major contributor' to the current Western thought, without diminishing other texts. For bad and good, The Bible is indeed a major contributor. Diminishing the influence and contribution of The Bible to the current Western discourses seems like a forced attempt to understate the contribution of the Christianity.
And re: "jingoistic innuendo that people without a Christian-inspired culture are not capable of democracy". This is a different question for another day, and to discuss about that claim etc is outside of my circle of (semi) competence.
Your use of these citations is an example of exactly the fallacy which I am talking about.
[2] and [3] are about the impact of Christianity on the modern world. I have never argued that this is not significant. My point is that reading the Bible is a terrible way to learn about this.
Firstly, most of the Bible is not about Christianity at all, since it was written before the birth of Christ. Secondly, large parts of it are not about anything interesting at all. Thirdly, most of the parts that are about Christianity, are not particularly useful for someone seeking to understand Christian ideas or culture.
[1] is about the ideas of Luther. Again, these are certainly important. Do you think that it was necessary for Max Weber to read the Bible in order to write the key sociological text on European Protestantism? For that matter, do you think that Francis Fukuyama had to read it in order to write that book? What about Nietzsche? If they didn't need to read the Bible in order to reason about the ideas and the mythos of Christianity, why should we?
The logical step from "Christianity (and/or Judaism) have profoundly influenced us, and should be examined and understood", to "one should read the Bible" is completely flawed, and only made because of the lingering Christian superstition that doing so is 'good for one' or leads to some nebulous form of well-being.
> There are much less obscure texts, roughly contemporary with the Bible, which discuss humanistic values such as might be associated with 'Western Civilization'. Some of these have been treated as holy by various religious groups including Early Christians, or as of a quasi-religious importance in the organization of society and its institutions. Many of these were widely read throughout the Christian era and are much easier to see as having influenced 'Enlightenment' and 'Modern Secular' values. For example, Plato's Republic. Any suggestion that the Bible is more important than that or similar works to gain "an understanding of the process of how Western Civilization is formed as it is today" just seems to me to be a hangover from Christian apologetics and bigotry.
Have an upvote!
Can you draw some broader pictures here for the relatively uninformed how you would get a broadly humanistic view from, e.g., The Republic? If that's too broad an ask, could you draw a line from Plato (and others) to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
> Is something you're meant to read through out your life, not in one sitting.
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?
Why are you replying as if you were a teen cringelord?
It's not a question of who decided that, but because it's a complex book.
And that is also true to pretty much every other religious book in the world, where believers reach to their respective holy texts on a regular basis to study them and have a deeper understanding of their faith.
But the words 'meant to' suggest that it is designed or intended to be read piecemeal over a lifetime, when in fact the history of what we call 'The Bible' makes it clear that this is not true.
Your final sentence is simply not true. Many religions have central texts which are short, unified in style and content, written over one person's lifetime, and intended to be completely read and understood by followers with limited time and educational resources. For example, the Qu'ran.
I can appreciate why people might say this, but modern translations are not that hard, and large parts are narrative and relatively straightforward. Probably a bit of an explainer is helpful, just like any other major work of literature.
As to whether OP would find it worthwhile reading, that obviously depends. But as others point out it is the most important book in shaping Western civilization as we know it...so there is probably some value.
On that subject Luc Ferry's Brief History of Thought has perspectives on several major thought streams. I don't know how accessible it is, but when I read it a few years ago, I found it reasonable, and I don't know much about philosophy.
I think the bible and a lot of other such religious books are "comfort books". You don't really understand every single word or passage and you have your own interpretation of most of the book which might not have been originally intended by whoever the authors were. But it provides peace and comfort and that's good enough for most people.
You are describing people mumbling through long and repetitive narratives about the history of the Jewish people without understanding or taking much in, because they believe it makes them closer to God, or simply reading the parts which feature well-known 'Bible stories' while ignoring most of the rest, thinking that they are reading 'The Bible'.
This does not invalidate what the GP said: [paraphrasing] that the Bible is difficult to understand and mostly of questionable value to a modern reader.
I highly recommend the Bible in a Year podcast series from Fr Mike Schmitz [0]. It's very approachable but also gives you enough theology and historical context to get a handle on the 'bigger picture' and how all the parts fit together. You don't have to use the sign-up link below, it's also available anonymously from all the usual podcast providers.
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.
I like the book as well. But I think it suffers a bit too much from technooptimism for answering the question "how to avoid a climate disaster". I appreciate Bill Gates's optimism, but it's a dangerous gamble to only talk about technical solutions and leave societal and cultural aspects off the table. With that in mind: It's still a very good book.
- The Way of The Superior Man. The only "self help" book I give any credit. It really boils down to encouraging people to have a purpose in life and accept ourselves.
- The Stupidity Paradox. Ever feel the world works in a "stupid" way? That your organization keeps promoting stupid ideas? Read this book and get into the roots of functional stupidity. It's a bit repetitive, but extremely insightful book.
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. The book I most recommend for any software professional.
Depends on what the journey looks like. If you're dead set on becoming a software developer it's a great and solid introduction to programming and computing.
But if you're not, I'd recommend resources targeting more popular and lower friction languages than scheme such as JavaScript.
I've read it after 5 years of professional experience and it was a very good read.
Framing SICP as a book is a little misleading. I mean, it is a book, but mostly it's a collection of ~350 programming exercises. Exercise solving time will dominate reading time like 10:1. It's worth it! But plan accordingly.
I've spent much more time in sicp on text (and video lecture) than I did exercises. I also read it on my own time, not in class, and it took me many months to go through it.
I guess everyone has a different way of approaching this.
Did you do all the exercises? Some of them go by in a minute or two, others have taken me 6-8 hours with sessions over multiple days. That is probably my main gripe with what is otherwise excellent pedagogy, the unpredictability and variance makes it difficult to set progress goals or schedule.
The first three chapters are an alternate-history computer science 101. There's nothing in there you haven't seen before, but reading what you might have thought were modern ideas in such an elegant presentation from the 80s/90s is a trip. It can get tedious though.
Chapter 4, on interpreters and alternative languages, is where in many readers' estimation the real payoff lies. Scheme itself is constructed in a very elegant way from few primitives. My Programming Languages course did an ML interpreter in Standard ML, but I found SICP's scheme interpreter more satisfying and more enlightening - especially when you see how an impossibly small "toy" implementation easily sustains all the modern conveniences, complexities, and artifice described in the previous three chapters. Then the next two sections were totally new to me: I had heard passing mention of logic programming and nondeterministic programming on HN, but never seen them in college or in practice. It's really impressive how elegant certain solutions can be under those paradigms.
Leetcode is an entirely different track and aesthetic on computer science, obsessed with doing things optimally, efficiently. SICP is the polar opposite of that: it tries to make things nice, organized, clean, elegant, intuitive. Even trivial optimizations are left on the floor, like I'm at the end of chapter 4 and we've been using linked lists in place of maps and vectors the whole time.
Depending on what you're doing, you need some of both. But some programmers are temperamentally more interested in the "ugly but optimal" track, and enjoy SICP less.
What's enlightening about solving algorithmic problems of harsher difficulty? I don't think it has any relevance to software engineering unless your job involves writing efficient algorithms all the time..
Because as far as self-help books go, the vast majority, that one included (sorry), don't even register as anything close to worthy. Here's 3 that are actually worth your time:
As a person who hadn't finished a book in years, hadn't felt excited by a book, this reminded me of what it felt like to not be able to put a book down. It is non-fiction but written as a narrative. It was a good mix of history, economics, politics and business. I cannot recommend it enough.
Two come to mind. "Travels" by Michael Crichton, and "Sharing a House with the Never-Ending Man" by Steve Alpert. Both are good, but neither is exceptional. But their different approaches to storytelling have been important.
This book, although many (most?) of its claims are disproved really had an impact on me since it showed me that there could be _a lot_ more in the world than meets the eye. Everything around us and in history is filled with mysteries, unanswered questions. You could find interesting things everywhere. I would say the content is not the important part, but it instills the curiosity to dig deeper.
A semi-autobiography of Carl Jung. It made me realise how "meta-programmable" humans are. How much of how we think can be though upon, itself. How we can introspect on our thoughs ... with our thoughts. Basically, made me in awe of conscious beings.
This is classic from Jorge Luis Borges. It showed me at the time "experimental" literature. How can one can push story-telling to another level, like many other art forms have done.
If you are spending significant time in your programming career modifying text. Not just code, but structural editing of text, heavy lifting text. You are making repeated modifications that confirm to a pattern, learning vim macros are something you must absolutely consider, they can make > O(n) editing steps happen in O(1) steps.
Certainly both. SLiSW was eye-opening. At the time, all I knew was PHP and JavaScript. For the past several years I have been writing Haskell almost exclusively.
I enjoy content that adds curious new information and different views to topics full of cliches, while still being relatively respectable or well researched.
Coming Apart - this book described the coming separation of the US into two “classes” long before it was widely talked about. Today most talk about it as a political divide. This book tackles it as a divide between knowledge workers and the rest. A controversial take that adds much needed food for thought to the conversation. If you’ve lived poor and you’ve also lived in a place like Palo Alto, you’ll be astounded by how readily you can point and say, “that’s me”. Lots of fascinating statistics.
Bowling Alone - a great book about the collapse of US social life. Dense, lots of statistics, but a clear picture is laid out of increasing isolation and alienation. Read it alongside something like Consumer’s Republic to understand how so much of this stems from the selfishness and individuality encouraged by consumerism in post-war America.
Triumph of the City - an excellent take that can be used as food for thought when people are talking about how dirty cities are. In truth, the author argues, they are our greenest “invention” ever. Lots of good evidence. Imagine collecting the trash if every human lived on their own acre of land. The sewage, the energy usage. Cities are incredibly efficient and clean.
The Man Who Solved The Market - everyone interested in finance needs to read this and it’s precursor More Money Than God. The Bogleheads and their index fund ilk are often correct when they say “money managers all lose to an index after fees”. Beating the market is nigh on impossible for all but a few. Most of those few work at Renaissance Technologies. Their Medallion Fund has made 36% after fees every single year since 1989. The fund does its best in market crash years. Closed to outside investors. A story of mathematicians essentially building models that can predict the future reliably. Utterly fascinating, the most successful money printer ever built. As a bonus, we learn that Jim Simons originally controlled this printer and spent the money helping US math teachers. He then ceded control to Robert Mercer, who used the printer’s output to fund Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon, Trump, etc.
The Snowball - a biography of Warren Buffet that tells an incredible story. The story is one of total obsession. Of a human who literally started from a few dollars, learned about some principles like compounding at age 6, and applied the exact same principles every day for the rest of his life with very little deviation. The craziest part of this story is how every 10 years, he’s surrounded by people saying “times have changed, you’re missing out”. Then those people get blown up by whatever black swan, and Warren’s snowball just grows and grows. He didn’t become a billionaire till he was in his 50’s but the snowball is still growing and he’s one of the richest people alive.
The Warren Buffet story bothers me a bit, especially since him and his pal Munger are cited all the time in HN-approved material. He's definitely one of the richest men in history, and his ability to achieve that is worthy of respect. I won't pretend that I don't want to be wealthy. But at the end of the day it's a person whose contribution is to just buy things at the right time instead of making anything. He is set to spend much of that in charitable endeavors but it begs the question of how individuals can get so massively wealthy and powerful to begin with a.k.a the Batman syndrome pointing to a societal failure. He's had way more of a contribution that I have or ever will but at the same time I feel there is something clearly wrong here.
The question is incredibly vague to me. All books that you find interesting or that you simply have fun reading are worth investing your time in. So I could mention wonderful classics of literature. It sounds like you want "insightful" books in a philosophical sense.
To those who mentioned Marcus Aurelius's meditations, I recommend the reading of "Zen mind beginner's mind". Along the same lines of somewhat spiritual books, "Siddartha" is a classic and also Khalil Gibran's "The Prophet".
Very different: for my personal history, reading "Goedel, Escher, Bach" when I was 18 deeply affected my vision of things. Other science books I loved: "the unfolding of language" (historical linguistics) and "the world within the world" (physics and philosophy of physics).
For something much more recent, that changed my view of the contemporary world, I recommend "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling. It's about understanding "poor" countries in their variety and in a less stereotyped way, but especially about understanding that living conditions across the world, essentially without exception, have massively improved over the last century. I feel Rosling's is only part of the story, though, and "Sapiens" (mentioned by others below) tells parts of the other half.
I also like poetry, and in the rare occasions I am in the right frame of mind and focus to read poetry, it feels like a powerful meditation or prayer.
If you want to "expand" your vision of things, one thing I tried to do, and loved, is reading as much as possible books from other cultures, for example postcolonial literature. I particularly liked Chinua Achebe's "things fall apart". Somewhat related, "the moon and the bonfires" was deeply moving to me, the life of a man in agricultural Italy after ww2. The reason why I put these together is that they do something extraordinary: we are used to descriptions of africans during the colonization process, or of poor Italians after the war, but we are not very used to them being full three-dimensional characters, people like us, and stepping in their shoes.
Finally I enjoy travel books, for similar reasons. Among my favourites is "the road to Oxiana", written in the 1930s, and full of british humour. Also, Rory Stewart (british politician, diplomat and academic) walked Afghanistan in 2002 and told the story in "The places in between". Very, very helpful for understanding Afghanistan beyond the news.
- So Good They Can't Ignore You. Even though kinda 'self-help'-ish and repetitive at times, it played a role in shaping the way that I think about my career.
- The Daily Stoic. A collection of snippets from stoic philosophers, tied with examples from modern living, it was a good and lightweight introduction to philosophy.
I'd have to agree. I personally found that the book's structure with the themed chapters doesn't lend itself to a continuous reading; but going in small chunks as the authors intended, the commentaries felt a tad better.
210 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadFiction: Jurassic Park by M Crichton. Just for the world build up and writing
Non-Fiction: The Machinery of Life by David Goodsell. I fell in love with biology again after reading this book. The wonderful illustrations make the book come alive.
I also found Seneca's "On the Shortness of Life" completely recalibrated my thinking about the passage of time and how I spend the time allotted me.
2. The Selfish Gene
3. Podcast: Kings of Kings
https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-56-kings-of-kings...
Each one of these were worth every minute of read/listen.
Edit to add: The world around us feels like it was created as we see it today. But these books and the podcast, combined, show us how we got here, where we are today. Wars, long periods of peace, pandemics, evolution, human adaptability, luck, there are so many things that brought us where we are today. It's not a given, and we can lose it all and be pushed back to stone age, or further back, if we take our current progress for granted.
Both the book and the author have been criticized, rightly in my opinion, the former for elevating the theories of a very specific and ideological branch of anthropology to facts, and the latter for being a grifter who does not know much about anthropology.
But we suppose the group who would fall for this kind of strategy is the exact audience the author was going for.
I've read a few other of the popular programmer books eg Clean Code, Refactoring, the Pragmatic Programmer, Working Effectively With Legacy Code, and I didn't get much value from any of them. They're not bad, it's just that they didn't teach me much that I hadn't already picked up on the job, and I didn't feel like a book was the best way to learn their lessons as opposed to just picking up what you need to know from Google, colleagues, etc, over the years as you gain experience.
2. The Crisis of the Modern World by Rene Guenon
3. Islam and the Destiny of Man by Gai Eaton
IMO these books are critical reading in a post-modern world to make any sense of life.
The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem - It shed light on me in regards to microelectronics, swarm intelligence. Nothing ever eased my learning curve more for genetic algorithms like this short novel! It is also a good read in general. It also taught me that the difference in scientific vs force vs emotional approach to unknown. Would recommend as a springboard from a day-to-day acitivities.
Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky - a Soviet sf classic, I've read it 3x already. It tells a story about a closed zone where 'aliens' left their artifcats, and how that changed people around them.
Ender's Game - I don't think there is an explanation needed. It is a total classic. It helps a lot to understand outsiders, not just aliens but a humans too.
All of the above are either hard or soft sf.
Indeed, it did -- it also spawned the "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." game series, which really nails down the derelict industrial soviet aesthetic.
Of Card's novels, the Shadow Saga, is a pretty good read thou. I've enjoyed it more than the Ender's one. It is set in the same universe, and focuses on Bean - another child from the Battle School. It drifts towards political fiction.
Republic - Plato
Laws - Cicero
National System of Political Economy - Friedrich List
Man and Technics - Oswald Spengler
The Bible
Stanford Western Culture class had Book of Genesis and New Testaments as part of required reading [0].
[0] https://web.stanford.edu/dept/news/stanfordtoday/ed/9705/970...
The political philosophy underpinning the stories in Genesis (much older than the Torah), is very different from that of the Babylon era when the Pentateuch was compiled. The Second Temple Era is very different from both of these. The historical context, and the political content of Christianity in Christ's era (or in the era of the early Gospels) is yet again different, and the context of the later, Pauline Christian books yet again another thing. Modern (post-Lutheran) scholarship sees each of these eras as a development or a refinement moving towards a better fulfilment of God's word, however the contemporary view was that many of these developments were revolutionary, iconoclastic, or heretical.
The Bible is undoubtedly an extremely rich historical document. However, the work of understanding its meaning and its legacy on some modern cultural and ethnic groups is not straightforward. Someone who reads widely through the Bible from the Pentateuch to the New Testament and believes to discern a single unifying philosophical theme or a coherent message to humanity either has not really understood most of it, or is schizophrenic. (Note that reading the Book of Genesis and the New Testament is a very different thing to reading the entire Bible. Many people who think they are able to comment on 'The Bible' really only know the Gospels + Genesis + Exodus, or some other subset such as the Gideon 'Bible'.)
Of course, 'Western Civilization' is somewhat synonymous with a culture that takes the Bible seriously and attributes a sort of mystical energy to it, while not necessarily honouring the stated precepts of Christianity (or Judaism). This makes the fact that the Bible is widely read and referred to something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, sometimes combined with jingoistic innuendo that people without a Christian-inspired culture are not capable of democracy, or tolerance or creative thought, or some other shiboleth of 'Western Civilization'.
There are much less obscure texts, roughly contemporary with the Bible, which discuss humanistic values such as might be associated with 'Western Civilization'. Some of these have been treated as holy by various religious groups including Early Christians, or as of a quasi-religious importance in the organization of society and its institutions. Many of these were widely read throughout the Christian era and are much easier to see as having influenced 'Enlightenment' and 'Modern Secular' values. For example, Plato's Republic. Any suggestion that the Bible is more important than that or similar works to gain "an understanding of the process of how Western Civilization is formed as it is today" just seems to me to be a hangover from Christian apologetics and bigotry.
tl;dr Placing an importance on the Bible because it's a founding text of 'equality of all man and inherent dignity of human' is no different than condemning it as a founding text of the transatlantic slave trade, or of Nazism.
I am not arguing that one should not read biblical texts. Just that the recommendation to read 'The Bible' is really a recommendation to read the central texts of Judaism, the central texts of Christianity plus hundreds of pages of not particularly edifying and largely irrelevant historical and spiritual marginalia, which were collected into a specific text known as 'The Bible' for fairly arbitrary reasons.
If the OP had said to read 'Genesis, Psalms and the Acts of the Apostles' it would have made some kind of sense to me. But dsr3's use of the fact that the Stanford course includes Genesis and the NT as support of the recommendation to read 'The Bible' is just sophistry.
Saying 'you should read every single thing Aristotle wrote, the important philosophy along with the archaic geometry and the incorrect biology' is on the face of it quite a lot less silly then saying 'you should read The Bible'.
But I would still argue that The Bible (or to be more specific in this context, Genesis and NT. I will continue to use The Bible as a term for the sake of brevity.), have significant contribution to the contemporary ideas in Western Civilization. Or at least, the thoughts that is derived from it. [1] argues that the Western idea of identity is born out of Luther and [2-3] has an extensive chronology about how The Bible influences Western thinking. For starter, directly quoting from [3], "The Greco-Romans despised the feeble, the poor, the sick, and the disabled; Christianity glorified the weak, the downtrodden, and the untouchable; and does that all the way to the top of the pecking order". I think Nietzsche also share the same sentiment about how the ideas started in The Bible caused the West to become 'weaker' compared to the original, dominant Greco-Romans values.
[1-3], and of course Nietzche, are secular source that does not rely on the claim that The Bible is divinely inspired. I also would not claim that The Bible itself is not influenced by outside thinking, especially Greek philosophy. [2] directly writes that in the Paul labors, there is a fusion between Jewish morality and Greek philosophy. As a matter of fact, these external influences is probably why the NT canon is so successful.
I also have to note that I do not claim that The Bible is 'the' contributor to the current thinking in the West, my main arguments is that it is 'a major contributor' to the current Western thought, without diminishing other texts. For bad and good, The Bible is indeed a major contributor. Diminishing the influence and contribution of The Bible to the current Western discourses seems like a forced attempt to understate the contribution of the Christianity.
And re: "jingoistic innuendo that people without a Christian-inspired culture are not capable of democracy". This is a different question for another day, and to discuss about that claim etc is outside of my circle of (semi) competence.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Identity-Demand-Dignity-Politics-Rese... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Dominion-Christian-Revolution-Remade-... [3] https://medium.com/incerto/on-christianity-b7fecde866ec
[2] and [3] are about the impact of Christianity on the modern world. I have never argued that this is not significant. My point is that reading the Bible is a terrible way to learn about this.
Firstly, most of the Bible is not about Christianity at all, since it was written before the birth of Christ. Secondly, large parts of it are not about anything interesting at all. Thirdly, most of the parts that are about Christianity, are not particularly useful for someone seeking to understand Christian ideas or culture.
[1] is about the ideas of Luther. Again, these are certainly important. Do you think that it was necessary for Max Weber to read the Bible in order to write the key sociological text on European Protestantism? For that matter, do you think that Francis Fukuyama had to read it in order to write that book? What about Nietzsche? If they didn't need to read the Bible in order to reason about the ideas and the mythos of Christianity, why should we?
The logical step from "Christianity (and/or Judaism) have profoundly influenced us, and should be examined and understood", to "one should read the Bible" is completely flawed, and only made because of the lingering Christian superstition that doing so is 'good for one' or leads to some nebulous form of well-being.
Have an upvote!
Can you draw some broader pictures here for the relatively uninformed how you would get a broadly humanistic view from, e.g., The Republic? If that's too broad an ask, could you draw a line from Plato (and others) to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
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?
It's not a question of who decided that, but because it's a complex book. And that is also true to pretty much every other religious book in the world, where believers reach to their respective holy texts on a regular basis to study them and have a deeper understanding of their faith.
Your final sentence is simply not true. Many religions have central texts which are short, unified in style and content, written over one person's lifetime, and intended to be completely read and understood by followers with limited time and educational resources. For example, the Qu'ran.
I can appreciate why people might say this, but modern translations are not that hard, and large parts are narrative and relatively straightforward. Probably a bit of an explainer is helpful, just like any other major work of literature.
As to whether OP would find it worthwhile reading, that obviously depends. But as others point out it is the most important book in shaping Western civilization as we know it...so there is probably some value.
On that subject Luc Ferry's Brief History of Thought has perspectives on several major thought streams. I don't know how accessible it is, but when I read it a few years ago, I found it reasonable, and I don't know much about philosophy.
This does not invalidate what the GP said: [paraphrasing] that the Bible is difficult to understand and mostly of questionable value to a modern reader.
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.
[0] https://ascensionpress.com/pages/biy-registration
[1] https://bibleinoneyear.org/en/
Always makes me think that as a species how we come to peace with and normalize extraordinary events.
Finally a book that approaches climate change from an engineering perspective and focuses on possible, constructive solutions.
Insightful and relate-able in a lot of ways.
- The Stupidity Paradox. Ever feel the world works in a "stupid" way? That your organization keeps promoting stupid ideas? Read this book and get into the roots of functional stupidity. It's a bit repetitive, but extremely insightful book.
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. The book I most recommend for any software professional.
But if you're not, I'd recommend resources targeting more popular and lower friction languages than scheme such as JavaScript.
I've read it after 5 years of professional experience and it was a very good read.
I guess everyone has a different way of approaching this.
Also I didn’t mean it in an overly demeaning fashion, I unironically find a lot of leetcode problems cooler than they are getting credit for.
Chapter 4, on interpreters and alternative languages, is where in many readers' estimation the real payoff lies. Scheme itself is constructed in a very elegant way from few primitives. My Programming Languages course did an ML interpreter in Standard ML, but I found SICP's scheme interpreter more satisfying and more enlightening - especially when you see how an impossibly small "toy" implementation easily sustains all the modern conveniences, complexities, and artifice described in the previous three chapters. Then the next two sections were totally new to me: I had heard passing mention of logic programming and nondeterministic programming on HN, but never seen them in college or in practice. It's really impressive how elegant certain solutions can be under those paradigms.
Leetcode is an entirely different track and aesthetic on computer science, obsessed with doing things optimally, efficiently. SICP is the polar opposite of that: it tries to make things nice, organized, clean, elegant, intuitive. Even trivial optimizations are left on the floor, like I'm at the end of chapter 4 and we've been using linked lists in place of maps and vectors the whole time.
Depending on what you're doing, you need some of both. But some programmers are temperamentally more interested in the "ugly but optimal" track, and enjoy SICP less.
1. The Body Keeps the Score;
2. CPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving;
3. Whole Again.
As a person who hadn't finished a book in years, hadn't felt excited by a book, this reminded me of what it felt like to not be able to put a book down. It is non-fiction but written as a narrative. It was a good mix of history, economics, politics and business. I cannot recommend it enough.
1. The Morning of the Magicians (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Morning_of_the_Magicians)
This book, although many (most?) of its claims are disproved really had an impact on me since it showed me that there could be _a lot_ more in the world than meets the eye. Everything around us and in history is filled with mysteries, unanswered questions. You could find interesting things everywhere. I would say the content is not the important part, but it instills the curiosity to dig deeper.
2. Memories, Dreams, Reflections (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memories,_Dreams,_Reflections)
A semi-autobiography of Carl Jung. It made me realise how "meta-programmable" humans are. How much of how we think can be though upon, itself. How we can introspect on our thoughs ... with our thoughts. Basically, made me in awe of conscious beings.
3. Ficciones (Fictions, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficciones)
This is classic from Jorge Luis Borges. It showed me at the time "experimental" literature. How can one can push story-telling to another level, like many other art forms have done.
- Seven Languages in Seven Weeks
Career changing for me.
Coming Apart - this book described the coming separation of the US into two “classes” long before it was widely talked about. Today most talk about it as a political divide. This book tackles it as a divide between knowledge workers and the rest. A controversial take that adds much needed food for thought to the conversation. If you’ve lived poor and you’ve also lived in a place like Palo Alto, you’ll be astounded by how readily you can point and say, “that’s me”. Lots of fascinating statistics.
Bowling Alone - a great book about the collapse of US social life. Dense, lots of statistics, but a clear picture is laid out of increasing isolation and alienation. Read it alongside something like Consumer’s Republic to understand how so much of this stems from the selfishness and individuality encouraged by consumerism in post-war America.
Triumph of the City - an excellent take that can be used as food for thought when people are talking about how dirty cities are. In truth, the author argues, they are our greenest “invention” ever. Lots of good evidence. Imagine collecting the trash if every human lived on their own acre of land. The sewage, the energy usage. Cities are incredibly efficient and clean.
The Man Who Solved The Market - everyone interested in finance needs to read this and it’s precursor More Money Than God. The Bogleheads and their index fund ilk are often correct when they say “money managers all lose to an index after fees”. Beating the market is nigh on impossible for all but a few. Most of those few work at Renaissance Technologies. Their Medallion Fund has made 36% after fees every single year since 1989. The fund does its best in market crash years. Closed to outside investors. A story of mathematicians essentially building models that can predict the future reliably. Utterly fascinating, the most successful money printer ever built. As a bonus, we learn that Jim Simons originally controlled this printer and spent the money helping US math teachers. He then ceded control to Robert Mercer, who used the printer’s output to fund Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon, Trump, etc.
The Snowball - a biography of Warren Buffet that tells an incredible story. The story is one of total obsession. Of a human who literally started from a few dollars, learned about some principles like compounding at age 6, and applied the exact same principles every day for the rest of his life with very little deviation. The craziest part of this story is how every 10 years, he’s surrounded by people saying “times have changed, you’re missing out”. Then those people get blown up by whatever black swan, and Warren’s snowball just grows and grows. He didn’t become a billionaire till he was in his 50’s but the snowball is still growing and he’s one of the richest people alive.
To those who mentioned Marcus Aurelius's meditations, I recommend the reading of "Zen mind beginner's mind". Along the same lines of somewhat spiritual books, "Siddartha" is a classic and also Khalil Gibran's "The Prophet".
Very different: for my personal history, reading "Goedel, Escher, Bach" when I was 18 deeply affected my vision of things. Other science books I loved: "the unfolding of language" (historical linguistics) and "the world within the world" (physics and philosophy of physics).
For something much more recent, that changed my view of the contemporary world, I recommend "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling. It's about understanding "poor" countries in their variety and in a less stereotyped way, but especially about understanding that living conditions across the world, essentially without exception, have massively improved over the last century. I feel Rosling's is only part of the story, though, and "Sapiens" (mentioned by others below) tells parts of the other half.
I also like poetry, and in the rare occasions I am in the right frame of mind and focus to read poetry, it feels like a powerful meditation or prayer.
If you want to "expand" your vision of things, one thing I tried to do, and loved, is reading as much as possible books from other cultures, for example postcolonial literature. I particularly liked Chinua Achebe's "things fall apart". Somewhat related, "the moon and the bonfires" was deeply moving to me, the life of a man in agricultural Italy after ww2. The reason why I put these together is that they do something extraordinary: we are used to descriptions of africans during the colonization process, or of poor Italians after the war, but we are not very used to them being full three-dimensional characters, people like us, and stepping in their shoes.
Finally I enjoy travel books, for similar reasons. Among my favourites is "the road to Oxiana", written in the 1930s, and full of british humour. Also, Rory Stewart (british politician, diplomat and academic) walked Afghanistan in 2002 and told the story in "The places in between". Very, very helpful for understanding Afghanistan beyond the news.
I could go on forever!
- The Daily Stoic. A collection of snippets from stoic philosophers, tied with examples from modern living, it was a good and lightweight introduction to philosophy.
It know better understand the importance of testing ideas before investing time and money.