Book Meme
Hooray, a meme! Not done one of these in ages.
List five books you have read which you think everyone should read. Your choices could be for any reason. They don't have to be your favourites. Maybe they really made you think, maybe they made you feel, or maybe they were just a cracking fun read.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Douglas Hofstadter) It's a crazy treatise on the mind, cognition and the natue of meaning, using recursion, self-referentiality, fractals, number theory, and other related fields. On top of that, a lot of these are used in the language of the book, which is full of puns, double meanings, acronyms, acrostics, palindromes and other sorts of wordplay. All of which still remains perfectly readable in the simplest interpretation. There is some maths in the book, but you don't have to follow it. Hofstadter tells you what he's going to prove and why, which is followed by the mathematical proof, which is then followed by a discussion of what the proof means and implies. You can just take it as read that the maths does what he claims, assume he's not made a mistake, and not miss anything important. It'll make you think about thinking.
Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson) Although in some ways Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" is a better novel, and "Reamde" is probably more accessible, "Snow Crash" is out and out over-the-top fun. Marrying dystopian cyberpunk with ancient Sumerian mythology, populated with outrageous caricatures which are somehow given great depth and personality, it feels like a bonkers comic book in novel form.
The Spy Who Loved Me (Ian Fleming) With nothing in common with the film, this is a Bond story told from the perspective of a Bond girl. Not a movie Bond girl either, just a regular girl, Vivienne Michel, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bond isn't even on a mission either, he just happens to end up, with Vivienne, in the way of a random petty criminal scheme. It's a really interesting take on Bond, with Vivienne's dénouement being particularly memorable for me.
The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins) His first book - purely as an evolutionary biologist before he got embroiled in fighting religion's attempts to displace science from biology classes in schools and universities - is not only a good explanation of how evolution works at the individual and population level, but provided an insightful framework for considering how it works at the genetic level. Examining how different alleles (alternatives), e.g. blue/brown color for eyes, of a gene compete with each other for dominance in a population, it shows how genes trying to replicate simply to ensure their own survival, can end up co-operating with other genes, and producing co-operative behaviour in the animals they build (phenotypes).
High Society (Ben Elton) Brilliant satire looking at how people in different strata of society have varying relationships to illegal drugs. It looks as which drugs they use, why they use them, how they get them, and what happens if they get caught. These differences are masterfully contrasted when some of these usually widely separated people's lives intertwine.
List five books you have read which you think everyone should read. Your choices could be for any reason. They don't have to be your favourites. Maybe they really made you think, maybe they made you feel, or maybe they were just a cracking fun read.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Douglas Hofstadter) It's a crazy treatise on the mind, cognition and the natue of meaning, using recursion, self-referentiality, fractals, number theory, and other related fields. On top of that, a lot of these are used in the language of the book, which is full of puns, double meanings, acronyms, acrostics, palindromes and other sorts of wordplay. All of which still remains perfectly readable in the simplest interpretation. There is some maths in the book, but you don't have to follow it. Hofstadter tells you what he's going to prove and why, which is followed by the mathematical proof, which is then followed by a discussion of what the proof means and implies. You can just take it as read that the maths does what he claims, assume he's not made a mistake, and not miss anything important. It'll make you think about thinking.
Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson) Although in some ways Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" is a better novel, and "Reamde" is probably more accessible, "Snow Crash" is out and out over-the-top fun. Marrying dystopian cyberpunk with ancient Sumerian mythology, populated with outrageous caricatures which are somehow given great depth and personality, it feels like a bonkers comic book in novel form.
The Spy Who Loved Me (Ian Fleming) With nothing in common with the film, this is a Bond story told from the perspective of a Bond girl. Not a movie Bond girl either, just a regular girl, Vivienne Michel, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bond isn't even on a mission either, he just happens to end up, with Vivienne, in the way of a random petty criminal scheme. It's a really interesting take on Bond, with Vivienne's dénouement being particularly memorable for me.
The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins) His first book - purely as an evolutionary biologist before he got embroiled in fighting religion's attempts to displace science from biology classes in schools and universities - is not only a good explanation of how evolution works at the individual and population level, but provided an insightful framework for considering how it works at the genetic level. Examining how different alleles (alternatives), e.g. blue/brown color for eyes, of a gene compete with each other for dominance in a population, it shows how genes trying to replicate simply to ensure their own survival, can end up co-operating with other genes, and producing co-operative behaviour in the animals they build (phenotypes).
High Society (Ben Elton) Brilliant satire looking at how people in different strata of society have varying relationships to illegal drugs. It looks as which drugs they use, why they use them, how they get them, and what happens if they get caught. These differences are masterfully contrasted when some of these usually widely separated people's lives intertwine.