![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'm dreadful with books and re-read them over and over so I was hard pressed to think of five in particular...these are a little arbitrary, although I've gone with those I've stuck with since I was a kid. I'm embarrassed (and a bit perplexed), reading over the list, about the dearth of women and writers from outside the West. It's something I've tried to fix since I started uni.
Anyway:
Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
I started reading this maybe in early high school, when I was too young to get a lot of it. Like a lot of other pop science books I read back then (Gleick's Chaos and a book about black holes stick in my mind), I came back to it every few years. Some of it left me with bits of odd knowledge, but I think what I got out of it mostly was practice thinking...trying to follow the logic of it and particular "tricks" of logic that helped get the point across, as well as pushing myself. I heard on a recent New Scientist podcast that it was about consciousness and the self...it sounds like a fair few people, like me, missed that. I'd like to read it again soon, as well as Hofstadter's new book, I am a strange loop.
Larry Gonick, The Cartoon History of the Universe (I).
This book played a huge role in forming my basic knowledge of 'the universe', at least between the big bang and Alexander the Great, which is where the first book ended. I started reading this sometime in primary school, and I probably remember more from it than any history lessons at school. I've just realised how silly it is, then, that we never had the other books and I never tracked them down, so I've just ordered them.
Douglas Adams: everything.
No explanation required.
Thor Heyerdahl, The Kontiki Expedition.
A wonderful adventure, which I think I'll always come back to. I remain utterly convinced that crossing the Pacific on a balsa-log raft would be fascinating (rather than a dreadful ordeal).
Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar.
Very hippy and 1970s, and a touch disturbing (it seems strange to me now that I enjoyed this in primary school). It used to be my book for reading in summer, usually sitting in a tree.
Anyway:
Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
I started reading this maybe in early high school, when I was too young to get a lot of it. Like a lot of other pop science books I read back then (Gleick's Chaos and a book about black holes stick in my mind), I came back to it every few years. Some of it left me with bits of odd knowledge, but I think what I got out of it mostly was practice thinking...trying to follow the logic of it and particular "tricks" of logic that helped get the point across, as well as pushing myself. I heard on a recent New Scientist podcast that it was about consciousness and the self...it sounds like a fair few people, like me, missed that. I'd like to read it again soon, as well as Hofstadter's new book, I am a strange loop.
Larry Gonick, The Cartoon History of the Universe (I).
This book played a huge role in forming my basic knowledge of 'the universe', at least between the big bang and Alexander the Great, which is where the first book ended. I started reading this sometime in primary school, and I probably remember more from it than any history lessons at school. I've just realised how silly it is, then, that we never had the other books and I never tracked them down, so I've just ordered them.
Douglas Adams: everything.
No explanation required.
Thor Heyerdahl, The Kontiki Expedition.
A wonderful adventure, which I think I'll always come back to. I remain utterly convinced that crossing the Pacific on a balsa-log raft would be fascinating (rather than a dreadful ordeal).
Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar.
Very hippy and 1970s, and a touch disturbing (it seems strange to me now that I enjoyed this in primary school). It used to be my book for reading in summer, usually sitting in a tree.