Literarily: Ulysses. Such a layered work, poetical and so run through with themes and styles.

Philosophically: the mind’s I by Dennet and Hofstaedter, great selection of articles surrounding consciousness and digital structures.

Plato’s Republic.

I got really interested by its description in Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. After reading the book, I realized how arbitrary the setup of current society is. Then I followed it up with More’s Utopia and Marx’ Das Kapital. A true Big Bang for my political views.

“Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.” ― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

1984- one hell of a way to start caring about politics

1984- one hell of a way to start caring about politics

1984- one hell of a way to start caring about politics

1984- one hell of a way to start caring about politics

When he opened his eyes, he was on the bottom of the pool, and there was beautiful music everywhere. He lost consciousness, but the music went on. He dimly sensed that somebody was rescuing him. Billy resented that.

Slaughterhouse-five

I read this a few years after I was in a near drowning accident, it was very surreal to read and has stayed with me since.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

I was considering suicide as a young person. I had never read a book before. I read it in one sitting, only breaking to get some food and bathroom. It’s a great story but it changed me and gave me something special. Confidence.

Jiddu Krishnamurti - Life Ahead (talks to students)

"One of the causes of fear is ambition, is it not? And are you all not ambitious? What is your ambition? To pass some examination? To become a governor? Or, if you are very young, perhaps you just want to become an engine-driver, to drive engines across a bridge. But why are you ambitious? What does it mean? Have you ever thought about it? Have you noticed older people, how ambitious they are? In your own family, have you not heard your father or your uncle talk about getting more salary, or occupying some prominent position? In our society - and I have explained what our society is, everybody is doing that, trying to be on top. They all want to become somebody, do they not? The clerk wants to become the manager, the manager wants to become something bigger, and so on and so on - the continual struggle to become. If I am a teacher, I want to become the principal; if I am the principal, I want to become the manager. If you are ugly, you want to be beautiful. Or you want to have more money, more saris, more clothes, more furniture, houses, property - more and more and more. Not only outwardly, but also inwardly, in the so-called spiritual sense, you want to become somebody, though you cover that ambition by a lot of words. Have you not noticed that? And you think it is perfectly all right, don’t you? You think it is perfectly normal, justifiable, right.

Now, what has ambition done in the world? So few of us have ever thought about it. When you see a man struggling to gain, to achieve, to get ahead of somebody else, have you ever asked yourself what is in his heart? If you will look into your own heart when you are ambitious, when you are struggling to become somebody, spiritually or in the wordily sense, you will find there the worm of fear. The ambitious man is the most frightened of men, because he is afraid to be what he is. He says, “If remain what I am, I shall be nobody, therefore I must be somebody, I must become a magistrate, a judge, a minister”. If you examine this process very closely, if you go behind the screen of words and ideas, beyond the wall of status and success, you will find there is fear; because the ambitious man is afraid to be what he is. He thinks that what he is in himself is insignificant, poor, ugly; he feels lonely, utterly empty, therefore he says, “I must go and achieve something”. So either he goes after what he calls God, which is just another form of ambition, or he tries to become somebody in the world. In this way his loneliness, his sense of inward emptiness - of which he is really frightened - is covered up. He runs away from it, and ambition becomes the means through which he can escape.

So, what is happening in the world? Everybody is fighting somebody. One man feels less than another and struggles to get to the top. There is no love, there is no consideration, there is no deep thought. Or society is a constant battle of man against man. This struggle is born of the ambition to become somebody, and the older people encourage you to be ambitious. They want you to amount to something, to marry a rich man or a rich woman, to have influential friends. Being frightened, ugly in their hearts, they try to make you like themselves; and you in turn want to be like them, because you see the glamour of it all. When the governor comes, everybody bows down to the earth to receive him, they give him garlands, make speeches. He loves it, and you love it too. You feel honoured if you know his uncle or his clerk, and you bask in the sunshine of his ambition, his achievements. So you are easily caught in the ugly web of the older generation, in the pattern of this monstrous society. Only if you are very alert, constantly watchful, only if you are not afraid and do not accept, but question all the time - only then will you not be caught, but go beyond and create a different world."

https://jiddu-krishnamurti.net/en/life-ahead/1962-00-00-jiddu-krishnamurti-life-ahead-chapter-7

“On the Shortness of Life” by Seneca, if we can call it a book. The claim that “life isn’t short, we just waste most of it” was not by itself that impactful until he started listing examples, among them Caesar Augustus. You can think what you will about him, but nobody can say that he was a lazy man sitting around doing nothing. And yet Seneca shows that Augustus in his “productive” life spent a lot of time complaining how he wished he had more free time, and so he didn’t really “live” all the time, just like someone who wastes their days drinking and gambling and whatnot. And the idea that a man who immortalized himself in history for all times “wasted” most of his life was really not something that ever occurred to me. I recommend it to everyone, it’s short and written in simple language.

weirdly, Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

It made me take up reading books as a hobby which I voraciously enjoy doing now.

Hyperion, first of all it’s just great and should be right up there with other classics. Second, in this age of AI I keep thinking back to Hyperion.

I’ve known I was coming to computer something even from a very young age, and when I read ‘The Soul of a New Machine’ by Tracy Kidder in high school I had even done some consulting.

It was like a window directly on my future professional life. I did EE at school and have been in chip design for over 20 years. This Tracy is not a computer scientist. He is a writer, but his effective reporting of the world is so spot on.

I think for me it’s Terry Pratchett’s ‘The Colour of Magic’. Not because of that book in particular, but because of it being a gateway to the Discworld as a whole.

As much as I enjoy those books, and have read almost all of them at this point, it’s more that they taught me how to be a thoughtful, empathetic person when I was a thoughtless, selfish teenager. Almost on the sly, Terry instilled values in me simply by virtue of the heroes of his stories being mostly good people who just want to have a positive impact, even if they’re flawed in different ways.

Like, Sam Vimes is undoubtedly a hero. Night Watch shows us that he strongly believes in the power of good, and that people can - and should - band together to limit the tyranny of power. But he’s also distrusting and curmudgeonly. Nanny Ogg is foul-mouthed bon viveur who places a lot of emphasis on living her best life, but she always puts her family and friends before her if she needs to. Even the Nac Mac Feegle work together for the greater good, even if, in their case, that means being able to get more drunk and fight more violently.

GNU Terry Pratchett

Das Kapital and the explanation of what money is.