Important Books
I recently received a Facebook alert showing the 15 books of a friend that she considered life changing. Here are mine in no particular order.
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig – When my life got crazy, I always found comfort in this book.
- How to Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie – I wish I could take this book and inject its wisdom into my DNA. I still have my tattered copy from high school freshman year.
- Holidays In Hell – PJ O’Rourke. Funniest book I ever read, and the only book I took with me to both Japan and Africa.
- On the Road – Jack Kerouac – The Beats searched for the divine in the mundane – an exercise in Zen that I admire and fail miserably at.
- Stranger In a Strange Land - Heinlein would have invented a better religion than LRH with this book had he wanted to do so.
- Ubik – Philip K. Dick’s classic that begs to this day for a movie. Are we alive or dead – a dream within a dream? This short book poses deep questions about perception and the nature of reality.
- Angry Candy – Harlan Ellison – I have grown into Ellison’s middle-aged frustration that he outlined here.
- The Panda’s Thumb – Stephen Jay Gould helped me to understand one of the most elegant yet complex theories ever invented – the theory of evolution. This is the first book of his that I read – but it wouldn’t be the last.
- Good Night Moon - Margaret Wise Brown – A children’s book that I memorized while reading our son to sleep. The ultimate example of warmth and coziness.
- Japan: Story of a Nation – Japanese history in a nutshell by a foreigner who truly understood the Japanese the best, Edwin Reischauer.
- Art of War – Sun Tzu/On War – von Clausewitz – Nearly 2000 years and 2 continents separate the works of these two military geniuses, but I view their works as two chapters in the same book.
- The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli – The first chapter in that book that explains the sources, uses and abuses of power. As relevant in today’s Obamanation as it was when it was written 500 years ago.
- And the Band Played On – Randy Shilts’s classic on the spread of a virus, and how society and politics enabled it on it’s deadly path.
- The Logic of Failure – Dietrich Dorner -Why do complex systems fail and how does the human mind play a critical role in that failure? A must read for anyone involved in complex projects such as engineering or software design.
- Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – This book is so funny that I think I have to introduce it to my son. Adams’s creativity is beyond compare and the humor is timeless.
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Chad:
Starship Troopers is one for me, believe it or not.
8 June 2009, 11:40 amScrap Iron:
Check out “The Probability Broach” by L. Neil Smith.
14 June 2009, 4:30 pmThis book won the Prometheus award in 1980 for best libertarian SciFi.