“There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Reading is one of the most essential occupations of the intellectual. A well read man is also a well educated one. I believe that every person should strive to expand their mind through literature and identify works which impact their passions and encourage growth. Below is a list of books that I have found instrumental in my intellectual development. However, before I go on, I would like to leave you with one of the most foreboding quotes, in relation to our modern society, that I have ever read...
“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury
Utopia by Thomas More
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
1984 by George Orwell
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
General Relativity From A to B by Robert Geroch
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott
Relativity: The Special and the General Theory by Albert Einstein
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard P. Feynman
Where is Science Going? by Max Planck
The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin
The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
The Lost World by Michael Crichton
The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales by H.P. Lovecraft
The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Alice's Adventure in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Philosophical Fragments/Johannes Climacus by Søren Kierkegaard
The Science before Science by Anthony Rizzi
Anti-Semite and Jew by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
The Republic by Plato
Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking by Dennis Q. McInerny
Gödel's Proof by Ernest Nagel
Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi
The Reawakening by Primo Levi
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”
― Henry David Thoreau
"Not being always able to follow others exactly, to attain to the excellence of those he imitates, a prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent, so that if he does not attain to their greatness, at any rate he will get some tinge of it."
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
No comments:
Post a Comment