Books I Like
Books. Who would I be without them.
Here are a few very dear to my thinking. A bit of everything I could think of, in no particular order. From childhood's favourites to my latest reads.
What should I read next? Write me david [at] cloudvertigo.xyz
Philosophy
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
Michel de Montaigne, Essays
Blaise Pascal, Pensées
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
Voltaire, Candide
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Arthur Schopenhauer, The Metaphysics of Sexual Love
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo and The Interpretation of Dreams
Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth
Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols and Four Archetypes
Hannah Arendt, Vita Activa and The Human Condition
Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty
Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
Norberto Bobbio, Left and Right
Friedrich Hayek, Denationalisation of Money
Mathematics and Science
Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins, What Is Mathematics?
Eugene Wigner, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
André Weil, De la métaphysique aux mathématiques in Collected Papers
Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy
Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Edgar Morin, Method: Towards a Study of Humankind
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Anil Seth, Being You
Stefano Mancuso, Brilliant Green
Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life
Literary theory
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Italo Calvino, Six Memos For the Next Millennium
Eric Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis
James Wood, How Fiction Works
Classics
Homer, Iliad and Odyssey
Virgil, Aeneid
Plato, Dialogues
Notably: Meno, Phaedo, Apology, Symposium, Phaedrus
Aristotle, Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
Epictetus, Handbook
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Augustine, Confessions
Laozi, Dao De Jing
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Anonymous, The Book of Changes (I Ching)
Fiction
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler and Karamazov Brothers
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Arthur Conan Doyle, Complete Works
Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
James Joyce, Dubliners and Ulysses
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha and The Glass Bead Game
Joseph Roth, The Silent Prophet
Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European
Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal, The Old and the Young
Italo Svevo, Zeno's Conscience
Agatha Christie, Complete Works
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo
Italo Calvino, Complete Works
Notably: Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, and The Castle of Crossed Destinies
Elsa Morante, Arturo's Island and History
Alberto Moravia, The Time of Indifference
Cesare Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfires
Leonardo Sciascia, To Each His Own
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Antonio Tabucchi, Pereira Maintains
Theatre
Aeschylus, Oresteia
Sophocles, Antigone and Oedipus
Euripides, Medea
William Shakespeare, King Lear, Macbeth, A Midsummer’s Night Dream
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Chekov, The Seagull
Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt