Gödel, Escher, Bach

Personal Power - Robbins, How to win friends and influence people - Carnegie, Feeling Good - Burns, Godel Esher Bach - Hofstadter, Fundamentals of Physics - Halliday and Resnick, Jonathan Livingston Seagull - Bach, The Commodore 64 User Manual, "Stocks for the Long Run", The Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide - Gygax, Dune - Herbert

I am... shocked as this 80% is is my list for the very same reasons. Surely you've enjoyed Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter as much as I have, if not (yet), this is my thank you to you.

Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance Godel Escher Bach Time enough for love - Heinlein Illusions -Richard Bach A wrinkle in time Stranger from the depths Sidartha and all the other books by Hess Zen MInd Beginners mind MOre to come Books by Bradbury Books by asimov Just starting Antifragile and it might make the list

I think we've swapped notes on a similar thread before, so we may have already talked about this, but let me say that if you liked Permutation City by Egan, you may also like Glasshouse by Charles Stross. I also "second the motion" in regards to both The Selfish Gene and *Gödel, Escher, Bach".

I'm sure there are many, but a few that jump to mind, in no particular order, and spanning both fiction and non-fiction: The Selfish Gene - Dawkins A New Kind of Science - Wolfram The Singularity is Near - Kurzweil Gödel, Escher, Bach - Hofstadter Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies - Hofstadter Atlas Shrugged - Rand The Fountainhead - Rand Nineteen Eighty-Four - Orwell The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin Time Reborn - Lee Smolin Ambient Findability - Peter Morville Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software - Steven Johnson Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age - Duncan Watts Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life - Albert-laszlo Barabasi Artificial Life - Steven Levy The Four Steps To The Epiphany - Steve Blank The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman not a book, but the various writings of Douglas Engelbart - http://www.dougengelbart.org/library/library.html Glasshouse - Charles Stross Permutation City - Greg Egan Neuromancer - William Gibson The Shockwave Rider - John Brunner The Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky…

My two cents: The selfish gene by Richard Dawkins - makes you look at living beings as software, and at the world as an immense optimization algorithm. Permutation City by Greg Egan - the perfectly rational idea that the mind is computable is rife with apparently unsolvable paradoxes. Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. Maths, logic, patterns, artificial intelligence, beauty, art and self-referentiality.

I just started Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, it's interesting.

A varied assortment: --- The Lifecycle of Software Objects Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind What Is Property The City of Dreaming Books Born to Run Gödel, Escher, Bach

Gödel, Escher, Bach

I bought GEB when I was 13, mostly because I liked the Escher paintings. I was hooked after reading the first Achilles/Turtle episode, though, and even though many concepts went over my head at the time. I still haven't read it cover to cover, though, but I still have a hard time not agreeing with this particular recommendation.

This is a great source of stuff for: function get_smarter(): 1. Am I smart enough yet? (default answer: of course not!) 2. If yes, go make a grillion dollars, or go fishing, or something. (Note: this statement is unreachable). 3. Otherwise: 1. Do various important things, until I have some free time. 2. Pick a book from my book list and read it. 3. If I've read it already, check all the references at the end, and add the ones that look good to my book list. 4. get_smarter() "If your book list is empty, add Gödel, Escher, Bach to it before calling the function for the first time. And with that, I'm off to go finish the book!" http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/godel-escher-blog