In Search of Lost Time

* Philosophy Arthur Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation. Surprisingly readable and insightful, even if you don't buy his metaphysics. Einstein had Schopenhauer's portrait on his wall and considered him a genius. * Poetry John Milton - Paradise Lost Powerful and beautiful writing. * Fiction Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel. Funny and a real feast of words (the translation is a work of art in itself) Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain. Haunting and moving Pierre Choderlos de Laclos - Dangerous Liaisons. Scandalous, gripping. Ivan Turgenev - First Love. A masterclass in writing. Short, sensitive and exquisitely told. Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time. Exceptionally rich and a beautiful study of love. Reading it is like living another life. PG Wodehouse - the Jeeves series. Hilarious, perfectly frivolous, light and sunny * Non-fiction Stuart Russell - Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control. Potential bad outcomes from AI and what we might be able to do about them Noam Chomsky - Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. How public discourse is shaped and controlled…

I came here to post this! And of course the (sort-of) French equivalent about life in modern times: In search of lost time.

No question,hands down: Proust. He wrote his novels over a hundred years ago, in a vastly different world that we line in now, but over-and-over again, he totally nails and dissects human experience. The first 30 or so pages of Swan's Way is about a child waking up in his room. He shows that something so benign and ordinary is anything but, it includes countless memories, senses, instincts, and emotions. Technologists should take note.

In Search of Lost Time. It's definitely famous and well-known, but I think it's far more talked about than actually read. Proust is a philosopher and psychologist more than a novelist, and large chunks of the book are basically just philosophical essays, but its still probably the greatest novel I've read. I think it's one of the greatest achievement of the human mind to date and it has more to say about the human experience than anything since, as far as I can tell.

In a chaotic system, arriving at abstractions of the forces at play often gives a more illuminating picture than trying to model those systems from weakly-linked data points. It's not that Austrian economists can't find their own data models to defend their positions, with an area like economics finding data to support your opinions is the easy part. Rather, we've found that obsessing over the data provides very little understanding of the underlying cause-and-effect of economics. It's like neurology. Yes, it's a terribly interesting field, but you'll learn more about the human mind from reading Proust.

One summer in high school I decided to read In Search of Lost Time before school started up again. I only made my way through Swann's Way (the first of seven books in the series), but I'm so glad I did. I think it was probably the toughest piece of literature I'd ever read, but one of the most rewarding by far.

I'm halfway through the last volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and I admit I'm proud of it. I don't know what can be said in a small space about a novel so large and canonical, but I've deeply enjoyed it. An unexpected quirk of the novel is that though I've been heavily absorbed in it the whole way, and found it moving, funny, and in general a complete literary experience, I can't really recommend it to others without absurd sounding qualifiers, e.g., "As long as you can put up with hundreds of pages on end of detailed descriptions of things like churches, landscapes, flowers, parties, dinners, families, manners, morals, and the like, you'll find it immeasurably beautiful and immediately personally meaningful!" --where I'd of course have never previously taken that bait.

I don't tend to read biz books, but recently I've read a ton of great Russian texts. The Master & Margarita http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita Goethe's Faust & the story of Pontius Pilate retold in 1930s Russia. Really, I mean really damn good. Very readable. Books 1 & 2 of The Gulag Archipelago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago An expansive history of the Soviet prison camp system, almost a folk history. Petersburg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petersburg_%28novel%29 Think Joyce writing about a revolutionary plot in the Petersburg of 1910-something, involving patricide and a time-bomb set for 24 hours from now. Yeah. That and slowly working through Proust (book 5). I'm not sure if I really recommend it, but I'd be interested to hear thoughts from other smarty-pants HN people.

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

I'm on a David Foster Wallace kick right now: Working through The Pale King, his collected essays and his short stories. Already read Infinite Jest. It's hard to say what qualifies as "essential reading" when it's impossible for a human being to read even one tenth of the great, all-time classic books. There just isn't enough time. My advice would be to read at least a few books that have reputations for being difficult. War and Peace, Gravity's Rainbow, In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses, etc. (The reason I'm only listing near-undisputed classics here is because these books are difficult, and in some cases very, very long [looking at you, Proust], and the assurance that it is all worth it helps you keep going when your brain hurts.) These books survived despite their difficulty because reading them is a mind-expanding, sometimes life-changing experience. Reading shouldn't be essentially passive.