Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.

Fiction: Victory City- new Salman Rushdie book. Great retelling of the history of one of the great medieval South Indian kingdoms. Not his best, but his writing is still top notch. Sea of Tranquility- speculative fiction from Emily St. John Mandel (of Station Eleven fame). It's a series of interconnected stories spanning centuries from the near past to the near future. Beautifully written. Read when I was down with COVID earlier this year and it invaded my dreams (in a good way). Short and easy read. Giovanni's Room- story of an American expat in Paris caught between his love for a man and his duty to his girlfriend. This is the first James Baldwin book I have read but will definitely check out more of his work in 2024. Theory of Bastards- speculative fiction by Audrey Schulmann. Literary sci-fi similar to Station Eleven. It's about a woman researching primate behavior set in the near future where the earth is ravaged by the effects of climate change. Very well researched, beautifully written and nothing like I have ever read before. This won the 2019 Philip K Dick Award.…

Gödel, Escher, Bach is an artistic appetizer over the stimulating world of structures, - not a manual. They young mind is opened by being shown relations it did not yet see. Read the extreme in that direction: Italo Calvino - Le città invisibili (which not only masterfully connects ideas, but most of the realm of existence and experience) - you should be able to see that principle at its apex. And there is no technical teaching: just an education to see the subtle.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino Prose poems, short 1-2 page descriptions of fictional cities. It’s a good gift to give and I like to pick it up at random, open to a random one, and sit with the imagery it conjures. If I had a ‘you could bring one thing to a deserted island’ then that would be it.

+1 for Invisible Cities, and just about everything else by Calvino. Also, is your HN name a Borges reference?

I try to only read books that are at least a few years old, so these aren’t timely recommendations. On the list for next year: The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language Essays of Montaign Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers Higher Speculations: Grand Theories and Failed Revolutions in Physics and Cosmology The Enigma of Reason Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind Impro Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China Invisible Cities Collapse of Complex Societies -- Favorites from this year: Death's End One Man's Meat Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery Cosmicomics Why Quark Rhymes with Pork The Unfolding of Language A Sand County Almanac

Antifragile by Nassim Taleb Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino Il deserto dei tartari (The Tartar Steppe) by Dino Buzzati How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Here's a few I've really liked that have a broader subject matter than only what you asked for. I figure that if you like to read you'd like these books. --- NON-FICTION --- Darkness Visible A Mathemematician's Apology Omnivore's Dilemma Fermat's Enigma The Code Book Born to Run Judgement of Paris Siddhartha Killing Pablo The Victorian Internet Lone Survivor I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman Papillon Into Thin Air Born on a Blue Day Touching the Void Got Fight The Conquest of Happiness --- FICTION --- Switch Bitch Lost Horizon The Cuckoo's Egg The Simlarillion The Time Traveler's Wife The Alchemist The Count of Monte Cristo A Canticle for Leibowitz Neverwhere My Uncle Oswald Stories of Your Life and Others Invisible Cities Life of Pi Atlas Shrugged --- WALL STREET / FINANCE --- When Genius Failed Liar's Poker Buffett (Lowenstein) Bull! Black-Scholes and Beyond (textbook) Fixed Income Securities (textbook) The Road to Serfdom The Smartest Guys in the Room Fortune's Formula The Fourth Turning Inside the House of Money --- ENTREPRENEURSHIP / COMPUTERS (non-textbook) --- Masters of Doom It's Not About the Bike Dot. Bomb Founders at Work The PayPal Wars…