[
]1There’s a facebook thing going
around on 10 books that’ve stayed with you. I’m not terribly inclined to
do these things…but then, the mental exercise actually thinking about it
was broadly interesting (and who doesn’t like book recommendations?) so
here are 10 books (or in some cases, authors – what a cheat) I think you
should like, in no particular order: 1. Ursula le Guin, particularly A
Wizard of Earthsea, but actually what reminded me of her writing (and
persists) was an excerpt given in Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life
(introductory ethics book) which uses [‘The Ones Who Walk Away from
Omelas’]2 as an example 2. Iris Murdoch, let’s go with particularly
The Sea, The Sea > “Then I felt too that I might take this
opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can
never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the
sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge
from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration.
Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning,
whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.” 3. Oliver
Sacks, particularly [‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat’]3,
along with [Ramachandran]4‘s book on Synesthesia. Both are fascinating insights into the role of
the brain, embodiment, plasticity, neural development, etc. 4.
[The Dice Man]5 – probably not a book I’d chose now, but I was
interested in hard determinism at the time, I remember it starting with
an epigraph: > We are not ourselves; actually there is nothing we can
call a `self’ any more; we are manifold, we have as many selves there
are groups to which we belong. Van Den Berg 5. [Why I am not a
Christian (and other essays)]6 (Russell) 6. [The Man Who Loved
Only Numbers (a bio of Paul Erdős)]7 – I was hanging out with
mathematics students at the time, and got interested in philosophy and
history of mathematics. Later I talked to some students a bit about it
(“history of maths? What’s that?”) and recommended [A Mathematician’s
Apology]8 for a UCAS personal statement (she selected a fantastic
quote from it), but this was the first maths book I’d read I think. 7.
Hitchhiker’s Guide – no need to explain surely? Don’t forget your towel
(full of nice thought experiments too) 8. The language instinct, Stephen
Pinker – my introduction to linguistics 9. The selfish gene – my
introduction to sociobiology, game theory and issues around units of
analysis 10.
Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and
Educational Considerations (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and
Computational Perspectives) – a great collection around
philosophical/psychological perspectives on mind and learning, pretty
key to my first Masters (and work after)
Footnotes
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/static/2014/10/book_snake.jpg ↩
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas#Synopsis ↩
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat ↩
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http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind?language=en ↩
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Loved_Only_Numbers ↩
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http://www.math.ualberta.ca/mss/misc/A%20Mathematician%27s%20Apology.pdf ↩