Great post and list! I always enjoy when people I find interesting share their favorite books/thinkers/ideas, while painting a picture of what they took from them. This will also surely provide inspiration for my own reading. Nice touch with linking the review from your blog, by the way (although the one I want the most, about Dennett and his work, apparently does not exist).
Trying to make my own compressed list of influential books:
Chaos, by James Gleick. This is the book that made me want to do science and research. Not that I was that enthralled by chaos theory (although it was exciting); instead, what captured my imagination was the day to day research work described in this book. People doggedly chasing ideas, and ending up with insights into the nature of reality after a lot of time and work. I had read science books before, and I liked maths and physics before, but never something so… tangible about research.
On Writing, by Stephen King. Just before my eighteenth birthday, I read this book. And then I started writing. It makes no sense retrospectively that I never tried writing, since I was a voracious reader and I wanted to create things. I wrote fiction, but writing regularly, adapting to an audience, thinking about what will be understood from the page, all this is still fundamental in almost everything I do today.
So Good They Can’t Ignore You, by Cal Newport. For all my teen years, I looked desperately for my passion. Every holiday was the occasion for trying something new, or going back to an old favorite. But I could never make anything stick, because nothing felt exactly right. Then at 20, I read Cal Newport’s blog and book, and he blew my mind. He told me that while a preexisting passion does exists for some, this is not the case for most people. Even more if you cannot make your mind. And that there was hope of creating a fulfilling and meaningful path for you, if only you choose. A couple of times since then, I was unsure and lost, but I choose. And it made all the difference.
Great post and list! I always enjoy when people I find interesting share their favorite books/thinkers/ideas, while painting a picture of what they took from them. This will also surely provide inspiration for my own reading. Nice touch with linking the review from your blog, by the way (although the one I want the most, about Dennett and his work, apparently does not exist).
Trying to make my own compressed list of influential books:
Chaos, by James Gleick. This is the book that made me want to do science and research. Not that I was that enthralled by chaos theory (although it was exciting); instead, what captured my imagination was the day to day research work described in this book. People doggedly chasing ideas, and ending up with insights into the nature of reality after a lot of time and work. I had read science books before, and I liked maths and physics before, but never something so… tangible about research.
On Writing, by Stephen King. Just before my eighteenth birthday, I read this book. And then I started writing. It makes no sense retrospectively that I never tried writing, since I was a voracious reader and I wanted to create things. I wrote fiction, but writing regularly, adapting to an audience, thinking about what will be understood from the page, all this is still fundamental in almost everything I do today.
So Good They Can’t Ignore You, by Cal Newport. For all my teen years, I looked desperately for my passion. Every holiday was the occasion for trying something new, or going back to an old favorite. But I could never make anything stick, because nothing felt exactly right. Then at 20, I read Cal Newport’s blog and book, and he blew my mind. He told me that while a preexisting passion does exists for some, this is not the case for most people. Even more if you cannot make your mind. And that there was hope of creating a fulfilling and meaningful path for you, if only you choose. A couple of times since then, I was unsure and lost, but I choose. And it made all the difference.