Fiction
Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions is one of my favorite books. These come highly recommended. And I’ve also been reading some of Vonnegut’s short stories. Another Vonnegut book I have liked up is Timequake.
Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley
I’m halfway through this. Huxley’s first book. A lovely period piece. Pokes fun at the affluent artsy private types of the twenties. Delightful read.
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
This is a mindtrip. Beyond any other Mindtrip. The writing style is indescribable, and very hard to get into. I picked it up because I heard that it’s great science fiction and notorious for being one of the hardest to read books ever written, perhaps second only to Pride and Prejudice. I’m four pages in, and find it challenging.
Allan Quatermain by Henry R Haggard
I’m doing it wrong by reading the last book in the series first. But this is the only book I could find.
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murkami
One of my favorite authors. Also gonna read Kafka on the Shore.
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco
This promises to be a trip. A book dealer loses his memory but remembers every word of everything he’s ever read, and relives his life through newspapers, comic strips, novels, his grandfather’s journal and others.
Lila by Robert Pirszig
Sequel to one of the most important books ever written.
Non-Fiction
Screw It Let’s Do It by Richard Branson
In this book Branson tells us how he screwed it and then did it. And how he’s going to do it. A must read if you want to know how one of the most influential business icons in the world made it big and what he intends to from here.
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B Cialdini
This is a book for evil marketing people. Or those who want to learn about how evil marketing people work. Take a wonderful peek into how human psychology is manipulated into buying. For marketing people, this is a great book that gives you a better understanding of how you can persuade people into buying, and how you can convert more potential leads into sales. There are a lot of references to real live cases and studies where there has been a measurable improvement in sales or conversions by adopting the methodologies discussed. There is a good deal of analysis as well, but not textbook level depth. This is a casual reader at best, but a great starting point. This is a really slow read for me because I keep going back to re-read certain parts in order to see them in a new light.
The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil is a hero to me. I have been reading his essays and following him for quite some time now. I might be a little biased in my opinion (what is an objective opinion anyway?), but Kurzweil, a futurologist and a transhumanist, is the single most important visionary and genius of our times. In this book, he provides us with an insight into where he thinks mankind his headed. His predictions of the future are both terrifying and awe inspiring. Explore how the pace of innovation and evolution for a given system are exponentially increasing as the amount of order increases. And try to grasp what this means for us, and how we are learning to manipulate our very nature as we were once learning to manipulate our environments.
The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
I’m a pseudo astrophysics wannabe who doesn’t even have a telescope, and I love reading about superstrings and GUT and pea brains.
The Meme Machine by Susan J Blackmore
I’m an anthropology geek in the making. This book was recommended to me by Amazon after I read Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, which was a very very good book, and one I believe should be compulsory reading at the high school level.
Guns, Germs an Steel by Jare M Diamond
This was recommended by a friend ages ago, but I haven’t gotten round to reading it. It promises to be a very interesting book, especially for anthropology and history geeks.
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault
Something I’ve been wanting to read for a great deal of time just so I can boast that I’ve read it. I’ve read a couple of essays by Foucault on morality and a friend suggested I read this.
Getting Things Done by David Allen
Because I can’t get things done. I was planning this blog post for a month now.
Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
Because the government said so.
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
This is because I want to describe my self as “Machiavellian” and put that on my business card. But I’d like to earn the right to do so first.
Trade to Win by Thomas L Busby
My broker gave me this.
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