106 books meme

I like this idea of "a book written just for me". Mine was "The Likelihood Principle" by Berger and Wolpert. I was about to say "don't bother looking for it on Amazon - it's not there", but actually there are two second-hand copies there, so go for it.

Every day I wonder whether I should have a blog.

Jason, if that's the book written just for you, then yes, you should have a blog. Such erudite deviance needs to be publicly displayed, for all to see and learn from.

you know, it's funny, but the thing that got me into philosophy was a hot girl i know when i was 16 taking a logic course at the local community college. I wanted to impress her. She ended up dropping the class, but i have gone on to major in phil.

Also, i like to think of myself as a reasonably well-read guy, but this list puts that to shame. I can't have read more than ten of those books, and i really want to read so many. On the other hand, i wonder how a similar list would work with blogs? If i had read as many books as i have blogs over the past two years i would be much closer to where i'd like to be on that list.

I'm not particularly sure which would have been a better investment of time, especially considering i'm mostly a lurker online.

Zen and the Art is/was (I'm not totally sure if it still is!) one of my bibles. The two books that got me into philosophy were Stephan Koener's The Philosophy of Mathematics and Karl Popper's Conjectures and Refutations which I read simultaneously leading me to speculate as to whether a Popperian philosophy of mathematics were possible. This thought led me to the book that was "written just for me" Imre Lakatos' Proofs and Refutations.

Zen... got me thinking, and set up all the issues I thereafter cared about. But today all I agree with it on is the need to do regular motorcycle maintenance.

bah! I'm impressed that you read, but terribly unimpressed with the list. Have you noticed any glaring inconsistencies in it? Any problems? A list that uses The Hobbit and The Silmarillion but neglects the LotR trilogy?

And where are the great multicultural novels? Plays? Lists like this exemplify exactly what's wrong with the Great Books Canon Most western lists contain only a limited pool of writers... and only more recent lists have made any attempt to be inclusive at all, generally picking only a single black writer (Toni Morrison) and perhaps some translations of ancient oriental texts. Very seldom do you see contemporary non-white writers on any western list. As for Native American writers, most people haven't even heard of the movie Smoke Signals, much less read a book by a contemporary indigenous author.

Dorid's objections would have been eliminated if John had given the source of the list. It's a list of the most common books that people have on their shelves but have *not* read. Compiled from: http://www.librarything.com/

It's a list of the most common books that people have on their shelves but have *not* read.

Hmmm, then I'm surprised the bible's not that list. And I guess too many have actually read Twain, or Hemmingway, or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Yeah, this wasn't like the usual list of The Great Books, but rather an aggregate of books that LibraryThing users had marked as "to be read". You can see the effects of the source in the distribution: a fair number of big SF/fantasy books that are dense enough for people not to read, a number of classics, and recent bestselling pop-lit books.

I'm more interested in the books that only speak to a very few people. I'm not talking about books for some sort of elite, but more like the equivalents of a pharmacological magic bullet.

I recently read a book by a guy named Richard Bodeus, Aristotle and the Theology of the Living Immortals, and immediately thought of John Wilkins as one of the half a dozen people in the world who would find huge personal relevance in a super-scholarly examination of how Aristotle's first philosophy--the stuff about the unmoved mover and thought thinking itself--relates to his beliefs on the status of the Gods worshiped in the city. I can't imagine that very many folks give a damn about Aristotle's piety or be interested in evidence that Aristotle may well have believed on the basis of tradition and experience that there were indeed Gods made of matter and form over and beyond or rather under and inside the intelligences associated with the stars; but I'd guess that John is one of 'em.

Some books are addressed to a very specific recipient. Belonging in a canon is only one way of being a significant book.

> This thought led me to the book that was "written just for me"
> Imre Lakatos' Proofs and Refutations.

I read "Proofs and Refutations" in a class taught by Neil Thomason, who was John Wilkins's PhD supervisor. Which goes to show that every blog discussion comes back to the beginning. Or maybe that every blog discussion comes back to John Wilkins.

It means, of course, that Feyerabend is the beginning of enlightenment.

Work prevented me from spending much time in that seminar. But the Monsterbarring argument remains with me today.

Jim, I've order Bodeus' book. Thanks for the headsup. But I think you might find several orders of magnitude more readers interested in Aristotle on religion than interested in, say, species concepts.

No Pterry?

My answer is over here:

http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2007/10/how-many-of-these-books-ha…

I've read the majority of them, but there's a lot that I'm afraid that I haven't read, including some major classics like Middlemarch which I dodged all the way through my original degree in Eng. lit., plus a shameful number that have been sitting on my "must-read" list for some time now, e.g. Cryptonomicon and the Neil Gaiman books.

I hope Neil doesn't ever read my blog and discover that I still haven't read American Gods or Neverwhere ... or I won't be shouted any drinks by him next time I run into him at a science fiction convention.

Hmmm, 57 on a quick count + the partially reads. Only a bare majority.

You drink with Neil Gaiman? Envy.

It's not that difficult - sf fandom is a friendly place. Though he's so mobbed by goth girls, these days, that it's hard to get to him. He's become like a rock star. When I first met him, ten or twelve years ago, he was merely a famous writer.

I think you're terribly mistaken: Melville wrote that book for me.

Back off, man. I'm the philosopher of classification here.

It is nice to see a few foreign language books on the list, but I am surprised there doesn't seem to be any Balzac.

He and Dickens almost invented the modern novel.

I would like to add a couple of other suggestions. Céline's "Journey to the End of the Night" was a real eye-opener for me as to what a novel could be. A sort of Catch-22, but much darker.

http://www.amazon.com/Celine-Journey-End-Night-Louis-Ferdinand/dp/08112…

I haven't checked, but it might be on the Gutenberg Project.

Another one is the Chinese classic, "The Golden Plum Vase, or the Chin P'ing Mei". It was written in the 17th century but reads like a modern novel and the themes are very contemporary.

http://www.amazon.com/Plum-Golden-Vase-Chin-Ping/dp/0691016143/ref=pd_b…

If you read French, there is a complete edition from the publisher Pleiade.

Another classic that should not be missed is Stendahl's "The Red and the Black".

Ulysses

Wow, congratulations on that one. No kidding. Good lord.

Finishing Ulysses and 100 Years of Solitude will repay the effort, John, though I doubt you need much convincing of the merits of either.

Gravity's Rainbow is still my favorite novel.

Re Moby-Dick, I found it wonderful also. I wrote an essay for a high school English class saying Moby was white for easy ID purposes - it would have made the novel a heck of a lot less dramatic with Ahab constantly shouting "Bring 'er closer, dammee, I can't tell if it's him yet!"

Zen and the Art was the book that got me into philosophy
Not Ayn Rand John?

Well, if you like Gaiman, you should move American Gods to the top of your 'To Do' list. Good book.

I'm suprised Proust doesn't make the list. À la recherche du temps perdu is one of the great slogs of the western literary canon.

Don Quixote is hilarious, btw, if you havent read it

ive read about 45 of those including Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
it was interesting how the modern author kept up an antique literary style throughout that whole book