How embarassing! I left that "poor me" post up there for months, I'm sure thousands upon thousands of visitors to this blog have seen it and cringed silently away. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's because *it is gone now*.
Here's some less pathetic content for us to consider - the long-belated (and long-ago written but not published) continuation of "Books"!
11. The Meme Machine (Blackmore)
More than any other, I think I have this book - The Meme Machine - to blame for my career path. At the time (summer of '99) I'd just tried to be a physic major for a year and was very disappointed at my poor grades, so was looking for something.. easier. I was interested in sociology in a broad way, and when I read a review of Blackmore's book - in The Fortean Times, no less, yes, I am a scientist - I was convinced that this was what I had been looking for. I got the book, devoured it, and my mind was set: I was going to be a memeticist. Of course, that was not a real thing to be, and I decided that the closest thing must be psychology, since that was the science of minds and thought, and there I went. The Meme Machine introduced me to Daniel Dennett as well - she leans pretty heavily on his ideas about consciousness being a fabric of patched-together contents - and from there I started reading him. I read Consciousness Explained (below!) - it took a while and I came away very dissatisfied and confused, but Dennett is the one that introduced me to the idea of perceptual science, psychophysics, study of visual experience (the book is full of wonderful examples that he abuses, distorts, misrepresents, etc to make his awful case about consciousness). Over the years 'memetics' has faded into memory (with 'meme' completely hijacked to different purposes since), though I do think that a big part of my thinking about the world, about social contents and change, were nevertheless shaped by the ideas in this book.
12. Death’s End (Liu Cixin)
I read the Three Body Problem trilogy one after the other, end-to-end, and I can tell you: it gets better. The prose, the characters, who cares really. The ideas though, the breadth and depth of the *ideas*, are just *so good*. I've never read, and it's hard to imagine ever reading, anything that covers the conceptual scale of what's covered in Death's End, which is amazing since it's still a story focused on one completely ordinary human character, who has nothing but normal human experiences. But those experiences take place against the backdrop of, ultimately, the death of the entire Universe, and it all unfolds (in-joke there) in the most extraordinary telescoping fashion, expanding bit by bit until you're there with all of existence serving as the window dressing of the story. It's amazing how well it works. If you read the first book and you're unsure of whether to continue, I'd say it's worth it just so you can get through to the end of Death's End.
13. A Wizard of Earthsea (LeGuin)
Until I read this book, had I ever read a true bildungsroman? No. Until I read A Wizard of Earthsea, had I ever read a book about wizards and magic, that wasn't Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit? No, I had not. Had I ever read anything by Ursula LeGuin? 'The ones who walk away from Omelas', I guess? All of that seems fine - but let me tell you also, until I read this book, I don't think I had ever read a novel written by a woman. I don't read a lot of novels, but I must have read a hundred or so up to the late 2010's, and to think I had not ever read a serious piece of fiction by a woman author, is quite disturbing to me. It was never intentional - in the years since I read AWoE I have intentionally tried to balance my reading a little bit - I can't be too programmatic about it, but I have tried. But aside from being a grade-A piece of fantasy fiction (I read all the sequels but the last one, which I decided to save for later), this book gets on my list here just for being a first in several ways.
14. Labyrinths (Borges)
It's hard to know where to start here. There are stories in Labyrinths that I've read more than a hundred times. It's my bedside book - if I don't have anything else to read and I want to read something, I read a story from Labyrinths. Personal favorites: The Immortal (mentioned in these very pages just a few years ago) and The Library of Babel (Is it the best thing I've ever read? Maybe?) - but I think I can pick it up and start on just about any page and be perfectly happy.
15. Consciousness Explained (Dennett)
I've already been over this a bit in the 'Meme Machine' above, but Dennett's big disappointing book on consciousness was nevertheless quite important in my intellectual development, such as it is, or was. I learned about the physiological blind spot from this book, and about many other interesting perceptual and psychological phenomena. This was around the time that I was deciding what to study in college, and Dennett probably pushed me over the precipice of experimental psychology, that bastard.. In the years since I decided that most of what I learned from this book was, in fact, misinformation, and I have become a hardcore anti-Dennetian, but I credit (or blame) him for setting me on my path. (Honorable Dennett mention: 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea' is a *much* better book, though it occurs to me that if I had become an evolutionary biologist, I might not remember it so fondly...)
16. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein)
I'm not going to say too much about the Tractatus, because I don't remember it very well. Why, then, is it on my list, you ask? The honest answer is: I read it in my last year of college and, while I didn't understand it all, I don't think I had ever had quite the feeling I had while reading it, that I was "reading someone's thoughts". His method for laying out his thinking, stripping each thought down to its basics before proceeding to the next idea, I took as a model: for years after, when I wanted to really think through a problem very, very carefully, I would write it out in my own poor imitation of Tractatus format. I still do, from time to time, but I've since developed other ways of thinking (and, I think, I just don't think as much as I used to..). I said more than I expected. That's why.
17. A Brief History of Time (Hawking)
Oh this book! Everyone's read Hawking's ABHoT. You've certainly read it. These days I'm sure it has its replacements in the pop science pantheon, but I don't know, how dated could it really be? I consider myself a solid expert in popular cosmology and astrophysics, and it all started with this book. I can remember making other kids in middle school think I was *really smart* by reciting stories and ideas I learned from Hawking.
18. The Perception of the Visual World (Gibson)
In my first year of grad school, I believe, I read Gibson's first book and I think it fixed some of my ideas about vision forever. He would not be happy about this, since he gradually renounced much of what he wrote, in favor of much stranger and (probably) wronger ideas - I did also read his last book, 'An Ecological Approach to Vision', which was fascinating, but my mind was already set, apparently, by the simple concept of the visual field, which has turned out to be the central feature of my work as a scientist. It's strange to see just how good plain old armchair visual phenomenology could be - the German gestaltists also did it really well, though mostly in German and not in such comprehensively good books as these - and strange to think that basically no one has really been able to to it as well since.
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