Jane Austen said 'The person who has not taken pleasure in a book must be intolerably stupid' and boy are we surrounded by many people who have obviously never taken pleasure in a book apart from ones that comes with crayons but not to despair because neuroscientist Sam Harris has developed a list of 12 books that everyone should read to make them smarter.
1. The history of Western philosophy, Bertrand Russell
2. Reasons and persons, Derek Parfit
3. The Last Word, Thomas Nagal
4. The Holy Koran
5. Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom
6. Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honour, Social Discomfort and Violence, William Ian Miller
7. The Flight of the Garuda: The Dzogchen Tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, Keith Dowman
8. I am that, Nisargadatta Maharaj
9. Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
10. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
11. The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcom
12. Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, Jean Hatzfeld
Quite a heavy, and dare i say boring, looking list there but nobody said being smart was easy but for people who don't find reading books a joy at the best of times they would be quite a slog to work through and i'm not sure how the Holy Koran even got in there.
I think to bring those with an aversion to reading literature into the fold you need to hand them something that would hold their attention and slip things in under the radar so they don't get a chance to say 'hang on, me is learning, what the...' and throw down the book and watch Ice Road Truckers instead.
My 12, in no particular order would include:
1. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
2. Animal Farm, George Orwell
3. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
4. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
5. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
6. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
7. Don't Sweat the Small Stuff, Richard Carlson
8. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
9. Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
10 Hearts in Atlantis Stephen King
11 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick.
12 Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Make your way through them and i refuse to believe that you will not put down the 12th book a better, smarter and more rounded person than when you picked up the very first one.
12 comments:
1. Rise and fall of great powers
2. True believer
3. Our oriental heritage
4. Guns, germs, and steel
5. The goal
6. Accidental superpower
7. The federalist papers
8. Blink
9. The worldly philosophers
10. Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
11. Early warnings
12. The age of the unthinkable
My issue with the original list was that non readers wouldn't read them and seems the same with your list, too heavy and not very subtle.
Yeah, my list isn't fiction. Reality based instead of la la escapism.
Good luck getting non readers to read by dangling the federalist papers in front of them.
But once they have read a bunch of fiction, good luck with having gained any value from reading the imaginary stories. Might as well read the Sunday funnies
But they will read and hopefully learn from it, your list and the original they won't even read so will not learn anything which defeats the purpose.
I've read 9 of the books on your list. several of them are horrible to read (grapes of wrath being the worst). Most normal people won't read them either...
In my view a good book has one message.
Out of curiosity - please provide a one sentence recap for each book that you listed that reveals the book's message.
For example, The Goal = every process has a constraint and that is the best place to improve the process
You didn't like grapes of wrath? I will do it next time I am on the pc.
Story was... real life struggle. Steinbeck style is painful.
Ok, maybe it wasn't real life. It was fiction and the only thing the family didn't face was locust and plague. It was all imaginable, though having all that happen to one family is a stretch...
my shot at the books i proposed. i didn't spend more than 2 minutes on it...
1. Rise and fall of great powers – fall behind technologically and fail
2. True believer – desperate people will do desperate things
3. Our oriental heritage – civilization is the passing of knowledge to the next generation
4. Guns, germs, and steel – environment impacts our civilizations
5. The goal – every process has a constraint which is the best place to improve the process
6. Accidental superpower – geography gives the USA a huge advantage over any other nation
7. The federalist papers – government is a necessary evil
8. Blink – out thinking is driven by our assumptions
9. The worldly philosophers – we are economic beings
10. Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson – what goes around comes around
11. Early warnings – change can be anticipated
12. The age of the unthinkable – technology is going to radically change the world
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