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Ask Slashdot: What Are Some Books You Wish You Had Read Earlier?
Reader joshtops writes: Hey, community. Could you folks please name some books that you wish you had read earlier -- especially because these books presumbably had an impact on your life. The books could be from any genre or year.
Grays Sports Almanac 1950-2000... back in 1990
Shocking how much more to it than the movie/tv versions. In fact, they only serve as spoilers.
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
By the time I'd read it I had figured most of it out, but if I'd read it earlier I could have saved some time getting there.
Definitely The Bible. Doesn't matter which version. I was well into my 30s before I started sacrificing chickens after accidentally touching women during menstruation.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
All the Adventures of a Curious Character (on Richard Feynman) by Ralph Leighton
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Rereading Daniel Dennett's "Conscious Explained" now... really opened my eyes to what consciousness is and isn't.
(I reference it in my own comic on dealing with mortality, as plugged in my sig)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I first encountered Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy in adulthood and I immediately wished someone had introduced it to me in middle school. For the purposes of this discussion, it's about a kid who keeps getting moved from one society into another. Each time he assimilates into a new group he notices the strengths and weaknesses of the new culture. Most of the coming-of-age books I was exposed to glorified the misfit and tried to reassure the reader that it's OK to be different. Citizen of the Galaxy doesn't bother with that at all---the protagonist integrates more-or-less successfully into every society he joins and he never gets angsty about not fitting in. This would have been a good thing to read when I was younger.
Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell.
While 1984 is better known, Down and Out is much more relevant especially today.
RTFM. Wiser words were never acronymized.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
by Dale Carnegie.
Seriously.
There's a thousand fantastic resources available on how to be a better programmer. Accruing technical acumen has always been the easiest part of navigating my career. Knowing how to work with humans has always been tricky. I wish I would have read this book back in high school.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
I'm currently on Green Mars (book two) and absolutely loved Red Mars (book one). Book Three is called Blue Mars. The first books was so good, and so timely with this topic, that I felt compelled to post. I read a lof ot Arthur C. Clarke as a kid, and wish I had read this trilogy when it first came out. The topics related to life back on Earth are so prescient, it is hard to believe the first book is nearly 25 years old. I'm definitely hooked, and will be reading more of Kim Stanley Robinson in the future.
No... don't. Everyone in our college clique who read it became fantastically unsuccessful. I only got a half way into the first book and somehow managed to salvage my life.
I'd read the The Book of the SubGenius instead. At least then you'll know how to fail upward.
Someone had to do it.
Kind of wish that I'd read Ringworld earlier, didn't get to anything Niven until I was already in my 30s. It's interesting to see what all Niven did with works in other genres like in the scripts he wrote for Star Trek: The Animated Series that included characters from N-Space.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Well, if you can't experience it firsthand you can always read about it I suppose.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I was left with two distinct ideas after reading this book that I'd wished I'd had 20 years earlier.
1) It's damn ok, if not mandatory, that a person feel good about making money off their talents
2) Pure unabashed capitalism is an extreme philosophy.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
The Naked Ape (a Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal), by Desmond Morris, 1967.
The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins, 1976.
These give clues about what we are, and why.
Perennially relevant to critical thinking about power. Similarly, Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World can explain how we make ourselves slaves. Follow up with Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand One Second After by William R. Forstchen Both equally relative with everything that's happening these days.
Because if I had started it 20 years ago instead of 15 I might have finished it by now.
This book would have changed my world had I read it when I was four. But now that I'm 44, not so much.
Yaz
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes books.
I too like reading watered-down eastern philosophy to make me feel #deep
Bad Science should be basic requirement in all high schools. People need to understand the difference between good science and bad science. Too many people think good science is bad, and bad science is good.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Contact by Carl Sagan
and
Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
If you are an engineer, manager or other technical career.... OR a MANAGER of anybody who falls into those categories, this should be *required* reading every few years.
Truths I've learned from this book include...
"If one woman can make a baby in 9 months... Then let's get 9 to make one it 1 month..." is a logical fallacy often used by management.
"Technical teams should be clearly scoped and fairly small or the amount of effort required for communications and coordination will consume more resources than the actual work. "
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Only the classics, i.e.
TAoCP (Donald Knuth)
GEB (Douglas Hofstadter)
The Illuminatus! trilogy (Robert Shea & Robert A. Wilson)
If I had read it before college I am certain I would have learned even more during my years there. As role models go, one can do a lot worse than Richard Feynman. :-)
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Dianetics. I had money before I read it.
Whatever you can say about Trump - one thing he is not and has never been is a religious conservative.
Exactly, if anything he is the antithesis of one; he is a real estate promoter and uses the same style as President as he did pushing real estate. Unfortunately, while it worked fine in the New York real estate world and during the election it has caused, and will continue to cause, problems for him as President.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I would have loved to read it but I am a bit tied up at the moment.
The Elements of Style.
It's not actually a book I wish I'd read early, it was a book I did read early and have been grateful for ever since!
It's a short, clear, concise book as you would hope for from a book to help improve your writing. It has many small points that really stick with you, in my case for decades.
For some reason the Kindle edition (linked to above) seems to be totally free at the moment so you have no excuse not to grab it! The paperback itself is fairly small if you prefer paper.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Though you type remarkably well with your remaining limbs...
Is it weird in here, or is it just me?
What I really wish I'd read more of earlier are financial books. How to handle money, how to budget, how to eliminate debt or be much more careful about using it than the average American is, how to invest, how to plan for retirement, all of those things.
I'm not really attached to these, but they're examples of a few reference points that made a difference to me in terms of how I thought about my finances:
* a Dave Ramsey book (they're all kind of redundant) - for budgeting, saving, and month-to-month financial management
* The Millionaire Next Door - some framework for understanding what habits contribute to wealth, and which ones don't
* The Four Pillars of Investing - a lot of history and basic investing environment
* The Intelligent Investor - a more detailed perspective on investing and history
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by the media theorist and NYU prof Neil Postman.
Read it a week ago after letting it languish on my bookshelf since college. Really wished I had read it ages ago! I'd have a lot more books than TV series under my belt.
Postman prophetically saw how TV would drastically reduce both our individual and our culture's collective capacity for critical thought and intelligent discourse by conditioning us to expect entertainment in every sphere of our lives (not just TV). In this important book, he sounded the alarm bell for American democracy. And his warning is even more relevant and critical today in our binge-watching, distractable, and social-media driven culture.
Here's a snippet from Postman's own forward:
"... What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture... As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right."
Eh, I just finished your copy of it. It wasn't that interesting.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Perhaps I'm just a bad geek, but I've found Lord of the Rings a little challenging to finish, though it's been a while since I've tried. I find that people who read it when they were younger (or had it read to them young) have a reverence for it I just don't quite share, but I feel a little like I'm missing out.
Eh, I just finished your copy of it. It wasn't that interesting.
Did you read the part where I died. Didn't seem realistic to me.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
anyone that's going to dig in to Dennett's explanation of consciousness should also consider two epistemological works by rudolf steiner:
The Philosophy of Freedom - Some results of introspective observation following the methods of Natural Science:
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/...
and
The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/...
A quick google of "The UNIX Programming Environment PDF" shows several available sources. Archive.org has a few other titles.
The AWK Programming Language
The C Programming Language - First Edition (useful for old systems, HP-UX bundled K&R compiler), Second Edition.
Practice of Web Programming (audio), also CBC Spark
DMR final web page mirror
The UNIX Time-Sharing System (C Programming Language alternate text)
The book that has by far influenced me the most is George Orwell's 1984. I read it when I was a teenager (~15'ish), though I don't think I would have appreciated it more if I had read it earlier. It's pretty dark, and its adult themes would have been harder to grok.
I'm in my mid-forties now, and it has influenced and informed my opposition to a surveillance state ever since. I remember thinking how awful it was that Winston would go out into the forest with his lover, thinking he was alone -- but they were STILL able to record him out there. As others have said, 1984 was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual.
- ------ Go 'til ya know.
Leadership and Self Deception is an amazing book. If you want something for the tech industry: Activator http://amzn.to/2qYDoT1
tora