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comment by Creativity
Creativity  ·  3148 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Looking for good reads

What are you interested in ?

Some suggestions :

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World it's a book about the materials around us : glass, paper, chocolate, concrete, porcelin, graphene, etc. It shows the history of the material, how, what and why it is the way it is. It's a short great read and gives you a new perspective of the world around you.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Some stories about the life of Richard Feynman, which was a nobel prize in physics but also a painter, lover, pick-locker, musical instrument player among other things. It shows how to think like a scientist and what it is and what it means to be scientific.

Born to run, Superintelligence, The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb), Thinking Fast and Slow, Nicomachean Ethics, The Martian, The Rosie Project are some suggestions among different topics.

You can search at http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ for free ebooks, they have over 30 millions ebooks. You can use the software 'Calibre' to create and organize your Ebook Library.





katakowsj  ·  3147 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'll second Born to Run. Anti-fragile, also by Taleb, left it's mark in changing my thinking.

I'm currently reading "Mindset" by Carol Dweck. Especially helpful if you're in a human-services related career.

prostheticfourhead  ·  3147 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'd read pretty much anything, just not books with a picture of Fabio and a woman with heaving bosoms on the front.

Thanks for the suggestions. And gen.lib.rus.ec looks great!

tacocat  ·  3147 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Read Stoner. It's a delicately constructed portrait of an ordinary man and his mundane tragedies and victories. It's not for everyone but it has emotional punch if you don't require a sweeping melodrama with your fiction. I have an ePub of it somewhere

lil  ·  3135 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Isn't that a surprising little book? A friend of mine in Haifa of all places found stacks of this book in a used book store and sent me a copy last year. Another novel on a similar topic (with South African politics thrown in) is Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (Nobel Prize for Literature, 2003).

tacocat  ·  3135 days ago  ·  link  ·  

New York Times Magazine or somebody rediscovered it a few years ago so I knew it was well regarded. But it's surprising in that nothing really happens and you can't put it down (if you're into quiet books with no lazer gun battles). It's a series of minor dramas delivered in such a tender way that it invites you into an ordinary life that parallels your own struggles. I can't say enough about it and can't explain why anyone should read it because the plot sounds so boring.

Those stacks might be worth something if they aren't the 2003 reprint.

b-612  ·  3147 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Plenty of good recommendations here. I would like to add Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, you can find it in the link Creativity gave you.