hi all, Ive written occasionally in this blog about various books that have highly influenced me over the years. the idea of collecting them all into a post is a great one. whose idea was that on here? Im not sure, but my credit goes to you for that. yeah theres other frivolous writing themes that have shown up on here on open salon. cant speak badly of them, but they just didnt appeal to me.

Ive read basketfuls of books, and since I read so many, maybe I should have double the number that others list....

it would seem that even as we are highly oriented around writing now in our culture with the internet, text messaging, blogs, twitter, facebook, and emails, in some sense literacy is declining. people really just dont read books that much it seems like. now, I admit this is an anecdotal point of view. but, possibly some kind of statistics could support that.

there are just too many other diversions for the modern generation than the lowly book. in a way, it seems that books are a weak substitute for all the toys we have now for a pre-technological age. video games, movies, music arguably play a much stronger cultural imprint than in my generation. the sophistication of each is much higher. today I can buy a $1 dvd from a vending machine [which was produced for tens of millions of dollars by vast moviemaking teams/specialists], watch any of millions of youtube clips, listen to vast music libraries via mp3s on an ipod, and play photorealistic video games all day long.....

the word that pops to mind is "fragmentation". now maybe this is a good thing. in biology there is a concept of a "monoculture" which is more susceptible to infections. fragmentation seems to have happened in the music business and it is somewhat of a model for the phenomenon. what I mean is, when there was more consolodation in the music business, there was also probably more of a monoculture, and the current fragmentation is the opposite of a monoculture, which in many ways is a Good Thing...

the new Ebook & Ipad innovations leave us some hope that this limitation in book reading might change. could we see a renaissance of writing? it seems like writers are paid less than ever and that the internet has even-worse-than-commodified writing. long ago I always did have a dream of becoming a professional writer but the ladder looked just too steep or nonexistent as I graduated college.

listed in no particular order.

it feels unfair to only write a paragraph on each, I could easily write entire essays on each....

1. Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter

this book came out in the 80s when I was a teenager & I remember reading it in jr high. I think I heard about it possibly in scientific american magazine. actually I think the 1st book I read by Hofstadter was Metamagical Themas. this book introduces its readers to the extraordinary mathematics of logic and computation. to me it heralds and foreshadows the beginning of the Algorithmic Age. the age of the PC and the Internet. written by an author who was just a very exuberant, enthusiastic graduate student living in his parents house at the time. a truly remarkable work.

2. Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer

this is a really standout summary of new thinking in the field of "parasitology" that shows the very complex "behavior" that they are capable of. it describes a paradigm shift in the field of kuhnian-level proportions. moreover about 3/5 of all species are not "freeliving" but in fact parasites, and so in many ways, to understand biology involves understanding parasites. a real eyeopener. brings out many metaphors and structures/patterns for thinking about the world and reality but which Zimmer didnt really get into. we might like to think our lives would be better without parasites, but they are so intrinsic to biology that one wonders seriously if the opposite may be true.

3. Red Queen by Ridley

a sophisticated work on evolution and human evolutionary psychology. darwinism has not yet fully played out in the psychological realm and Ridley wrote this amazing book that opened that up to a large degree. also, he discovered the importance of a "red queen race" that I still havent seen well articulated in evolutionary areas/literature, but which I am firmly convinced is an extraordinary unifying principle as he argues, and which is applicable to many areas of human life such as economics. "social darwinism" was supposedly discredited decades ago but we keep re-encountering the same themes in society in slightly different shades, even as we wish to sweep them under the rug and deny they exist. this book is still underappreciated and its full implications still yet to be felt.

4. Introduction to languages, automata theory, and computation by Hopcroft and Ullman

yeah, its a technical book, so sue me. in 5th grade I forgot to check out a book from the school library for a book report, and decided to take up the teacher on her policy that "any book was ok". I did a review on a book on 6502  assembly language programming by Lance A Leventhal. she gave me an A as I recall and told me never to do it again, hahaha. I have a love for mathematics in algorithmic form that runs deep. in college I heard about the P vs NP problem and was instantly engaged and enthralled. I took a sr level CS class with the very advanced and difficult Hopcroft and Ullman book. I had dreams of solving the P vs NP problem. I wanted to be the einstein of CS. here at almost 40 it hasnt materialized yet, but theres still a little )( time left.... hopcroft and ullman have a picture of Alice in Wonderland with a rube goldberg machine signifying the various area of modern computation theory. a fitting picture. I would say CS is still waiting for its Einstein or Newton. any takers? Im still working on it....

5. Tantric Quest by Odier

I came from a very conservative & religious background that recognized the dangers of materialism and the myriad deceptions of "maya". reconciling that with living physically in the world, ie finding some kind of equilibrium/balance, was a difficult quest for me and which I recognize one could possibly be involved in for an entire lifetime. and which you see play out in the front pages of newspapers in celebrity lives. tantra is a remarkable religion that is very obscure, not well known, and purposefully so. if you wonder what those amazing figures in the statues of Khajuraho were thinking, this book is probably the closest to what they actually felt and practiced. a real shining jewel. maya, the protagonist-- what a real goddess of both the physical and spiritual.

6. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus by John Gray

its become fashionable to joke about this book, and its now kind of a laughingstock, and I took due note of another writer whats-her-name insisting she would never read anything by Gray-- but it did in my opinion start/cause a kind of reverberatory cultural shift. there was nothing else like it at the time and now there is a lot of thinking and writing along these lines, definitely more evolved. very novel and influential at the time. Gray articulated ideas that were very difficult for me to figure out on my own in the age of feminism. my mother worked at a good job but there was some real unresolved gender conflict and confusion in my family without us all fully realizing it. what are men and womens roles after the feminist revolution? I respect the feminists but they didnt always have all the answers, or some of their answers were incorrect and in conflict with basic male/female human nature and this played out in my own life in a big way. to me, Gray ushered in a post-feminist era.

7. Lao Tzu, Stephen Mitchell translation

I read Lao Tzu as a teenager but the Mitchell translation I must agree is one of the most nuanced and playful and probably very close, or as close as possible to the original spirit in modern language. Lao Tzu observed ideas about yin and yang, and was concerned and dispirited about humans inherent tendency toward economic disparity which he saw as in direct conflict with nature's principles. he was fascinated with a sort of "invisible power" he saw as greatest as all. who was Lao Tzu? probably not more complex than a farmer, yet his ideas have intense and direct applicability in our highly technologized and complexified world. Lao Tzu understood that as humans, with quite a bit of understanding, we still pale in comparison to the deep secrets/mysteries of the unverse.

8. Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda

my mother was particularly involved with a religion founded by Yogananda. I went to a camp as a teenager, about 14 or so as I recall. this book was bedtime reading in my preteens. I cannot deny that it had a huge influence on me but which I have rethought significantly also. yogananda in many ways predicted the materialistic direction and excesses that America would take. he might be simultaneously enthralled and horrified at the levels it has reached since he died in the 50s. the idea of a sort of spiritual transcendance was achievable in our materialistic age was very mesmerizing. concepts of karma and reincarnation are not provable concepts but useful principles that can take spirituality to a practical level. the stories suggest that there were deep spiritual truths that you could live your whole life only weakly brushing against. that humans are slowly evolving to something far greater than they are now in all our chaos, suffering, and violence.

9. Creature from Jekyll Island by Griffin

about the shady origins and machinations behind the federal reserve. Griffin doesnt really have a lot of background into economics and approaches it all more from a nonacademic angle. his historical insight is really unrivalled and does seem to unequivocally uncover significant manipulation at best and a conspiracy at worst around the creation of the federal reserve system, the foundation of the US banking system for now over a century. again, a real eye-opener. I always knew there was something not quite right about fractional reserve banking, but seeing it all confirmed in black and white was a real paradigm shift.

10. zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance by pirsig

a book on some other's lists Ive seen on here, and I must concur and use up an entry for it also. an intense book, told almost "blog-style". attempts to resolve the east-west cultural dichotomy at a date (1976) when it wasnt trendy. I didnt know it at the time that I read it, but now my brother is a schizophrenic who has undergone a lot of shock therapy over the last half decade. it does seem to improve his symptoms. I see my brother in many of the qualities that Pirsig writes about in his life, and I see many of those reflected in my own life. sometimes I feel about computers, mathematics, software, or algorithmics the way Pirsig feels about motorcycles and "quality". pirsig was interested in spiritual transcendance in a technological age and use his motorcycle to get as close to enlightenment as possible without getting burned... or, actually, getting burned....