Books

To Read
Heartfelt sentiments of an art loving friar- Ludwig Tieck
Antipodes Of The Mind- Benny Shanon
The exegesis of Philip K Dick
Techgnosis (Erik Davis)
On the marionette theater (Heinrich Kleist)
The True Believer (Eric Hoffer)
Skepticism and Animal Faith (George Santayana)
The Oracles and Demons Of Tibet (Rene de Nebesky-Wojkowitz)
The First Three Minutes (Steven Weinberg)
Identity and Reality (E. Meyerson)
The Great Transformation (Karl Polanyi)
Science And The Modern World (A.N Whitehead)
Dupin (Edgar Allen Poe)
The structure of appearance (Nelson Goodwin)
The human worth of rigorous thinking (Cassius J Keyser)
The logic of scientific discovery (Karl Popper)
Becoming Animals (Konrad Lorenz)
The right stuff, The Me Generation (both by Tom Wolfe)
Contingency, Irony and solidarity (Richard Rorty)
Great Chains Of Being (A.O. Lovejoy)
Short Circuit (Richard Douthwaite)
The money mafia (Paul Hellyer)
The Singer of tales (albert b Lord)
A history of mechanical inventions (Abbot Payson Usher)
The copernican revolution (T.S. Kuhn)
The intellectual life of the british working class
U.S.A trilogy (John Dos Passos)
The open society and its enemies (Karl Popper)
The Idler, The Rambler (both Samuel Johnson)
Upwingers (F.M Esfandiary)
The game of life, The politics of ecstasy, The magus (all by Timothy Leary)
Sociobiology (Edward Wilson)
Genetic Code (Isaac Aasimov)
Mind and nature (bateson)
The social construction of reality (Berger and luckman)
Matter and memory (Henri Bergson)
The house of the intellect (James Barzun)
The physicists conception of nature (Heisenberg)
The lonely crowd (David Riesman)
The bias of communication (harold Innis)
Language and Myth (Cassirer)
Experiments in hearing (George von Bekesy)
Mechanisation takes command (Siegfried Giedion)
The alphabet (david Diringer)
Painting and reality (Etienne Gilson)
The decline of the west (oswald spengler)
The birth and rebirth of pictorial space (who?)
In the grip of the past (Bernard von Groningen)
Space and spirit (Edmund Whitaker)
The untuning of the sky (John Hollander)
Short history of music (Albert Einstein)
Empire and communications (Harold Innis)
The recognitions, JR(both william gaddis)
Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake (Joyce)
The end of history and the last man (Francis Fukuyama)
The division of labour (Durkheim)
Philosophy- Truth In Transit (John D Caputo)
Capital in the 21st century (Thomas Piketty)
1381- The year of the peasant's revolt (Juliet Barker)
Stop thief! the commons, enclosures and resistance- Peter Linebaugh
Guinea Pig B, Ideas and Integrities (both Buckminster Fuller)
On the psychology of the transference (Jung)
On the poverty of historicism (Karl Popper)
The sensory order (F.A. Hayek)
The ragged trousered philanthropists
Changing concepts of time (harold innis)
Ludwig Richter's autobiography
Conversation about Dante (Osip Mandelstam)
A guide for the perplexed (Ef Schumacher)
The sense of Order (Eh Gombrich)
The confidence man (Melville)
As you like it (Shakespeare)
The man who loved islands (D.H. Lawrence)
Lives (Plutarch)
The castle (Kafka)
An Essay on the production of wealth (R Torrens)
The dance of life (Edward T Hall)
Infinity in all directions (freeman Dyson)
Dreamers (knut Hamsun)
Mind Children (Hans Moravec)
A Wrinkle In Time (Madeleine L'Engle)
Intelligence in Nature (Jeremy Narby)
Hallucinogens and Shamanism (Michael Harner)
Tertium Organum (PD Ouspensky)







Read (recentlyish)


'*'s were particularly good.

Sculpting In Time**- Andrei Tarkovsky describes some of his thoughts behind film, time, art, love and debt.
Hard To Be A God**
 The Master and Margarita*
The Peregrine**- JA Baker follows peregrine falcons one winter in Southeast England. There are no words for the quality of this writing.
The Mind In The Cave**- David Lewis-William's theory of the origins of art and consciousness in relation to cave paintings. Clearly explained methodology based on a broad range of evidence, disciplines and models. Diligent treatment of a truly awesome subject.
Deschooling Society* (Ivan Illich)
The Ghost In The Machine (Koestler)- Analysis of humans as whole and sub-organisms, gives contrast of the damage done by self-assertive action versus 'misplaced devotion'.
Truth and Reality (Otto Rank)- Goes over the psychological effect of driving through life with one's foot on the accelerator and brake at the same time.
Slow Learner*- Thomas Pynchon's short story collection. Citadelle/The Wisdom Of The Sands (English title)- Antoine St Exupery * Aphoristic writing about the structure of a desert society and the rules of the game. Long but still condensed.Heroes and Villains (Angela Carter) Richly detailed, earthy, stark and painful story. The necessity of adversaries for the tension of growth.**The Denial Of Death (Ernest Becker) This was a painful book.* The Birth and Death of Meaning (Ernest Becker) Being handed a rollercoaster maintenance kit. Tool for de- (and hopefully re-) construction, even if you end up shell-shocked on reality's subs bench for a while in the interrim.**The Act Of Creation (Arthur Koestler) (Koestler paying some heavyweight homage to the mental gyroscope and all it's defensible mutations. Surprised if there's a better book on creativity out there...my dad tells me there might be.)
 Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me (Richard Fariña) ( 60's rhizome of obscurantism, good karma and absurd change. some new context on Pynchon and the decade)
The Sleepwalkers* (Arthur Koestler) (Exploration of personalities, creative mistakes and luck in the history of cosmology. Good final chapter on science/religion split, leads onto his book The Act Of Creation)
 The Dead Father (Roland Barthelme) (a team of 19 dragging a 3200-cubit Dead Father by cable in search of a golden fleece)
Collected Poems (Vladimir Nabokov)
Camp Concentration (Thomas Disch) *(syphilis and alchemy. harrowing but brilliant)
Solaris *
Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen **(tragicomic, hypersexual and beautiful. roughly in ratio to each other)
On Becoming A Person (Carl Rogers) ** (never liked the name of this book but it's resoundingly sane)
The death of Ivan Ilyich (Tolstoy)
On Poetry by Glynn Maxwell **
Wind, Sand and Stars (Antoine de St Exupery) ** (someone who appreciates sandcastles. an evaluation of the crushing and exalted nature of beauty that can be brushed against but never held.)
Small Is Beautiful (E.F. Schumacher)
Manhood Of Humanity (Korzybski)* (analysis of geometrical and arithmetical progression of human population and world resources. written after world war 1 by a person determined to stave off a second one.)
Big Data
Revolution (Russell Brand)
The Little Prince (Antoine St. Exupery)
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (study of the Piraha and their worldview traditionally being based only on the direct experience of living members of the group )
Prometheus Rising (Robert Anton Wilson)*
The Gutenberg Galaxy (Marshall McLuhan)** (this is what the Gideons should be handing out)
Mathematics and The Imagination* (great visual metaphors for higher dimensions, among other things)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
Gravity's Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)** (para((military))noid-baroque-vaudeville celebration of the dark, dark and sorry marble we call home.)
Against The Grain (Joris K. Huysmans)* (paranoid aristocrat shuts himself in and experiments with his senses. indulgent but fun)
The Star Maker(Olaf Stapledon)** (dauntingly large work of imagination, still gives me vertigo thinking about it. epic space travel from humble beginnings, promoting relationships with discarnate intelligence whilst seeming to have itself been spawned from one)
Diaspora (Greg Egan)** (the dutiful search for the Euclidean grail in which to store all memory from physical destruction)
Society Of Mind (Marvin Minsky)* (MIT artificial intelligence professor giving an explanation in layman's terms of how the brain performs the mind.)
My Family And Other Animals (one of my favourite descriptions of childhood sense-experience and family dynamics)
The Dark Net
The Establishment And How They Get Away With It (owen jones)
I Have America Surrounded ** (brilliant Leary biography)
Mysteries (Hamsun)* (influence on David Lynch?)
The Third Policeman *
Cities Of The Red Night (Burroughs) (another possible David Lynch inspiration. seem to be a few books from this time that tie sex, disease and nuclear war together like this. Camp Concentration reminded me of it)
Living Time And The Integration Of The Life
Human Givens (interesting and constructive outlooks on schizophrenia and autism)
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques Of Ecstasy (Eliade)
Conference Of The Birds
Science, Order and Creativity (Bohm and someone)
Art Of Seeing (Huxley)
Catch 22 (Joseph Heller) (Milo's syndicate alone makes this book worth reading)
Brave New World (Huxley)
Down And Out In Paris And London (Orwell) (hilarious book with an explanation of how the more you spend on food in a restaurant the more likely it is to be poked and licked by the chef)
The Penultimate Truth (PKD) (another pinnacle of PKD cynicism. post-apocalyptic story of Madison avenue playing a near-literal game of whack-a-mole with the general public.)
Behold The Man (Michael Moorcock)
The Perennial Philosophy (Huxley)* (dutifully collated)
No Souvenirs: Journal 1957-1969 (Mircea Eliade) (few fabled childhood memories and gives some insightful context on his academic circles and wider cultural currents at the time)
No Surrender: My Thirty Year War (Hiro Onoda)* (autobiography of an intelligence officer who continued to fight WW2 until 1976. thought-provoking in terms of how confirmation bias can pair with military duty)
Process And Reality (Alfred North Whitehead)**
House On The Borderland (William Hope Hodgson)
Understanding Media (McLuhan)*
Twenty Three Tales (Tolstoy)
Decoding Reality (Vlatko Vedral)
Life Of Milarepa*
Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein)
Temptation Of St Anthony (Flaubert)
Cosmicomics (Calvino)*
Archetypes And The Collective Unconscious (Jung)
Integration Of The Personality (Jung)
Time and Free Will (Bergson)
Nature Of Creative Activity (Viktor Lowenfeld)
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein)
Discourses of Rumi
Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir
Wisdom And Experience (Goethe)
The growth of the soil (Hamsun)
Moby Dick (Melville)
Flatland
The dispossessed (Le Guin)** (dutiful)
The lathe of heaven (Le Guin)** (this is inspired)
The golden apples of the sun (Bradbury)
A fisherman of the inland sea (Le Guin)**