Good books
One thing I’ve returned to over the years is Dr. Eliot’s five-foot bookshelf,1 a library that would furnish a pretty complete education and fit in that space. I often enjoy other people’s ‘favourite books list’. This is mine. It is incomplete, and I will add to this from time to time when I discover or remember something great.
Textbooks
The Art and Craft of Problem Solving, Paul Zeitz: Great collection of math puzzles from middle school to IMO level, this book has almost biblical in status in my math-natsci friend group from undergrad.2 Has given me much pleasure, often shared, and I expect will for a long time to come.
Concepts in Thermal Physics (2nd Edition), Blundell & Blundell: My favourite physics textbook,3 nominally about thermodynamics, actually explains in a very lucid fashion almost everything I find most interesting in physics.
The Princeton Companion to Mathematics: Both this and the applied maths volume are delightful to peruse, great reference books. I like to flip through this the way one might through any encyclopaedia.
Biology: The Whole Story, Lindsay Turnbull: Written by an Oxford prof., and with great illustrations. This covers all of high school biology and a good amount of undergrad biology in a pleasant manner. Not dumbed down, but starts from scratch and goes far enough to be interesting. Ten chapters, one per big theme (plants, energy, DNA, …)
Novels
The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe: Brilliant, couldn’t put it down. Sent tingles down my spine. Napoleon read this novel six times during the Egyptian campaign4.
The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig: For a long while this was my favourite book, I don’t really remember it that well now, but it struck a note at that time and I will return to it. Zweig is the best psychologist-author I’ve read (in the same class as Dostoevsky, but less depressing). Lots of other good novellas (Amok) and biographies (Mary Stuart and Magellan are my two favourite, the others are, at worst, pretty good).
The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien: My favourite book as a ten year-old, still one of my favourites 15 years and a few re-reads later. I keep coming back to identification with Bilbo (a Baggins, certainly, but also a Took!) and his journey.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde: A one day read, very much worth it. Not necessarily deep, but very good.
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen: Recently re-read most of this. Mr. Collins, and Mr. & Mrs. Bennet still made me laugh and cringe as much as the first time. Felt just as emotionally engaged in the story between Darcy and Elizabeth as the first time I read this. Definitely one of my favourite novels.
Philosophy/History
History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russel: Opinionated, intelligent, and funny in a very British manner. Beautiful prose. Don’t agree with everything in there,5 and admittedly I skipped a couple centuries of medieval philosophy but thoroughly enjoyed this one.
The Apology of Socrates, Plato: Read this in one go without putting it down, I was so excited by the end (at Socrates’ suggested own punishment, in particular) that I threw the paperback across the room upon finishing it.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung: Left me with the strong impression that Jung must have been a very clever man. Lots to be learned.
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Waterson: Intelligent, funny, cute as anything. As much a good philosophy book as a comic strip. Have read many times over.
Autobiography, Bertrand Russel: Perhaps the best biography ever.6 Inimitable prose, exceptional mind. I don’t always admire Russel but he was clearly a brilliant man.
Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, Ray Monk: Super interesting. Read this in english and then in french again two years later when in Chilean Antarctica. This was my first intro to Wittgenstein, and I discovered it through Reid Hoffman, who mentions it as his favourite book from his time at Oxford. How to Read Wittgenstein by Monk is a great follow-up, and perhaps the most annotated book on my bookshelf. Wittgenstein is characterised by intense intellectual honesty7 and pursuit of a life that is good, he volunteers to fight for Austria-Hungary in WWI, is one of the wealthiest men in Europe after inheriting part of his dad’s fortune, gives it all away to his sisters (not the eldest one, she was too wealthy already according to him!), works as a gardener, a Cambridge Philosophy professor, and in WWII volunteers in an english hospital particularly affected by the blitz. Lots of good and very practical lessons to be had from his example. My first “meeting” with Wittgenstein was actually on his grave in Cambridge, where Anthony and me read aloud one of his lectures at 6am one cold spring morning, after a night of solving the final examples sheet from our course “Oscillations, Waves and Optics”.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I, Edward Gibbon: This is like drinking the finest of teas.8 Delicious, you want it to take a long time, and indeed it does. Highly quotable, Gibbon was friends with Hume9 and you can see their Enlightenment ideals shine through.10 Haven’t yet read volumes II-VI, I anticipate it will be a great pleasure to read them too.
Book of Proverbs + Ecclesiastes, Old Testament: Definitely a NYT bestseller if it had been published last year.
The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources, Javier Blas: Great book, read in a day or two, pulls the curtain on how the world works.11
Good books that made me laugh
Sometimes all I want to read is something that will crack me up, these did the job well.
My Uncle Napoleon, Iraj Pezeshkzad: An Iranian classic, I’m told a lot of the humour is lost to the non-Iranian but Dick Davis’ translation still had me laughing a lot.12
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams: Only came around to reading this in 2024, as good as its reputation.
Roman Fleuve, Philibert Humm: This won’t work in any other language than french, but perhaps the funniest thing I’ve ever read.
Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!, Richard Feynman: A good laugh, some great pranks.
The Anti-Christ, Friedrich Nietzsche: There are good reasons to read Nietzsche, but an under-appreciated one is how funny he is, this goes for Ecce Homo and Beyond Good and Evil as well. All very good.'
The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis: Almost any C.S. Lewis is worth reading, but this one is very funny. Light reading, in a sense, but some very good ideas in there. The premise is that there is a “junior devil” whose job it is to get a few human “patients” to hell, and we are reading letters from his supervisor giving him feedback on how best to achieve this.
Charles Eliot was the president of Harvard at the turn of the 19th century.
Thanks to Giulio Filippi and Samuel de Courcy-Ireland for this gem.
Elvinas, my friend, IPhO 2016 gold medallist and a good teacher also thought this the best textbook from our undergraduate degree.
“The Topographical Bureau’s curious office hours – from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. and 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. – allowed Napoleon plenty of time to write a romantic novella entitled Clisson et Eugénie, a swansong for his unrequited love affair with Désirée. Employing the short, terse sentences of the heroic tradition, it was either consciously or unconsciously influenced by Goethe’s celebrated novel of 1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther, which Napoleon read no fewer than six times during the Egyptian campaign, and probably first when he was eighteen.”
Roberts, Andrew. Napoleon the Great (p. 62). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Other books taken by Napoleon to Egypt include: “Captain Cook’s three-volume Voyages, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and books by Livy, Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus and, of course, Julius Caesar. He also brought biographies of Turenne, Condé, Saxe, Marlborough, Eugène of Savoy, Charles XII of Sweden and Bertrand du Guesclin, the notable French commander in the Hundred Years War. Poetry and drama had their place too, in the works of Ossian, Tasso, Ariosto, Homer, Virgil, Racine and Molière.6 With the Bible guiding him about the faith of the Druze and Armenians, the Koran about Muslims, and the Vedas about the Hindus, he would be well supplied with suitable quotations for his proclamations to the local populations virtually wherever this campaign was finally to take him. He also included Herodotus for his – largely fantastical – description of Egypt.”
Roberts, Andrew. Napoleon the Great (p. 163). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
In particular Russel, like most philosophers shortly after WW2, quite mis-understood Nietzsche and presents a bit of a straw-man.
Thanks to Richard Price for putting this one on my radar with this great tweet.
This is the key thing imo, all my favourite thinkers have this: Jung, Nietzsche, even Dalio. If you’re not original, are you yourself or just parroting the herd? I guess this is why I don’t love Russell, he cared too much what others thought of him.
or “finest of wines”, but wine tastes so bad :-/
Incidentally I learned in the intro that Lausanne was a great centre of European intellectual life in the mid-18th century, and that Gibbon thought that if he’d stayed in Oxford for his studies he would just have been a drunk later in life. Decline and Fall is one of the first modern history books in that it doesn’t explain historical events through a theological lens. As it turns out, the Church had too much power for this sort of thing to be conceived of and completed in England, and Gibbon’s formative ideas came to him from Hume (Scotland), Montesquieu (France) and the Lausanne intellectuals (Switzerland is protestant, protestants don’t like the powerful churches, so they supported “anti-clerical” ideas like “social history” as opposed to “theological history”).
A great companion book is Ray Dalio’s The Changing World Order, it completes Gibbon’s picture very well, with more of a focus the monetary/financial big cycle, whilst Gibbon gets the internal and external order/disorder cycles spot on. This plot of the silver content of the Denarius is a good example of how the two analyses dovetail each other nicely.
Thanks to Hugo Hamilton for giving me this book.
Thanks to Ali Pichvai for recommending this indirectly via dad.