A Not So Fancy Listing of Books

The author of the rather amazing Scary Go Round. I highly recommend procuring the printed collections; the printing quality is superb (full color on glossy paper), and the long story arcs are much easier to read.

Looks, Brains and Everything

Blame the Sky

Skellington

The Retribution Index

Great Aches

Ahoy Hoy!

Heavy Metal Hearts and Flowers

Ghosts

Anonymous

Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz

Aristophanes

The Frogs

The Clouds

Ecclesiazusae

Aristotle

Ethics

Categories

Poetics

Rhetoric

Marcus Aurelius

Meditations

At the time, I enjoyed reading this collection of meditations on Stoic philosophy, and it was a fairly quick read (fifteen minutes a day over the course of two weeks for me). Nowadays I've read Epictetus, and I suggest reading his Discourses instead.

William Blake

Blake is my favorite of the English poets. His unique use of relief etching and watercoloring makes for very interesting Illuminated works. There is a very high quality complete archive of Blake's works online with high resolution plate scans and full transcriptions among other things.

The Four Zoas

The unfinished manuscript of Blake's longest apocalypse. The Four Zoas divide from Albion and rage through the ages of dismal woe to bring about the end of the cycle of Ulro and restore the cycle of Beulah.

Jerusalem

Mike Carey

Lucifer (series)

Of the Sandman spinoffs, Lucifer stands out as the best for the first half, but then the writer appears to take on far too great a task, and, with the introduction of some disagreeable character relations, fails to execute the story as well as it could have been. Still, it was worth reading to the end even though most of the stories after issue 35 or so were merely ok. If you like Kierkegaard I suggest issues 2, 3, and 62—they show the form of the incommensurable relation of the single individual to the absolute perfectly.

Confucius

Analects

Neil Gaiman

The Sandman (series)

Perhaps the best comic book series of all time; I would say The Sandman as a whole ranks higher than anything even Alan Moore has written.

Good Omens

A friend of a friend decided one evening that I needed to read so-called normal people books, and so she lent me Good Omens. It was an enjoyable read and unearthed vague memories of comic book magazines I read when I was small and the name Sandman; thus through one book I found something far greater.

John Taylor Gatto

Underground History of American Education

An interesting underground history of the American education system. Available online for free.

Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran is fairly interesting; his earlier works do not agree with my æsthetic sense (blah blah), but The Madman onward are all rather nice. A few of his works are online, but I recommend scouting used book stores for old hardcover editions. The (late 90s onward at least) hardcover versions from Alfred A. Knopf are in fact permabound paperbacks with a hardcasing, and are of seriously inferior quality to the editions from the 50s and 60s (and cost quite a bit more, naturally).

A Tear and a Smile

One of Kahlil Gibran's earlier works, I did not much like A Tear and a Smile excepting the last poem ("A Poet's Voice").

The Prophet

Sand and Foam

The Madman

Homer

The Odyssey

Aldous Huxley

Perhaps the most overrated modern writer. Other people have written everything he has to write better and many years before he got around to it.

The Doors of Perception

Huxley stains the name of Blake by naming this horrible pseudo-scientific and pseudo-poetic essay after a line from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Subjectivity and objectivity are incommensurable; his attempt and being subjectively objective is utterly worthless.

Heaven and Hell

Blah blah LSD blah blah Mushrooms blah blah Peyote blah blah I'm Aldous Huxley I'm a pretentious jerk. Don't bother.

William James

The Varieties of Religious Experience

The PhD Octopus

Henry James

The novelist brother of William James; I've not read many (read: one) of his books, but what I did was decent.

The Altar of the Dead

A short novella about a man who maintained an altar in a church for all of his lost loved ones on the surface, but something a bit more beneath.

Gregor Kiczales

The Art of the Metaobject Protocol

AMOP is useful as a reference to the CLOS MOP (although less so with the online MOP spec), but the true value of the book lies in the first half of the book. It presents the design of the CLOS MOP through a series of revisions that fix limitations of earlier implementations and gradually work toward a generic and well designed MOP for CLOS. Through that process one is made more aware of a few general object protocol design skills, and gains insight into how to cleanly make mapping decisions customizable.

Søren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard was a master of style and philosophy; his writing is interesting even if one finds the theistic extentialism espoused disagreeable.

Sickness Unto Death

I purchased this when I was looking through books at a store after being unable to find the book I really wanted, and I must say that it was better for me to have found this one.

Contained within is a beautiful analysis of despair in the context of Christianity (really theism in general). Even if the argument offends, the presentation cannot. The dialectical nature of despair is reflected in every aspect of the work, and the method of presentation forces reflection.

Either/Or

Composed of two portions, Either/Or is a rather lengthy but rewarding read. The first book is a series of essays and a diary of a young esthetician; the second is a pair of long letters from an older ethicist friend to this esthetician. You are then left to resolve the conflict between the views.

Fear and Trembling

Repetition

He who despairs of esthetic repetition gets none; he who despairs of ethical repetition receieves the esthetic. Is it true then that no repetition exists? Is transition all one can hope for?

Alisa Kwitney

Destiny: A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold

David Lamkins

Successful Lisp

After learning Scheme, I read Successful Lisp and was able to pick up Common Lisp fairly easily.

Mencius

Walter Miller

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Alan Moore

Watchmen

V for Vendetta

Thomas More

Utopia

I read most of Utopia in high school with the TI-89 ebook reader, but the way the book was split up made it a bit difficult to grasp the overall structure. I found a copy at a used book store one day, and so I read it again, and found it much more comprehensible. It is a quick read, and decent piece of literature. The interesting social system espoused resembles resembles state communism (even if perhaps as a negative ideal), but with an strange blend of 14th century European social customs.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A bit acerbic and esoteric, Nietzsche is for me a good secular counterpart to Kierkegaard's theistic philosophy. Nietzsche's polemical works raise important questions for anyone who reads works on ethics. As such it is a shame that he has gotten a bad reputation by being read by far too many angsty teenagers who see (and relay) only Nietzsche the asshole rather than Nietzsche the master of the polemic.

Beyond Good and Evil

A somewhat more comprehensible, if a bit less aesthetically pleasing, presentation of much of the philosophy found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the negative form. The final chapters are very important (not to detract from the value of the rest of the work) if one wishes to understand On the Genealogy of Morals.

On the Geneaology of Morals

On the Geneaology of Morals is a wonderful book of three polemical essays on the origin of moral/ethical valuations, and the blindness of modern philosphers whose very thinking is tainted by these valuations unknowingly.

Ecce Homo

Ecce Homo is Nietzsche's very strange autobiography and explanation of his own works. At points it is clear that it could have used a bit more editing (prevented by Nietzsche ... falling into a catatonic state and all), but is still a very useful book to read as Nietzsche explains the overall structure of his works.

George Orwell

1984

Animal Farm

Plato

Symposium

Euthyphro

Apology

Crito

Phaedo

Protagoras

Luke Rhinehardt

The Dice Man

A quotation from one of my favorite metal songs inspired me to grab this book; at worst it would be a waste of time. Much reward was found in this random stab in the dark. The book is framed as an autobiography of the author as a psychoanalyst, and his progression through life as a Dice Man after deciding to live his life through random chance.

The style, plot, and content are equally neurotic; part comedy, part attack on psychoanalysis, and part deep philosophy. It was often difficult to put down, and was read in under a week of spare time.

Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash

As one must read the Bible to understand English literature, so one must read Snow Crash today to be a nerd. In the realm of modern pop fiction this is one of the better books I've read; it was devoured in a mere four nights. Neal Stepheson may not be Milton, but he does come up with enganging tales. Snow Crash has a nice undertone of (quite accurate) political and social commentary that makes it worth reading as more than mere cyberpunk fiction.

Cryptonomicon

I read Cryptonomicon when it was new, and at the time I thought it was good. It could have lost a hundred or so pages without detracting from the plot, but it was easy reading and didn't take very long to finish. The story was enganging, and the continual switching between the 1940s and present day slowly unravelled the tale in a nice way.

I'd still have to recommend Snow Crash if one wished to read only one Stephenson novel.

Bjarne Stroustrup

The C++ Programming Language (3rd edition)

Once upon a time I was fifteen and I read this book. It was more or less what taught me how to write programs just large enough to do useful things, and so shall forever be remembered by me. A year and a half later I stumbled upon a little language called Scheme and fell down the rabbit hole.