Christof Koch's Book List

Chronologically arranged list of interesting books - science, philosophy, novels, whatever - I've recently read. By-and-large, these are books I like; otherwise I wouldn't have finished them. Must-read books have flashing titles.

2008

Liberty Bar by Georges Simenon (1932). A classical Inspector Maigret novel. Tight and sparse prose, about murder, human weakness, lust and alcohol among the beautiful surroundings of the Cote D'Azur and about somebody who had it all but who, in middle age, threw it all away because he could not resist temptation. Not cynical but sad & poignant. Recommended.

Spook Country by William Gibson (2006). A continuation of his earlier novel Pattern Recognition. It deals with the familiar Gibsonian themes of the nature of art and media (he introduces locative art, that exploits a combination of VR and GPS-sensitive interactive art), the socio-cultural effects of advanced technology, the privitization of functions that were previously carried out by the government and the shady underbelly of society, inhabiting by post 9/11 intelligence and military operatives as well as criminals and private individuals with unlear motivations (but a far cry from the much more free-wheeling Sprawl that figures so prominently in his earlier signature cyberpunk stories). The novel follows a variety of characters around Los Angeles (at the W and the Standard) and New York who don't know what they are doing until they all converge at a warehouse in Vancouver. The denouement is a bit thin but that's not the point of the novel.

Against Love: A Polemic by Laura Kipnis (2003). A witty, and at times very funny cultural-study tract considering the many and varied benefits of adultery. One of Kipnis' often repeated points is that the prevalence of adultery constitutes a referendum on modern monogamy. With roughly half of all marriages ending in divorce, perhaps it is time to change the institution itself. She argues that it could not survive without being constantly ideological reinforced via the idealization of romantic love as the sine qua non norm in pop-culture, movies, books, songs, religious institutions, and the law (in most countries, bigamy is a crime). Viewed from a Marxist point of view, marriage is too much work and not enough play and submitting to the repressive regime of marriage that she lovingly describes in pages upon pages (based, perhaps, on personal experiences) of ascerbic prose, is simply a private enactment of a larger social conformity demanded by capitalism. And so she sounds the clarion call: when romantic love and sex become buried under careers, childen, and daily life, adultery liberates the adulterer. Like any polemic, she chooses not to defend the other side. She never mentions the obvious powerful biologcial urges that drives the vast majority of us to serial monogamy and completely sidelines the stability, friendship, and love that can be found in so many long-term marriages. Read this not for a penetrating analysis about the flaws in this ancient institution and what could be done to make it more sustainable in today's culture but for some very funny prose and great quotes (for example, Adultery is the sit-down strike of the love-takes-work ethic; or It is at least a reliable way of proving to ourselves that we're not quite in the ground yet .

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham (1915). His all-time classic, partly autobiographical novel of self-discovery, liberty, determinism versus freedom, the meaning of life, and the various shades of love. At its heart is the obsessional relationship between the protagonist, Philip, and the vulgar cockney waitress Mildred that almost proves his doom. He is deeply enslaved to her, against his will, and he knows this and, yet, is powerless to do anything about it. This brings to mind Spinoza's Ethics, "Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions," where Spinoza writes "The impotence of man to govern or restrain the [emotions] I call bondage, for a man who is under their control is not his own master, but is mastered by fortune, in whose power he is, so that he is often forced to follow the worse, although he sees the better before him." Truer words never spoken.

Artifacts - An Archaeologist's Year in Silicon Valley by Christine Finn (2001). Interesting account of one year - 2000, the height of the dot com bubble - a British archaeologist, actually more of a social anthropologist, spent in and around Silicon Valley. Her main vehicles are interviews - including one with Carver Mead. She considers the culture and its traditional roots, its transition from rural to hypermodern, its artifacts and what is lost in the hubris and the Über-emphasis on speed and technology.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (2006). Wonderful account of the romantic and brutal aspects of circuit life in Depression-era 'Small Town America' told from the vantage point of the protagonist growing old and senile in a nursing home; his feelings of helplessness and anger that he experiences in such a setting are well described. He recounts his early life as a 23 year old dropout from Cornell following the suddent death of his parents in a car accident and his running away with a circus. The protagonist finally finds happiness after death, murder and a stampede. A roaring good read.

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch and Jeff Zaslow (2008). Very well written, short instant classic of the inspirational literature. Pausch, a CS proofessor at CMU, is diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Following a beautiful germanic academic tradition of giving a last lecture - summarizing and celebrating one's lifetime academic achievements (Abschiedsvorlesung) - he focusses on his childhood dreams and how critical they are forming a happy, and situated and ethical person. A bit sentimental at times. In the face of certain death, Pausch clearly has lust and zest for life - he talks ever so fondly about his father, his wife, his children, his students, his doctoral adviser and other heroes in his life. Despite the fluff, definitely to be recommended.

The Philosopher's Dog - Friendships with Animals by Raidmond Gaita (2002). This book should be for me - the author, a moral philosopher, goes gaga over dogs and he used to be an avid mountain climber. Lot's of interesting anectotes concerning the canine (and the feline and the birdish) and the alpine (and his father) abound. The central theme of the book is how knowledge of our death makes us different from animals. He offers some strange opinions without further justifications (uconditional love has no application to animals). Overall, while a fine piece of writing on friendship with animals it is not cut from a single, intellectually convincing monolithic block.

We Think the World of You by Joe Ackerley (1960). Depressing and strange novel about a psychological timid and stunted gay man who develops an obsession with a German shepherd, Evie. She comes to completely dominate his life. Set in the outskirts of impoverished post-WWII London among working class people. I have an intense relationship to dogs - can't pass one without talking to it - but this is unnatural.

The Seeker by Sudhir Kakar (2007). A historical novel, based on private letters and diary entries of Madeline Slade, the daughter of a high British naval officer, who joined Mahatma Gandhi in his Indian ashram, dedicated to self-discipline, austerity and tolerance. The book describes in compelling manner the intensity, dedication and intense need for purity that drives a spiritual person such as Madeline to live what most of us would consider a life of extreme deprivation and poverty and how in the end she runs up against the limitations of her own psychology. This is a nice quote, epitomizing the sense of the book
Perhaps I still doubted whether a life of the mind (and at least a modicum of the senses) I had envisaged for myself would also provide enough nourishment for my spirit. Fifty years later, I realize that I still do not have an answer. Perhaps this is a question to which there are no answers, or one to which each must find the answer on his own. I still wonder what it would have been like if I had stayed with Bapu (Ghandi), immersed in a cause greater than myself, guided through the journey of life by a man people have likened to the Buddha and Jesus. Instead I chose to strike out on my own, with a road map of happiness that detailed ways of satisfying the needs and longings of my self. Yes, I chose to seek pleasure, however balanced and sensible my pursuit might have been.

2007

Jerusalem - City of Mirrors by Amos Elon (1989). A collection of essays about the fascination that the Holy city of Jerusalem has exerted on the Western mind for the past three thousand years. A great counter-point to Michener's The Source, it gives a sweeping view of this city's bloody history, and its collection of zealots and sinners and saints and plain nut cases (of course these categories are often indistinguishable) who have been attracted to Jerusalem. The book covers the post 1967 period, when Jews, for the first time since the Roman empire took over direct control around the time of Jesus' birth, control all of the city again. The book has minatory words for the future - it remains unclear whether in this new age of religious extremism, any stable and peaceful solution to people of very different sensibilities co-existing side by side can be found. I read this book as I was enjoying the warm hospitality of the Mishkenot Sha'ananim Guesthouse, with a spectacular view from my bedroom window of the walls of the Old City built in the 16th century by Suleiman the Magnificent. Every night, I would venture forth to some part of the Old City. After a while, however, the city and the inhabitants with their obsession with the past and with living according to obscure rules set down hundreds and even thousands of years ago, in a completely different age, became oppressive. Elon's book well expresses this. Take the Church of the Hold Sepulchre in which five competing Christian sects jealously guard their particular fraction of the sanctum. The city is all about the past and only very little about the future. I happily made my escape to America, which is the opposite. For better or for worse, the fault-lines of the future run through California.

The Farbric of the Cosmos - Space, Time and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene (2004). Exceedingly well written romp through modern fundamental physics, from quantum mechanics, special and general relativity to inflationary cosmology (the masterful written chapters 10 and 11), superstrings and beyond. Himself a superstring theorist (as if there were an exprimental superstring physicist) at Columbia, Greene has a gift for the well-turned metaphor. His topic is, of course, awe inspiring. Just consider that quantum fluctuations in the pre-inflationary universe (a trillionth of a trillionths second after the beginning of the universe) gave rise to the large scale distribution of galaxies and clusters of galaxies we observe today. Thus, fluctuations at the smallest of scales determines what happens at the largests of all scales (and then some people consider the brain a deterministic system)! Highly recommended to the educated reader; it is not an easy read.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami (2006). More than two dozen surreal short stories dealing with loss, alienation, the many ways that love can develop and the essential strangeness and unfathomability of life. My favorites are ``Man-eating cats" and "The kidney-shaped stone that moves every day". Reminescent of Kafka.

Les Adventures de Tintin: L'Etoile Mysterieuse by Herge (1941). A one day academic conference took place on at the Jerusalem guesthouse where I was staying. Out of sentimentality - I read all 23 adventures as an adolescent growing up in Marocco - I bought his tenth adventure and enjoyed the clear, expressive drawing style and the warmly rendered stock characters - Tintin and his inseparable terrier Milou, Captain Haddock, and the single-minded and obsessed scientists.

The Blue Mountain by Meir Shalev (2001). Translated from the Hebrew. A folksy, whimsical and fantastic account of the founding of an agricultural cooperative by Ukrainian Jews in a swampy part of the Galilee. The novel spans three generation of idiosyncratic individuals, their trials, tribulations, loves and hates, all told by the grandson of the founder, who ends a fat, rich and exiled undertaker.

The Pea and the Sun: A Mathematical Paradoxon by Leonard Wapner (2005). A non-mathematical introduction into set theory and transfinite numbers, culminating in a thorough discussion of the famous Banach-Tarski Paradox. Take a sphere in three or more dimensions and partition it into four non-overlapping subsets. When these are appropriately moved around and re-assembled, you end up with two balls, each with the same volume as the original sphere! No cheating occurs - the subsets are only translated and rotated, no stretching or adding of new matter. This violates our deeply held intuitions about conservation of space/volume. Controversial when it was published by the two Polish mathematicians Banach and Tarski in 1924, this result is now accepted as a consequence of the axiom of choice. The paradox does not apply to `real' physical space as the subsets in question are non-measurable - they can't be obtained by cutting the sphere with a knife (but maybe with Philip Pullman's Subtle Knife from his His Dark Materials). Ultimately, the Banach-Tarski paradox is a further weird consequence of infinite numbers and sets similar to Hilbert's Hotel with its infinite rooms. Wapner's book does an admirable job of conveying the relevant mathematics in just over 200 pages.

Hidden Dimensions - The Unification of Physics and Consciousness by Alan Wallace (2007). A gifted writer with a background in physics as well as a Buddhist monk, Wallace makes several intriguing arguments in this easy-to-read monograph. Most cogently, Wallace argues that science must make a more serious attempt to study the phenomenological mind. Science spends untold hundred of millions of $ each year on studying the objective, third person manifestations of the subjective, conscious mind - think of fMRI experiments in humans or electrophysiological investigations of animal cognition. Yet we mind-brain scientists only make use of very crude and unsophisticated descriptions of the subjective attributes of the phenomenological mind. We ask subjects to rate the intensity of some stimulus as 'low' or 'high' or whether or not subjects saw a briefly flashed face. Yet any serious meditative practice involves 1,000 to 10,000 or more hours of training to contemplate the mind, without distraction of forms, of percepts, of memories, of thoughts, of positive or negative emotions, of desires, wants and fears. With the right attitude, these techniques are as reliable as any scientific method (which likewise require year of practice in the form of graduate school and post-doctoral apprenticeship). I do agree with the author that the contemplative, Eastern traditions have a lot to teach to Western science of the mind.
Wallace's second, more lengthy pursued, argument is that the modern view of physics as provided by quantum mechanics and ancient Buddhists beliefs are congruent. Both assert that the classical distinction between subject and object is illusory, that both are deeply linked and that the so-called measurement problem - think of Schrödinger's cat, Heisenberg's uncertainty relationship, the collapse of the wave function, the many-worlds interpretation of Everett and so on - and consciousness depend on each other. One can't exist without the other, a variant of Idealism (without subject no object). While this is an appealing notion, the actual evidence on the ground that the brain relies in some non-trivial sense on macroscopic quantum phenomena, in particular on entanglement, is non-existent. Mind you, at 300 degrees Kelvin, the brain is very hot. It is also wet and strongly coupled to the environment. All of this makes it very unlikely that the brain is a quantum computer. All the evidence is in favor of the 'boring' hypothesis that at the scale relevant for its behavior, the brain obeys classical physics. Furthermore, ever since I read Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics donkey years ago, I'm skeptical of the highly selective interpretation of these two radical different domains of thought. As pointed out by Peter Tse, these similarities should be viewed next to the significant incompatibilities between the two - for instance, the Buddhists belief in reincarnation, in various forms of extrasensory perception, and other spooky stuff with no hard-nosed evidence. Anyhow, I enjoyed reading the book and ordered Wallace's most recent one.

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer (1996). Wonderful moving account of the peripatetic, post-College, two year long peregrination - in the original sense of pilgrimage - of Chris McCandless (alias Alexander Supertramp) throughout the American West and his death from starvation in the Alaskan wilderness north of Mt. McKinley in August of 1992. An intense, idealistic young man from an educated and privileged background, Chris was obsessed by a need for Tolstoyian purity and poverty, living a rigorous, monkish life without any of the trappings of modern civilization, and a need for adventure. Far from being suicidal, Chris managed to survive for more then 100 days in the wilderness on 10 pounds of rice he took along, whatever berries and roots he could scrounge up and on what he could shoot. It reminds me of what the philospher Richard Watson has written about such driven personalities:

Suicide? Don't be absurd. They don't want to die. They don't intend to die. They choose to do something very difficult right at the limits of human possibility in order to savor the joy and satisfaction of having done it. The risk is essential. It defines how hard it is. Even more, risk of death raises awareness of life to a peak. Socrates said, Know thyself. On the edge we are reminded of our mortality, knowledge of which makes us human.

That's the way to live my life!

Krakauer uses elements of an earlier, autobiographical story that I love - The Devils Thumb from his collection of essays, entitled Eiger Dreams, about his three week long solo climb of an isolated mountain in Alaska - to explain why some men, driven by unresolved psychodynamic conflicts, find such intense, solitary high-risk experiences so very life-affirming. I confess that I only read the book after I saw the eponymous movie that closely follows the book and the life of Chris.

How to be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto by Tom Hodgkinson (2007). Fun and quick read by the British editor of a magazine, The Idler. A tongue-in-check counterweight to Pieper's book on leisure. Questions the strong association in Western cultures - in particular in protestan, Anglo-Saxon countries - between idleness and wasting time. The book makes the interesting sociological observation that never has such a large fraction of the middle classes worked so hard than today - despite technology, larbor-saving devices, extension of life span, pension systems and so on. This certainly applies to me. Yet I find it almost impossible to relax, to truly enjoy life. I feel the need to work hard, or play hard, or run 20 miles, or read a book a day. It's a compulsion.

Wendepukte im Lebenslauf by Jürg Willi (2007). A Swiss-Germany psychoanalyst's musing about personality development following drastic changes in life circumstances (death of a loved one, unemployment, divorce). He points out the dramatic loss in the way one interprets the meaning of one's life and its significance when leaving any long-term relationship. Many years or even decades of joint experiences are rent asunder with profound consequences for one's sense of wholeness.

Leisure - The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper (1948). Originally published in German as Musse und Kult. On the importance of leisure, or contemplative celebration or serenity. Citing Aristotle's ``we are not-at-leisure in order to be at-leisure", Pieper argues that leisure is at the basis of true culture and that Modernity, with its insistence on total work, is forgetting this at its own peril. Today, leisure is only meant to serve as a reprieve from work, to make us more efficient or more creative. Leisure stands opposed to this exclusive ideal of work as social function. Leisure does not exist for the sake of work. It is of a higher order than the world of work. Its justification is not that the worker should function faultlessly and without a breakdown, but that he should be a man (in this sense, leisure is totally opposed to laziness, idleness or sloth). Pieper reminds us of the ancient origin of liberal arts. The Artes liberales are those studies that serve no useful function, that are only justified in themselves - while the artes serviles are those practices that lead to useful knowledge including the sciences, engineering, law, and medicine. The book serves as a wonderful antidote, as a counterpoint, to the attitude to life I, and most of my colleagues and friends, embody but that is so difficult to give up: despite, or possible because, of our vast technological powers, we work more than any other educated people in history!

Straw Dogs - Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals by John Gray (2002). A cynical pessimist muses about human nature, so-called progress - illusory except in the sciences - vices of Christianity, the imbecility of any sort of religious beliefs and other edifying themes. Well written but predictably Cioran-like dreary. Can't recommend it.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957). Well, I finally read this quintessential 'Beat Generation' novel in its 50-th anniversary edition - identical to the original scroll the way Kerouac wrote it in 1951. It is a continuous stream-of-consciousness creation and a great, hyperkinetic account of Kerouac and his friend criss-crossing America in search of adventure, girls, music, and booze. The last trip the book recounts, from Denver to Mexico City in a few days, is a blow-out and a must read. I love the book's raw and unsophisticated energy, enthusiasm and zest for life "...because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing...but burn, burn burn like a roman candles across the night." I understand well why this book can have such a big impact on the adolescent male mind.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman (2007). When hiking over an alpine pass, have you ever suddenly come across a gorgeous mountain valley filled with horrible condos, ski lifts and hotel and have indulged in the seductive fantasy `what if there wouldn't be any people around?' If the answer is yes, this book is for you. An original and utterly compelling, if morbid and sad, investigation into the future of our planet sans people. In a doomsday scenario reminiscent of "The Quiet Earth" or "The Day of the Trifids" or countless other science fiction movies and novels , the author extrapolates into the proximal and distal future with the aid of archeologists, biologists, physicists, engineers and others. Weisman starts by imagining what would happen to our houses and homes if people would simply disappear - wiped out by a virus or whisked away by aliens. He figures it would take Nature between 100 and 1,000 years to reclaim these, depending on how much stonework was used in their construction. What would happen to Manhattan? Within a day or two, the subway would flood and within a few years, wolfs and other wild animals would soon haunt central park, cats would became feral and would continue to hunt the grossly increased bird population, and Lexington Avenue would cave in, becoming a river in the process. Weisman visits places that have been left alone for decades - the DMZ between the two Koreas, the 30 km 'Zone of Alienation' around Chernobyl, the Green Zone in Cyprus - to observe how quickly Nature reclaims these regions. He figures that there are still enough open lands with enough wild animals today that they could rapidly do away with our domesticated animals we raise for food, work or companionship (except for cats). However, this will not be true anymore a century from now, when humanity will have wrecked so much of the planet that only the suitably evolved successors of our domesticated plants and animals will have filled ecological niches occupied and swept clean by mankind. The most chilling chapters are on the legacy left by plastic and nuclear energy, lasting well into geological times. Neither existed 50 years ago; now about 500 nuclear reactors litter the planet and 100 million tons of non-bio-degradable plastics are produced every year. Among the longest lasting human artifacts are the presidential portraits on Mount Rushmore - made out of granite in a geological very stable part of the country - and the two spacecraft Voyager 1 and 2 that have entered the distant realms of the solar system where the sun's influence gives way to those of other stars. Parts of the book make for desolate reading. In my younger days, I was 'Gung Ho' about the future of mankind. Now, when I see the mess we have made of our planet, I frequently despair. This situation brings to mind Shelly's Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Given the ever increasing pace of technological development and economic expansion, this can't go on for very much longer without some large scale catastrophic, planetary-wide reorientation, forcing us to live within a dramatically reduced footprint (shades of Jared Diamond's "Collapse"). A must read.

The Magus by John Fowles (1977). A novel that follows its hero, a rather flawed but intelligent cynic with few ambitions, as he falls unwittingly under the spell of a very rich and unusual patron while teaching on a hauntingly beautiful and distant Greek island in the early 1950s. This patron manipulates the hero using a large cast of actors and actresses for unclear reasons. While the first few 300 pages are written in a very compelling and engaging manner, the increasingly unrealistic arc of the story, the ever less compelling coincidences, the passive nature of the hero, put me off the story. I was glad it was over (by page 670!).

Descartes - A Biography by Desmond Clarke Barrett (2006). An exhaustive (at close to 500 pages) but not exhausting account of the peripatetic life of René Descartes, the foremost philosopher of the modern, scientific age (1596 - 1650). The Irish scholar Desmond places Descartes's life into context, explaining the prevailing philosophical, social and historic forces within which Desartes lived and acted. Descartes comes across as a genius for his seminal contributions to physics (his principle of inertia), mathematics (Cartesian coordinate systems), physiology and metaphysics but not as a pleasant fellow, a recluse, excessively adulatory to those above him and hypersensitive to criticism from his peer. The book does highlight the obfuscation of medieval scholasticism with their endless forms (e.g. a burning piece of wood has an inherent property, a form, called ``burning"), their disdain for acquiring new knowledge, their endless re-interpretations in the light of The Philosopher (aka Aristotle). Descartes sweeps all of this away with his theory of knowledge that opens the epistemic gap between our subjective feelings and objective, external realities by explaining such sensations as heat, light or hunger in terms of the action of particles that are only distinguished by their size, shape and motion. The book well describes the sociology of European scholars and their mode of interactions. In some cases, nothing has changed from today: when there was an intellectual dispute involving Descartes, the University of Utrecht set up a committee of professors to report on it! Other things have changed, as the style of academic disputes among natural philosophers appears to be more gentile today. Witness the title of this treatise (1640): A sponge with which to clean the filth of the objections that James Primrose, Doctor of Medicine, recently published against the Theses in support of Blood Circulation that were recently disputed at Utrecht University.

Irrational man - A Study in Existential Philosophy by William Barrett (1958). A highly readable account of the crisis of Modern Man as expressed most coherently within Existentialism. His account of the decline of rationality, what he calls the dream of the "Crystal Palace" (think of the Victorian world exhibit in London in the mid 19. century), the attendant decline of the luminous Medieval dream of an orderly and comprehensible world, with God located at the apex, is masterful. He traces the roots of existentialism from Plato, Christian sources, Hebraism and Hellenism until he comes to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre. What becomes apparent is the barren pursuit of these latter thinkers, obsessed with such topics as dread, nausea, essence and being; far, far removed from the ancient Greeks desire to comprehend the world in a rational manner. Some quotes from the book: "And the final solution for Job is not in the rational resolution of the problem, any more than it ever does in life, but in a change and conversion of the whole man". Or "Plato's is the classic and indeed archetypal expression of a philosophy which we may now call essentialism, which holds that essence is prior in reality to existence. Existentialism, by contrast, is the philosophy that holds existence to be prior to essence. The history of Western philosophy has been one long conflict, sometimes explicit, but more often hidden and veiled, between essentialism and existentialism." And "Most people, of course, do not want to recognize that in certain crises they are being brought face to face with the religious center of their existence. Such crises are simply painful and must be got through as quickly and easily as one can. Why, in any case, should the discovery of the religious come to us at the moment in which we feel most sundered and alone, as Abraham did on Mount Moriah or as Kierkegaard did face to face with his own deprivation? Kierkegaard's answer to this is pretty traditional: "The fear of the Lord", says the Bible, "is the beginning of wisdom"; and for modern man, before that fear and as a threshold to it, are the fear and trembling in which we begin to be a Self." And, finally, "But the whole man is not whole without such unpleasant things as death, anxiety, guilt, fear and trembling, and despair, even though journalists and the populace have shown what they think of these things by labeling any philosophy that looks at such aspects of human life as "gloomy" or "merely a mood of despair." We are still so rooted in the Enlightenment - or uprooted in it - that these unpleasant aspects of life are like the Furies for us: hostile forces from which we would escape. And of course the easiest way to escape the Furies, we think, is to deny that they exist. It seems to me no accident at all that modern depth psychology has come into prominence in the same period as Existentialism and for the same reason: namely, that certain unpleasant things the Enlightenment had dropped into the limbo of the unconscious have begun to backfire and have forced themselves finally upon the attention of modern man.

The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem (1967). A thoughtful reflection on evolution, self-organization, and the inability to communicate with a radical different life form. This short book takes the form of a science fiction novel in which a space ship, the "Invincible," lands on a desert planet and is confronted by totally alien machine-life. After the death of a civilization of biological creatures, their surviving machine artifacts fought each other and finally, after eons of selection pressure, evolved into tiny, cellular-like, hexagonal organisms that can aggregate - if the need arises - into gigantic cloud-like colonies with highly adaptive behaviors. Written many years before the birth of Artificial Life, Lem is pessimistic about the possibility of fundamentally incompatible creatures understanding each other.

Bethlehem Road Murder by Batya Gur (2004). Her last novel involving the pensive Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon of the Jerusalem police. A very slow-moving and thoughtful and terrifying murder mystery. It starts out with this clarion call: "There comes a moment in a person's life when he fully realizes that if he does not throw himself into action, if he does not stop being afraid to gamble, and if he does not follow the urgings of his heart that have been silent for many a year - he will never do it."

From Bauhaus to our House by Tom Wolfe (1981). A wonderful essay in book-form, nay, a hilarious diatribe against the excesses of modern, i.e. Bauhaus, architecture. He describes how Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Gropius (aka the White Prince) invented their minimalist style on anti-bourgeois-principles, ending up with the soulless naked, steel, glass & concrete buildings we associated with modernism (and some forms of post-modernism). Following the rise of the Nazis, this arcane and esoteric cult of the minimal ('less is more') was then imported to America where it took hold among university architectural departments, inhibiting and delaying the emergence of a genuine American style of architecture. Chapter V "The Apostates" is the apotheosis of Wolfe's book, dealing in one fell swoop with the sterility of much of modern art in painting, music, photography, philosophy and architecture. Personally, I never understood why people - including my parents - held the Bauhaus in such high esteem since most of their houses and offices were sans life, devoid of the organic, cold. Why would anybody sane want to live in such a building if they didn't have to? (however, let it be said that two of the most comfortable chairs I own are Bauhaus designed: Breuer's Wassily Chair and the Rietveld's chair, built by my son Alexander; and three of Josef Albers color prints 'homage to the square' given to me by my father, hang in my lab). Wolfe is a gifted writer: "which is to say, the proper concern of philosophy was the arcane of the philosophical clerisy itself", "as the Eagle screamed his supremacy in the twentieth century".

Free Will - a very short introduction by Thomas Pink (2004). Highly unsatisfactory defense of libertarian freedom - a position I am very sympathetic to - by purely philosophical arguments combined with appeal to common sense (where would physics or biology be if physicists or biologists would limit themselves to understanding biological creatures, elementary particles or the cosmos in terms of our common sense notions of time, space, wave, particle and so on). There is almost complete disregard for any scientific arguments for or against the various positions on free will that philosophers have advocated (Pink concentrates almost exclusively on Hume, Hobbes, Kant, Acquinas, Calvin; the 20-th century and its discoveries seems to have passed him by). This monograph represents the worst kind of armchair philosophizing, uninformed by and seemingly indifferent to relevant knowledge gained by studying animal decision making, studies of patients with relevant brain lesions, a thorough discussion of the physics and the mathematics of causation). Pink offers a vague account in which 'libertarian freedom' can influence events without amounting to either a random choice of yet another cause.

The Wandering Jew by Stefan Heym (1981). Translated from the german novel Ahasver. A retelling of the story of Ahasverus, condemned to walk the earth until Christ returns for refusing to offer Jesus a temporary restinng place when he carried the cross to Golgotha. Similar to - but not as powerful as - The Master and Margarita, it jumps back and forth between the career of a spineless protestant elder in post-reformation Germany, and his seduction by Lucifer, and the modern day German Democratic Republic (now fortunately defunct).

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan (2006). Fast-paced and quite violent cyberspace crime noire, cyber-punk novel that takes place in San Francisco of the 25. century. It assumes that you can download your mind into any body (sleeve). If the body is killed you download a backup copy of your mind - sans the latest personal memories, of course - into the next sleeve. I should write a critique of this from the point of view of present-day neuroscience.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan (2006). Sagan's 1985 Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology. Such a superb, clear and compelling thinker and writer. The actual topic is more on natural knowledge but Sagan touches on questions of why people believe, the weird and highly idiosyncratic nature of beliefs, the question of God, what can science confidently assert (plus, of course, on Sagan's signature themes of astronomy, SETI and nuclear winter). An excellent job and a superbly edited book. I recommend it highly.

2006

Next by Michael Crichton (2006). Crichton has turned into a cynic - every character in this novel about human-animal chimera and the academic/biotechnology establishment - is a sleaze ball driven by lust, publicity, or greed. I think he's been living to long in La-La land; I can't recommend the book. Crichton does not have a feel for what drives academic scientists. He is right, though, about the deleterious effects of granting patents on genes.

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac (1958). Pleasant travel and mountaineering accounts of two young men of the 'beat' generation in San Francisco and the High Sierras.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2004). An amalgamation of the social sensibility of Jane Austen with the imagery and fantasy of JR Tolkien. Takes place in a fictitious England during the Napoleonic Wars when true "magic" is being rediscovered. Although 800+ pages long, this is truly a novel that I wished would have been twice as long. I finished it very late on Christmas Eve. My favorite novel of 2006.

Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes (1637 and 1640). Foundational texts of Western Philosophy and Rationalism.

Grown-Up Marriage by Judith Viorst (2003). Folksy but enjoyable account of marriages and the problems they encounter from a psychoanalyst.

Descartes' Secret Notebook by Amir Aczel (2005). A quick read of Descartes' life; not very penetrating. Talks a bit about his mathematics and 'Euler's law (F+V=E+2)" that Descartes discovered almost a century before Euler.

Intuition by Allegra Goodman (2005). A very realistic depiction of life as a post-doc in a high-pressure cancer biology lab. It shows how fraud could happen and makes it plausible. Although not written by a scientist, the author faithfully captures the atmosphere and typifies the various scientific personae in a sympathetic manner. Has overtones of the David Baltimore case.

Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann (2006; from the German). Very readable, semi-fictionalized account of the lives of Carl Friedrich Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt. One problem is that it's left unclear what actually happened and what is purely imaginary.

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman (2006). ok collections of short stories. Nothing like Neverwhere.

Scream Queens of the Dead Sea by Gilad Elbom (2004). Very funny but quite outrageous at times. The front-page, "Sex! Heavy Metal! Linguistics!", gives it pretty much away.

The Question of God by Armand Nicholi (2002). An excellent, interwoven biography of CS Lewis and Sigmund Freud and how they dealt with the question of God. PBS made this lecture series into a superb DVD.

Chasing Daylight by Eugene O'Kelly (2006). OK biographical account of an executive who discovers he only has a short time left to live.

Francis Crick - Discoverer of the Genetic Code by Matt Ridley (2006). Precise and very readable account of Francis' life. Probably the best for years to come.

The Primordial Emotions by Derek Denton (2005). Short and very readable account of the evolution of consciousness across a variety of species. Its center of gravity is an interoceptor driven theory of consciousness, focusing on animal and human experiments manipulating thirst, hunger, breathlessness, micturition (the need to urinate), pain, temperature control, ejaculation and so on.

Darkness Visible - A Memoir of Madness by William Styron (1990). Classical account of a writer's descent (and ascent) into living hell in the form of a severe and acute depression that almost ended in suicide. In this slim volume, the author honestly tries to describe his internal state and speculates on the various causes and effects of depression. I wasn't as impressed with it as I felt I should have been from the book's reputation. But I suspect it is like trying to explain color to a color-blind person. If you don't have a morbid, negative personality you have grave difficulties understanding this horrible condition.

The Search: How Google ad Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Batelle (2005). Humdrum, not very analytical, journalistic account of Google.

Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen (2006). Poetry by the Canadian singer while living in a Zen Monastery on Mt. Baldy, 20 miles from here.

The Wine of Wisdom by Mehdi Aminrazavi (2005). Insightful book on the life, poetry and philosophy of Omar Khayyam and his enormously influential Ruba'iyatt with his quatrains. Discusses his variable reception in the West. I can recommend it highly.

Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies by Nancey Murphy (2006). A readable monograph on a theological account of the mind-body problem on the background of physicalism. Makes the interesting historical point that the belief in dualism was not necessarily co-extensive with the belief in resurrection and an eternal afterlife.

2005

Pompeii by Robert Harris (2004). Another great novel by the British historian; he is particularly good and making you feel what it was like to be a Roman, to think roman thoughts.

Animal Liberation by Peter Singer (1975; but I read the updated 2002 edition). The book by the Australian philosopher that gave the modern animal rights movement its intellectual underpinnings. Compelling.

Rethinking Life and Death by Peter Singer (1994). A must-read book on traditional ethics, to what extent they don't meet our modern needs and how to construct an ethics for the 21. century.

State of Fear by Michael Crichton (2004). Takes a strong anti-global warming perspective by selective (but correct) citations of the literature. He loses much of my respect. The novel has the usual Crichtonian arc.

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman (2005). The usual Gaiman fare, well presented.

Monsieur Monde Vanishes by Georges Simenon (1952). My first Simenon novel (a stunning half a billion copies of his books have been sold). Stark existentialist prose about a well-off Parisian who suddenly one afternoon leaves his wife, family, house and business for no compelling reason, on a whim. A strangely compelling psychological drama.

iCon - Steve Jobs - The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business by Jeffrey Young & William Simon (2005). Readable biography.

The runner by Richard Watson. A sparse, existentialist novel of an obsessive-compulsive runner and his - on the whole - sad life and lack of any meaningful connections.

Happiness - The Science Behind Your Smile by Daniel Nettle (2005). Popular account of the psychology of happiness. The principal take-home message is the disparity what peope want and what they like.

Forward the Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1993). Acceptable, fourth volume. I then re-read the first volume of the original trilogy Foundation. Although I loved it when I first came upon it as a teenager, I found the characters stilted and one-dimensional. I still love the series for the vast canvas in space and time that it paints upon. Curiously, in Asimov's Galactic Empire, no significant advances in biotechnology have been made from today. No Internet either. Asimov's creativity is focused onto progress in physics and in the material sciences.

Oaxaca Journal by Oliver Sacks (2005). Delightful travel journal of Sacks as he visits Mexico with some botanical friends looking for ferns (yeah, ferns like in plants). I loved it.

Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond (2005). I like Diamond and his universal, catholic view of the sciences and the history. This book didn't disappoint, in particular his superb discussion of the demise of the Viking settlements in Greenland and the Eastern Island.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon (2005). A very perceptive novelistic account, in the form of a mystery story, of a teenage boy with Autism/Asperger. The extent to which his thought-patterns resemble that of a scientist (i.e. myself) is disconcerting.

The Shining Company by Rosemary Sutcliff (1990). Pleasant historical adolescent novel set in Arthurian England by the author of the impressive Sword at Sunset.

Fantastic Voyage by Ray Kurzweil & Terry Grossman (2004). Intriguing and well-written book on improving your health and (possibly) extending your lifespan. Goes into great detail, with plenty of footnotes to dig into, discussing the current literature on health, inflammation, nutrition, vitamin supplements etc. What makes the book wacky is the - apparently sincere - belief of the authors that true immortality, meaning to love without death, is just around the corner. Kurzweil himself pops on the order of 250 (this is not a typo) pills a day. Of course, they never discuss in the book the vast potential for negative synergistic effects all of these drugs and supplements.

2004

Angels & Demons by Dan Brown (2000). Written before the Da Vinci Code and much more believable. At the heart this novel is about the conflict between faith and science in modernity. The author writes about this theme in such passionate terms that I suspect he himself is thorn by these questions, as I am.

The Philosopher's Diet: How to Lose Weight & Change the World by Richard Watson. A thin but eminently readable and no-nonsense book on how to live a full-filling and healthy life - including plenty of advice on how to eat - by a philosopher (a specialist in Descartes). What other dietary book has such chapter titles as Fat, Food, Roughage, Running, Sex, How to Live and How to Die. This last chapter is a jewel. I frequently consult this book. Highly recommended.

Last modified on March 8. 2008 by Christof Koch