Bookslist

@jacobcole list public jacobcole-net systematicawesome Updated 2026-02-12

Bookslist

systematicawesome.jacobcole.net > bookslist.jacobcole.net

Table of Contents
Inbox (to process)
Contemplative topics
“Complete” worldview introductions
Windows into the lives of saintly characters
Saintly Characters
Excellent Books
Unread, but highly recommended:
Recommended book list for TedX Oxford (w/ descriptions)
Short Stories
Philosophically Thought Provoking in a Meditative Awakening Way

See Also: philosophy.jacobcole.net • Jacob’s Raw Books List • lifechangingthings.jacobcole.net •/quoteslist.jacobcole.net • http://thoughtfulweb.jacobcole.net/

Related:Will Zeng’s “Public Library” Google Doc

Notable Tags:
Tags:, artful, on, particularly, artfully, written, books

Inbox (to file):
Great Thinkers (esp. Heidegger section). ~by The School of Life  (Author), Stuart Patience (Illustrator), Alain de Botton;  See also: http://heidegger.jacobcole.net/

Inbox (to process)

Drive by Daniel Pink

Jacob’s Bookshelf

Casual / Fiction:
Wise Man’s Fear
Wheel of Time, The Dragon Reborn
Neuromancer #beautiful
Too Like the Lightning
Casual / Nonfiction:
                Stealing Fire
                Autobiography of a Yogi

Dense / Fiction:
Middlemarch
        Dense / Nonfiction:
Religiousness in Yoga

Contemplative topics

“Complete” worldview introductions

Religiousness in Yoga: Lectures on Theory and Practice ~T. K. V. Desikachar (first 6 pages http://yoga.jacobcole.net/)

The Complete book of chinese health and healing ~Daniel Reid
Shambhala : The Sacred Path of the Warrior

Windows into the lives of saintly characters

Saintly Characters

Cheng Man Ch'ing
        There Are No Secrets: Professor Cheng Man Ch'ing and His Tai Chi Chuan

The Third Wave: A Volunteer Story  by Alison Thompson

Fred Rogers
        #movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

See also:
Meditation.connectordocs.com

Excellent Books

  • The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (SO GOOD THE BEST BOOKS I'VE EVER READ...or close to. Really. They're amazing.) #Angela
  • A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce #Jacob
  • The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay #Jacob
  • Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky #Jacob
  • Ender’s Game/Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card #Jacob
  • Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan #Jacob
  • Dune by Frank Herbert #Jacob
  • Anthem by Ayn Rand <--I read the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged; liked the Fountainhead better #Angela <-We The Living is also really good #Eric
  • Name of the Wind? #Jacob [Also, The Wise Man’s Fear, book no.2] #artful
  • The Lady’s Not for Burning by Christopher Fry #Angela, a play, not a novel
  • The Things They Carried
  • Neuromancer #Eric #artful
  • "Stress Free for Good"/"Forgive for Good" by Freddy Luskin #Ilya
  • Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson
  • Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
  • Anathem - Neal Stephenson #Holden
  • Lolita by Vladmirir Nabokov #Angela (The author was autistic! How is that reflected in the writing??) <--Nabokov was a synesthete, but I don’t think he was like austitic/mentally disabled. The book’s descriptions are amazing.
  • Pale Fire by Nabokov
  • Fifty Shades of Gray - E. L. James #erotic
  • Middlemarch #Victoria
  • The Death of the Heart--Elizabeth Bowden
  • *Portrait of Dorian Gray #Eric
  • Naked Lunch, Burroughs #linfinity
  • House of Leaves, Danielewski #linfinity
  • Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon  #linfinity
  • V, Pynchon #linfinity
  • Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut #linfinity
  • Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut #linfinity
  • Stories of your life - Ted Chiang #Holden
  • Inheritance trilogy, Dreamblood series - N. K. Jemisin #Holden
  • *Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami #Holden
  • No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai #Trinity
  • Grit - Angela Duckworth #jasonx
  • The Alchemist #Howon
  • The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan - Evolution of the mind and consciousness
  • Stoner by John Williams #Julia
  • East of Eden by Steinbeck #Julia
  • We All Looked Up by Tommy Wallach #Trinity
  • We the Animals by Justin Torres #Trinity

General ref:

  • Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Hofstadter
  • The Elegant Universe - Greene
  • Programming the Universe - Lloyd
  • Decoding the Universe ­- Seife
  • The Code Book - Singh
  • Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea - Seife
  • Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman - Feynman
  • Guns, Germs, and Steel - Diamond
  • Pillars of the Earth - Follett
  • Essays - Emerson
  • The Notebooks of Lazarus Long - Heinlein
  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court - Twain
  • The Invisible Man - Wells
  • The Subtle Knife - Pullman
  • The Amber Spyglass - Pullman
  • The Wheel of Time: The Dragon Reborn - Jordan
  • The Earthsea Cycle: A Wizard of Earthsea - LeGuin
  • The Earthsea Cycle: The Farthest Shore - LeGuin
  • Faerie Wars - Brennan
  • The Silmarillion - Tolkien
  • PHP 5 Advanced: Visual QuickPro Guide - Ullman

  • Introduction to Programmable Logic – Parnell (FPGA Microchip Design)

  • Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace #Angela

  • The Techno Human Condition #Eric Gu
  • Physics of the Future #Eric
  • Biology of Freedom #Eric
  • Reality is Broken #Eric
  • Making and Breaking of the Grid #Eric
  • Thinking with Type #Eric
  • Made to Stick #Ben Lerner
  • Moonwalking with Einstein #Yan (#Eric, try reading it right after reading “Power of Habit”) ^ ^ #Jacob THIS IS PHENOMENAL
  • Power of Habit #Eric (simplified explanations from neuroscience POV and plenty of case studies, worth a weekend read)
  • 5 C’s of Cinematography #Eric (the best beginner’s guide on the subject I think)
  • Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky #Jacob
  • Moral Calculations #Holden
  • The Information, James Gleick #Holden
  • Quantum computing since Democritus, Scott Aaronson #Holden

Bathroom reads: (Good new category yes? #Eric)

  • Predictably Irrational #Eric
  • What I wish I knew When I was 20 #Eric
  • The World is Flat #Eric
  • After the Quake #Eric

Tags:, Jacob
Moonwalking with Einstein ~Joshua Foer -- an eloquent sequence of fresh insights on how memory is a profound root of cognition, and the story of its author, former US memory champion Joshua Foerr. This is where my verbiage of "becoming aware of the tension systems" in objects in the world comes from: Foerr describes how the difference between a novice at chess and a master's thinking can be found in their eye movement patterns and language – a novice sees the board as a disparate collection of pieces, whereas the master sees the pieces is having an elaborate network of tensions between them.

The Art of Learning~Josh Waitzkin -- Burnt-out chess prodigy becomes Tai chi master and world champion, in the process discovering how to channel the forces in his mind, body, and the world around him that cause him to act. (I contend that tai chi is the art of becoming aware of the tension systems in one's mind, body, and the world around you!)

Religiousness in Yoga: Lectures on Theory and Practice~T. K. V. Desikachar -- extremely lucid, interactive explanation of how to apply yoga philosophy in practice that is urgently relevant to modern life. Written by Desikachar, who is the son of the father of modern yoga, and who was an engineer for before becoming interested in yoga himself. This book has the tools to help us overcome the conditioning-induced misperception that, just because something felt good in the past (e.g. eating a slice of chocolate cake), that it will feel good again if we do it again in the present (the result of which might be overeating chocolate cake). This sort of falsely held belief, called avidya in Sanskrit, I see to be at the core of much unhappiness and problems in the world.
(It's worth checking out chapters 1 to 3 on Google books (linked) :-) Note that this book is pretty rare, and I would like it to be less so.)

Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology ~Helen Vendler -- a truly great anthology with commentary that reawakened my senses to the joy of eloquence. I took a class with its author, Helen Vendler, and I've been reciting poems nonstop ever since.

The Power of Myth ~Joseph Campbell -- this classic is a great inspiration for me as I aspire to further the enterprise of "wisdom management"

Secondly, I feel like there's just as much or more to be learned from the example of characters in stories, and I would love to recommend the following:
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality ~Eliezer Yudkowsky --  I would describe it as "Artemis Fowl in Harry's body" --  Harry is recast as a skeptic genius whose hilarious attempts at applying the logical extensions of magic he learns re-enchants the enterprise of science for me. Doubly wonderfully, in the process, Yudkowsky also re-enchants magic as a plot element for me -- he demonstrates its power to reveal the nature of the real world as something that can be "spoken to" and changed with our will.
Incidentally, its author is famous AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, head of the Singularity Institute/MIRI and also the founder of lesswrong.com, an online community dedicated to furthering rational thought.
It's free online at hpmor.com . The first 17 chapters are also available in a printable book you can give out to people. We can probably get a box of 50 of these to give out for free, though it would be great to donate money to their organization.

The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss , and its sequel Wise Man's Fear -- a recent fantasy novel with music in its words that has characters so vibrant you want to get up and emulate them. Those interested in education would learn a great deal from that behavior of the main character. (Incidentally, the author, who spoke here at the worldbuilders society last term, spent nine years as an undergraduate)

Short Stories

The Egg ~Andy Weir
Stories of Your Life and Others ~Ted Chiang
        Specifically stories:
Understand
Story of Your Life

The yellow wallpaper ~Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman ~Harlan Ellison
Dancing on the Radio ~Paul Theroux

Philosophically Thought Provoking in a Meditative Awakening Way

Steps to an ecology of mind - Bateson and mead

the structure of scientific revolutions ~kuhn

The bicameral mind

Essays by Emerson

Bradford keany

No bad drugs by andrew weill

Cheng man Ching
There are no secrets

Moonwalking w Einstein

Autobiography of a Yogi
The art of mindful living #Book

Zen mind beginners mind

Augmenting Human Cognition ~Doug Engelbart

what is life ~Schrodinger  Atman Brahman concept

Essays by Emerson

I haven’t read it, but one of Rafael and Lucas favorite books is good and real by Garry Drescher