Reading List Part 1. Mind and Soul.
Why read books?
Reading is about expanding your perspective, developing empathy, learning lessons from the failures of others, finding inspiration, developing skills, enjoying yourself, and getting more introspective. Yes, "audiobooks are real books."
Posting a reading list invokes emotion in people.
I noticed that today when Lex Friedman posted his. People are mad as guys love to argue over who reads better books, even tho most aren’t reading much and it’s an act.
Anyway, here’s an introduction to my recommended reading list. I’ll offer the rationale for reading some of them. Take a look around. If you’re a “real reader,” you’ll find some new directions hopefully. I also have multiple additional parts on the way. Sign up here to get those.
(Disclosure: Some of these may be affiliate links, assume this is all advertising. I tried cleaning up the links, but anyway, I don’t care where you buy your books from, or if you get them from the library. Assume this is true, “As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.”)
Theory of Mind / Consciousness.
How do you know other minds are real? Not kidding. How do you know I have a mind? You have to guess based on how I behave. If my behavior is in line with your mental map of reality, then I have a mind. If I deviate, then I have “lost" my mind.” Anyway, this is a great subject to get into.
The Minds I, published in 1981, holds up well.
It’s more welcoming than Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is the book everyone smart pretends to have read. (Few have.) Yes you should plug away at Gödel, Escher, Bach. Which is a huge collection of essays and reflections. That’s how you can spot the fakers. They go, “Oh I loved the book?!” Yeah? Which essay was your favorite? Imagine people saying they read Nietzsche but don’t know much of his work was aphoristic. Same energy.
Plus the real fan boys abbreviate it GEB. That’s how you know how read it. It’s GEB babe. There’s math stuff in it as well. No one mentions that.
Even now I’m mind-effed by Gödel, Escher, Bach. Not sure that I understand it. When I read GEB, I feel like I am getting it. Then I put it down and go WTF.
People smarter than me (yes they do exist) ensure me that this is a good sign.
You are a strange loop.
If You Grew up Gifted…
Positive Disintegration by Kazimierz Dabrowski will explain a lot of what you went through if you had an objectively “gifted” IQ. Or if your kids have one.
Dabrowski’s theory is that much of what people with gifted personalities went through, which felt traumatic and isolating at the time, was a totally normal process of dis and reintegration. Not many people cared or understood because society largely focuses on those they deem to have greater challenges.
You can see these values reflected in how much money is spent on special education programs vs. gifted programs. In many areas, gifted programs are completely being defunded, even though this a catastrophic social error.
Gifted children do face “special” challenges. Positive Disintegration will have you go “oh wow now it makes since,” if that applied to you. IYKYK.
Virtue. Morality. The Good Life.
Ryan Holiday made a fortune doing Cliffs Notes for Meditations, which is an easy book to get through, but that shows you where modern IQ is at today. I wonder who will do the same with Aristotle, who can at times be a challenging writer only due to his deliberative style. You need to have an attention span to get through The Nicomachean Ethics.
The Nicomachean Ethics, like other early Greco-Roman philosophical works, focused on the question: What is the good life? This was the pre-Christian era. You couldn’t go, “Jesus Christ is your savior, read the Bible, that’s that.”
You had to use reason and judgement to reason, from scratch, what the well-lived life looks like.
The Nicomachean Ethics is the greatest secular philosophical book on how to live a good life. No, I’m not going to give you the notes. Read the book.
Are we living the morality of slaves?
The Viking Portable Nietzsche contains highlights of Friedrich Nietzsche best works.
Nietzsche is another guy people pretend to have read. You can tell who has and hasn’t if you’ve done the work, because what is Nietzsche's philosophy? He has a metaphysics, but is most known for his work in ethics, especially on master-slave morality.
Be careful tho. Nietzsche's writing is powerful and engrossing. You’ll get sucked in. There is some dark magic at work. I hesitate to recommend it, lest people be led astray. On the other hand, people do need to have a wider understanding of the world, and Nietzsche's critique of Christian morality (so-called) is one you need to confront.
God, Metaphysics, and the Soul After Death.
Is God real? If so which God? Do we face a final judgment? What happens to the soul after death? (Standard rules apply: Don’t use the comments as an evangelical soap box. If you’ve read these books, then your insights into them are welcome. Generalized “opinions” are not.)
The spirit world is real. I’ve been there myself. Graham Hancock in Visionary: The Mysterious Origins of Human Consciousness, has the best summary of what many of us have seen during such journeys. This is an incredible book. Read it.
If Christianity is true, then Orthodox Christianity is the most accurate representation of the religion.
To go deeper into these issues, as well as to see the Christian perspective of ayahuasca, The Soul After Death by Fr Seraphim Rose is required reading.
Is ayahuasca demonic? Fr Rose argues, Yes.
We need to see Graham Hancock on Lord of Spirits podcast, or the Lord of Spirits podcasts on Joe Rogan.
When Fiction is Non-Fiction.
People make a mistake when they separate fiction from non-fiction. Novels contain an author’s worldview. The best way to appreciate “fiction” is to go into it believing that the author understands that this would be the state of the world and humanity, but for a few historical changes in circumstances.
Maybe I’ve revealing myself as a cliche, but of course Blood Meridian makes any Cerno reading list.
Judge Holden On War.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is fun to read and also predicted much of the tech world we live in. Or maybe his ideass inspired the programmers.
To get a sense for what I mean by “read fiction as if it’s non-fiction,” consider these quotations from Snow Crash:
“Ideology is a virus.”
“All people have religions. It’s like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we’ll latch onto anything that’ll fill that niche for us.”
“We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.”
Characters express those views. What the heck is the difference then if some guy wrote them up into a tidy little theory of meme books under his own name. Same-same.
Along those same lines, That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis will give you significant insight into the forces at work today.
Reading List Part 2 Coming Soon.
I have a lot more on the way.
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For years the debate in my head was Orwell v Huxley, who got it most right? Then I read Lewis’s ransom trilogy this year and it was almost too accurate. Frighteningly so. What’s worse, that our world has gone crazy, or that its craziness is such a predictable end product of its starting assumptions decades ago that a logical observer saw it all coming so precisely? And how do you think someone like Lewis felt when his skeptical colleagues undoubtedly told him to calm down and stop exaggerating?
The other book that hit me like That Hideous Strength this past year was Demons, or The Possessed, whatever it’s called, by Dostoevsky. Not a coincidence that both he and Lewis take the demonic very very seriously.
Feel free to disagree and mock me, but I find free online courses/lectures about books you read very helpful. Hillsdale has one on Aristotle, I’m sure others do too, and there’s tons of top notch free or near free college level lectures on Lewis out there.
Very intruiging list of books, especially as you describe them. I'm looking forward to reading some of these and to exercising my brain! Thank you for sharing!
Also, completely agree re reading fiction as non-fiction. 25 years ago my Phil 101 professor (Dr. Taiwo - I'll never forget him. . . he was a Lutheran from Nigeria) used fiction to teach the class how to think philosophically. He had us sort through the different works to figure out the author's worldview, or at least the worldview purported by the stories and their characters. After his class I was hooked, and ended-up majoring in Philosophy (and English Lit.). His approach made Philosophy accessible. He taught us how to think philosophically about even the most mundane elements of daily life. If I have any critical thinking skills it's because he helped wake them up and develop them.
Also, 100% agree re Lewis' That Hideous Strength - it's downright prophetic. I think Lewis, because he was a Christian (and because of the way in which he came to be a Christian), had an astonishingly accurate sense of human character, particularly as it played-out in higher ed.