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Rating: (6) / Nonfiction
I enjoyed reading this collection of meditations on Stoic philosophy. It is a fairly quick read; I read each of the twelve books before sleeping over the course of two weeks. Toward the end of the collection things get a bit topically repetetive (e.g. acting according to the nature of man is reflected upon over and over), but each repetition looks at the topic in a slightly different light. A number of passages I found quite inspiring, and scratched them down in my notebook to ponder further.
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.
Rating: (10) / Fiction
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.
Rating: (10) / Fiction
The finest of Blake's Illuminated works.
Former teacher and now author-activist.
Rating: (9) / Nonfiction
An interesting underground history of the American education system. Available online for free.
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).
Rating: (3) / Fiction
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").
Rating: (9) / Fiction
Rating: (7) / Fiction
An interesting little book of aphorisms.
Rating: (8) / Fiction
Rating: (7) / Nonfiction
A partially finished extended summary
Nonfiction
America is thus as a nation rapidly drifting towards a state of things in which no man of science or letters will be accounted respectable unless some kind of badge or diploma is stamped upon him, and in which bare personality will be a mark of outcast estate. It seems to me high time to rouse ourselves to consciousness, and to cast a critical eye upon this decidedly grotesque tendency. Other nations suffer terribly from the Mandarin disease. Are we doomed to suffer like the rest?
The novelist brother of William James; I've not read many (read: one) of his books, but what I did was decent.
Rating: (7) / Fiction
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.
Rating: (10) / Nonfiction
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.
Kierkegaard was a master of style and philosophy; his writing is interesting even if one finds the theistic extentialism espoused disagreeable.
Rating: (10) / Nonfiction
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.
Rating: (10) / Nonfiction
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.
Rating: (7) / Fiction
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.
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.
Rating: (8) / Nonfiction
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.
Rating: (9) / Nonfiction
On the Geneaology of Morals is a wonderful book of three polemical essays on the origin of moral/ethic valuations, and the blindness of modern philosphers whose very thinking is tainted by these valuations unknowingly.
Rating: (7) / Nonfiction
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.
Rating: (7) / Fiction
And it's his illusions about what constitutes the real world which are inhibiting him... His reality, his reason, his society ...these are what must be destroyed
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.
Rating: (9) / Fiction
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.
Rating: (8) / Fiction
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.