Books

Books to Buy

Used:

• The Nightmare of Reason: A Biography of Franz Kafka- Pawel i know that you know that I know - George Butte Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein and Frankenstein : Reinventing the Universe by John Brockman
• Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
• What is the Name of this Book: Raymond Smullyan
• Thought Contagion: How Ideas Act Like Viruses - Aaron Lynch
• Language, Thought, and other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism - Ruth Garrett Millikan

Paperbacks:

• The Illuminated Man: The Life, Death, and Worlds of JGB (apr 27)
• the center cannot hold: my journey through madness - Elyn Saks
• no one cares about crazy people - Ron Powers Born on a Blue Day - Daniel Tammet
• Pellis - The Playful Brain
• Strauss - The Three Waves of Modernity
• Peter Handke - Insulting the Audience
• Lorrie Moore - Self Help
• La Modification - Michel Butor
• Un Homme qui dort - Georges Perec
• How Like a God - Rex Stout

• Time and Narrative - Paul Ricoeur
• Flight of Icarus - Raymond Queneau
• Nausea - Sartre
• Seven, Zed, etc by Joanna Kavenna. See blog.
• Building a second brain
• how to solve it
• Adam and Eve in Paradise - eca de queiros
• The Bounds of Possibility - Philosophy book about categories
• Nicola Barker - Tony Interrupter Happy, etc
• On Growth and Form - D'Arcy Thompson
• Alpha and Omega - Jane Ellen Harrison
• the Whole is Simpler than its Parts - Willard Gibbs
• Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel - Edwin Frank
• Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery - Theodore Schwartz

Hardbacks:

• Mark Solms - The Only Cure - Freud and Neuroscience

• The Beginning Comes After the End - Rebecca Solnit
• Being and Time Annotated or paraphrased ?
• Capitalism: A Global History-Sven Beckert
• Violent Saviors: How the West Conquered the Rest - William Easterly
• The master of contradictions: Thomas Mann and the making of the Magic Mountain
• The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: A Planetary Experiment
• the moebius book - Catherine Lacey
• Chance and Necessity - Jacques Monod
• L'homme microscopique - Pierre Auger
• Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Maths Behind Modern AI (out in paperback Jan 30 2025)
• A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity (awaiting paperback)
• The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium
• Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization
• Consolations - David Whyte

Books to Read

• Reading to Learn - William Zinger
• Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut

Currently Reading

• Atomic Habits - James Clear
• Die Montez-Juwelen - Sabine Vôhringer
• The Book: A Cover-to-Covet Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time - Keith Houston
• Understanding Media - Marshall McLuhan (re-read)
• The Practice of Not Thinking: A Guide to Mindful Living - Ryunosuke Koike
• Congo: Une Histoire

Books Read

2026 (week 30)

• 32. The Art of Logic: How to Make Sense in a World that Doesn't - Eugenia Cheng
• 31. Why Read - Will Self
• 30. The Collected Schizophrenias - Esmé Weijun Wang
• 29. L’Intranquille Monsieur Pessoa (BD) - Nicolas Barral
• 28. Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain - Lisa Feldmann Barrrett.
• 27: Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum - Daniel Tammet
• 26: Ambigrammia: Between Creation and Discovery - Douglas Hofstadter
• 25. Once Upon a Prime:The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature - Sarah B. Hart
• 24. Short Stories in German for Beginners - Olly Richards (reread - with Ricky)
• 23. Books v. Cigarettes - George Orwell
• 22. Der Nasse Fische - Volker Kutscher (in German!)
• 21. We Are Our Brains: From the Womb to Alzheimer's - Dick Swaab
• 20. Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife - Francesca Wade
• 19. How the World Made the West - Josephine Quinn
• 18. Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning - Sigmund Freud
• 17. This is Your Mind on Plants: Opium - Caffeine - Mescaline - Michael Pollen
• 16. Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life - Agnes Callard

• 15. Consciousness: How Our Brains Turn Matter Into Meaning - John Parrington
• 14. The Happiness of Dogs: Why the Unexamined Life is Most Worth Living - Mark Rowlands
• 13. The Hidden Spring - Mark Solms
• 12. The Interpretation of Dreams - Sigmund Freud
• 11. A Certain Lucas - Julio Cortazar
• 10. The Intentional Stance - Daniel Dennett
• 9. La Conquête de Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart 4) - Zola
• 8. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine

• 7. On the Calculation of Volume: 3 - Solvej Balle
• 6. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction - Brian Richardson
• 5. The Seven Dials Mystery - Agatha Christie
• 4. Le Ventre de Paris (Les Rougon-Macquart 3) - Zola
• 3. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (2nd Edition) - H. Porter Abbott
• 2. Autocracy Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World - Anne Applebaum
• 1. The Secret Life of the Periodic Table - Dr Ben Still

2025

• 55. The White Priory Murders - Carter Dickson (re-read)
• 54. How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology - Philip Ball
• 53. Who Killed Father Christmas? and Other Seasonal Mysteries - Martin Edwards
• 52. Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction - Peter Atkins
• 51. The Scheme of Things - Allen Wheelis
• 50. La Fortune des Rougon (Les Rougon-Macquart 1) - Zola
• 49. Cause for Alarm - Eric Ambler
• 48. The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann - Ananyo Bhattacharya
• 47. Everything is Predictable: How Bayes' Remarkable Theorem Explains the World - Tom Chivers
• 46. The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are - Alan Watts
• 45. La Curée (Les Rougon-Macquart 2) - Zola
• 44. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer - Siddhartha Mukherjee
• 43. La Bête Humaine (Les Rougon-Macquart 17) - Zola (re-read)
• 42. The Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky
• 41. Le Père Goriot - Honore Balzac
• 40. Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon (re-read)
• 39. Le Colonel Chabert - Balzac
• 38. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett - James Knowlson (re-read)
• 37. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative - Peter Brooks (re-read)

• 36. Steps to an Ecology of Mind - Gregory Bateson (re-read)
• 35. Le Bilan de L'intelligence - Paul Valéry
• 34. Zero - Charles Seife
• 33. Alan Turing: The Enigma - Andrew Hodges
• 32. How to Do Things with Words - J L Austin
• 31. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society - Norbert Wiener
• 30. The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind - Nick Chater
• 29. Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI - John Brockman
• 28. A Little History of Philosophy - Nigel Warburton
• 27. All Fours - Miranda July
• 26. Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern - Douglas R Hofstadter
• 25. The French Lieutenant’s Woman - John Fowles
• 24. Short Stories in German for Beginners - Olly Richards
• 23. On the Calculation of Volume: 2 - Solvej Balle
• 22. Deep Simplicity: Chaos, Complexity, and the Emergence of Life - John Gribbin
• 21. Das Ludwig Thoma Komplott- Sabine Vöhringer
• 20. Maus - Art Spiegelman
• 19. On the Calculation of Volume: 1 - Solvej Balle
• 18. The Concept of Mind - Gilbert Ryle
• 17. Cognitive Neuroscience: A Very Short Introduction - Richard Passingham
• 16. The Experience Machine - Andy Clark
• 15. Why We Remember: Revealing the Hidden Power of Memory - Dr Charan Ranganath
• 14. From Bacteria to Bach and Back - Daniel Dennett (re-read)
• 13. The Village of Eight Graves - Seishi Yokomizo
• 12. Science: A History - Richard Crockett
• 11. Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World - John Gribbin
• 10.The Inugami Curse - Seishi Yokomizo
• 9. The Rise and Reign of the Mammals
• 8. Four Ways of Thinking - David Sumpter
• 7. I've Been Thinking - Daniel Dennett
• 6. Serendipities: Language and Lunacy - Umberto Eco
• 5. I Am Dynamite: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche - Sue Prideaux
• 4. A Brief History of Intelligence - Max S. Bennett
• 3. Foucault’s Pendulum - Umberto Eco (re-read)
• 2. Kant and the Platypus - Umberto Eco
• 1. Le cerveau m’a beaucoup déçu. L’esprit, non - Antoine Sénanque

2024

• The Plot - Will Eisner
• The Prague Cemetery - Umberto Eco
• The Nonjin Murders - Seishi Yokomizo
• When We Cease to Understand the World - Labatut
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig (reread)
• The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities - Fauconnier and Turner
• The Singularity is Nearer - Ray Kurzweil
• Physics and Philosophy - Werner Heisenberg
• Le Ton Beau de…
• The Origins of Creativity - Edward O Wilson
• Psychonauts -
• The MANIAC - Benjamin Labatut
• In Search of Memory - Eric R. Kandel
• Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction - Hobson
• Les Effinger - Gabriele Target
• Triad - Tom Keve
• Nietzsche - Stefan Zweig
• The Weirdest People in the World - Joseph Henrich
• How Language Works - David Crystal
• The Invention of Nature - Andrea Wolf
• The Song of the Cell - Siddhartha Mukherjee
• Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter
• From Bacteria to Bach and Back - Daniel Dennett

Challenging Books (per ChatGPT)

That’s a great (and slippery) question, because “challenging” can mean different things: difficulty of language, density of allusion, fractured narrative structure, philosophical depth, or even sheer length. Here’s a map of novels often considered among the most challenging, grouped by what makes them hard:

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1. Language & Style Difficulties

• James Joyce – Finnegans Wake (1939) Probably the hardest novel in English: dream-logic, multilingual puns, and invented words.
• William Gaddis – The Recognitions (1955) and JR (1975) Huge cast, little exposition, dialogue-driven (often without quotation marks).
• Samuel Beckett – The Unnamable (1953) Interior monologue collapsing into language itself; syntax dissolves.

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2. Length & Scope

• Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time (1913–27) ~4,000 pages, long sentences, obsessive detail, profound reflections on memory.
• David Foster Wallace – Infinite Jest (1996) ~1,000 pages + 100 pages of endnotes; encyclopedic, fragmented plotlines.
• Norman Mailer – Harlot’s Ghost (1991) or Ancient Evenings (1983) Dense, sprawling, philosophically ambitious.

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3. Experimental Structure

• Thomas Pynchon – Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) Fragmented narrative, technical language, paranoia, hundreds of characters.
• Clarice Lispector – The Passion According to G.H. (1964) A single, intense interior monologue; metaphysical and unsettling.
• Julio Cortázar – Hopscotch (1963) Offers multiple reading orders; disruptive structure.

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4. Philosophical / Esoteric Depth

• Hermann Broch – The Sleepwalkers (1931–32) Mixes fiction with philosophy and essay.
• Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities (1930–43) Massive unfinished modernist work, blending narrative with philosophical treatises.
• Thomas Mann – Joseph and His Brothers (1933–43) Retells biblical myth with immense erudition and depth.

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5. Dense Intertextuality

• James Joyce – Ulysses (1922) Homeric parallels, stylistic experiments, deep allusion to Irish politics and myth.
• Roberto Bolaño – 2666 (2004) Five interlinked novels, ranging from literary criticism to detective fiction to Holocaust history.
• José Lezama Lima – Paradiso (1966) Baroque Cuban prose, mythic density.

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6. Postmodern Labyrinths

• Mark Z. Danielewski – House of Leaves (2000) Multiple narrators, typographical experimentation, layered commentary.
• Viktor Pelevin – The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (2004) (or Generation “P”) Satirical, reality-bending narratives.

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A few contenders often called “the hardest of the hard”:

• Finnegans Wake (Joyce)
• The Recognitions (Gaddis)
• The Man Without Qualities (Musil)
• Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon)
• In Search of Lost Time (Proust)