Books

Books to Buy

Used:

• 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
• The Scheme of Things (The Way We Are, and others) - Allen Wheelis
• Language, Thought, and other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism - Ruth Garrett Millikan

Paperbacks:

• 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
• Open Socrates - Agnes Callard
• Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel - Edwin Frank
• Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery - Theodore Schwartz

Hardbacks:

• 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
• Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

• Chance and Necessity - Jacques Monod
• L'homme microscopique - Pierre Auger
• The Hidden Spring - mark solms

• 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
• How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology - Phillip Ball

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
• How the World Made the West - Josephine Quinn

Books Read

2026 (week 2)

• 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