(Anti)Library

As far back as my memory reaches as far back I see books. I remember being (more than once) an irritation to others by taking a book about fusion reactors to the beach in the spring when my family visited the eastern sea. Or sitting in my room at home and reading about the Peloponnesian War when other kids watched TV.

Books always accompany me, they enrich my life, and so I thought: Why not share some of their names so other people might enjoy them too? That is what this page is all about. It is a collection of titles in no particular order but with some rough classifications.

But more than that this page also holds a list of books I still want to read. In some sense my digital antilibrary.

Essentials

They are essential to me. They changed how I see the world and how I operate as a human being.

• A Treatise of Human Nature; David Hume, 1739
• Meditations; Marcus Aurelius, 161-180
• The Wealth of Nations; Adam Smith, 1776
• Crime and Punishment; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1866
• War and Peace; Leo Tolstoy, 1865
• Debt - The first 5000 years; David Graeber, 2011
• Bible
• How to read a book; Mortimer J. Adler, 1972

Well Rounded

Some I like. With some, I disagree. Some are a slug to read. But not having read them would have been a net negative.

• Trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen (Man’s search for meaning); Viktor Frankl, 1946
• Siddharta; Hermann Hesse, 1922
• Brave new World; Aldous Huxley, 1931
• The Stranger; Albert Camus, 1942
• Republic; Plato, 375 BCE
• The Count of Monte Cristo; Alexandre Dumas, 1844
• The Brothers Karamazov; Fyodor Dostroyevsky, 1879
• The Idiot, Fyodor Dostroyevsky, 1868
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Mark Twain, 1884
• 1984; George Orwell, 1949
• Iliad; Homer, 8th century BC
• The Odyssey; Homer, 8th century BCE
• Mrs. Dalloway; Virgina Woolf, 1925
• Animal Farm; George Orwell, 1945
• Solaris; Stanislaw Lem, 1961
• The old man and the sea; Enerst Hemingway, 1952
• The Black Swan; Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2007
• Consolations; David Whyte, 2014
• Histories; Herodotus, 340 BCE
• Romeo and Juliet; William Shakespear, 1597
• Hamlet; William Sharespear, 1599
• Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis); Franz Kafka, 1912
• In der Strafkolonie (In the Penal Colony); Franz Kafka, 1919
• Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love); Friedrich Schiller, 1784
• Faust; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1772
• The Futurological Congress; Stanislaw Lem, 1971
• An Anthropologiest on Mars; Oliver Sacks, 1995
• What’s our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies; Tim Urban, 2023

Just plain fun

Not every story changes how I see the world. Some just bring me joy. They carry me to a foreign place or let me have a break. They are a small vacation.

• The Lord of the Rings; J.R.R. Tolkien, 1954
  • The Fellowship of the Ring
  • The Two Towers
  • The Return of the King
• Foundation Cycle; Isaac Asimov
  • Foundation; 1951
  • Foundation and Empire; 1952
  • Second Foundation; 1953
• Pride and Prejudice; Jane Austen, 1813

Didn’t age well

While publicly celebrated I find their value questionable.

• Sapiens; Yuval Noah Harari, 2011
  • There is academic critique going around about this book (see here for an example).
• Thinking, Fast and Slow; Daniel Kahnemann, 2011
  • Some experimental results enumerated in his book are proven wrong by now. Besides that, I always compare his book to Hume’s Magnus Opus which isn’t particularly fair but still strikes me as astonishing that Hume uncovered many of the insights shared in Kahnemann’s book. But Hume did so already hundreds of years ago. So what I am left with is a book that stands on a shaky scientific foundation and provides me with insights that have been known for a long time.

Antilibrary

A list of my literary and academic blind spots. Books I haven’t read (yet). This list has only one goal: always be longer than all the lists above combined. My antilibrary should stay true to Aristotle’s exclamation ”The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know”.

Entries marked with 📕 are already in my collection.

• Lighthouse; Virginia Wolfe, 📕
• Trust; Hernan Diaz
• Wittgenstein’s Mistress; David Markson
• The Dawn of Everything; David Graeber, David Wengrow 📕
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden braid; Douglas R. Hofstadter
• Shogun; James Clavell
• East of Eden; John Steinbeck
• Dune; Frank Herbert
• Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose; Noel, Turner
• The Hidden Life of Trees; Peter Wohlleben
• The Plague; Albert Camus, 1946, Robin Buss translation
• Der Traum vom Mond (The Dream); Johannes Kepler
• Jenseits von Gut und Böse; Friedrich Nietzsche
• On Anger; Seneca
• Das Kapital; Marx
• On the Origin of Species; Charles Darwin 📕
• The Categories; Aristotle, Revised Oxford Translation
• Leviathan; Thomas Hobbes
• A Thousand Brains; Jeff Hawkins
• The Extended Phenotype; Richard Dawkins
• The Selfish Gene; Richard Dawkins 📕
• Elements; Euclid, Heath translation
• The Pale King; David Foster Wallace
• The Picture of Dorian Grey; Oscar Wilde
• The Waste Land; T.S. Eliot
• The Natural House; Frank Lloyd Wright
• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Principia Mathematica; Isaac Newton, 1686
• Phaedo; Plato
• Tao Te Ching; 4th century BCE
• Capitalism and Freedom; Milton Friedman, 1962
• The History of the Peloponnesian War; Thucydides, 5th century BCE
• City of God; St. Augustine, 5th century
• The Song of Roland; 11th century
• Niebelungenlied; 12th century
• The Prince; Niccolo Machiavelli, 1532
• Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus spoke Zarathustra); Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883
• Anna Katarina; Leo Tolstoy
• Farewell to Arms; Ernest Hemingway
• For Whom the Bell Tolls; Ernest Hemingway
• Notes from Underground; Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Play, Dreams, and Imitation; Jean Piaget
• Enuma Elis; 900-200 BCE, Der babylonische Weltschöpfungsmythos Enuma Elisch - Kämmerer und Metzler translation
• Upanisads; 700-200 BCE, Oxford Classics - Pattrick Ollivelle translation
• The City of God, Augustine of Hippo, 5th century, Bettenson translation
• The Divine Names, Dionysius the Areopagite,
• The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali, 11th century
• The Philosophical Writings of Descartes
• Ethik (Ethics), Baruch de Spinoza, Gebhardt translation
• Candide, Voltaire, 1759, Penguin Classics
• Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men, Rousseau
• Discourse on Political Economy, Rousseau
• On the Social Contract, Rousseau
• Emile, Rousseau
• On Writing, Steven King
• The Divine Comedy, Dante, 1321
• Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco, 1980
• Determined: Life without Free Will, Robert Sapolsky
• Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin, 2008
• Paradies lost, John Milton, 1667
• Notes on Complexity, Neil Theise
• Rigor of Angels, William Eggington
• Excellent Advice for the Living, Kevin Kelly
• The New Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen, https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6886

You found a typo or some other mistake I made in this text? All articles can be changed here. If you want to exchange ideas then simply drop me a message at contact@paulheymann.de.