Books!

Here i will defend cd318... 😁😊

If you are about to die, because life is short, almost all books are not so much important... Save very few one....

My greatest endeavour when i was young was discovering illuminating books in any field at all cost...I lived like my life was depending of ONE book i did not know yet....

For example i bought a book in 1975 that sell in french 125 dollars of today...guess the actual inflated price to have an idea of this very high cost for one book only?

In this book reading all my view of the world change... It was a book about Egyptology but the book change in one second all my understanding of the meaning of mathematics...

Then one book can change your life in a way 95 % of the book could never do ...

Reading is very important yes,but picking the RIGHT book is a question of life or death sometimes... Especially if we are young....Old people dont remember that....

We can think sometime that we are predestined to encounter a woman who we love...I think that it is the same for some predestined for us books...

Imagine now that you had never read some important book...Do you feel the huge impact?

If not i am sorry it only means that you have never encounter a life changing book...

Books are 95% crap? With all due respect, that might win the prize for the most absurd blanket statement about anything that I’ve ever heard.

anybody read that David Byrne book yet ?

or for that matter, Dave Grohl ?

@brown12

All 3 are very difficult subjects to write about.

To this day I haven’t seen a better book on psychology than Eric Berne’s A Layman’s Guide to Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis.

It’s the only one I remember out of the dozens I have read.

I’ve yet to read a really good book on either Freud or Jung.

What about hypnosis? Is there even a single decent book written about it?

Henry Hazlitt’s Thinking as a Science is certainly a book I wish I’d read much earlier in life. As is Rolf Dobelli’s The Art of Thinking Clearly (which was impossible as it was only published in 2013).

Both books are a distillation of an enormous amount of experience and knowledge gathered in an easy to read volume.

I’ve read dozens of books on the Beatles but Mark Lewisohn’s renders most of them redundant.

Best book on Lennon?

How about Albert Goldman’s The Many Lives of John Lennon?

I’ve yet to read his book on Elvis but I’m hoping it will be more memorable than Peter Guralnick’s efforts.

Heinrich Harrer’s 1959/64 book ’The White Spider’ remains my favourite book on mountaineering.

When it comes to books on personal computers apart from Carey Holzman’s The Healthy PC (now sadly out of both print and date) I found nothing memorable.

What about novels?

How many can you call truly great?

Anna Karenina, A Christmas Carol, The Great Gatsby, The Trial, 1984, Tropic of Capricorn, Remembrance of Things Past, Young Man in the Sun, Tom Sawyer, The Rose (Charles L Harness), Wuthering Heights are the ones that immediately come to mind though I must have read hundreds.

The vast majority of which I now have little recollection.

Life is too short and time is too precious to waste on books.

Just like with audio playback, you want the very best that’s out there.

It’s also very important to be able to put what you read into some form of practical use.

There’s nothing wrong with reading for entertainment or escapism, and I should know, but just how many decent reads are out there when you have mostly mountains of dross being churned out on a daily basis.

There’s also mountains of books being pulped and deleted forever everyday but sadly not all of them are dross either.

We all might have different tastes, but what you read can really matter and make a difference.

Here’s a writer I’ve never read (along with Dostoevsky), but I’ve always liked this quote.

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer." E.M. Forster, Howards End

Here’s another by our good friend @mahgister

"If you are about to die, because life is short, almost all books are not so much important... Save very few one...."

Indeed.