I asked on Twitter today for books that people would like to have read, but don’t want to put in the time and effort to read.
What’s a book you would like to have read but don’t want to read?
— John D. Cook (@JohnDCook) June 15, 2018
Here are the responses I got, organized by category.
Literature:
- The Brothers Karamazov
- War and Peace
- Crime and Punishment
- Gravity’s Rainbow
- Infinite Jest
- Finnegans Wake
- Ulysses
- Atlas Shrugged
- The Iliad
Math, Science, and Software:
- Art of Computer Programming
- Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
- Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++
- An Introduction to Default Logic
- A Brief History of Time
- A New Kind of Science
- Partial Differential Equations
- Princeton Companion to Mathematics
- The Algebraic Eigenvalue Problem
History and economics
Religion and philosophy
Misc:
The Codebreakers, David Kahn
The Canon of Intellectual Longing
I was surprised to discover I’ve read most of the books on this list. Advice to others: If you want to have read these books, just READ THEM, and do it now. Most are not that hard. If one IS hard, just skim it now, then put it aside to read it again later.
The Illiad is a REALLY good listen. (Which makes sense because it comes from an oral tradition not a written one.) it was almost no work to listen to but was tough reading. Same thing for the Odyssey.