“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” ― Jorge Luis Borges
As most people that know me well are aware, I absolutely love books. To be able to hold a dead piece of tree and be able to hallucinate about anything and everything possible and impossible in this universe and to teleport yourself to any place and time on earth and beyond – there’s no better thing.
I usually update my most current reads on my Goodreads profile.
Some of my favourite books of all time are below.
Fiction:
Labyrinths (and Ficciones and everything else) by Jorge Luis Borges. My favourite writer of all time.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Foucalt’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Science Fiction:
Exhalations and Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. My favourite living author.
The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu
Revelation Space by Alaistar Reynolds
His Master’s Voice by Stanislaw Lem
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
Blindsight by Peter Watts
History:
The Lessons of History by Will Durant
Napoleon by Andrew Roberts
The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs by Marc David Baer
The Ruins of Empires by CF Volney
Non Fiction:
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hammond
Empires of the Sky by Alexander Rose
Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them by Antonio Padilla
“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others – a very small minority – who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable