Favorite Books

Non-fiction

James McPhee, Annals of a former world. (I love geology, its time scale and massive forces! McPhee's writing is at times annoyingly erudite, but I tolerate it because he weaves rocks and words so well).

Simon Singh, Fermat's enigma. (You don't need to love mathematics to love this story of the pursuit of mathematical truth).

Stephen Jay Gould, The mismeasure of man. (Gould at his best).

Fiction

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the time of cholera. (I go back and forth about whether I like this or Solitude better, but I keep going back to them in both English and Spanish. I like the hopeless romanticism portrayed in Cholera, but I also adore the psychedelic characters of Solitude.)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One hundred years of solitude.

Haruki Murakami, The wind-up bird chronicle. (Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru). A psychomystery full of strange characters and random confluences that really don't make sense but activates your imagination. If you read Japanese, much is lost in translation.

Academic

Edward Tufte, The visual display of quantitative information. It has transformed the way I think of data.

Noam Chomsky, Language and mind. I read this along with Syntactic Structures, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, and his review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior at about the same time during college. Before that, I just didn't know that people could think like that.

F. C. Bartlett, Remembering. As an experimental psychologist, I think of this book, originally published in 1932, as a paragon of scholarship in which the methods are guided by the questions, the writing is human, and the findings are deep.