For many years, I always gifted people books for birthdays. It took a long time to realize that most people see them more as obligations than anything. I guess I was trying to recapture some of the magic they have always brought me.
The following books are not necessarily the best ones I’ve read or even the ones that have absorbed deepest into my personality. But they’ve had a distinct impact. Let’s begin.
(Note: I’m experimenting with Amazon Affiliate Links in this post)
The Wizard of Earthsea
I read this when I was very young – it was accidentally misplaced in my class’s reading library from the main school library and was not age-appropriate. But Le Guin’s writing and vocabulary is actually very simple and the book relatively short. So I slogged through it. I think I failed to absorb much of this book’s subtle message, but it still opened my eyes as to what was out there and marked the start of my serious reading phase.
This book and its sequels1 are still a joy to read to this day.
Wizard’s First Rule
Fast forward several years, and I was heavily into fantasy doorstoppers, such as The Wheel of Time, The Saga of Recluce or Dragonriders of Pern. I loved the stories of epic heroes and battles, and had no understanding of character depth or themes. Wizard’s First Rule changed that. This book was so cliche and uninspired, it finally woke me out of my slumber, and started to realize that there was more to books than their plots.
This book has sat on my shelf for years, and I’ve never desired to re-read it. Just reminding myself of the blurb is enough to remember why.
Physics for Game Developers
Another book I received while I was too young to really understand it, I begged my dad to buy this after spying it in a bookstore. I didn’t realise it at the time, but in my teen years I was starved for challenging material, and this wound up being my only source, causing a deep obsession. The book covers some fairly interesting physical simulations, and how to code them. The physics led to some academic success, and my involvement with the Box2D library later which was my first major experience with open source. The programming side later became my entire career!2 And the game development became this blog and the projects you see on it.
This book is from 2001, I can’t recommend anyone to read it, let alone consider re-reading it.
A Fire Upon the Deep / A Deepness in the Sky
I’d transitioned from fantasy to science fiction following Wizard’s First Rule but was still relatively unread. These books were given to me by Roko at the start of our friendship, as he introduced me to transhumanism. But they represent a milestone where I started engaging with fiction as a way of spreading ideas, rather than pure entertainment. This culminated in reading The Sequences and joining the rationalists, which almost made a separate item in this article.
I’ve not re-read these, but I think it would be fun to, they’re good books I expect hold up today. Apparently there is a 3rd in the series I never got around to.
Brave New World
If A Fire Upon The Deep was about starting to spread ideas through fiction, then Brave New World was its apotheosis for me. At the time, I was a strong, if unexamined, believer in happiness maximising utilitarianism. This book destroyed that so thoroughly, that I became a nihilist for several years. I expect my poorly considered beliefs would have crumbled sooner or later, but I took the lesson to heart.
I re-read this, but it didn’t make a huge impression the second time. There was a decent radio play adaptation.
Three Panel Soul
This is actually a webcomic, not a book. At one point I was very heavily into webcomics, reading about 50 daily and more on an infrequent basis. There are many good ones that moved me and influenced my tastes. Three Panel Soul is not one of those.
It’s on this list due to a single page which I can no longer locate or remember precisely. But it depicted a pleasant date naturally transitioning to an overnight encounter. Most media depictions of both dating and sex are overly dramatic and not realistic. As a poor navigator of social customs, it turns out I needed a bit of guidance, or at least reassurance, about how normal and straightforward these things can be. I think everyone absorbs behaviours from media and observing others, but it’s strange that this one item always stuck in my memory so much.
I’ve reread the entire 20-40 hour archive of some webcomics multiple times. But I’ve never re-read Three Panel Soul. And eventually, my interest in webcomics died off too, along with their popularity.
On review, so much about these books is “right place, right time” rather than the specifics of the book itself. My dad’s library at home was filled with historical fiction, Jungian analysis and classics – I wonder if I could have been a completely different person if I’d picked those up instead?
What books would you pick?