3.09.2004
excerpts from nettime discussion on reading lists, >>A<< reading list:
Reply-to: "geert lovink"
(Would it include Empire, Crowds and Power, Male Fantasies, a Foucault, Ahrendt or even Deleuze? How much history (of science)? How much would politically correct and which titles would really be useful? Geert)
The Problem with Dead White Males By Arnold Kling Published 02/27/2004
My List
If I were asked to select five books that every college student must read in order to be prepared to engage in discourse in the 21st century, my list would be as follows:
The Blank Slate, by Stephen Pinker
The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Ray Kurzweil
The Transparent Society, by David Brin
The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson
Eastward to Tartary, by Robert Kaplan
The Skeptical Environmentalist, by Bjorn Lomborg,
The first two volumes of Robert Skidelsky's biography of John Maynard
Keynes
Tom Wolfe , Bonfire of the Vanities
economist Randall Parker's Reflections on the Great Depression and Winston Churchill's The Gathering Storm.
militant Islam, Ralph Peters book Beyond Terror.
Contemporary economics Virginia Postrel's The Future and its Enemies or Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics or Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed.
******************
Reply-to: Alan Sondheim
Koran, Bible, Analects - at the least. I don't think it's possible to
understand contemporary culture and fundamentalisms without them.
There's a series of Verso books - the No-Nonsense Guides - I've read the one on Islam, which brilliantly summarizes a great deal of material. There are others on globalization, terrorism, etc
Anthologies such as the New Media Reader.
An updated version of Fiske's Television Culture.
Winograd and Flores - Understanding Computers and Cognition.
The analog/digital sections of Anthony Wilden's System and Structure.
Wittgenstein's Tractatus read in conjunction w/ Philosophical
Investigations.
perhaps a book questioning three things: genre, canon, essentialism.
By the way - not Male Fantasies, but male fantasies. I would include at least one pornographic work. However defined, it's a critical discourse. Read against Kathy Acker.
Flesh and Steel by Mishima and with and against any Heiner Muller.
******************
Reply-to: "Prem Chandavarkar"
Rather than a definitive list of books (which implies that there is a
starting and end point to reading) I would first emphasise the importance of the continuing impulse to read. In the movie 'Shadowlands' which is based on the life of C.S. Lewis, a student of Lewis makes the profound remark "We read in order to know that we are not alone". The act of reading forces us to shift out of our own eyes and adopt the eyes of another, to move out of the comfort zone of our life and step into the unknown space of the book. The step away from our life and the return to it is a cycle of renewal and it its essential that we constantly repeat it.
Hayden White: "The Tropics of Discourse" - a collection of essays that
shattered my perception of history as a canonical form of truth, and
revealed the literary and artistic devices used in the writing of history.
Jean-Francois Lyotard: "The PostModern Condition"
Jacque Derrida: "Of Grammatology"
Jeanette Winterson: "Art Objects - Essays in Ecstacy and Effrontery"
Italo Calvino: 2 books - "Invisible Cities" and "Six Memos for the New
Millenium"
Lawrence Lessig: 2 books - "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" and "The Future of Ideas".
Huston Smith: 2 books - "The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions" and "Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition"
Michael Polanyi: 3 books - "The Tacit Dimension", "Personal Knowledge" and/or the last book "Meaning" which summarises his philosophy.
Steven Johnson: "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software"
Wolfgang Sachs (ed): "The Development Dictionary"
John Allen Paulos: "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper"
Etienne Wenger: "Communities of Practice"
Albert Laszlo Barabasi: "Linked: The New Science of Networks".
Bernard Lietaer: "The Future of Money"
******************
Reply-to: aphid
virilio's information bomb or speed & politics
debord's society of the spectacle
delanda's 1000 years of nonlinear history
lev manovich's language of new media, which i have a lot of problems with but at least he has done a better job with 'interactivity' than in 'what is digital cinema'
critical art ensemble's digital resistance
kevin kelly's out of control
some foucault is appropriate, as is deleuze, and of course benjamin
(simultaneously with lessig perhaps)
Reply-to: "geert lovink"
(Would it include Empire, Crowds and Power, Male Fantasies, a Foucault, Ahrendt or even Deleuze? How much history (of science)? How much would politically correct and which titles would really be useful? Geert)
The Problem with Dead White Males By Arnold Kling Published 02/27/2004
My List
If I were asked to select five books that every college student must read in order to be prepared to engage in discourse in the 21st century, my list would be as follows:
The Blank Slate, by Stephen Pinker
The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Ray Kurzweil
The Transparent Society, by David Brin
The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson
Eastward to Tartary, by Robert Kaplan
The Skeptical Environmentalist, by Bjorn Lomborg,
The first two volumes of Robert Skidelsky's biography of John Maynard
Keynes
Tom Wolfe , Bonfire of the Vanities
economist Randall Parker's Reflections on the Great Depression and Winston Churchill's The Gathering Storm.
militant Islam, Ralph Peters book Beyond Terror.
Contemporary economics Virginia Postrel's The Future and its Enemies or Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics or Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed.
******************
Reply-to: Alan Sondheim
Koran, Bible, Analects - at the least. I don't think it's possible to
understand contemporary culture and fundamentalisms without them.
There's a series of Verso books - the No-Nonsense Guides - I've read the one on Islam, which brilliantly summarizes a great deal of material. There are others on globalization, terrorism, etc
Anthologies such as the New Media Reader.
An updated version of Fiske's Television Culture.
Winograd and Flores - Understanding Computers and Cognition.
The analog/digital sections of Anthony Wilden's System and Structure.
Wittgenstein's Tractatus read in conjunction w/ Philosophical
Investigations.
perhaps a book questioning three things: genre, canon, essentialism.
By the way - not Male Fantasies, but male fantasies. I would include at least one pornographic work. However defined, it's a critical discourse. Read against Kathy Acker.
Flesh and Steel by Mishima and with and against any Heiner Muller.
******************
Reply-to: "Prem Chandavarkar"
Rather than a definitive list of books (which implies that there is a
starting and end point to reading) I would first emphasise the importance of the continuing impulse to read. In the movie 'Shadowlands' which is based on the life of C.S. Lewis, a student of Lewis makes the profound remark "We read in order to know that we are not alone". The act of reading forces us to shift out of our own eyes and adopt the eyes of another, to move out of the comfort zone of our life and step into the unknown space of the book. The step away from our life and the return to it is a cycle of renewal and it its essential that we constantly repeat it.
Hayden White: "The Tropics of Discourse" - a collection of essays that
shattered my perception of history as a canonical form of truth, and
revealed the literary and artistic devices used in the writing of history.
Jean-Francois Lyotard: "The PostModern Condition"
Jacque Derrida: "Of Grammatology"
Jeanette Winterson: "Art Objects - Essays in Ecstacy and Effrontery"
Italo Calvino: 2 books - "Invisible Cities" and "Six Memos for the New
Millenium"
Lawrence Lessig: 2 books - "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" and "The Future of Ideas".
Huston Smith: 2 books - "The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions" and "Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition"
Michael Polanyi: 3 books - "The Tacit Dimension", "Personal Knowledge" and/or the last book "Meaning" which summarises his philosophy.
Steven Johnson: "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software"
Wolfgang Sachs (ed): "The Development Dictionary"
John Allen Paulos: "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper"
Etienne Wenger: "Communities of Practice"
Albert Laszlo Barabasi: "Linked: The New Science of Networks".
Bernard Lietaer: "The Future of Money"
******************
Reply-to: aphid
virilio's information bomb or speed & politics
debord's society of the spectacle
delanda's 1000 years of nonlinear history
lev manovich's language of new media, which i have a lot of problems with but at least he has done a better job with 'interactivity' than in 'what is digital cinema'
critical art ensemble's digital resistance
kevin kelly's out of control
some foucault is appropriate, as is deleuze, and of course benjamin
(simultaneously with lessig perhaps)
