Fall '08 Reading List

I’ve compiled quite a list for the rest of this year. I’ve actually finished a few of these but I wanted to write them down so that I can keep the list up to date. Not that anyone really cares what I’m reading, but I go back to these lists to find conscious and unconscious themes in my interests. I’m still tackling a lot of religious themes and also took a detour last month to read a few books by Barack Obama.

I also decided to read Mahabharata from beginning to end. I’ve read a greatly abridged version but the full version will probably take 2 years to finish. The unabridged translation of the Mahabharata contains 74,000 verses, long prose passages, and about 1.8 million words in total. Put another way, it is roughly ten times the size of the Iliad and Odyssey combined. It’s going to take me a while. I’ve also being pulled back into physics and I have picked up a few new interesting books. Of course, I’m still making an unsuccessful effort to learn Hindi – and, as always, I am re-reading some old favorites like Catcher and Pale Blue Dot. Anyway, this is the list.

• The Mahabharata, Volume 1: Book 1: The Book of the Beginning by J. A. B. van Buitenen (Translator)
• The Truth About Muhammad by Robert Spencer
• Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources by Martin Lings
• 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense by Michael Brooks
• Hindi by Living Language
• Hindi: Lessons 1 to 5 by Pimsleur
• Healing Mantras by Shri Anandi Ma and Shri Dileepji Pathak
• The Philosophies of India by Doug Allen
• Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
• The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
• Change We Can Believe In by Barack Obama
• Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• The Art of War by Sun Tzu
• The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind
• The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
• Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch
• Das Kapital by Karl Marx
• Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson
• The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot by Bart D. Ehrman
• Myths and Masks of God by Joseph Campbell
• Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
• Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku
• The Republic by Plato
• Upanishads translated by Eknath Easwaran
• 1984 by George Orwell
• The 33 Strategies Of War by Robert Greene
• River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins

I’m also going to try to get through a few Teaching Company courses by the end of the year:

• Story of Human Language by John McWhorter
• Dante’s Divine Comedy by William R. Cook
• Biology and Human Behavior: The Neurological Origins of Individuality by Robert Sapolsky