Joel's Bookshelf
I think you can learn a lot about a person by looking at his bookshelf,
so instead of filling this page with a detailed autobiography, I will
instead list a few books which tell something about me and my interests.
Some of these books are listed here because I grew up with them, others
are here because they are my favorite pleasure reading, and others are
here because of their significance in the development of my thoughts and
my academic life. Some are here simply because I read them recently.
Some of these books are books I wholeheartedly agree with, while
others are on this list not because I agree with them but because they
challenged me and made me think. I do not know if you will get the same
things out of these books that I have, but if you have not read them,
I recommend them.
I have many more books than this, and I keep buying more. I have a hard
time staying away from
used
bookstores in particular, and there are many in Charlottesville.
My roommate tells me that I have a problem, and that the books are going to
take over the apartment. But I don't understand: how can too many books be
a problem? It just doesn't make sense.
- The Hobbit,
The Lord of the Rings, and
The Silmarillion by
J. R. R. Tolkien
- Plato's Meno, Crito, and
Euthyphro
- Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- The 1994-1995 Undergraduate Catalog of
The College of William and Mary in Virginia
- The 1999-2000 Graduate Record
of the University of Virginia
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, along
with the other four books in the trilogy
- The Future of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig
- Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
-
The C Programming Language by
Brian W. Kernighan
and
Dennis Ritchie
- The Mythical Man-Month, by Fred Brooks, Jr.
-
The Analects of Confucius,
The Book of Chuang-tzu,
and the
Tao
Te Ching, in various translations
- Beyond Good and Evil by
Friedrich Nietszche
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
in translation, as well as the
original middle-English, which is not as hard to read as you might think.
- The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
-
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
Through the Looking Glass, and
The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll:
``What I tell you three times is true!''
- The Holy Bible,
in various translations
- Religion and Nothingness by Keiji Nishitani
- The Once and Future King by T. H. White
- Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
- The Battle Cry of Freedom by James MacPherson
- Gödel,
Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter
- At Home in the Universe by
Stuart Kauffman
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