Even more than Cosmos I regard The Ascent of Man as the documentary series that had the biggest impact on me - I was probably only 8 when it was shown on the BBC, but I can still remember watching it, particularly this:
NB The Leó Szilárd he mentions was the Hungarian physicist who had the original idea for an atomic bomb while crossing a road in London in 1933, as Richard Rhodes described it:
"The stoplight changed to green. Szilárd stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woes, the shape of things to come."
Years ago I interviewed Alan at his home in LA. First thing that struck me about his house was the BOOKS, books everywhere, bookshelves everywhere, shelves in every room, every hallway, stacked everywhere, just nonstop books. Of course, as we were walking through the house before we even sat down, I asked about the books. He proudly told me he read a new book every day. On every subject under the sun.
I knew it was gonna be a great interview... it was.
I think part of it is that he has been reading fluently from a young age. My son can barely recognise his name and he's nearly 4. That's a very good head start in terms of practice. It might also be due to a strong natural ability.
All in good time. That was the first of 3 or 4 interviews I did with him as part of research for my book on the history of the PLATO system, which Alan and a number of PARC folks were keenly aware of and went out and visited (and PLATO folks came out to visit PARC).
I went back and checked the transcript of the interview. He told me he reads "somewhere between 200 and 400 books a year, since I was five or so. Depends on the year. And generally a wide range of genres and things. . . most of the sciences."
On several occasions, Kay has mentioned Molecular Biology of the Cell as an outstanding example of how modern technology can be used to create textbooks in the aid of comprehension rather than spectacle. An example of vulgar abuse by Kay's standards would be any of the massive, technicolored tomes with names like Calculus or College Physics.
I read The Inner Game of Tennis based on Alan Kay's description in a youtube video. It is an excellent book.
I am glad to see Csikszenmihalyi on the list as well. Flow is a very powerful concept; we all know it, but understanding it and using it effectively is a different matter entirely.
After reading The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh, I realized that all three books are actually talking about the same subject from different perspectives.
To this list, I would add:
anything by Robert Grudin, but especially:
Time and the Art of Living and The Grace of Great Things
How to solve it by G. Polya
Conceptual Blockbusting by James Adams
Nice to see the Mortimer Adler recommendation as well, but I think his How to Read a Book should be a prerequisite for serious reading.
As I've gotten older, I've come to the conclusion that true understanding requires the kind of depth that comes from knowing one's self intimately. It's a lot harder than it sounds, especially for a technologist.
How does one even go about reading 5000 books? I know it only says his library is 5000 books, but what's the point in amassing a library if you haven't read it? That would be nearly two books a week for 50 years. Imagine if even 5% of those were text books.
To cure you out of this vision of a library I would suggest you read Umberto Eco's essay "How to Justify a Private Library” in How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays, it's great! In The Black Swan Taleb summarizes the lesson from this essay as:
"“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”"
My mother was a librarian of a small library in a village in Scotland - from about the age of 13 she used to let me take the key and go and take books out myself any time I wanted (subject to the same rules as everyone else about number of books and keeping records).
I have a room filled with several thousand books I've read, an a shelf in my bedroom filled with several hundred books I bought to read later. Then I have 2 ebook readers with several hundred other books, some I've read, some I haven't read yet.
As a child, I've been pretty impressed the first time I've been to some friend's home where there was only a few books, the dictionary, the Guinness book of records and a couple of large, picture books that nobody ever reads. I was so alien to me; even at the age of 12 my bedroom had its longest wall entirely covered in bookshelves.
Same thing here. There is nothing worse than carrying my books in boxes and being afraid to unpack them because I move every 7-8 months. I have a reader, but the feeling is definitely not the same. I also tend to at least read the introduction of every book I think might be of interest even if I do not read it all. I am not reading a book per day, though, as Alan Kay; one per week (and a couple dozen introductions)is closer to my limits with 2 children at home.
I now listen to a lot of audiobooks - I only listen to the unabridged ones otherwise it feels like cheating. The big advantage being I can listen to them while walking to/from work and while doing other things like cooking - that's probably 2 hours a day.
[NB Audible is awesome - I particularly like how you can return a book if you don't like it, something I've only done a couple of times but is a great feature to have].
I think its a neat idea, but completely outdated. You can order a new book you need and get it within a day. A massive library of textbooks you can, at best, hope to glipse through for a few important bits of information, is a much larger financial investment. At that scale, you actually need an entire room devoted to containing your anti-library, taking dozens of hours to set up and organize.
I find it hard to believe that anyone could have books on difficult subjects like mathematics, philosophy, etc. and actually read 5000 of them in any contemplative way.
You could spend months alone reading, re-reading, consulting commentaries and attempting to understand Kant's Critique of Pure Reason alone.
And meanwhile, you can complete your reading and contemplating by reading other books - which is the point. 5000 books is not a huge amount if you're curious; for a more contemporary vision, think about the time you've spend browsing from one article to the other on wikipedia - or the web for the matter.
Imagine being Kay and having to watch GUIs get increasingly dumbed down, people using Object Oriented Programming to refer to things nothing like what you created, people not using computers to the full potential you thought you had enabled decades ago. "Guys! You're doing it wrong!"
But this means there's still a lot of room for "innovation" to build on top of his "inventions" (distinction he made in a talk that[1] was posted here yesterday: invention being creating new things, innovation being the task of bringing them to market). Or if that's not your deal, he laid out the kind of environment that's required to create new inventions. You could try to work in such an environment or create one.
It's probably too late to have the same "early life" that he did, but you've learned to read, if you're here you've probably learned to code, and chances are you've still got at least a couple "lives"[2] left in you.
Well, Alan Kay isn't a young guy. Presumably, he's been reading for many years. Knock out a couple a year and you should be good to go.
On the flip side, remember this any time you read someone else's "recommended reading list"... if YOU sat down and wrote your "recommended reading list" it would probably also be very long and impressive as well.. it would just (probably) have a lot of different titles on it.
He learnt to read when he was an infant..
I remember clearly in a conference he said: "... by the time I got to school I have read a couple of hundred books ..."
And that website serving the page is the original wiki, WikiWikiWeb. An incredible piece of Internet history and also an incredible resource for software development mastery.
I do not understand ... please, can you elaborate what is the connection between GEB (which I presume is 'Gödel, Escher, Bach') and for example the "Learn you a Haskell" book ? They are both good books, but I do not think that books about programming languages are suitable alternatives to GEB.
Not knowing you, I can only suggest questions to ask your self.
What yardstick are you using to determine your level of suckage? Is it true? How do you know? If it is true, do you care? If you care, in what way do you care? Does it matter? If it matters, is it important? How so? Hopefully, the books you have read will help with the answers. You may not be able to answer all of these questions (and honestly, the answers don't matter too much), but they might serve to orient you.
I have read a fair number of the books on the list (and many more not on the list) and can truly say that I am a better human being for doing so, according to my criteria.
You don't have to own a book to have read it - library, friend lending you book, and so on are all great way to get and share information. We often forget that in our current digital age, swapping as always been easy since Guttenberg.
How do you maintain such a library? Do you devote a portion of your house? I always thought I had a pretty sizable library, but its probably <1000 books (and probably <500). As of now, its basically one book shelf with 5 rows, 2 of which are filled with paperbacks and two books deep (the other rows are larger books, including textbooks and only a single book deep) and another drawer filled with things that are in my reading queue, maybe 50 books total. I'm still rather young (I just graduated undergrad in December), but I can't imagine having a library of 10,000 books without a sizable portion of my life revolving around maintaining such a monstrosity. It must have cost you a small fortune to acquire 10,000 books and a room to house all of them in anything but cardboard boxes.
I just got home and I'm looking at this book shelf now and there's probably less than 150 books here. I'm just incredulous that you can have a 10,000 book library without being incredibly eccentric and wealthy, or maybe a well off professor or book fanatic. 10,000 books must take at least 1000 sq ft to store (assuming you arrange in such a way that these books are accessible, not just piled 8 feet high in storage boxes) -- realistically probably double or triple that if you wanted a place to sit down and do all of this reading, unless you have extremely high ceilings and a rolling ladder.
I just did some quick googling, and your assertion is the equivalent of owning 1/5 of a smaller sized Barnes & Noble, the smallest of which are around 3000 sq feet, or a fairly large detached 3 story home with maybe 4-5 bedrooms in a suburban area. Yes, Barnes and Noble doesn't organize it efficiently for storage, but for display, my point still stands that 10,000 books in a personal library is extreme.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0PDGZKGAWs
NB The Leó Szilárd he mentions was the Hungarian physicist who had the original idea for an atomic bomb while crossing a road in London in 1933, as Richard Rhodes described it:
"The stoplight changed to green. Szilárd stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woes, the shape of things to come."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le%C3%B3_Szil%C3%A1rd