MindFarmer 2010 List

Hello all, first post here on LT. Looked around and liked what I saw.

January is a bit sparse - I don't remember all the things I read then. Read too fast, I guess.

January:
1. The Zen of Drawing, Frederick Franck
2. A Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilber
3. The Art of Deception, Kevin D. Mitnick
4. Candide, Voltaire

February:
1. Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow
2. The Modern Researcher, Jacques Barzun
3. The Spooky Art, Norman Mailer
4. A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut
5. On Writing Well, William Zinsser
6. Green, Inc., Christine MacDonald
7. Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
8. The Worldly Philosophers, Robert L. Heilbroner
9. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
10. Poor People, Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Silas Marner, George Eliot
12. The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey
13. The Prince, Machiavelli
14. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
15. The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick
16. A Splendor of Letters, Nicholas A. Basbanes
17. Gangs of America, Ted Nace
18. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
19. Side Effects, Woody Allen
20. Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich

March:
1. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
2. The Book of Other People, Zadie Smith (editor)
3. The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould
4. Darwin's Black Box, Michael J. Behe

Reading:
The Stuff of Thought
Off the Books
Small is Beautiful

I read everything that I might learn something from. Suggestions are welcome. Thanks.

Welcome to the group!

Suggestions are welcome. Believe me, you will get plenty in this group. Just pick a thread, any thread, and dive right in!

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask. We are a pretty friendly and very talkative bunch.

Welcome!

Thank you very much.

Question: Is there a way to quote posts? Or make a link to certain posts within a thread?

I just cut-n-paste to quote posts, usually with the italics or bold HTML tags to set off the text. It's also good form to include the message number of the post you're quoting just so people can follow along easier.

The message number in the separator bar is also a link to that particular message, so you can use cut-n-paste again to make a link in your text.

Hi. Welcome to the group - I'm new, too. I was amazed to see The Worldly Philosophers on your list - I read that in high school a VERY long time ago (in the '70's), and because of it I majored in Economics in college (I quickly found out that most economics courses were not going to be interesting in quite the same way, but never mind). I'm interested to know how it holds up today - did you read it for a course? What did you think of it? Did it seem hopelessly outdated?

Thank you, drneutron.

@Janet:
I read The Worldly Philosophers by myself for fun. I read the 1999 edition, but having no previous education in economics, and without anyone to ask in person, I would be a bad judge of its current relevance.

Otherwise, it was a flowing, informative book. It could've been called The Story of Economics, styled after Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy - they are written similarly, in style and presentation. I found it makes economics much more enjoyable than trying to plow through a text of Wealth of Nations or Das Kapital by myself.

I'll put it like this - I borrowed this book from the library, read it in a day, and bought the book the next.

Nice to know some things hold up. I recently found a copy of a book called Mathematics for the Million which my Dad told me was a great book about math when he read it in the 30's or 40's. There was a new paperback edition which said it was still considered the clearest book about math. I still haven't read that one, though!