Posted: May 04, 2012 9:45 am
ASOIAF is the best fiction, hands down. It's the The Wire of fantasy.
EDIT: MacIver's mentioning of Sandman is definitely worthwhile, but I'm an even bigger fan of the Lucifer spinoff from that series, which is essentially an extended meditation on "free will" and determinism with a great many pages torn from Paradise Lost, and is just goddamn brilliant.
Nonfictionwise, I don't have a favorite, more a top 5, and most of these are my favorites because they've had a strong effect on the heuristics I tend to use in my understanding of the world. The Stuff of Thought by Pinker, The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama, Nonzero and The Moral Animal, both by Robert Wright, and A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine are the current five I tend to keep in my brain.
It's interesting to me in that my appreciation for Fukuyama's and Irvine's books stemmed immediately from the understanding I gleaned from Wright's two books, and my reading of both Pinker and Wright affected my appreciation for Irvine's book.
I think Wright was the most influential for me. My top five prior to reading Wright probably would have been some combination of Dawkins, Shermer, Sagan, and Harris' books. I think I've almost totally lost my appreciation for them now.
EDIT: MacIver's mentioning of Sandman is definitely worthwhile, but I'm an even bigger fan of the Lucifer spinoff from that series, which is essentially an extended meditation on "free will" and determinism with a great many pages torn from Paradise Lost, and is just goddamn brilliant.
Nonfictionwise, I don't have a favorite, more a top 5, and most of these are my favorites because they've had a strong effect on the heuristics I tend to use in my understanding of the world. The Stuff of Thought by Pinker, The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama, Nonzero and The Moral Animal, both by Robert Wright, and A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine are the current five I tend to keep in my brain.
It's interesting to me in that my appreciation for Fukuyama's and Irvine's books stemmed immediately from the understanding I gleaned from Wright's two books, and my reading of both Pinker and Wright affected my appreciation for Irvine's book.
I think Wright was the most influential for me. My top five prior to reading Wright probably would have been some combination of Dawkins, Shermer, Sagan, and Harris' books. I think I've almost totally lost my appreciation for them now.