by Campbell and Campbell
by Lambek and Scott
by Oscar Wilde
pg 147.3, "But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, ..."
by Suketu Mehta
pg 257.2, "The day after my second meeting with Satish, and the day after that, I walk about in the world of the mundane in a daze. I go with Sunita inot the city to meet an old friend, to take in a movie, to have dinner. But te rest of the world seems trivial. Their conversations revolve around trivialities -- careers, taxes, shopping. Nobody in that Bombay talks about God, or sin and virtue, or death except when it is imminent, looming over a near relative, and then it is dealt with in a quick, frightened fashion, as if to get it out of the way as quickly as possible. But I have been immersed in extended contemplation of those questions with people who have to face them every hour of every day, and it has been exhilarating. The last time I can recall exploring those topics in such depth was with my grandfather, as he lay dying in my uncle's house in Bombay. But I was not as close to death then as I was in that hotel room."
by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson
by Paul Auster
by Euripides
by Iain Banks
by Vladimir Nabokov
There is annotated version online here.
Here are the words I had to look up while reading Ada.
by Adam Smith
pg 173.6, "Labor is there [in the British colonies of North America] so well rewarded that a numerous family of children, instead of being a burthen is a source of opulence and prosperity to the parents. ... The value of children is the greatest of all encouragements to marriage."
by Benjamin Franklin
pg 33.1, "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."
pg 108.7, "That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."
pg 118.8, "Human felicity is produced not so much by great peices of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day."
by Greg Stekelman
An entertaining and highly irreverent read. It opens with the narrator -- themanwhofellasleep -- fending off a down-and-out Jesus's advances. While out and about reading, the looks attracted by my bursts of laughter could only have been asking, "What mental institution did you escape from?" I think part, if not all, of the book can be found at themanwhofellasleep.com.
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
I finally got around to reading it after finding a paperback edition in Shanghai. I've also started following their equally thought-provoking blog.
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
by Marcus Buckingham, Donald O. Clifton
Recommended by a friend. Although he found it useful, I thought it was terrible and couldn't make it all the way through. He also recommended The 80/20 Principle
by Richard Koch but I didn't bother.
by Leo Tolstoy
pg 462.2, "That realization showed him the eternal error men make by imagining that happiness consists of gratification of their desires."
pg 507.8, "Karenin was quite devoid of that deep imaginative facualty of the soul by which ideas concieved by the imagination become so vivid that they must be brought into conformity with other ideas and with reality."
by Malcolm Gladwell
by John Kennedy Toole
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
by Plato
by J. G. Ballard