Magnus Lyckå - Literature

Literature

I've planned for some time to write something about books, and literature, providing some tips about books I liked and so on, but the truth is that I haven't really read that many books the last decade, at least if we disregard computer manuals etc.

Coming to think of it, recommending people to read all those books I enjoyed in my teens might not be the right thing to do... Oh, well, take it for what it is. Either way, I guess I could divide the books I like in a few categories:

Philosophical books

I appreciated Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" a lot. "The Tao of Pooh" by Benjamin Hoff is another good book about life. For something more related to the mysteries of logic I can recommend "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter.

Science Fiction

Ok, most of this I read at least fifteen years ago, so I might think otherwise today, but I'll make a try anyway: The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov is more or less compulsory reading if you want to call yourself literate. Arthur C. Clarke has written a lot of nice books too, and I used to read a lot of books by Clifford Simak. "Dune" by Frank Herbert is worth reading, but don't buy all the follow up books at once, I felt that it got out of hand eventually, and I have a few books in the series at home that I never read... A Swedish SF author I like is Bertil Mårtensson. His book "Samarkand 5617" really fascinated me a long time ago...

Fantasy

I guess J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy is another requirement for claiming literacy. "The Hobbit" is a good book too, and it's something you can enjoy while you read it to your children. (Don't ask me how old they have to be, I don't know things like that yet...) Bertil Mårtensson writes fantasy too, and I really liked the trilogy Maktens Vägar.

Funny Books

"Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams is a must! How else would you be able to converse with people? You would be as lost as if you had never heard of Monty Python...

Other Fiction

"Pillars of the Earth" by Ken Follett is a great book (two actually, at least in the Swedish version I read) about events in medieval England.

Computer Books

"UNIX in a Nutshell" from O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. is a book I like. More or less all you need of the unix manuals and some other goodies compresses into about two centimeters of book shelf space.

Obviously, there are hundreds of good computer books around, but I won't list all the ones I've read and liked. Today I find a lot of the information I need on the net.

Other Non-fiction

TBD

Why Green?