My Favorite Books - a list by DLP

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Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything: Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubn

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This book is amazing. It takes a topic that people generally find boring - economics - and turns it into something full of life. Leavitt takes numbers you'd never compare and finds relationships among crime and abortion, the KKK and the housing market, school teachers and sumo wrestlers, etc. I was totally blown away.

Updated Jan 23, 2009

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The Illuminatus! Trilogy: Robert Shea, Robert Anton Wilson

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"You never disappoint me." Hagbard said. "If they ever hang you, you'll be arguing about whether the rope really exists until the last minute."

"That was a simple riddle used by Zen Masters in the training of monks, Joe remembered. You take a newborn gosling and slip it through the neck of a bottle. Month after month you keep it in there and feed it, until it is a fullgrown goose and can no longer be passed through the bottles neck. The question is: Without breaking the bottle, how do you get the goose out?"

"Objectivity is presumably the opposite of schizophrenia. Which means that it is nothing but acceptance of everybody elses notion of reality. But nobody's perception of reality is the same as everybody's notion of it, which means that the most objective person is the real schizophrenic. It is hard to get beyond the accepted beliefs of one's own age. The first man to think a new thought advances it very tentatively. New ideas have to be around a while before anyone will promote them hard. In their first form, the are like tiny, imperceptible mutations that may eventually lead to new species. That's why cultural cross-fertilization is so important. It increases the gene-pool of the imagination. The Arabs, say, have one part of the puzzle. The Franks another. So, when the Knight Templar meet the Hashishin, something new is born. The human race has always lived more or less happily in the kingdom of the blind. But there is an elephant among us. A one-eyed elephant."

Updated Jan 9, 2009

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Even Cowgirls Get the Blues: Tom Robbins

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"I believe in everything; nothing is sacred, I believe in nothing; everything is sacred."

"Sometimes those things that attract the most attention to us are the things which afford us the greatest privacy."

"There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for."

"A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves - all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences."

Updated Jan 9, 2009

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Neverwhere: A Novel: Neil Gaiman

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"The boy had the towering arrogance only seen in the greatest of artists and all nine-year-old boys."

"Nice in a bodyguard is about as useful as the ability to regurgitate whole lobsters."

Updated Jan 9, 2009

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Good Omens: Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett

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"Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your own home."

"That's how it goes, you think you're on top of the world, and suddenly they spring Armageddon on you."

"A favorite game in quarry had been based on a highly successful film series with lasers, robots, and a princess who wore her hair like a pair of stereo headphones."

"Many phenomena -- wars, plagues, sudden audits -- have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A."

Updated Jan 9, 2009

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American Gods: A Novel: Neil Gaiman

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"What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul."

"One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory; you must remember this."

"There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous."

Updated Jan 9, 2009

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Cryptonomicon: Neal Stephenson

3 people recommended this item

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"Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be--or to be indistinguishable from--self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time."

"The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy. And yet, despite all of this, not one of these bodies makes a single sound at any time during the sultan's speech. It is a marvel that can only be explained by the power of brain over body, and, in turn, by the power of cultural conditioning over the brain."

Updated Jan 9, 2009

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The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

4 people recommended this item

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"The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward."

"Conformity and rebellion...both ways are simple-minded--they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity."

Updated Jan 9, 2009

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Snow Crash: Neal Stephenson

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"The Movie Star Quadrant is easier to look at. Actors love to come here because in The Black Sun, they always look as good as they do in the movies. And unlike a bar or club in Reality, they can get into this place without physically having to leave their mansion, hotel suite, ski lodge, private airline cabin, or whatever. They can strut their stuff and visit with their friends without any exposure to kidnappers, paparazzi, script-flingers, assassins, ex-spouses, autograph brokers, process servers, psycho fans, marriage proposals, or gossip columnists."

"Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight."

Updated Jan 9, 2009

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A Million Little Pieces: James Frey

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"I think it's bullshit. People don't want to accept the responsibility for their own weakness so they place the blame on something that they're not responsible for, like a disease or genetics. As far as studies go, I could prove I was from Mars if you gave me enough time and enough resources."

"Sometimes skulls are thick. Sometimes hearts are vacant. Sometimes words don't work."

Updated Jan 9, 2009

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