The Reading List: A Proposal

For a long time now, there’s been a list of books I’ve kept in my head and occasionally on paper: a list consisting of those books that truly are classics in their fields, those books that take away the purpose for other books to even exist, books that so perfectly instruct and systematize a field that no other book could approach their level of quality.

This list is of the greatest value to any and all autodidacts. Those who would teach themselves need books from which to learn and the little time they can find to spend on their self-education is easily wasted without the focus a good teacher imparts. They require the right books to guide them along the path to self-development.

So, I’d like to work on creating this list and giving the public access to it.

The truth is that I’ve even had a brief version of this list on the site before, but it’s never been taken very seriously by me, so that it’s only right that no one else should ever have taken it seriously. What I’d like to do now — with the help of all of you who are willing and able — is to compile an ever increasingly more complete and more perfect list of the best books.

To make it clear what this list should consist of, I can say simply that each book on it should be the sort of book that one would do better to reread five times than to read it and four other books once. The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie is a perfect example: there is simply no reason to read any other introduction to C after reading this book.

Of course, all of the books on the list will be hard books, because what defines these books is that they have more real content in five pages than other books have in five hundred. These books are of the sort that mathematics students know well: books with prefaces that remind the reader that they are not stupid if they are working slowly through the book, that they are probably going too fast if they read more than a page a day. For what is important in learning is to gain a complete mastery of the material: these books present the material without anything superfluous and in proper order. It is up to the student to work on the material and to constantly reapproach it until it is fully mastered.

This goal stated, I’d like advice on how to approach making a public project out of this idea. I’m thinking to purchase the domain name thereadinglist.org (the .com and .net domains already being taken) and place a sort of Wiki on it to allow for colloborative development. But that’s only a rough idea. A lot more details need to go into this project if it’s going to be valuable to anyone.

But I think it would be enormously valuable if done well. As a friend once said to me while I was still in high school, the problem of human life is never that there is not enough information: it’s knowing what to learn and when to learn it and where to find it.

All knowledge is not created equal and this project is an attempt to see to it that people are taught the most important things properly. One of my great interests in this life is the as yet undeveloped art and science of pedagogy: to develop a truly definitive list of works for instruction would be a great step in this direction.

And, beyond everything else, there’s the fun in the irony that while so many are fighting against the canon, I am here trying to create a new one built upon better principles.