Favorite Books

Here are ten books that have given me much enjoyment

and have had an impact on my life decisions.

Gödel Escher Bach by Douglas Hostadter

(By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, the book expounds concepts fundamental to mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence. Through illustration and analysis, the book discusses how self-reference and formal rules allow systems to acquire meaning despite being made of "meaningless" elements. It also discusses what it means to communicate, how knowledge can be represented and stored, the methods and limitations of symbolic representation, and even the fundamental notion of "meaning" itself. The notion of recursion is a critical element of the book.

Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky

(This short book, which I read in graduate school, is a founding document of a new approach to linguistics formulated at MIT in the fifties. It introduced the idea of Transformational Generative Grammar—a new approach to the study of sentence structure. The book was responsible for my switching from literature to linguistics. The idea of recursion appears again here. )

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

(This book explores how computer designers work and think.)

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

(Begins with a plausible though somewhat fanciful explanation of the beginning of life on earth, and in a later chapter introduces the concept of the cultural meme as a new kind of replicator.)

Fortunata y Jacinta by Benito Pérez Galdós

(This is one of the most popular and representative novels of Spanish literary realism. It’s the story of two madrileñas of different classes who both have a romantic involvement with the same man.)

Three Who Made a Revolution by Bertram Wolfe

(After slogging through countless boring chapters of European history in a college course, we were assigned to read this wonderful portrayal of the Russian revolution, and we learned what good history looks like)

The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution by CP Snow.

(A long essay about how scientists and humanists think and why they have trouble talking with each other. )

La España que Sobrevive—the original edition by Fernando Diaz-Plaja. (An account of Spain's transition to democracy that shows how former enemies can agree to forge a new order. This book kindled my interest in the Spanish Civil War. I was able to get an introduction to the author and together we published an American edition with notes and glosses for college students of Spanish)

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway.

(The story of an American's experience in the Spanish Civil War, written in 1940, pretty soon after the war took place.)

Longitude by Dava Sobel.

(The story of solving one of the thorniest maritime problems of all time—how you can determine your east-west location at sea. Spoiler alert—it’s a clock.)