Darren Zastruga

The first Stephen King book I ever read, I stole this from a second-hand bookstore (I passed over that other book whose title instructed me steal it, and shoved this one in my pocket instead). It got me hooked on King books.

In high school, I plucked this book off the shelf in a Barnes and Noble store, because I liked the portrait of Chekhov on the cover. His dark comedic look at Russian society instigated my lifelong interest in Russia.

The first PKD book I ever read, the interweaving confusion over realities was mind-blowing at the time. At some point I loaned it indefinitely to someone I can no longer recall, but I want to re-read it.

This is one of the stories in the Russian reader I got back in my Russian college classes, an excerpt from Lermontov's book A Hero of Our Time. I've always liked it, perhaps because paradoxically Lermontov's "hero" is a bit of a bigoted jerk.

The time travel aspect of this book allowed for a unique romance, but I think this book is underminded by its characterization as a romance novel. If anything, the time travel feature allows Niffenegger to better explore the themes of personal change over the course of a relationship. In any case, it's one unique novel.

I stumbled across this beat-era book in a Los Angeles bookstore when I was still in college. I once became convinced I could write it into a great screenplay. I hang onto it in case I ever do follow through on that idea.

A fictionalized version of his non-fiction collection Falafal Birmingham still tells a great story that later became a movie not nearly as engaging as these two books. He later went on to write three sci-fi novels and essays on his interviews with Aussie politicians about marijuana.

Leonard loves his strong female characters, indifferent in the face of danger, and this is one of his best (save for his favorite, Karen Sisco).

It's Marquez's "magical realism" that is always mentioned in descriptions of his work, and it's what captured my imagination. Actually, it's his treatment of the supernatural almost as another layer of mundane life that surprised me--that suoernatural events could be treated as just another part of existing. Somehow, that's more powerful than throwing all kinds of literary flourish at the supernatural.

Vonnegut's first published book, I'm going to admit it's not amazing. But if you replace the cold steel machine engineering with cold silicone computer engineering, it's got modern-day relevance.

This is such a great collection of stories, with a variety of formats for what I imagine were the conventional 1950's-1960's. My favorites: "All the King's Men," "The Hyannis Port Story," "Deer in the Works," "The Euphio Question," and "Unready to Wear."

This re-imagining of Shakespeare's King Lear is brilliant. Moore's talent is in giving Pocket, Lear's fool, such a distinctive, sarcastic, and hilarious voice of his own. Moore is also fantastic at constructing a great story without completely relying on the original play's structure.

This collection of short stories a different, more realistic portrayal of James Bond than I'm used to from the movies (though I haven't read FlemingÕs novels). Here's he's just a sharp-minded intelligence operative; only a few stories required much dare-devil action. In some stories, he wasn't even the primary focus of the story. Just good, clean story-telling without too much fluff.

I have read this text multiple times. Every time, I get it--or it gets to me--in a new way. It's wisdom can be deceptively simple sometimes. Reading the Tao Te Ching never gets old.

Bruce Lee approached martial arts with a technical simplicity while applying a philosophical complexity. This book is actually a compilation of his writings put together after his death (including many of his handwritten notes and sketches). It’s a good summary of all his ideas for the person wanting to know the tenets of Jeet Kune Do and Lee’s philosophies.

This book contains many lessons told through allegories: maintaining balance while achieving success, not being so useful as to be used up by others, and connecting with the spirit of the Tao. But the most entertaining are those that dig at Confucius and his followers.

PKD’s “introspection without end.” Nine hundred pages of Dick’s roiling mind. It’s actually culled from the 8,000 pages Dick scribbled night after night from 1974 until his death in 1982, trying to come to terms with his mystical experiences, the nature of reality, and the many philosophies he’d studied to understand the way of the universe.

As a young man, Dr. Hawkins nearly died huddling on the side of a road in a blizzard. He reached some kind of spiritual understanding, and he grew up to write a book about kinesthetic calibrations of human consciousness. While I don’t remain convinced of his system of asking people questions while gently but firmly pushing their extended arms down, he certainly lays out a fascinating foundation for his work.

A reader for anyone looking to catch up on the basic literature of existentialism, this book contains excerpts from the works of many great writers and philosophers of Western culture: Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Hesse, Heidigger, Jaspers, Kafka, Mailer, and others you didn’t know about/thought of as existentialist. I read this in the beginning of my philosophical journey.

This ancient text lays out the various cycles of life, mood, feelings, and luck. After some studying of the metaphors and abstract words used, you might be able to figure it out. This book was a huge influence on Phillip K. Dick at one time; he used it to plot his books when he got stuck.

The textbook I read to catch up on all the basic concepts of psychology. I found it in a used book store in a podunk Idaho town while driving to Montana; it cost me $6. It was also published in 1996--it doesn't even mention MRIs until the last chapter. Though not the most current book, it got me up to speed with the basic functions. And it's wkind of fun to read more recent books and see how our understanding of brains has changed in nearly 20 years.

This book perfectly matched my interest in neurology and my frustrations with my new dog. I’m trying to remember that my dog is more attuned to motion than color details and watches every single thing I do around the house to learn my habits.

Medina aimed to write a simple primer on the way the brain functions in everyday life situations, and he succeeded. The rules cover the way sensory integration, attention, memory, and stress (among other things) work in the brain.

There’s more to the science of self than just neuroscience. Ouellette also dives into the studies of what genes result in certain personality traits. That, and the ego-dissolving power of LSD.

The brain is a pattern-recognizing machine, Kurzweil shows, and he and others have reverse engineered it to create speech recognition programs. The artificial intelligence field has a long way to go to develop the perfection in what evolution designed in the human brain, but when it does you won’t be so sure what makes you so different from an android.

Lehrer put together a great cornucopia of all those studies you heard described on This American Life, Radiolab, and all those Ted talks. Lehrer’s ultimate point is to point out that we use emotions to decide things all the time, but there’s also a mental process involved in those “gut feelings.” He never really defines the nature of “emotions,” however.

I just finished reading this collection of Chinese texts from 900-1500 A.D. These writers are actually just summing up the collected wisdom of Taoists, Buddhists, and even some Confuciousists. While it still uses some obscure Chinese metaphors, in many cases they restate the themes more clearly. But regardless of the philosophy, the main idea remains the same: focus on the breath, stop the mind, and you're on your way to higher learning.

This is another ancient collection of Taoist texts that serve as a sort of manual for meditation. Except this one uses fewer abstract metaphors (in parts), so it’s a little more comprehendible.

In my hometown library one day after school, I stumbled on Laberge’s book and first learned the techniques for having lucid dreams. At that time, I had difficulty doing things like relaxing my body as I prepared for sleep. But I did have a few lucid dreams, and it led me to try again with Robert Waggoner’s book.

This is a bizarre and macabre graphic novel about two boys creating complex musical instruments using the corpses of pigs and squirrels. They live in their own world, traveling through mazes of old, seemingly abandoned houses filled with all kinds of mechanical equipment. I’m still trying to understand the purpose of the story.

I never realized how many zodiacs exist in DC. Ovason is convinced that the Masons who designed and founded DC and its most important structures wanted to make sure it had the celestial protection of Virgo. Sometimes he tries to hard to make his point, but he points to plenty of examples in DC you never noticed. Great book if you want to know about Masonic symbology, astrological zodiacs, and DC history all at once.

A refreshing change from the standard book on writing that only focuses on the techniques of writing. Turchi uses maps as the metaphor for crafting a story, so he delves into the history of cartographry to find more sub-metaphors. In the end I came out with both a better sense of how to "map out" a story and the history of mapping out the world before us.

Ekman was the first to really break down the research-proven methods for identifying a liar’s tells. He also writes in this book not just about what to look for when they do lie, but also why and when people might lie.

A former FBI agent specializing in interviewing and interrogating suspects, Navarro covers the signs the body gives about internal emotions. It’s a perfect compliment to Ekman’s books; where Ekman focuses on the face, Navarro looks at feet, legs, hands, and posture.

The mind needs to stay active if you want to keep remembering things. Dr. Small tells you not to worry about whether your mom is more senile now that she’s retired; she just needs something to keep herself busy. A good lesson even for young people.

At over 1,000 pages, this biography probably covers every twist and turn in Buffet’s life a little too closely. But it is invaluable for understanding how he developed his masterful knowledge of stocks and philosophy of investing.

As the title says, this is a book about the math behind the moderately successful CBS TV show Numb3rs. A few months ago I visited an exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Theater about the history of cryptography, and it re-kindled an interest in math that I lost in pre-calculus in high school. I then found this book in my closet, with a note inside from a friend that said, "Ignore the show. Read chapters 4, 6, 9, 10, 11." Thsi book presents an intro (and an intro only, at just 206 pages) into the concepts of probability, data mining, Bayesian inference, DNA profiling, code making/breaking, fingerprint reliability, network analysis, and the math in Blackjack.

While not as insightful into the events of Vonnegut’s life as autobiography (or even biography) might have been, reading Vonnegut’s letters provided a lot of insight into Vonnegut’s thinking, as the letters span the various cycles of his life.

I read this book by Kurt Vonnegut’s son Mark after reading the collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s letters. I wanted to get another point of view of Vonnegut’s life than his own. While it does have some insight on the elder, Mark Vonnegut’s book is an excellent first-hand view of schizophrenia and psychotic breaks, and humorous just like his father’s books.

Now Ames is a journalist for Pandomedia and Taibbi is a columnist for Rolling Stone, both with several books in print. But they wrote this book while still publishing The eXile magazine in Moscow to poke fun at the American media coverage of Russia and to more deeply explore the Russia of the 1990’s.

Painstakingly detailed in its timeline from interviews with and documents obtained from Kruschev’s family, this is as complete a biography as you’ll find. But it’s also a fine textbook on Soviet history. The scenes from Stalin’s inner circle, drinking themselves silly and playing pranks on each other to keep Stalin amused while they all feared getting a bullet to the back of the head, still stay with me.

The indispensable history of how Afghanistan became the mire it is, the United States government's shifting attention to the country, and the CIA's role in shaping the factions on the ground. Will also tell you everything you need to know about how little we can trust Pakistan's intelligence agency.

Baer’s book is better written and less ego-driven than Jones’. And he keeps an eye on the broader, global dynamics picture.