A Map of my Mind, Part 1: Fifteen Books
Sooner or later, one gets the feeling that introspection does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. Answers to questions like “Who am I?” are far from apparent from a cursory inspection of our own consciousness. On the other hand, the unexamined life is not worth living. So we need to be a bit more sophisticated in exploring our own inner geography, for which, a map of the psychic cosmos would come handy. Now, a good atlas of the earth gives us different kinds of information: data about cities and countries details the spatial distribution of human inhabitation and political boundaries, contours of the earth’s surface show us the distribution of mountain tops and oceans trenches and maps of minerals and vegetation give us the distribution of natural and organic substances.
What would be a corresponding map of the inner world? What would make it easier for the explorer of the psyche to find his or her way through the jungle? As a bibliophile, the first thought that comes to my mind is that the books I read are the best landmarks to start this inner exploration. With that thought, here are fifteen books I have read recently and that have left a positive impression. They are distributed into five categories: Fiction, History/Biography, Religion, Philosophy and Science.
Fiction.
Borges: Collected Fictions
Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
Desani: All about H.Hatterr
History/Biography
Raab: Five Families : The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires
Wilentz: The Rise of American Democracy
Montefiore: Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
Philosophy
Garfield: The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way : Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika
Gardner: Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Kant and The Critique of Pure Reason
Raju: Structural Depths of Indian Thought
Religion
Panikkar: The Vedic Experience
Cleary: The Blue Cliff Record
Ricard: The Life of Shabkar
Science
Bortoft: The Wholeness of Nature : Goethe’s Way Toward a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature
Gibson: The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
Johnstone: Sketches of an Elephant: A Topos Theory Compendium
All the links are to Amazon’s listing of the book in question. They are not paying me, but since I use their website as an unofficial bibliographic database all the time, I thought I should acknowledge them as the source of many a citation.
