The 3 books you’d find criminal not to have read?

[BernardLanguillier]

I’ll start:
- 21 lessons for the 21st century - Harari
- The society of the spectacle - Guy Debord
- A brief history of everything - Ken Wilber

Cheers,
Bernard

[Alan Goldhammer]

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
JR by William Gaddis (maybe the best work of fiction about the business world)
The Goldbug Variations by Richard Powers

[Martin Kristiansen]

Don’t know about criminal but books important to me anyway

A Dry White Season. Andre Brink. Revealed the evils of apartheid to me as a youngster.
Maps of Meaning. Jordan Peterson. Hard to explain. Tied many things together that were rattling around in my head as disconnected items.
The Essence of the Heart Sutra. 14 th Dalai Lama. You would have to read it or perhaps be a Buddhist to understand why this was a big deal to me.

[degrub]

the composted works of William Shakespeare
One is enough.

[Martin Kristiansen]

the composted works of William Shakespeare
One is enough.

Composted? I guess you mean complete. Well I’m not sure actually. He did write more than three books. Could I then say the complete works of Charles Dickens as one of my books? Seems a bit of a reach no?

[degrub]

Well.....
digested as one sees fit.

[jeremyrh]

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
JR by William Gaddis (maybe the best work of fiction about the business world)
The Goldbug Variations by Richard Powers

Two excellent choices there. I’m not familiar with the 3rd but as a general rule I’d avoid picking up a fiction about business for fear of inadvertently selecting some Ayn Rand- esque horseshit.

[Alan Goldhammer]

Two excellent choices there. I’m not familiar with the 3rd but as a general rule I’d avoid picking up a fiction about business for fear of inadvertently selecting some Ayn Rand- esque horseshit.

If you are referring to JR by Gaddis, it's not Rand-esque in any way.  Gaddis was one of the great post-modern writers of our time and spent a long period doing corporate public relations work.  More is on his Wikipedia page:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gaddis   It takes time to get used to his fiction as the books are almost entirely written in dialogue.  "A Frolic of His Own" is a great send up of the American legal system.

[RSL]

Everything by Churchill: the six volume second world war series, The World Crisis (his first world war series) , Marlboro, His Life and Times, A History of the English Speaking Peoples, and everything else of his you can lay hands on. Since his take on WW II was somewhat biased, also read the three volume set: The Last Lion.

If you want to learn how to write, and to get a handle on how to think, you MUST read Churchill. That'll keep you busy for a while and off Luminous Landscape.

[BernardLanguillier]

Thank you all for your inputs.

It’s going to be interesting to look at the themes being highlighted and at the authors being selected.

My initial 3 choices were aimed at understanding what I consider to be the most relevant aspects about the past, the present and the future.

Cheers,
Bernard

[josh.reichmann]

These are all dense and require preliminary set up reading - but they each sky-rocket ones understanding of fundamental knowledge/perspective. (Whoever mentioned Ken Wilber:👌)

1. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

2. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

3. The Great Exposition of Secret Mantra - Volume 1
The Wisdom of Tibet Series
Introduced by His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama
Translated and Edited by Jeffery Hopkins

[David Sutton]

Jean Renoir: Renoir, My Father
Robert Henri: The Art Spirit
Tom Wolfe: The Painted Word

And a bonus extra: for insomnia anything by Dickens works a charm.

[elliot_n]

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought

[HonorableSensor]

3 Books:

Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
Lord of the Rings by Tolkien (always been a fan and loved Silmarillion, which deepened my love of LOTR)
Markings by Dag Hammarskjold

3 Essays/Short Stories:
Youth by Joseph Conrad
Of Missing Persons by Jack Finney
AE Housman introductory lecture on becoming a professor of Latin

Bonus essay that photographers might well enjoy:  "In Praise of Shadows" by Junichiro Tanizaki (sorry I don't know how to put in the accented characters)

[HSakols]

How about

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollann. 

Timothy Leary' spirit is still alive, but he also helped demonize psychedelics, which I think delayed this technology by a couple of decades.  At this point, I cannot ingest psychedelics drugs again, but I believe that Pollan is on to something. 

[Ivo_B]

Bertrand Russell: history of western philosophy
Karen Armstrong: A history of God
Stephen Covey: the seven habits of highly effective peoples.


And to understand something about growing up in a collaborating family during WWII:
Hugo Claus: The sorrow of Belgium

[josh.reichmann]

How about

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollann. 

Timothy Leary' spirit is still alive, but he also helped demonize psychedelics, which I think delayed this technology by a couple of decades.  At this point, I cannot ingest psychedelics drugs again, but I believe that Pollan is on to something.

I read this. And as a proponent / partaker of plant medicine and psychedelics, I can attest.
From attuning to issues of the psyche to the somatic relationship with mind/body and beyond - with a proper setting/practitioner, a lot of healing and change can come. More than can be summarized here.
Friends of mine are fairly forefront on the development of a more egalitarian version of Ayahousca ceremonial sharing. This field is moving fast. And moving away from it’s perhaps tainted image.
I could go on.
The place where I studied contemplative psychotherapy and the teachers who formed it from Stanford, and most schools looking at mind are perusing this.