Alan Kay's reading list

An important idea about reading is that part of the pleasure (maybe even more than that) is one's choice of "this book, now". I had read many hundreds of books a year by the time I got to high school, but I balked at reading books chosen for me in a class. I suggested instead that the classes deal with themes and that there should be several thousand good books in the library that students could choose for themselves. This would make the discussions of the themes quite interesting, etc. But no go, so I wound up -- for their chosen books only -- reading "Classic Comics" like most of the rest of the students (I did get around to reading the "chosen books" later in life.)

The approach of lots of books and themes was used by Mortimer Adler in putting together "The Great Books of the Western World" (now 60 of them). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor... Besides these books he picked 102 "Great Ideas", wrote an essay on each one, cross indexed the ideas through the "Great Books", and published the essays as the two volume "Syntopicon".

In this sense, the reading list I came up with for Anderson Consulting was too short -- it wasn't a decent library size. And this is true of the "Great Books": it's too short as well.

Another idea is the "Oxbridge" approach: pick "4" important as orthogonal as possible large subjects, and go deep on them until they meet in "the good stuff".

Simplest heuristic: read a lot.

One way to think about this in the larger sense is that "an interesting person is one who is interesting whether you agree with them or not". This also goes for books. (This is the "it's about perspectives, not about relevance" point of view.)

It's worth it to try to understand what "interesting people" have thought -- it provides context for one's own thinking.

_The Laws of Form_ by George Spencer Brown,

Anything about logic by Gotthard Günther :) (He's a rare bird.)

_Autopoiesis and Cognition: the Realization of the Living_ by Maturana and Varela

Anything by Niklass Luhmann about social systems: the economy, mass media, art, functional differentiation, … He was a student of Talcott Parsons

Norbert Wiener, _Cybernetics: Or Control And Communication in the Animal and the Machine_ and _The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society_

_An Introduction to Cybernetics_ by W. Ross Ashby

McCullogh and Pitts (You mention Minsky but not these dudes.) _A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity_

Basically, most of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberneticist

? :)

Fluency really helps because there are fewer really worthwhile books than other kinds (this is similar to "most ideas are mediocre down to bad", in no small part because good ideas are a rarer set of insights, and they have to be formed in our not wonderful commonsense environment).

In third grade I started to put a lot more effort into really remembering what I read (it finally occurred to me that I'd have to reread most of the books if I didn't).

Because of efficiency, etc., I generally finish virtually all books. I often read several books at a time. I don't spend all day reading now, though I certainly often did when I was younger.

Reading often leads to other reading. I also read reviews of books. A really fun find ca 1970 was The Whole Earth Catalog, which listed thousands of "tools" including hundreds of books with small very useful reviews. Most of these were very worthwhile (and all the books in the WEC were the first books in the PARC library).

I sympathize with the writer below who wished for a little description for each book on my reading list (annotated bibliographies are very helpful).

I follow my nose (and try to use other dim senses when possible).

Just to remind again that the list was for people in business -- they were quite intelligent, had college degrees, but were not well read or "broad". They were very goal-oriented, and I think they did not use school or college for "general education". I tried to pick books that would be assessable and useful for them.

So no "Das Kapital" or other political tracts. I would have put in Madison's Notes on the Constitutional Convention, and many other political writings for a different audience.

I didn't really include much if anything primary about Philosophy (again, that wasn't the point for this group).

And, now that we are discussing this, I now recall that the original list (it was an email) was not just expanded by I know not whom into the pictorial form on the web, but has also been edited a bit. The most important changes are from sentences like "Anything by Bertrand Russell" and "Anything by Jerome Bruner" etc. to the individual books (as subsets). However, I don't recall what I did say about Plato ...

by that account, shouldn't we all be learning mathematics ?

Good question, but I don't have a good answer (perhaps too much of an idealist ...)

EDIT: from a brief read of his wikipedia page:

"Kay has lectured extensively on the idea that the computer revolution is very new, and all of the good ideas have not been universally implemented."

Coming from someone with multiple major accomplishments (OOP pioneer, smalltalk, overlapping window GUI, etc.), that's a powerful message that can still be applied today.

That's probably true, and that's good. However, that doesn't mean that the author's gender doesn't influence the work itself. You are not deliberately opting into skewing the data yourself, but you are still consuming a biased input set.

> Your comment suggest that Alan Kay deliberately discarded books written by women, and I find that hard to believe.

I don't think that's the case. I think it's just the more value-free observation that "this set of data points is biased." It doesn't state why it is, just that it is. That might be relevant to someone who expects the list to reflect a certain distribution of perspectives.

The subject of paper vs digital is of particular interest to me because I volunteer with www.savenypl.org, a group created to thwart the NYPL's efforts to gut the stacks at the 42nd Street Library and sell of two branch libraries (we succeeded, mostly). I am not as skeptical of keeping books off site as some of our members, but I think many libraries are misguided in their rush to remove paper books, for reasons of both reading efficacy and surveillance. I know many technologists share these concerns. Richard Stallman was kind enough to help a few years ago (https://stallman.org/save-the-nypl.html). Now it would be good to have additional technical people weigh in on the issue of digitization / paper book removal.

May I add you to the list of such people and / or keep you posted?

It would be good to know if they have tried studies that involve grades of reading fluency.