10 books intro

[arethinn]

From the plutonica.net blog, this sounds interesting:

Over at Rune Soup Gordon introduced a book game with the following guidelines:

How would you introduce someone to magic using only books? He or she has a month in a lake house and will read whatever you tell them in the exact order that you tell them to. Not even any peeking at other books on the list.

I'll have to think about my own response, but in the meantime I'm interested in yours. Feel free to exapnd a bit from "magic" per se into your personal spiritual path or whatever. (Note that the books certainly need not strictly be on such topics; Psyche's take started out with Baudelaire.)

Comments

[elf]

For starters ('cos I'm not going to come up with a month-long intensive reading plan off the top of my head, and that's all I've got time for right now):

• Three Books of Occult Philosophy - Agrippa
• Magic - Aleister Crowley (preferable to Magic in Theory and Practice, which was edited by Regardie & removed some important parts)
• The Occult - Colin Wilson
• Real Magic - Isaac Bonewits
• Spiral Dance - Starhawk
• Etheric Anatomy - Victor Anderson
• Illusions - Richard Bach (despite recently-noted reservations about it)
• Be Here Now - Baba Ram Dass/Richard Alpert
• Liber Kaos - Peter Carroll
• 1 book on divination, probably on tarot, astrology, or i ching.
• 1 book on some form of neuro-linguistic programming (loosely defined)
• 1 book on meditation, zen, and creative visualization. (Again, loosely defined.)
• Lords and Ladies - Terry Pratchett

I can think of several others that have been highly recommended but I haven't read them. And I was touching on religion but not directly leading in that direction. There are other Pagan magic books besides SD, but that's the one *I* would use. I wouldn't be surprised if BTW people used the Farrar's books instead.

[arcanetrivia]

Three Books of Occult Philosophy - Agrippa

You'd use this as the first introductory text? Wow. High hurdle. I don't think I've ever managed to get through it.

[elf]

Not so much as "read this to get started," but "start reading this, go read some other stuff, come back to this, read other stuff some more, come back to find out where that factoid came from," and so on. Reference work that should (IMHO YMMV) be introduced early.

[michiexile]

Modifying the question to "10 books to take someone to where I am", I might do something like this:

1. Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach.


2. Hofstadter: Metamagical themas


3. Lakatos: Proof and refutations


4. Aigner, Ziegler: Proofs from the book


5. Cox, Little, O'Shea: Ideals, Varieties and algorithms


6. Armstrong: Basic Topology


7. Adams: The Knot Book


8. Conway: The symmetries of things


9. Koszlov: Combinatorial Algebraic Topology


10. Zomorodian: Topology for computing

Most likely, however, the hypothetical someone who launches into this would do well to have a minor reference library at hand, just to slug through the not-quite-as-entrancing literature they need to get back up to date with the mathematical techniques used by the listed books. I do include a few steep jumps from popular and enchanting books to technical and enchanting books.

However, for every single one of the books listed above, my feelings when reading it have been mainly "OMG! This is SO awesome! I want to do THIS myself!"; and my current self is shaped indelibly by my contact with each of these books.

I have left out a number of formative books - what 10-book list could avoid it? Among the most important ignored books, I'd include, in no particular order: Beachy-Blair: Abstract Algebra, Weibel: An introduction to homological algebra, Flatland, Alice in wonderland, Newman: The world of mathematics, Schneier: Applied Cryptography, Kaczynski-Mischaikow-Mrozek: Computational homology, Hatcher: Algebraic Topology, Matousek: Using the Borsuk-Ulam theorem, Atiyah-MacDonald: Introduction to commutative algebra.

[valkyriur.livejournal.com]

This is a fascinating question that I think could be particularly illuminating to the self. One would have to ask oneself "why" they would choose those books, along with the best order to present them. I may or may not come back with an answer, but I wanted to comment to let you know I think this thought-provoking.