It’s been quite some time since I blogged about what I’ve been reading. That’s not because I haven’t been reading – au contraire! – but rather because I’ve been busy doing so. I find these posts interesting for myself, so that I can look back and see where my interests were at a particular point in time. Given the sheer number of additions, I can’t properly rate them like I have in the past. Here are the more interesting ones, those that stick out in my mind:
Music
Theory of Harmony, Arnold Schoenberg. 1922.
Psychology of Music, Carl E. Seashore. 1938.
Study of Counterpoint, John J. Fux. 1965.
The Study of Fugue, Alfred Mann. 1987.
Counterpoint: The Polyphonic Vocal Style of the Sixteenth Century, Knud Jeppessen. 1992.
Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, Christoph Wolff. 2001.
Guitar Man: A Six-String Oddyssey, or, You Love that Guitar More than You Love Me, Will Hodgkinson. 2006.
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Oliver Sacks. 2008.
Mathematics
Euclid’s Elements (Books 1 - 13). 300 BC.
The Principia : Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Isaac Newton and Andrew Motte. 1846.
Introduction to Mathematical Logic, Alonzo Church. 1944.
Foundations of Algebraic Topology, Samuel Eilenberg and Norman Steenrod. 1952.
Foundations of Mathematical Logic, Haskell B. Curry. 1963.
Diophantus Of Alexandria -A Study In The History Of Greek Algebra, Sir Thomas L. Heath. 1964.
From Zero to Infinity: What Makes Numbers Interesting, Constance Reid. 1964.
Euclid in the Rainforest: Discovering Universal Truth in Logic and Math, Joseph Mazur. 2006.
Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra, John Derbyshire. 2007.
God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History, Stephen Hawking. 2007.
Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics (Modern Library Chronicles), David Berlinski. 2008.
Computers
LISP 1.5 Programmer’s Manual, John McCarthy. 1962.
Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, Marvin Lee Minsky. 1967.
The Theory of Parsing, Translation, and Compiling (Volume I: Parsing), Alfred V. Aho and Jeffrey D. Ullman. 1972.
The Theory of Parsing, Translation, and Compiling (Volume II: Compiling), Alfred V. Aho and Jeffrey D. Ullman. 1973.
Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, Niklaus Wirth 1976.
A Discipline of Programming, Edsger W. Dijkstra. 1976.
Architecture of Concurrent Programs, Per Brinch Hansen. 1977.
The Elements of Programming Style, Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger. 1978.
Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas, Seymour Papert. 1980.
Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective, Edsger W. Dijkstra. 1982.
CLU: Reference Manual (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), B. Liskov, et al. 1983.
Algorithms and Data Structures, Niklaus Wirth. 1985.
Communicating Sequential Processes, C. A. R. Hoare. 1985.
The Little LISPer, Third Edition, Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen. 1989.
Common LISP, The Language, Second Edition, Guy Steele. 1990.
The High Performance FORTRAN Handbook, Charles H. Koelbel, et. Al. 1993.
201 Principles of Software Development, Alan M. Davis. 1995.
Algol-like Languages (Progress in Theoretical Computer Science), Peter O’Hearn and Robert Tennent. 1996.
Based on this list, you might surmise that I read a lot. ;) In fact, I typically have between 3 and 5 books going simultaneously (how parallel of me), so I use the term “read” somewhat nontraditionally. I prefer to absorb the information by immersing myself in many books in the same genre simultaneously, instead of committing to a single one. This seems to be effective, but is also slightly odd and perhaps quite esoteric to other people; the result is that every room in my home is littered with books each in some possibly long-forgotten state of being “read” (along with tattered academic papers, language manuals, etc). I like it, but some people believe this is an indication that I’m a tad insane. C’est la vie.