600 Books

I am turning 23 next Saturday. I did the math, and realized that, if I read one good book per month, and live to be 73, I only have time to read 600 good books before I die, hopefully of liver cancer.

I'll probably read other books than the big 600. If I wanted to, I could read a book a week, on average. The book a month estimate is for good books. I've read a lot of books in my life, but I think I've only read about six good books in my life:

The Prince

The Art of War

Mere Christianity

The Everlasting Man

Fear and Trembling

The Sickness unto Death

I'm realizing there's a huge difference between plain old books and good books, the sort of books by dead people that are read more than a hundred years later. The Radical Reformission, or Blue Like Jazz, are a couple of books that I really like and have found to be quite helpful, but I don't think they'll be read in a hundred years. They aren't built to last. People are going to read The Republic or Critique of Pure Reason, until the end of the world, and maybe even after that, because they say something no one had said before in a timeless way. 

I want to read good books, because most of the things I say, have been said before me, more eloquently.

What are your suggestions for really good books, the ones that are going to be read a hundred years from now, that say new things that haven't been said before? (I've mostly mentioned non-fiction here, but fiction that's about something big is super, too.)

Mr Shear and the Dumpster

While at community college, I took Differential Equations with Mr Shear. As he would write equations up on the chalkboard, coming to one that was particularly useful or profound, he would laugh through his nose with delight. I suppose he once worked as an engineer or physicist for the U. S. Army at their labs in Aberdeen; then, instead of retiring, he became a professor. He was a good professor. Mr Shear was quite old.

Mr Shear wrote on the chalkboard with a brass chalk holder, so that he wouldn't get chalk dust on his fingers. He posted his home phone number in the syllabus, with the note: "Call me if you have any questions about the homework. Do not call after 9 PM. I go to bed early because I am an old man.". One time, we had a take-home test, and when we got to class to turn it in, Mr Shear asked who had called him at 1 AM. He wasn't mad so much as amused.

One time, Mr Shear was lecturing, when some student made the mistake of asking him what logarithms are. Mr Shear gave the sort of prepared speech that all the old engineers have, about how we used to do everything using slide rules and tables of logarithms are quite useful when that's all you have.

"In fact," he continued, "during the Great Depression, there was a sort of Civilian Conservation Corps for mathematicians, except, instead of building parks and bridges and so on that didn't really need building, they worked out tables of logarithms to an unnecessary precision. These otherwise out-of-work mathematicians labored for years, calculating logarithms by hand. They filled volumes and volumes with these tables of logarithms. And do you know where these books are now?"

"No, where are they?" we asked.

"In the dumpster. We have calculators now!" He laughed through his nose, and went back to lecturing on the method of undetermined coefficients.