Duino Elegies
We have a marvelous, almost legendary, image of the circumstances in which the composition of this great poem began. Rilke was staying at a castle (Duino) on the sea near Trieste. One morning he walked out on the battlements and climbed down to where the rocks dropped sharply to the sea. From out of the wind, which was blowing with great force, Rilke seemed to hear a voice: Wer, wenn ich schriee, horte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? (If I cried out, who would hear me up there, among the angelic orders?). He wrote these words, the opening of the first Duino Elegy, in his notebook, then went inside to continue what was to be his major work and one of the literary masterpieces of the century.
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- Labyrinths - Jorge Borges (I've gifted this many times)
Duino Elegies - Rainer Rilke, translated by Robert Hunter
- Rilke is a must!!! I loved his Duino Elegies.
- Language in Thought and Action, S.I. Hayakawa
How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler
Gilgamesh
Beowulf
Snowcrash
High Output Management, Andy Grove
Hell's Angels by Hunter S Thompson
Programming Pearls, Jon Bentley
Walden, Thoreau
Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
Letters from a Stoic, Seneca
Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein
Tyranny of Words, Stuart Chase
Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon
Disrupted, Dan Lyons
Big Data, Nathan Marz
Practical OO Design in Ruby, Sandi Metz
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainier Maria Rilke
Anatomy of a City, Kate Ascher
Language and Thought by Chomsky
Hero of a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
Language and Responsibility by Chomsky
Magic, Science, Religion by Malinowski
Meditiations by Marcus Aurelius
Oranges by John McPhee
The Dream of the Enlightement, Anthony Gottlieb
Nonexistant Knight/Cloven Viscount, two novellas by Calvino Italo
Deltoid Pumpkin Seed by John McPhee
Infrastructure by Brian Haynes
I'd recommend almost all of them, but especially the first two, and Autobiography of Red(poetry).
