Here are 87 books that The Romantic Generation fans have personally recommended if you like
The Romantic Generation.
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I am an academic researcher and an avid non-fiction reader. There are many popular books on science or music, but it’s much harder to find texts that manage to occupy the space between popular and professional writing. I’ve always been looking for this kind of book, whether on physics, music, AI, or math – even when I knew that as a non-pro, I wouldn’t be able to understand everything. In my new book I’ve been trying to accomplish something similar: A book that can intrigue readers who are not professional economic theorists, that they will find interesting even if they can’t follow everything.
In the ongoing debates over artificial general intelligence (AGI), Judea Pearl is taking a firm stand: He argues that an intelligent robot should be able to reason about causality and that the currently fashionable approaches to AI miss this aspect.
A celebrated AI researcher and a Turing Prize laureate, Pearl has developed an amazingly original approach to this problem. This book is a high-end popular exposition of his approach.
But it’s so much more than that. It’s a history of statistics and its conflicted attitude to causality. It’s a story of heroes (or villains?) in this history. And it’s a scientific autobiography that describes Pearl’s journey. Pearl likes picking fights with the AI community, statisticians, or economists. He’s boastful, provocative, extremely intelligent, and knows how to tell a story.
'Wonderful ... illuminating and fun to read' - Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow
'"Pearl's accomplishments over the last 30 years have provided the theoretical basis for progress in artificial intelligence and have redefined the term "thinking machine"' - Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist, Google, Inc.
The influential book in how causality revolutionized science and the world, by the pioneer of artificial intelligence
'Correlation does not imply causation.' This mantra was invoked by scientists for decades in order to avoid taking positions as to whether one thing caused another, such as smoking…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I am an academic researcher and an avid non-fiction reader. There are many popular books on science or music, but it’s much harder to find texts that manage to occupy the space between popular and professional writing. I’ve always been looking for this kind of book, whether on physics, music, AI, or math – even when I knew that as a non-pro, I wouldn’t be able to understand everything. In my new book I’ve been trying to accomplish something similar: A book that can intrigue readers who are not professional economic theorists, that they will find interesting even if they can’t follow everything.
A simple (not perfect) test of whether you’re going to love this book: Just check out the author’s blog, called “shtetl-optimized”. The style is similar: sharp, funny, mixing professional theoretical Computer Science with broader takes.
I am still in the middle of the book, and nevertheless, I’m happy to recommend it. As an amateur with superficial CS knowledge, I am enjoying this introduction to classical complexity theory and the basic theory of quantum computation.
Aaronson’s distinctive style makes the ride all the more enjoyable. It’s neither a “real” textbook nor a pop-science book. It’s in a weird space somewhere in between, and I love it!
Written by noted quantum computing theorist Scott Aaronson, this book takes readers on a tour through some of the deepest ideas of maths, computer science and physics. Full of insights, arguments and philosophical perspectives, the book covers an amazing array of topics. Beginning in antiquity with Democritus, it progresses through logic and set theory, computability and complexity theory, quantum computing, cryptography, the information content of quantum states and the interpretation of quantum mechanics. There are also extended discussions about time travel, Newcomb's Paradox, the anthropic principle and the views of Roger Penrose. Aaronson's informal style makes this fascinating book accessible…
I am an academic researcher and an avid non-fiction reader. There are many popular books on science or music, but it’s much harder to find texts that manage to occupy the space between popular and professional writing. I’ve always been looking for this kind of book, whether on physics, music, AI, or math – even when I knew that as a non-pro, I wouldn’t be able to understand everything. In my new book I’ve been trying to accomplish something similar: A book that can intrigue readers who are not professional economic theorists, that they will find interesting even if they can’t follow everything.
This is actually not one book but a five-volume (!) series of books which contains some of the best writing on classical music I’ve ever come across.
Taruskin, who passed away recently, was a legendary musicologist. In his writings, he managed to combine analytic writing that addresses his colleagues with unbelievably sharp and insightful writing that I, as a classical music fan who is not a pro, enjoy tremendously.
Taruskin loved picking intellectual fights, and this sort of combative energy is gripping. In this series, there are major story arcs like the interplay between “oral” and “literate” traditions or the role of nationalism in 19th-century music. I liked how Tarsukin switches smoothly between a close analysis of a piece and a discussion of how it relates to the wider culture.
The Oxford History of Western Music is a magisterial survey of the traditions of Western music by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists of our time. This text illuminates, through a representative sampling of masterworks, those themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to each musical age.
Taking a critical perspective, this text sets the details of music, the chronological sweep of figures, works, and musical ideas, within the larger context of world affairs and cultural history. Written by an authoritative, opinionated, and controversial figure in musicology, The Oxford History of Western Music provides a…
Coyote weather is the feral, hungry season, drought-stricken, and ready to catch fire. It’s 1967, and the American culture is violently remaking itself while the country is forcibly sending its young men to fight in a deeply unpopular war.
Jerry has stubbornly made no plans for the future because he…
I am an academic researcher and an avid non-fiction reader. There are many popular books on science or music, but it’s much harder to find texts that manage to occupy the space between popular and professional writing. I’ve always been looking for this kind of book, whether on physics, music, AI, or math – even when I knew that as a non-pro, I wouldn’t be able to understand everything. In my new book I’ve been trying to accomplish something similar: A book that can intrigue readers who are not professional economic theorists, that they will find interesting even if they can’t follow everything.
I am an academic economist, but even more interested in intellectual debates. I discovered this book when I was a PhD student, and it has remained a favorite of mine.
In the 1970s, macroeconomics (not my field) underwent a revolution. The old guard was “Keynesian,” the new Turks were “new classical”. This book is a series of conversations from the early 1980s with the protagonists of this epic period, many future Nobel laureates.
The interviewer, Arjo Klamer, was interested in the rhetoric and culture of economics, and he constructed the interviews in a way that nicely brought out these elements. The interlocutors are brilliant, acerbic, and funny. If you think economics is dry or boring, you won’t think so after seeing how passionate these people are.
A collection of interviews with 11 of the nation's leading economic theorists providing an introduction to current issues in economic theory and to the ways in which economists think.
I’ve been an equestrian all of my life, so when I pick up a story that promises horses, I have high expectations. I want to be immersed in the moment, and to be honest, that can be difficult to find. I have put down more ranch romances than I have finished. My cowboys really need to be cowboys, not just hot guys in hats that maybe ride a horse off-screen sometimes. But when I find that special something, I can’t put it down. I hang on for the ride and put the horses up wet. I do wish these places were real. I’d book my ticket in a heartbeat.
Silverian Stables isn’t technically a ranch, as it is in a fantasy story and the stable is more a place where the horses of the knights, travelers, and other high-born’s horses are kept, but in only a few pages I was sold and ready to start the long trek up Mount Saddle. The stables become a focal point in book two where the Stable Master is one of the main characters. We get a loving peek into her life and the lives of those caring for the horses. The horses that fill the stables feel like ones I have known all my life and am dying to ride. Even though it is fantasy romance, it reads like any great small-town story, just with an added hint of magic.
Raised as a noble scion, Heinregard comes to the House of Silveria for their famous Spring Song festival, but when he hears the voice of stable lad Clayten, he's overthrown in more ways than one. As they spend time together overseeing Heinregard’s troublesome younger cousins, the two grow close. Is Heinregard prepared to risk everything for someone of a different station?
As the Dowager Duchess’ daughter, Viraya is safely past marriageable age and responsible for Spring Song celebrations. This year, their guests include a formidable Capitán who has the gall to set his…
I’ve been fascinated by fictional royal stories ever since I was a little kid watching them unfold in children’s movies. Once I became a reader, I quickly became a fan of the genre. There’s such an escapism that comes with reading books about royals. And since America has no monarch, the books offer a fantasy and fairy-tale aspect to the reading. I read these books to relax, to fall in love with love, and to cheer for the ordinary person finding something extraordinary in their world—real orfictional.
I love Jess Mastorakos’ military books. As a military veteran, I always enjoy a good romance featuring our country’s servicemen and women. Pairing one up with a royal is pure genius on Ms. Mastorakos’ part. This book had humor, sweet moments, a little clandestine action going on, and a swoony ending. This book reminded me why I read Jess Mastorakos.
What happens when a side gig working security turns into a royal calamity?
My mom is clawing her way out of a massive amount of medical debt. So, in addition to being an active-duty Marine, I'm also working security for my friend's matchmaking company to help her out as much as I can.
Then one night, a gorgeous and mysterious woman needs my help evading a group of well-dressed men who are after her. I don't question it, I just get her out of there.
Then I find out she's the princess of a small country, and she wants to…
Homeless following the death of his adoptive parents in a car crash and the subsequent loss of their farm tenancy, Seb decides to enrol as a residential student at the Asklepios Foundation, a College of Natural Medicine, boasting a sanctuary modelled on an ancient Greek healing temple. Spending a night…
If you ask people to name a book set in the Regency period, your money is safe if you bet on them picking a Jane Austen. But the Regency was about much more than manners and matrimony. In my own areas of interest – justice, money, and financial crime – everything was changing, with the widespread introduction of paper money and cheques, the recognition that those on trial should have a defence as well as a prosecution, and the creation of modern police in the form of the Metropolitan Police. Dickens made the Victorian era famous, but the decades before good Queen V ascended the throne are equally fascinating.
And this choice is a sneaky one: it was published in 1826, but it’s actually set in the late 21st century. I couldn’t resist including it for three reasons: it’s a product of the 1820s (and deals with several social concerns of the time, such as republicanism), it’s written by a woman (and my other four choices aren’t), and its rather apposite storyline concerns a mysterious pandemic that rapidly sweeps across the entire globe, ultimately resulting in the near-extinction of humanity (leaving just the last man)… It wasn’t popular at the time – widely considered to be Shelley’s weakest work – but to be fair to her, she was simply ahead of the game and had invented the genre of dystopian fiction. Read in that light, it’s a brave and fascinating work.
With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Pamela Bickley, The Godolphin and Latymer School, formerly of Royal Holloway, University of London.
The Last Man is Mary Shelley's apocalyptic fantasy of the end of human civilisation. Set in the late twenty-first century, the novel unfolds a sombre and pessimistic vision of mankind confronting inevitable destruction. Interwoven with her futuristic theme, Mary Shelley incorporates idealised portraits of Shelley and Byron, yet rejects Romanticism and its faith in art and nature.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) was the only daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and…
I fell in love with the British Romantic poets when I took a course about them, and I fixated like a chick on the first one we studied, William Blake. He seemed very different from me, and in touch with something tremendous: I wanted to know about it. Ten years later I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Blake, and then published quite a bit about him. Meanwhile there were other poets, poets in other countries, and painters and musicians: besides being accomplished at their art, I find their ideas about nature, the self, art, and society still resonate with me.
Art history also knows a Romantic movement, as does music history. Brown’s book has 250 color plates, mostly of painting from Constable, Turner, Blake, Friedrich, Delacroix, Goya, and many others, but also of some architectural wonders. Brown makes continual connections to the poetry and philosophy of the time, and to political events, as he organizes his chapters by theme: the cult of the artist, the religion of nature, the sense of the past, orientalism, and the exotic, and so on. There are several fine books on Romantic painting, but this is probably the best place to begin.
Romanticism was a way of feeling rather than a style in art. In the period c.1775-1830 - against the background of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars - European artists, poets and composers initiated their own rebellion against the dominant political, religious and social ethos of the day. Their quest was for personal expression and individual liberation and, in the process, the Romantics transformed the idea of art, seeing it as an instrument of social and psychological change.
In this comprehensive volume, David Blayney Brown takes a thematic approach to Romanticism, relating it to the concurrent, more stylistic movements…
My life is one of two halves; I spent the first half living in the industrial West Midlands, at school and then training to become a doctor, and the second half living in rural bliss in the southwest of England. For the day job, I’m an anesthesiologist, but my true passion, thanks to my mother being an English teacher, is reading romance and writing my own. I am well-travelled and spend a quarter of each year in France, so my books often have characters from all over Europe as well as characters working in the medical profession or overcoming/ living with a variety of health conditions.
As a Brit, I love books set in the US; I love exploring our cultural differences. This one is an angsty emotional journey with a very strong female character, which isn’t always successfully pulled off in romance novels. Love isn’t always rainbows and sunshine, and I think this is one of those stories reminding us that it needs to be worked at.
Twenty-one year old Laura Sedgwick is a rebel without a cause. Her only plans for life are to make no plans She revels in her fascination of the unexpected as she navigates her way through mid-nineties' Dallas nightlife. One very bad night brings her face to face with the one man likely to change her mind about…well...everything.
Twenty-three year old Seth Whitaker has every intention of seeing through with his well mapped out life. He is a hard working over-achiever that has no intentions of slowing his pace for anyone. With a fierce…
Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS
by
Amy Carney,
When I was writing this book, several of my friends jokingly called it the Nazi baby book, with one insisting it would make a great title. Nazi Babies – admittedly, that is a catchy title, but that’s not exactly what my book is about. SS babies would be slightly more…
I fell in love with Romantic poetry when I was young. Then, after a gap of several years, I began to write historical fiction, and it was at this time that I found myself being drawn once more to the Romantic poets, this time as people as much as for their work. I discovered their place in the world, contested and controversial, and their influence became a driving light to me and my characters. InBeneath Black Clouds and White, Delphi explains: “It has a pulse, you see, like any other living thing. You must treat each poem as though it were alive.” I feel the same way!
I’m a person with limited interests so, as well as loving history and poetry, I also collect bits of both… Ballads and Lyrical Pieces is one of the only books I can boast about having a first edition of!
I have a lot of time for Walter Scott, not only as a writer, but as a cultural politician and a folklorist. A lot of the pieces in this book are not solely his work, but the reimagining of local ballads. After scooping up these, there’s no wonder he went on to invent the romanticised “Scottishness” we recognise today. This book, 15 years before Scott influenced George IV’s visit to Scotland, shows where his own influences came from.
Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure…
