Books like Travels in Hyperreality — picked by fans

I am curious. What catches my attention are those sudden, highly surprising new combinations of existing knowledge, which I have not been aware of so far.

Though I have not studied particle physics, I always thought that the quantum mechanisms entail mysteries that still wait to be discovered by interpreting them. Maybe by applying a new formal language. As a fan of Spinoza, I am convinced that life, mankind, is all nature and might be explained with a similar toolset as non-living systems. I invented a research project called "Quantum Political Economy." It got stuck.

Then I encountered this book on "Quantum Biology." It is a marvelous attempt to take the first steps towards an epistemological break in our understanding of how we could frame what happens in the brains of living subjects. 

I adore the political attitude of this famous leading researcher in quantum theory.

Of course, he knows better than the general public how severe a global nuclear conflict will endanger the survival of the human species. And of course, he had to endure a broad wave of criticism from colleagues who rather shied away when asked to warn of a new escalating armament race. "This is not our business," was their recommendation.

But Carlo Rovelli always was after truth and wrote a book that fascinates me. His books pave the way not only to understand space and time in a new way, but also to combine the clear argument of natural science with humanist goals. With them, an epistemological break is on its way.

For me, Sheila Rowbotham is one of the central authors representing the epistemological break that I was experiencing as a teenager in the Sixties.

She describes her involvement in the intellectual wars of the time as well as her everyday involvement in lust and tears. I love her book; for me, it is indeed a promise. She represents the left-progressive feminism, which at the time was fully integrated into this broader wave of emancipatory movements.

Nevertheless, it is not all pure praise; Rowbotham’s critical view of her generation anticipates what turned out to destroy the youth revolt in the following decades. It is a promise on which learning as well as optimism can follow.

I love this book because it opened up doors in my mind, which I did not know they exist.

For a long time, I thought that I had a split set of ambitions. On one side, I was fascinated by mathematics and its connection to theoretical physics. On the other side, I was drawn to art, to live as part of the community of artists.

With this book, Marcus de Sautoy showed me in detail how art did pave the way to formal theoretical innovations, how my two sides are the same stupefying property of human exploratory understanding. To trust in this property of the human species is an elementary ingredient for the optimism needed to master the upcoming epistemological break!   

Etienne Gilson was the leading intellectual historian of the medieval Church in France, and this is the clearest, most lucid exposition of St. Thomas Aquinas’s thinking that I have read. Perhaps because the Roman Catholic Church has often used Aquinas’s thinking to justify conservative positions, we often forget that he was a world-class genius who radicalized religious and ethical thought in the Middle Ages, and whose work helped inspire later movements of reform like the Vatican II Council. Gilson’s sympathetic treatment of Aquinas restored this understanding of his thinking and helped produce the modern neo-Thomist movement. It is worth reading – and it is readable!

Anything by Lafferty is well worth reading. This was intended as the second book of a trilogy, but got published on its own. This tells primarily of Finnegan, an astonishing hero who is searching for the devil. If you haven’t made the acquaintance of R.A. Lafferty, this would be a good place to start. Imagine a cartoon world modeled on the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. Lafferty writes in a tall tale mode that disguises much of his literary ambition. It’s hard to describe Lafferty’s writing. It might be described as Calvino with no pretension. Or maybe, just read a sample:

A night-dune imaginary: there was a world full of people with pumpkin-heads for heads, and candles burning inside. Then Seaworthy and the Devil and their spooky crew came along, lifted the top off each head, blew out the candles inside and put the tops back. The pumpkin-headed people… show more.

In many ways, this sort of book has gone out of style since it was published in the 1960s.

It’s an opinionated and ambitious portrayal of the Italian psyche and culture. Barzini looks at his fellow Italians with a dispassionate eye and a healthy sense of irreverence, uncovering their foibles, hidden beliefs, superstitions, and great strengths as a culture.

For me, Italy is an eternal paradox. Just when you think you’ve worked it out, something happens that makes you do a double-take. This book helps you understand that paradox has been part of Italy’s identity since the very beginning.

In my favorite book of poems, Daniel Ladinsky has compiled three hundred poems from twelve of the great mystical poets across time: Rumi, Hafiz, St. Francis of Assisi, Kabir, Mira, St. John of the Cross, Tukaram, Rabia, St. Catherine of Sienna, St. Teresa of Avila Meister Eckhart, and Thomas Aquinas. While the voices are different, every one of them reveals the true nature of the Divine. Filled with humor and ecstasy, these poems never fail to uplift and inspire me.

A deep dive into medieval philosophy with chapters by many of the leading scholars in the field. It’s arranged by philosophical topic rather than chronologically or by figure. But it also has a very detailed list of medieval philosophers providing their dates and indications for further reading. This is only one of several useful appendices: also included are lists of medieval translations of philosophy between different languages. So again this book invites readers to go beyond the usual suspects of Latin scholasticism like Abelard, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham.

The first three books on my list concentrate on building form and space, with little about function.

The ‘pattern language’ is different, mapping human activities onto appropriate built forms, and advocating repeated patterns that have been found to work.

Christopher Alexander wants us to use the patterns in designing responses to situations, but they also help to judge how well-built spaces fit their contexts in analysing architecture.

Although Alexander maps activities onto his own preferred design style, the patterns are not inherently specific to any style or period of architecture.

Despite being written 50 years ago, this one-of-a-kind book is still fresh and relevant.