@CindyWeinstein

When I was about 20 or 21, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain.

At the time, I could be seen in Berlin's fashionable coffee houses, loudly exclaiming "I am Hans Castorp!" Even today, every sentence of this novel touches me directly, without reflective mediation.

Three decades later, it was Laozi's Tao Te Ching. An encounter that changed everything.

In parallel, several mathematical textbooks or design and engineering texts had similar life-changing effects on me, in more or less subtle ways. Ernst Snapper & Robert Troyer, Metric Affine Geometry; Mike Gancarz, The UNIX Philosophy; Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style; William Press & Saul Teukolsky, Numerical Recipes in C.

The best expositional or instructional texts are deeply personal, they are Art: a genuine intervention by the author into the reader's way of thinking.

#LifeChangingBooks #books #literature #textbooks

#ThomasMann #ErnstSnapper #MikeGancarz #RobertBringhurst #WilliamPress