The nonfiction list looks nice, but it’s probably looking quite formidable as it is for someone with no idea what the books are about. And the selection in general looks like something you’d want to give to a university student or an above average high-schooler, who of course needs to read English fluently. If you’re going to give this to people who aren’t expected to know the books already, you probably want to have a bit of text for each book telling what it’s about and why it’s on the list.
And for random people, the best case scenario is probably that they will get one of the books and read some of it, so you might want to split off a shorter list of five or so books you recommend people will read first, so that they won’t have quite as hard a time figuring out where to start.
Random additional fiction suggestions: Greg Egan’s Permutation City (theory of identity, computation) and Distress (philosophy of science, epistemology). Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad (robot fables), His Master’s Voice (the process of science and mathematics) and Solaris (the limits of science when you run into aliens who won’t play along). Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others (short stories, the nature of reality, messing with human cognition). Peter Watts’ Blindsight (humans are mostly crazy robots made of meat; delicious, delicious meat). Walter Jon Williams’ Aristoi (cybernetic mental upgrades beat medieval mooks). Karl Schroeder’s Ventus (magic is runaway nanotech the medieval mooks are confused about, then things get weird, could be a jumping point from Harry Potter). Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (you can do cool shit with math). Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End (VR internet 20 minutes into the future has simulated Harry Potter magic interfaces, popular culture magic as a thing that ends up shaping actual tech).
The nonfiction list looks nice, but it’s probably looking quite formidable as it is for someone with no idea what the books are about. And the selection in general looks like something you’d want to give to a university student or an above average high-schooler, who of course needs to read English fluently. If you’re going to give this to people who aren’t expected to know the books already, you probably want to have a bit of text for each book telling what it’s about and why it’s on the list.
And for random people, the best case scenario is probably that they will get one of the books and read some of it, so you might want to split off a shorter list of five or so books you recommend people will read first, so that they won’t have quite as hard a time figuring out where to start.
Random additional fiction suggestions: Greg Egan’s Permutation City (theory of identity, computation) and Distress (philosophy of science, epistemology). Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad (robot fables), His Master’s Voice (the process of science and mathematics) and Solaris (the limits of science when you run into aliens who won’t play along). Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others (short stories, the nature of reality, messing with human cognition). Peter Watts’ Blindsight (humans are mostly crazy robots made of meat; delicious, delicious meat). Walter Jon Williams’ Aristoi (cybernetic mental upgrades beat medieval mooks). Karl Schroeder’s Ventus (magic is runaway nanotech the medieval mooks are confused about, then things get weird, could be a jumping point from Harry Potter). Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (you can do cool shit with math). Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End (VR internet 20 minutes into the future has simulated Harry Potter magic interfaces, popular culture magic as a thing that ends up shaping actual tech).