[Stratovarius]

I need a ton of books. Websites will be a appreciated also, if you know any.

1. Economics (basic)

2. Finance (I know absolutely nothing)

3. Agriculture

4. Gardening

5. Peak Oil

6. An overview of world religions

7. Bicycles

8. Logic (something light, as in, no 1000 page textbooks)

If anyone here is a well-versed in philosophy, that's always welcome. I'm still a teen, so I haven't read much. Right now, I'm not looking for things like Descartes' mind-body problem...but more along the lines of people. If you've read The Brothers Karamazov, A Treatise of Human Nature, or anything by Montaigne and Nietzsche you will know what I'm talking about.

[TheTurtle]

Have you looked through all 5 pages of the Book/Media Reviews Forum?


Or how about Resources - Books (Schneider's Books For The Future) in the Planning for the Future forum?

For that matter, all the rest of the threads in Planning for the Future might just answer the questions you have.

There's a lot of good information that has already been posted at Peakoil.com. You just have to look for it.

[Carlhole]

Except for the comprehensive survey of world religions, all of those subject headings are so huge that you could find different books within each one contradicting one another.

The religions survey can be neatly summarized thusly:

"They are all totally fabricated".

If you wanted to learn alot about finance and do it in an interesting way, you could spend the money for a subsciption to Investor's Business Daily. It's issued four days a week and each issue has features 3 or 4 articles on finance and economics. So if you subscribe and read those articles everyday, you'll eventually accrue a detailed understanding of what's happening in the world of money. I used to be addicted to that paper.

It helps to actually put some money in the market, too, even if it's only a few bucks. You can get pretty knowledgeable that way but you have to keep at it.

[Stratovarius]

Wow, how did I miss an entire sub-forum?

[Ayame]

Right now I am saving up for William Catton's Overshoot. It probably doesn't harbour anything novel for me though since I have already worked out the following:

1. Humans f*** just like all other animals
2. Humans can potentially overshoot like all other animals.
3. Humans pretend that they aren't subject to limits like other animals and strive to push back the limits as far as possible.
4. Humans fail and die-off occurs.

[Doly]

Right now I am saving up for William Catton's Overshoot. It probably doesn't harbour anything novel for me though since I have already worked out the following:

1. Humans f*** just like all other animals
2. Humans can potentially overshoot like all other animals.
3. Humans pretend that they aren't subject to limits like other animals and strive to push back the limits as far as possible.
4. Humans fail and die-off occurs.

Point 4 doesn't seem to happen every time. In fact, there are times and places where humans have successfully lived sustainably.

[ashurbanipal]

Logic:

Philosophy of Logics by Susan Haack
Methods of Logic by W.V.O. Quine

If you're looking for a simple intro to sentential calculus, you could do worse than A Concise Introduction to Logic by Richard Hurley (I know the last name is correct, not sure on the first). If you want a textbook of predicate calculus, Elementary Logic by William Bates is still the best one around.

Religion:

Depends on what you're looking for. There are so many surveys it's nearly impossible to list them. Just about anything you find will contain the basic information. For some slightly more interesting reading, though, try:

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
Magick in Theory and Practice by Aleister Crowley
The Golden Bough by James Frazier
Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

Philosophy:

Frederick Coppleston's History of Philosophy is generally considered to be the best overall survey.

You might also try From Socrates to Sartre by T.Z. Lavine for a bit of lighter reading.

If you're interested in modern approaches to the mind-body problem, look for authors working in Consciousness Studies. Try, for instance:

Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennet (a great or terrible book, depending on how you view it. I think it's highly enjoyable and utterly wrong in its conclusions--Dennet is really smart but he doesn't really get what he's saying).

The Conscious Mind by David Chalmers (Chalmers is quite a maverick, but so smart that everyone has to deal with him)

Consciousness by John Searle (Searle maintains he is not a property dualist, but I sometimes wonder if he can really avoid it)

You can also try the following websites:

http://consc.net/online.html

http://www.consciousentities.com/

Gardening:

Just pick up 5 or 8 books by different authors on organic gardening methods. I've got about 20 or 30 on my shelf and for the most part they all contain about the same information. This is one of the few areas where the bigger books usually do contain more information.

[TheTurtle]

Logic:
Methods of Logic by W.V.O. Quine

Please don't let this be your first logic text. I used the book in my second semester of logic and it is, indeed, superb. But don't start with it.

[ashurbanipal]

Yeah, I didn't mean you should start with Quine. If you can work through Hurley and Bates, tackling Quine should be doable, though.

[TheDude]

Bicycles and Logic? You're covering the bases for practicality there...
Eugene A. Sloane wrote good books on bicycles, like The Complete Book Of Bicycling, which you can get used at Amazon for one lousy cent. Add shipping and you get $3.51. There's the DK publishing Ultimate Bicycle book, which has the usual heap of DK full color spreads. There are good bicycle forums online, too - forums for every subject you list, for that matter. Reading those'll keep you from actually getting anything done.

[Loki]

For an overview of religious thought, Mircea Eliade's anthology From Primitivism to Zen might be worth looking at. It's been many many years since I read it, so it may not be as good as I remember. He also wrote a multi-volume history of world religions that I used to refer to a lot when I was a student of comparative religion. Like Joseph Campbell, though, Eliade's work is more theology than history. Take both with a grain of salt.

As for philosophy, I tend to appreciate Asian traditions the most, but I've also come to really like Epicureanism and Stoicism. For an overview of Chinese philosophy, Fung Yu-Lan's History of Chinese Philosophy is by far the best I've come across. I'd also recommend reading the Tao Te Ching, Chuang-tzu, the Confucian Analects, and the Dhammapada. These will give a good intro to Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. But I'd definitely recommend reading Fung Yu-Lan's short history (or some other general overview) before diving into the primary texts, which are in a very different style than modern western philosophy.

For Epicureanism, I like The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia, but you could start with the texts on this site and this site.. I also like The Essential Works of Stoicism, edited by Moses Hadas. Good overview of the Stoic tradition in a cheap paperback.

[uncarve_db_lock]

As far as mind-body books, I suggest:

The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot

Quite an interesting read regarding the way we live and the ways we can potentially live.

Other general religion stuff:

Tao Te Ching is an essential

I would toss in the Bhagavad Gita too.

Thomas Merton, later period reads pretty good for progressive Catholicism

[PrairieMule]

Power of Positive Thinking and Tough Minded Optimist-Norman Vincent Peale

[dunewalker]

Don't forget: "Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert M. Pirsig...

[Tanada]

Beyond Oil by Kenneth Deffeyes
The 5000 Year Leap by Skousen
One Second After by Fortschen
Guns, Germs and Steel by Diamond
The Creature from Jekyll Island by Griffen

[Rune]

In The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil (or the later, The Singularity Is Near, which isn't quite as good, same subject matter and author)

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

The Moral Animal: Why We Are The Way We Are by Richard Wright

Oil and the Global Crisis: Predictions & Myths by Stephen Gorelick - explores both sides of the peak oil debate.

Regenesis by George M. Church - get learnt up on synthetic biology.

Generations: The History of America's Future by Strausse and Howe (or get The Fourth Turning which isn't quite as good, same authors)

Calculus by Ron Larsen and Bruce Edwards - and get yourself one them nifty calculators that produce all the graphs. Algebra and Trig are easy, boring and necessary and you gotta do them first. Calc is where things begin to get interesting.

Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad - 6 short stories written by a master at his peak way before crappy magazines, TV, radio, internet, cell phones and twitter spoiled the beauty of written English fiction.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead by Robert Thurman - a good off-set to stupid-ass Chri... oh, forget it.

Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation Into Children's Memories of Previous Lives by by Dr. J. Tucker - I'm not even religious or much of a believer at all but I still thought these last two books were pretty damn good and worthwhile reading.

I would recommend The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who made excellent observations about Earth evolutionary past and future. But de chardin has not got a pleasant writing style. Best thing to do would be to read about the Noosphere in wikipedia, read about Teilhard de Chardin and then look for modern authors who re-capitulate what he wrote about. Teilhard de Chardin considered Earth to be an organism in its own right aned was on an evolutionary growth path towards what he called the Omega Point.

Strangely, though scientific, Teilhard de chardin was a Jesuit Priest.