Adams, Scott
The Dilbert Future

Very funny and perceptive. It’s just like Adams says it is, but why?

Bailey, Alice A.
From Intellect to Intuition

This stuff actually starts to make sense with the two kinds of processing and how they operate clearly in mind.

Bell, J. S.
speakable and unspeakable in quantum mechanics
It’s worth savouring this book by a master of the subject. Bell’s philosophical rigour and willingness to recognise the unsolved problems are quite wonderful. He writes in a way that is accessible to the non-specialist reader, and the maths is there for those with a technical background - although his use of bra-ket notation is not quite like anyone else’s!

Bennett, J. G.
Gurdjieff: The Making of a New World
A detailed and scholarly account of much of Gurdjieff’s life, the ancient traditions which were his likely sources, and Bennett’s impressions of the picture of reality which he attempted to convey in the first half of the 20th Century.

Berne, Eric
Games People Play
This very sensible and practical book founded the “transactional” school of psychotherapy. Berne begins by describing a social context where everyone engages in “games” for purposes of “time structuring”. He then shows that for some people the games become pathological, so they spend their time repeating self-destructive activities. Berne doesn’t suggest any reason why people play games, except for filling in the void between now and the time of their deaths in an organised way. The picture of boredom addicted societies where all activities end up being ritualised fits right in here.

Brookes, Frederick P.
The Mythical Man-Month
Generally recognised as the most sensible guide to running practical, effective software projects. If modern organisations had taken Brookes to heart, commercial software production would not be stagnant.

Davies, Paul
The Cosmic Blueprint
Intelligent discussion of a self organising universe filled with deep structure.

Davies, Paul (ed)
The New Physics
Excellent general discussion of issues in quantum mechanics and chaos in particular. Rich yet very readable.

DeMarco, Tom & Lister, Timothy
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
Common sense observations regarding making effective software projects, most of which apply to any kind of teamwork. The emphasis on jelled teams is particularly interesting.

Dennett, Daniel C.
Consciousness Explained
He doesn’t actually explain consciousness at all, but Dennett provides a superb introduction to the fascinating field of Consciousness Studies.

Deutsch, David
The Fabric of Reality
Deutsch’s view relates the themes of quantum physics, epistemology, theory of computation and evolution in a way that is quite friendly to the picture in Chapters 1 to 5. He’s deeply wedded to multiple universes, but in such a way that we can swap them out and install the backwards arrow of time instead. In particular, his challenge on p217, “To those who still cling to a single-universe world-view, I issue this challenge: explain how Shor’s algorithm works.” is answered in Chapter 4 as an event that must be possible on both arrows at once - the same place probability amplitudes come from.

Feynman, Richard P.
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Non-technical anecdotes describing how the genius saw the world.

Feynman, Richard P.
The Character of Physical Law
Vintage Feynman. There’s a very rare bit in here, where he seems to handwave and fudge, unhappy about what entropy is at cosmological scales!

Feynman, Richard P.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics
It’s like every other book you’ve seen does a bit of this, in a complicated way.

Feynman, Richard P.
Feynman Lectures on Computation
All good, but particularly the sections on Charles Bennett and the energy value of information.

Gamma, Erich et. al.
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
This is a technical book, but it’s the book on design patterns in software engineering. Emphasises the compositional aspects of software design - the bit boredom addicts can’t do.

Gibran, Kalil
The Prophet
A simple window into the priorities and perceptions of a mind less frenetic than most modern people.

Goldratt, Eliyahu M & Cox, Jeff
The Goal
Fairy stories about how our heros manage to think around workplace boredom addiction and solve problems, instead of being driven off site with their stuff in binliners, which is what would really happen. Even so, provides valuable insights into the nature of the problem (including its utter predictability) as it appears on the ground.

Goldratt, Eliyahu M.
It’s Not Luck
More fairy stories.

Graves, Robert
Seven Days in New Crete
A science fiction novel in which the poet demonstrates the relationship between poetry and real magic.

Gribben, John & Gribben, Mary
Richard Feynman: A Life in Science
An insightful biography of a boredom addiction free person, and what he achieved.

Gurdjieff, G.
All and Everything or Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson
Very hard to read due to a construction that forces the reader to stay awake. Once you have them in mind, clearly contains the picture in Chapters 1 to 5. Also, once you get into him, Gurdjieff is very, very funny.

Gurdjieff, G.
Meetings With Remarkable Men
The more accessible style and Indiana Jones ripping yarn narrative in this collection of exemplary people sometimes conceals the deep points Gurdjieff makes by providing examples. Do you believe the bit about the stilts?

Hartmann, Thom
Thom Hartmann’s Complete Guide to ADHD
A wide ranging description of the stresses that conscious children are subjected to in the context of production line “education”, the potential of conscious children, and practical measures to make life more bearable for conscious children in the present situation of undeclared classroom warfare.

Harvey, Andrew
The Direct Path
A subjective description of changing perspectives with growing awareness.

Hohmann, Luke
Journey of the Software Professional
A sincere engineer looks at his art and begins to break free of the sterile, robotic worldview. The Journey of the title is of course, Hermetic.

Laing, R. D.
The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise
Laing’s description of humanity in the grip of totalitarian boredom addiction and inside out thinking.

Laing, R. D.
Knots
Laing recognised the deep logical structure in the linguistic games he saw people playing, and set it down. At the root of it all is the logical blindspot documented in Concerning Logic.

Leff, Harvey S. & Rex, Andrew F. (eds)
Maxwell’s Demon 2
A variety of papers, some more accessible for the non-technical reader than others, but all fascinating.

Levy, Steven
Hackers
This is about creative programmers, not criminals! Levy describes the ethical philosophy and spirit of fun that allows creative programmers to form jelled teams without management - and produced modern information technology. Everyone “diagnosed” with ADHD fits right in with these people.

Lovelock, James
Gaia
A holistic basis for starting to understand our planetary ecosystem as an integrated thing thing in its own right.

Mandelbrot, Benoit B.
The Fractal Geometry of Nature
If you’ve never seen this book, it’s a real treat. For some reason, the geometry of nature is very fractal.

McDermott, Robert A. (ed)
The Essential Steiner
Floris Books

ISBN 0-86315-225-2


An idea packed introduction to the huge output of the Waldorf Schools’ founder.

Naur, Peter
Computing: A Human Activity
ACM Press

ISBN 0-201-58069-1


Wise words from the dawn of time. It couldn’t be anything but a human activity, but this is all too easily forgotten in boredom addicted society, where people avoid direct connection with their work.

Newton, Isaac
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
Just Another Alchemy Hacker!

Ouspensky, P. D.
In Search of the Miraculous
Lots of description of boredom addiction, how to break it, states of consciousness etc. There’s a “system of hydrogens” that might be about multi-fractals.

Ouspensky, P. D.
The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin
Peter Ouspensky’s erotic science fiction novel! Contains a “block universe” model of time.

Rae, Alastair
Quantum Mechanics
Standard text, so accessible for physics types.

Rowling, J. K.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
The thing is, Voldemort’s got a point! Why should magical people have to hide their abilities from the purple-faced Muggles?

Rumi, Jalaluddin trans. Philip Dunn and Manuela Dunn Mascetti
The Illustrated Rumi
The common mystical picture of reality in very beautiful and accessible form. Like the Mandelbrot book, this one is an art object as well as a text.

Sacks, Oliver
Seeing Voices
The famous neurologist describes the experience of the Deaf, including the richer abilities of Sign for indicating viewpoint, process and relationships.

Schrodinger, Erwin
What Is Life?
A really smart guy ponders the deep questions. Everyone should read this if only to dispel the myth that “there are no answers”. There’s always other ways of looking at things.

Schwartz, Howard S.
Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay
Describes the sterile and antagonistic situation that develops in commercial settings. Schwartz explains the motivational and delusional structure by using Freudian psychology instead of proposing boredom addiction as the cause, but there’s no doubt about what he sees people doing.

Senge, Peter M.
The Fifth Discipline
Boredom addiction free business thinking. Introduces “Sengian Patterns”, which are the deep structural patterns that boredom addicts can’t see in business situations.

Seymour-Smith, Martin.
Robert Graves: His Life and Work
A detailed biography of Graves which demonstrates how even those who are close to real magicians and appreciate their results can completely misunderstand and dismiss the magical worldview if they do not share it.

Shah, Idries
The Sufis
The history of Sufism, and its influence on Western thought in one fascinating volume.

Shah, Idries
The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin
Ancient teasers and teaching stories. Very light hearted and accessible.

Sheldrake, Rupert
A New Science of Life
Describes the now famous “hypothesis of formative causation”, which suggests that living things tend to grow towards the physical forms of similar things. This makes all oak trees seem to “vote” on what shape an oak tree should be. With two arrows of time, Sheldrake’s observations become equivalent to Teilhard de Chardin’s “omega points”.

Skinner, B. F.
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
A very scary book, written from the perspective of a deductively fixated mind that sees itself and all other minds as programmable robots without the capacity to form an independent “I”. Skinner is exactly in accord with half of the psychology described by Gurdjieff, but completely omits the beneficial effects of feedback in a self organising universe.

Spencer-Brown, George
Laws of Form
A cult classic amongst creative programmers nearly 30 years ago, also referenced in Robert Anton Wilson’s Universe Next Door books. Spencer-Brown introduces the “primary algebra”, which can be used to solve logic problems. Where things get really interesting is that in Spencer-Brown’s algebra, inside out thinking can be indicated by placing an extra “cross” around every term in a logical proposition to signify that it has been dragged over the system boundary into the internal thinking space of the deductive mind acting alone. Then the logic all works out in a self consistent way, yielding a result which doesn’t match reality! In particular AND and OR relationships are switched.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre
The Phenomenon of Man
Evolving structure will coadunate and reach an Omega Point.

Thorne, Kip S.
Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy
Predeterminism in General Relativity, how Penrose escaped inside out thinking and applied global methods to black hole entropy, and how Einstein turned up at his local physics group with another theory of Relativity every Wednesday for a month before they stopped iterating!

Vonnegut, Kurt
Slaughterhouse Five
A clever, urbane, humanist science fiction novel that in the end is silly because the central conceit contradicts itself.

Weinberg, Gerald M.
The Psychology of Computer Programming
This ancient text still hasn’t been bettered. Which is odd considering the importance of this labour intensive conscious work - and the amount of money sloshing around it.

White, Michael
Isaac Newton - The Last Sorcerer
White doesn’t seem to understand that alchemy is a transformation of the alchemist, but his journalism is excellent so you can draw your own conclusions from his data.

Yourdon, Edward
Decline and Fall of the American Programmer
It took a while, but it ended up happening pretty much as Yourdon described.