And here are some books you might find interesting; click on the links to order.

The first book I want to recommend to you is written by Stanislaw Lem; it is a story about some people who built a computer who turns out to be more intelligent than its makers. The computer starts to give several lectures, and the story consists of nothing but those lectures -no laser guns, no space ships. There are 46 lectures, but Lem actually wrote only three of them -and one of those three he wrote, the one about mathematics, was never published. So there remain two lectures, the first one about the humans, and the last one about computers. Both are published in the book "Golem" (the name of the computer giving the lectures, and unfortunatly not available via Amazon), the first one is also published in Imaginary Magnitude, a collection of introductions to imaginary books (Lem did something similair once again, with its book Perfect Vacuum, consisting of nothing but reviews of imaginary books, also a book very well worth reading, especially the last chapter).
The first of Golems lectures, the lecture about humans, is a very astonishing piece of text. Lem explains an idea he developed independently at the same time as Richard Dawkins, that is, the idea that the genes are not instruments the living beings use to reproduce, but instead the living beings are instruments the genes use to reproduce. Dawkins explains this idea in his The Selfish Gene, where he develops this idea from the viewpoint of a biologist (a book you should read too; it can be easily understood also by non-biologists: in fact, it can also be read as an introduction into genetics. By the way, Dawkins did write some kind of introduction into genetics, a book about Darwinism, The Blind Watchmaker. Another more specific book, but also a must-read for biologists, and also understanable for non-biologists, is his The Extended Phenotype), while Lem develops the same idea from a more abstract point of view. Even more astonishing is that Lem not also found one of the most important ideas of Dawkins independantly, the same text also presents one of the most important ideas of Stephen Jay Gould, the other of the two most famous living evolution scientists, that is the idea that the evolution neither has an interest in increasing the complexity of living beings, nor does increase the complexity of living beings (Gould also has written a book about this idea that can be understood by non-biologists, that is Full House). Both ideas are part of a discussion of how mankind came into existence, how people misunderstand their situation, what live is all about and what the future of mankind could be.
If you prefer the more ordinary type of science fiction, Solaris is a good introduction in the works of Lem, and a nice love story too. Another very important book of Lem is his The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age; it starts with some simple robot tales, but imperceptible, Lem uses the tales more and more to deal with philosophical problems (see also my Chastity Belt Essay, where I quote Lem quite often.

My favourite books are Illiad and Odyssey by Homer.

If you want to start read Plato, I would recommend you to start with Apology, Protagoras, Theaetetus and Gorgias, in this order, unless you don't buy his Complete Works.

Imre Lakatos has written a book Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery (the title is an allusion to Poppers Conjectures and Refutations and Logic of Scientific Discovery, both important books, but written more technically and less easy to read). Lakatos investigates the question what mathematical proofs proof, with the result, that there is no perfect certainty in mathematics, that even proofs can be refutated. This is done in a dialogue between a teacher and his class, with an interesting (and nevertheless easy) geometrical problem as example. Although the book gives you a deep insight how mathematic works, it can be understood by non-mathematicians (except for the appendices perhaps, being more technically).

And now the more belletristic books.

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is a very famous, but nevertheless a very good and touching book. You probably will have heard of the plot: an adult man falling in love with a girl and abusing her. Disgusting - but Nabokov manages to make us to feel with the older man and to understand him, without being forced to forgive him, and, a real miracle of narratation: although the whole story is told by the man, there are some cracks in this story through which we can see the story from the girls point of view. And although the girl, Lolita, is descriped as not very intelligent or gifted or warm-hearted, and although the girl is flirting with the older man, Nabokov is able to show us how this doesn't alter his guilt in a very subtile way.

Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué has written one of the most beautiful german romantic tales, the Undine, the story of the love between a knight and a mermaid, which inspired Andersen, and about which Heine reported that he once met a girl who told him that she would give one year of her life if she would be allowed to kiss the author of the Undine: and, Heine said, that girl had the most beautiful lips he ever saw.

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is also one of my favourite books (her sister Charlotte Bronë's Jane Eyre is less sinister, but also less perfect).

Jan Austen has written some books about how to become married, especially Emma and Pride and Prejudice.

Flann O'Brien has written a book At Swim-Two-Birds about a student writing a book about an author writing a story in which the persons of the story become alive and finally almost kill their author; about the irish hero Finn Mac Cool; about a book with three different beginnings; about a devil and his wive; about a mad king, living on trees as a bird. Nearly as avantgardistic as James Joyce, but much more fun to read.
He also wrote The Third Policeman, a story told in a more linear manner, but not less grotesque, about bicycles, atomic theory, and a very weird kind of hell.

Jorge Luis Borges is mostly famous for his short stories (like Ficciones or Aleph), but he himself thought his poems to be of equal importance, and I would agree. Unlike his stories, his poems often deal with love and the relations between men and women. One of his books of poetry translated in english is The Gold of the Tigers.

The late Borges thought the short stories of Rudyard Kipling to be far more complicated and interesting than those of, e.g., Kafka. Kipling is famous for his longer stories (like Kim or Jungle Book), but even more interesting is a collection of very short short stories, Plain Tales from the Hills; everey story shows a different model of writing.

One of the most astonishing kinds of poetry is the poetry of middle-age iceland. And one of the most astonishing books about poetry is Snorri Sturlusons introduction into writing poetry, its Edda (usually called "Younger" or "Prose" Edda, to distinguish it from the "Elder" or Poetic Edda, a book also worth reading). Most editions focus on the first part of the Edda, about mythologic stories, but even more interesting are the second and third part, the Hattatal, about synonyma and verse forms.

Arno Schmidt is a german author who wrote after the second world war. I have certain objections in regard of his later works, but certain of his earlier writings I think are worth of reading, inespecially his story "Brand's Heide", which you can find in the volume Collected Early Fiction 1949-1964 Part I(covering the time 1949-1957).

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