100 Desert Island Books

Finally got around to making that “100 books I would want on a desert island” list. Another title would be “100 books that I consider essential reading for *my* life”: thus, this is a personal selection. I don’t claim to have this list cover the most important aspects of human life or the universe, nor do I expect “famous” books to be on this list (although some of them are). The list just reflects my personal traditional interests – history and philosophy of science has the most numbers, followed by science textbooks, general history, philosophy and theology and a tiny sliver of fiction (I started reading fiction seriously quite recently). One condition in listing these books was that I should have read them in their entirety: this is true of all of them except “Gödel, Escher, Bach” which I think I am going to keep soldiering through my whole life. I am very privileged to call some of the authors here my friends.
One common thread running through most of these books is that I discovered them early, when I was in high school, college and graduate school, in most cases in either the college or university library or the British Library which was a stone’s throw from where I grew up. Early impressions are often the strongest, so I keep coming back to these volumes and they keep inspiring and instructing me.

I have thousands of books on my shelf and I always find it hard to give any away. There are many others I haven’t listed here which I love, but if I actually had just these 100 (110 to be precise), I wouldn’t be entirely depressed (just don’t tell my significant other…).

HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE (INCLUDING BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY)

Richard Rhodes – The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes – Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb
Freeman Dyson – Disturbing the Universe
Freeman Dyson – Infinite in All Directions
George Dyson – Turing’s Cathedral
George Dyson – Darwin Among the Machines
Edward Wilson – Naturalist
Edward Wilson – Consilience
James Gleick – Chaos
John Horgan – The End of Science
Robert Serber – Peace and War
Jeremy Bernstein – Hans Bethe: Prophet of Energy
Silvan Schweber – In the Shadow of the Bomb
Silvan Schweber – QED and the Men Who Made It
David Kaiser – Drawing Theories Apart
Kip Thorne – Black Holes and Time Warps
Robert Kanigel – The Man Who Knew Infinity
Robert Hoffman – The Man Who Loved Only Numbers
Robert Crease and Charles Mann – The Second Creation
Douglas Hofstadter – Gödel, Escher, Bach
Alice Kimball-Smith and Charles Weiner – Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections
Peter Galison – Image and Logic
Emanuel Derman – My Life as a Quant
Kameshwar Wali – Chandra
John Gribbin – In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat
John Casti – Paradigms Lost
John Casti – The Cambridge Quintet
John Casti – Gödel: A Life in Logic
George Johnson – Strange Beauty
Roger Penrose – The Emperor’s New Mind
Roger Penrose – The Road to Reality
Richard Dawkins – Climbing Mount Improbable
Gerald Durrell – My Family and Other Animals
Konrad Lorenz – King Solomon’s Ring
Robert Laughlin – A Different Universe
Horace Freeland Judson – The Eighth Day of Creation
Peter Michelmore – The Swift Years: The Robert Oppenheimer Story
Richard Feynman – Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman
Stanislaw Ulam – Adventures of a Mathematician
Laura Fermi – Atoms in the Family
Werner Heisenberg – Physics and Philosophy
Ronald Clark – Einstein
Steven Pinker – The Blank Slate
David Deutsch – The Beginning of Infinity
Steven Weinberg – Dreams of a Final Theory
J. Robert Oppenheimer – The Open Mind
Stuart Kauffman – Reinventing the Sacred
Barry Werth – The Billion Dollar Molecule
Oliver Sacks – On the Move
Carl Sagan – The Demon-Haunted World
Max Perutz – I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier
Jonathan Allday – Quarks, Leptons and the Big Bang
Philip Ball – H2O: A Biography of Water
Philip Ball – The Self-Made Tapestry
Alan Lightman – Einstein’s Dreams
Alan Lightman – The Accidental Universe
Brown, Pais and Pippard – Twentieth Century Physics (3 volumes)
Ed Regis – Who Got Einstein’s Office?
C. P. Snow – The Physicists

TEXTBOOKS

Ira Levine – Quantum Chemistry
Peter Atkins – Molecular Quantum Mechanics
Lubert Stryer – Biochemistry
Albert Lehninger – Biochemistry
George Simmons – Introduction to Topology and Modern Analysis
George Simmons – Differential Equations
Richard Feynman – The Feynman Lectures on Physics
David Griffiths – Introduction to Electrodynamics
John Lee – Inorganic Chemistry
Samuel Glasstone – Sourcebook on Atomic Energy
Samuel Glasstone – Thermodynamics for Chemists
Arthur Beiser – Concepts of Modern Physics
Gautam Desiraju – The Weak Hydrogen Bond
Linus Pauling – The Nature of the Chemical Bond
Linus Pauling and Edward Bright Wilson – Introduction to Quantum Mechanics
Clayden, Warren, Reeves and Wothers – Organic Chemistry
Eric Anslyn and Dennis Dougherty – Modern Physical Organic Chemistry
Wells, Wells and Huxley – The Science of Life
Goodman and Gilman – The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics
Jerry March – Advanced Organic Chemistry

HISTORY

Barbara Tuchman – The Guns of August
William Shirer – The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
James Swanson – Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer
David McCullough – Truman
James Scott – Against the Grain
James McPherson – Battle Cry of Freedom
Gordon Wood – Empire of Liberty
John Barry – Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul
Bernard Bailyn – The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
Robert Caro – The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vols. 1-4)
Rick Atkinson – An Army at Dawn
Will Durant – Our Oriental Heritage
Russell Shorto – The Island at the Center of the World
Nick Bunker – An Empire on the Edge
Brad Gregory – Rebel in the Ranks
Cornelius Ryan – The Longest Day

PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

Sam Harris – The End of Faith
David Edmonds and John Eidinow – Wittgenstein’s Poker
Plato – The Republic
Matthew Stewart – The Courtier and the Heretic
Isaiah Berlin – The Proper Study of Mankind
Bertrand Russell – Unpopular Essays
Bertrand Russell – Why I am Not a Christian

FICTION

Vasily Grossman – Life and Fate
Haruki Murakami – What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Cormac McCarthy – Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy – The Road
Isaac Asimov – Asimov’s Mysteries
Cordwainer Smith – No, No, Not Rogov! (this is a single story but it is very striking in its vividness and poetry and made a deep impression)
Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace
Fyodor Dostoevsky – Notes from the Underground
William Faulkner – As I Lay Dying
H. G. Wells – The Time Machine
Chekhov – Stories