Books
Given my wide-ranging interests outside of maths, I thought it would be remiss of me not to include a chapter in this website dedicated to the love of good literature. This is just my small way of showing my appreciation for the enormous benefits the arts and the humanities have to offer us in conjunction with the sciences.
Aside from maths and science, good literature is another great passion of mine, and I have spent a large amount of time searching through the vaults of history – from ancient through to more contemporary times - to try and bring you some of the best title recommendations available on a diverse range of subjects including the classics, science, philosophy, history, psychology and more.
A popular misconception which exists today amongst a significant proportion of young people, and probably the population at large, is that education and entertainment do not mix; that they are both somehow mutually exclusive and incompatible entities. What’s more, in these modern times of technological innovation with its myriad distractions of television, computer gaming, social networking and interactive mobile hand-held devices to name but a few, it’s easy to see how the simple act of reading a good book can find itself taking a back seat in the face of such abundant, albeit unworthy, competition.
In this section, I hope to do my little bit to help redress this imbalance; to show that the best entertainment can educate and the best education can entertain, and that the indulging of one without the other is analogous to playing with half a deck, thereby limiting yourself to just half an experience - temporarily satisfying, maybe, but unfulfilling nevertheless. Finally, I'd like to state my firm conviction that if the most intellectually stimulating, entertaining and all-round fulfilling experience is to be had anywhere, it’s to be had in the reading of a good book – an experience which, at its best, can take the reader on a fascinating journey of discovery through the realm of imagination and on a tour through the mindscape of thoughts and of ideas.
So on that note, I invite you to close down your social media web browsers, switch off your television sets, put down your console gaming pads and switch your phones to silent, if only for a few minutes or so. Once you have temporarily banished these nonessentials to well outside the purview of your immediate focus and attention I would implore you to spend a little time browsing through the recommended listings I have posted in this section.
Whether you’re already a keen reader, or someone who has heretofore neglected this most ancient and rewarding of pastimes, there’s sure to be title recommendations amongst the following lists just waiting to make your acquaintance, or re-acquaintance as the case may be.
And for those of you in need of a little extra persuasion, inspiration or motivation to get you started, or maybe just to reignite your love of reading, I have included below some of my favourite author quotations on the subject of books. I invoke their words, not just for their wisdom and superior eloquence to my own, but also in the hope that they may share the burden of my book-peddling tone and moralising sentiment. I hope you will find their words stimulating, and in the few cases that I intended, quite amusing.
But before I hand you over to these giants of literature, I realise I was somewhat unfair in my condemnation of television earlier and should really try to make amends for this. I would therefore like to make a defence of television by corroborating a remark once made by Groucho Marx. Like Marx, I too found television to be most educational… since every time someone in my house would switch it on I would go into another room and read a good book!
And now over to my author friends:
“The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.”
Mark Twain
“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.”
Harold Bloom
“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.”
Henry David Thoreau
More Book Quotes
Title Recommendations
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Dedicated to making maths elementary