December 2025
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    I'm looking for books–mostly nonfiction–that are inspiring in how they show the inner workings of a brilliant author's mind. The specific topic matters far less than the sense of having a window into an interesting or ingenious frame of mind dedicated to the author's craft. Any thoughts?

    Books in this category:

    – Darwin's On the Origin of the Species

    – C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination

    Claude Levi-Strauss's The Savage Mind

    – Italo Calvino Six Memos for the Next Millennium

    by mr_porque

    6 Comments

    1. *Thinking Fast, and Slow* by Daniel Kahneman, winner of The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

      A most brilliant person expertly explaining his life’s work. I cannot recommend this enough!

    2. The Symposium – Plato – a groups of Ancient Greeks including Socrates, discuss what love and desire mean

    3. Southern_Problem2996 on

      **Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid** by Douglas Hofstadter

      **I am A Strange Loop** by Douglas Hofstadter

      **The Order of Time** by Carlo Rovelli

      **The Mathematics of the Gods and the Algorithms of Men** by Paolo Zellini

      **The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that** **Changed our Understanding of Time** by Jimena Canales

      **On the Origin of Time** by Thomas Hertog (Stephen Hawking also collaborated before his death)

    4. Selections from the Prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Or basically any of the books where he talks about hegemony.

      Well, my job was to recommend books others might not.

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