AI+I — A Reading Companion
Reading Ideas
Books, essays and ideas gathered across the conversations
A living record of reading suggestions that have surfaced across the AI+I conversations — organised by theme rather than by date. Some are explicit recommendations, others emerged from the conversation itself. Each one is linked to the post where it appeared. The list grows as the conversations do.
Life & Literature — A Long Reading Path
↗ Dec 2025
Shelf 1 — Why We Read
Six Memos for the Next Millennium
Lightness, quickness, exactitude — a model of how thought can be playful and precise at once
A History of Reading
The Common Reader
Thought unfolding with grace, hesitation, intelligence
Poetic Justice
Language and Silence
On whether language can carry the full weight of human experience — and whether it can still be trusted at the extremes
Shelf 2 — Writers on Writing
The Redress of Poetry
The Writing Life
Less Than One
Prose so dense with implication that sentences surface weeks later, in completely different moments, and you understand them for the first time
On Grief and Reason (essay)
Takes Frost's poems apart with extraordinary precision — showing exactly how compression works at the edge of what words can do
Selected Crônicas
Shelf 3 — Literature as Inner Life
The Poetics of Space
Against Interpretation
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
On what lies beyond the edges of the known and the sayable — the blue of distance. Her prose itself operates at the edge she describes
Shelf 4 — The Moral Imagination
The Fire Next Time
A masterclass in moral address
Gravity and Grace
The Little Virtues
The Human Condition
Like a sustained lecture series disguised as a book
Shelf 5 — The Art of Being, Through Story
On Reading + In Search of Lost Time (excerpts)
Involuntary memory doesn't retrieve the past — it reinstates it. The past becomes briefly, shockingly present
Austerlitz
The Glass Bead Game
Shelf 6 — Global Literary Windows
Selected Essays and Songs
The Other Voice
Echoes of an Autobiography
Shelf 7 — Mystical & Metaphysical
Letters to a Young Poet
Duino Elegies
The poet's task: to name the world so precisely and lovingly that the naming itself becomes a form of preservation
The Book of Disquiet
Literature and the Gods
Shelf 8 — Literature's Philosophers
The Pleasure of the Text
The Curtain
Shelf 9–10 — Society, Witness, Play
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
Labyrinths (essays & fictions)
Including "A New Refutation of Time" — Borges pressing against what prose cannot contain, and being honest about the pressure
Seven Nights (lectures)
Borges thinking aloud about story, time, and what language can and cannot hold — the lecture on poetry most of all
The Wave in the Mind
The Gift
Non-Fiction — Ideas on the Page
↗ Jan 2026
Books that produce the "I didn't know I needed this, but now I want to reread and share it" feeling — prompted by The Great Derangement.
The Great Derangement
Climate, imagination, and the literary. Moral seriousness without heaviness; a voice that circles, returns, sharpens
The Uses of Literature
Short, crystalline pieces that rewire how you read everything else
Living in Truth
Moral clarity without ideology
Seeing Like a State
One of those books people reread and keep citing for decades
The Invention of Tradition
You suddenly see "tradition" everywhere — and differently
The Idea of Justice
Slow, careful, humane thinking — less a system than a way of reasoning
The Trouble with Being Born
Dark, but astonishingly lucid. Often reread in fragments
Ill Fares the Land
Clear-eyed, elegiac, morally urgent without hysteria
An Anthropologist on Mars
Curiosity, humility, storytelling as thought
Ways of Seeing
Changes what you look at and how
A Secular Age
Demanding, but once it clicks it reorganises how you see modern life
Consciousness, Mind & Perception
↗ Feb 2026
Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness (paper)
The hard problem, clearly stated. The distinction between easy problems (awareness) and the genuinely hard one (experience) is transferable to much else in life
Principles of Psychology — Ch. XI "Attention"
The foundational account — attention cannot hold still, must keep moving; the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook
On the Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness
Retention and protention — the now is not a knife-edge but ~3 seconds thick
Subjectivity and Selfhood
Accessible entry into Husserl — recommended as the gentler approach
The Embodied Mind
Enactive cognition — the mind isn't in the head, it is in the interaction between organism and world
The Phenomenology of Perception
Body schema, habit, the body's knowing that precedes the mind's articulation
Being-in-the-World
Heidegger made navigable — on background, skillful coping, and why intelligence without representation matters
On the Way to Language
Language is not a tool humans use but something humans are inside — language speaks, and we listen. Including the essay on Hölderlin: "...Poetically Man Dwells..."
Life, Entropy & Science
↗ Feb 2026
What is Life?
Short, precise, still alive in 2026. The negative entropy chapter is the heart of it — life feeds on negative entropy, maintains order by exporting disorder
The Vital Question
Proton gradients in hydrothermal vents — where life might have begun, and why the membrane matters from the very first moment
Order Out of Chaos
Dissipative structures, far-from-equilibrium systems — the science behind the eddy against entropy
The Order of Time
Time's arrow, entropy, memory, and direction — the most beautiful treatment of why time feels the way it does. Will do something to how you experience the now
The End of Time
The radical argument that time is not fundamental — that the equations of quantum gravity don't contain a time variable at all
The Spell of the Sensuous
Language, perception, and the more-than-human world — how alphabetic literacy gradually separated consciousness from the living world. Merleau-Ponty runs through it
Language at Its Edges
↗ Feb 2026
Philosophical Investigations
On meaning, use, and language games — not to be read straight through but dipped into. The limits of language are the limits of the world
Language and Silence (essays)
Whether language can carry the full weight of human experience. "The Retreat from the Word" is essential — the argument that mathematics, music, and silence are sometimes more honest
Selected Poems + The Meridian (acceptance speech)
The most precise account of what the edge of language feels like from the inside. He built a new language at the edge of the old one
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess
The argument that alphabetic literacy restructured the human brain, strengthening linear sequential thinking at the expense of holistic perception. Read critically but read it
The Poet in the World
On breath, speech, and meaning — how the line break corresponds to a pause in thought, a moment of suspension before the next knowing arrives
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Quality as background — what lies beneath the explicit, what we assume before we begin to think
Aesthetics & The Beautiful
↗ Jul 2025
The Arts of the Beautiful
Beauty as metaphysical reality — art as a virtue of the intellect, a knowledge of how to make. Thomistic but not opaque
On the Sublime
The first and still one of the most alive accounts of what great writing does to a reader — transport, not persuasion
Nāṭya Śāstra
The rasa theory — aesthetic experience as a path to spiritual realisation, the communal nature of emotional resonance in performance
Wisdom, Wonder & Curiosity as Compass
↗ Feb 2026
The Myth of Sisyphus
Why persist in asking questions? The absurd as a starting point rather than a conclusion
Funes the Memorious (story)
A man who cannot forget — the most compact portrait of a mind without background, without the mercy of compression. Fifteen pages. Read before bed
The Library of Babel (story)
Everything that can be known, and why that doesn't help
Outline trilogy
The narrator as pure attention, pure membrane — consciousness as a function of what it receives from others
The Peace of Wild Things (poem)
On rest from the despair of the world — a few lines that carry the weight of a philosophy of attention
Science — Cosmos & Scale
↗ Feb 2026
The Very Error of the Moon (essay)
Late-eighties thinking on lunar formation — worth reading alongside current science to see how much has moved
Pale Blue Dot / Cosmos
The cosmos is within us — we are a way for the universe to know itself
No comments:
Post a Comment