The Idiot and Crime and Punishment are also quite good... vivid characters, situations that'll make you want to sit up reading til October to find out what happens. I was unable to get excited by, or even particularly interested in, Notes from Underground.

War and Peace is, arguably, the best novel ever written. I shall not make such an argument, but will say I enjoyed it immensely, though I could do without the embedded treatise on the nature of history.

Regular, or decaf abomination? --Kellnerin

no country for old men - cormac mccarthy
invisible monsters - chuck palahniuk
running with scissors - augusten burroughs
nexus - henry miller

lighthearted?  No pulp?  No bad comedy?

Too serious, dear math student.
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Taken out of context I must seem so strange - Ani DiFranco

If you like Agatha Christie you might like Dorothy Sayers.

Oscar Wilde's plays are good even just to read, if you haven't already done so.

Saki is great but there's probably nothing else like him.

OK, that's all I know about in your list.

Plenty of people have worked just as hard as Grothendieck and not gone nuts.  It just makes a more interesting story when they do, and recieves a disproportionate amount of attention.  Besides, Grothendieck's reasons for stopping were (at the time) quite clearly the war machine, and not the "spiritual exhaustion" he began citing only much later.


"A Genius?! For 37 years I've practiced 14 hours a day, and now they call me a genius??" -- Pablo de Sarasate

Victor Hugo. Alexandre Dumas.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Most young people get completely caught up in the non-sense around them. You cannot escape this by rebeling. One of my friends looks back on his rebellious youth and it now looks to him as if he had purchased a BS9000 procedures manual How To Be A Rebellious Youth from HMSO and followed it to the letter.

I wasn't even a rebel. If I had been born in 1920 in Germany, come 1933 I would have had a crush on Hitler and joined the Hitler youth. I would have loved all that certainty, who to blame, what to do about it. When I heard that Gunter Grass, of all people, had joined the Waffen-SS when he was 17 I was not surprised. The problem with fighting evil is not how to win, it is how to make sure that you have joined in on the right side.

Ayn Rand is interesting because she grew up with the Russian revolution. Studying philosophy and history at the University of Petrograd she graduated in 1924 then escaped to America. She saw through the bogus ideals of the Bolshevik in a very deep way, and her novel dissects the way in which men decieve themselves.

I claim that this is a great achievement. Obviously it sets her apart from ordinary intellectuals, the folk who went to the Soviet Union in the 30's and came back declaring that they had seen the future and it worked. Unobviously it sets her apart from those who opposed Communism and Socialism, but were merely opposed because opposition was the non-sense around them.

I don't know whether her ideas are right or wrong, but I'm clear that she has a much clearer insight into human nature than I have. My own efforts to understand why the USSR failed have been far too heavy on the economics and quite naive about human psychology. My plan is to put more effort into making sure that I have understood what she has to say.

I'm not the kind of person to be persuaded. I believe in reading the writings of deep thinkers, reading history, testing ones understanding by attempting to predict the path of current affairs, and each man making his own synthesis. I do rate Rand as one of the must-read deep thinkers.

Is this a tailored suggestion? Perhaps. You liked Asimov's Foundation series, and John Galt is a hero partly in the style of Harry Seldon.

You really need to expand your horizons beyond the stultifying graveyard of bloated genre titans and the tombstone tomes approved by the self-appointed Ivory Tower culture czars who shill their irrelevant, dusty corpse-books like a twisted, but enervated pimp trying to push a too old, cracked out, busted down old whore on a confused, but eager young boy.

You need these books, before your mind completely decays -

Errol Flynn: My Wicked, Wicked Ways
Jacqueline Susann: Valley of the Dolls
Mickey Spillane: various Hammer novels
Kitty Kelly: Jackie Oh!
"Valerie X. Scott": Surrogate Wife
Etienne Aubin: Dracula and the Virgins of the Undead
Bonnie Golightly: The Wife Swappers
Wade Barker: Ninja Master #7 - The Skin Swindle

... through the first 2/3s is S. Clarke's well-known 'Jonathan Strange &. Mr. Norrell.'

It captures the tone of the period in a similar way as well as the language of such works.

If you like Dickens in general, I highly recommend Wilkie Collins (Woman in White, The Moonstone, Hide & Seek), one of his contemporaries.

There is no need to retreat, even temporarily, from the joy of mathematics. Connected to mathematics, or at least mathematicians, is a recent historical novel featuring Gauss -- alas, I suspect that 'Die Vermessung der Welt' has not yet made its way to English translation.

_
"The german quoting guy is a little bit out there." (fleece)

this, although some find it abstract and convoluted.