14 Books To Read Before They Hit The Big Screen. 23 Books You Didn't Read In High School But Actually Should. Your mega summer reading list: 200 books recommended by TEDsters. A look at the famous TED Bookstore at TED2013.
Photo: Michael Brands Books can entertain, sucking you like a tornado into incredible new worlds. Books can teach, giving you a richer understanding of time periods, people and ideas you’ve never been exposed to. But books can do so much more. Lisa Bu: How books can open your mind In today’s talk, TED’s own Lisa Bu introduces us to the concept of “comparative reading,” the practice of reading books in pairs, to give deeper context and reveal new insights. Every year at TED, we set up a bookstore filled with books recommended by TEDsters of note. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank B. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson. John Adams by David McCullough. Personal History by Katharine Graham. The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore. Big Cats by Holiday Reinhorn.
From Zero to Well-Read in 100 Books. Isn’t it strange that we have the term “well-read” but absolutely no one can come close to defining it?
And isn’t also strange that other art forms don’t have equivalent terms for a vague sense of someone’s total experience of that form (well-seen for movies? Well-heard for music? Absurd). Thinking about this recently sucked me into a little thought-experiment: say someone had never read any literature and wanted to be well-read. What should they read? This hypothetical forces any given answerer to do two things: provide their personal definition of well-read and then give a list of books that might satisfy that definition. The following 100 books (of fiction, poetry, and drama) is an attempt to satisfy those competing requirements.
As for the number of 100: in addition to being a nice, round number, it is also a number that, at a one-book-every-two-week pace this hypothetical reader could accomplish in just about four years–the standard length of an undergraduate program. The best books of the ’00s. Anyone looking for trends in our selection of the best books of the ’00s might have a hard time finding them amid the wizards, 19th-century serial killers, dysfunctional families and such.
Narrowing down our decisions was pretty tough, and the process required a number of back-and-forths about what was significant as well as beautifully executed, which book from a given author represented his or her best of the decade, and so on. So consider these alphabetically listed selections 30 of the many, many memorable books published this decade, and as always, let us know what we missed. Non-fiction: Devil In The White City (2003), Erik LarsonIt’s easy to imagine Devil In The White City as a historic true-crime novel, devoted to telling the chilling story of the serial killer H.H. Holmes, with the Chicago World’s Fair simply serving as a backdrop. Freakonomics (2005), Steven D. Fiction: [pagebreak] Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince (2005), J.K. 10 Redesigned Book Covers That Are Actually Better Than the Iconic Versions.