Gaining Wisdom
Books
currently reading
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
Douglas Hofstadter
An interdisciplinary meditation on formal systems, music, art, and mind. I'm reading it as a map of how recursion and self-reference produce intelligence from rule-bound structures.
Caesar: Life of a Colossus
Adrian Goldsworthy
A historical biography that situates Caesar inside the machinery of late-republic Rome, showing how personality, military command, and institutional weakness converged into imperial transition.
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance
Bruce Fink
A psychoanalytic lens on desire, enjoyment, and psychic structure through Lacanian thought. I keep this one nearby for slow, careful passes rather than straight-through reading.
Shelved & finished
Siddhartha
Hermann Hesse
A compact philosophical novel on renunciation, experience, and inward freedom; less a doctrine than an invitation to test wisdom against lived life.
Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle
A foundational account of virtue as practiced habit, where character is formed through repeated action and practical judgment rather than abstract rule-following.
The Republic
Plato
A wide-ranging dialogue on justice, education, political order, and the structure of the soul, read here as both civic theory and a study of intellectual discipline.
The Bhagavad Gītā
Vyāsa (trad.)
A sustained reflection on duty, action, and interior steadiness under pressure; especially useful for its ethic of disciplined work without attachment to outcomes.
