I do not have the time to put here retrospectively all the books that I liked in the past, and do not maintain this page very regularly. Hence, I try to recommend only a few books, but essential ones.

I do not try to be original in books I recommend. I claim my tastes are independent from fads, not negatively correlated to them! I even hope that to correlated my tastes with works that in the long run, last in the common cultural background.

Essays in moral and social sciences

• ``Reflexions sur la Formation et la Distribution des Richesses´´ par Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, 1766 — Cours de base sur le capital et le capitalisme
• ``Principes de Politique´´ par Benjamin Constant, 1810
• ``De la démocratie en Amérique´´ par Alexis de Tocqueville, 1833
• ``La Loi´´, par Frédéric Bastiat, 1850.
• ``Harmonies Économiques´´, par Frédéric Bastiat, 1850 — Bastiat a parfaitement compris ce qu'est la Liberté.
• ``On Liberty´´ by John Stuart Mill, 1859 — Mill doesn't know what Liberty is, but he can mostly feel it.
• ``Utilitarianism´´ by John Stuart Mill, 1863 — Mill doesn't know what Morality is (see Hazlitt below), but he can mostly feel it.
• ``Discours aux sourds´´ par Guglielmo Ferrero, 1922
• ``Pouvoir, les génies invisibles de la cité´´ par Guglielmo Ferrero, 193?
• ``Propos sur le pouvoir´´ par Alain, 1937
• ``The road to serfdom´´ by Friedrich A. Hayek, 1944 — A good cybernetical analysis of the evil of socialism — turned me (classical) liberal, even before I read Bastiat.
• ``Du Pouvoir´´ par Bertrand de Jouvenel, 1945 — A good cinematic description of the process by which the Minotaur grows, though without any dynamic analysis; you must read (classical) liberal authors for that.
• ``Atlas Shrugged´´ by Ayn Rand, 1957 — a treatise of applied ethics, disguised as a breathtaking novel; nevrotic, but so refreshing.
• ``The Foundations of Morality´´ by Henry Hazlitt, 1964 — an excellent synthesis of the essence of what the classics can teach us about ethics, as well as a debunking of many myths about morality.
• ``Essais de Morale Prospective´´ par Jean Fourastié, 1966
• ``Power & Market´´ by Murray N. Rothbard, 1970 — an in depth analysis of the effects of government intervention on society.
• ``Les nuisances idéologiques´´ par Raymond Ruyer, 1972
• ``The Fatal Conceit. The Errors of Socialism´´ by Friedrich A. Hayek, 1988
• ``Libéralisme´´, par Pascal Salin, 2000 — une excellente présentation de cette philosophie de la liberté-responsabilité-propriété, et de ce qu'elle a vraiment à dire des problèmes de notre époque.

Sciences of Knowledge and Understanding

• ``Goedel, Escher, Bach´´ by Douglas Hofstadter, 1979
• ``The Mind's I´´ by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, 1981(?)
• ``Metamagical Themas´´ by Douglas Hofstadter, 1984(?)
• ``Métaconnaissance´´ par Jacques Pitrat, 1986
• ``Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, 2nd Edition´´, by Abelson and Sussman, 1997.
• ``Le ton beau de Marot´´, by Douglas Hofstadter, 199x — un voyage littéraire pour tenter de pénétrer la poésie, la traduction, le sens d'un texte, les langues, l'intelligence, sans oublier l'amour...

Sciences of Nature

• anything by Charles Darwin
• a few essays by Stephen Jay Gould
• anything (?) by Richard Dawkins, including ``The Selfish Gene´´ and ``The Extended Phenotype´´.
• ``Qui sommes-nous?´´ (``Chi siamo? La storia de la diversità umana´´) par Luca et Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, 1993. — About what every honest man should know on genetics.
• ``The Moral Animal´´, by Robert Wright, 199x — how to understand human behaviour based on evolutionary theory.

History

• ``Le voile arraché´´, par 'Abd al-Rahmâne al-Djawbarî, fin du XIIIème siècle (traduit en français par René Khawam) — The hidden side of holy men.
• ``Zniewolony umysl´´ (fr: ``La pensée captive. Essai sur les logocraties populaires´´; en: ``The Captive Mind´´) par Czesław Miłosz, 1953 — The fate of polish intellectuals through WWII and its communist aftermath.
• ``L'Archipel du Goulag´´ par Alexandre Soljénistyne, 1976 — The story of the ultimate communist institution: the concentrationary system.

Fiction and Poetry

• ``Pantagruel´´ by François Rabelais, 1533
• ``Brave New World´´ by Aldous Huxley, 1931 — A good book, though the error about all this society is that it considers welfare as being a matter of energy rather than of information; Huxley understands that there is an error, but can't find which. Note that Cybernetics didn't exist at the time, although Hayek had already published many things.
• ``The Hobbit´´ by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1936 — The unequaled master-piece that founded a genre — heroic fantasy.
• ``L'étranger´´ par Albert Camus, 1942
• ``Ficciones´´ por Jorge Luís Borgés, 1944 — Surrealism and poetry in a very intellectual way. excerpt: ``The Library of Babel´´
• ``1984´´ by George Orwell, 1949 — A great book about totalitarianism. Of course, such societies would die because they spend much more energy than they can regenerate, and can't adapt to changes. See the fall of the Inca empire, for instance.
• ``Martian Chronicles´´ by Ray Bradbury, 1950 — Looks like science-fiction, but really is intemporal poetry.
• ``Catch-22´´ by Joseph Heller, 1955 — Hate and love, death and sex, madness and sanity, failure and virtue, horror and laughter, despair and hope, absurdity and meaning, this book is a portrait of life itself.
• ``Mother Night´´ by Kurt Vonnegut, 1961 — His experience with war also led Vonnegut to wonder about the essential questions of existence and morality in a way both tragic and comic.
• ``A Confederacy of Dunces´´ by John Kennedy Toole, 1969 — Though first published in 1980, getting the Pulitzer prize long after the author's death. Funny book, almost surrealist.
• ``The Illuminatus! Trilogy´´ by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, 1975 — Conspiracies, sex, drugs, and philosophy. Not the deepest book on life, but one of the widest, as far as questioning your assumptions go. Funny, too.
• Most of Isaac Asimov's many works.
• Most (all?) of Stanislaw Lem's many works.

Comic strips

• Tout Christophe, y compris ``Le sapeur Camember´´, ``La famille Fenouillard´´, ``Le savant Cosinus´´.
• Anything by Will Esner.
• Tout ce que Goscinny a touché.
• Anything by Quino, including the ``Mafalda´´ series.
• La série ``Les Indiens´´ par Hans Kresse, et ses autres oeuvres.
• Tout Jean-Pierre Petit.
• Le début de la série des ``Thorgal´´ par Rosinsky et Van Hamme; par les mêmes, drôle aussi, ``le grand pouvoir du Schninkel´´.
• La série des Cités Obscures par Schuiten et Peeters.
• ``The Watchmen´´ by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

In the pipeline

For a list of books that I am reading, see the bottom of my page Old News.

More Readings

If you liked some of these readings, maybe you'll also like these sites:

• Ma page Libres Livres voire ma page sur Le Libéralisme, le vrai.
• The Search for Terrestrial Intelligence project. (MIA)

ToDo

• Mon Manifeste de la Libre Information
• After all, I think that it might be good to share about books not to read, so that you don't waste time with books for which much better works exist covering the same topic and more.
• Before I make it more elaborate, I need transform this page into an authentic database, using standard bibliographical formats...
• I'd like to add comments on the presented books.

Faré Rideau

Faré's

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