My Five Books Every Geek Should Read story got a lot of eyeballs yesterday, made it to the front page of Digg, Reddit, and picked up a lot of insightful and interesting commentary all over the place. In all the commentary, there are surprisingly few "shut up, Wesley"-style jabs, which are annoying, but I guess I'm just going to have to accept as online background noise for the rest of my life. As of this writing, over 38,000 people have hit the page at SG. That's really cool.
It made me rather happy to see people scoring themselves against my suggestions, with lots of them getting 5/5, and the suggestions for other books to read (or include in a future column) were great. I've begun a list, and somehow I'll have to convince myself that it's entirely acceptable to head up to the park with my iPod and a book for "work."
There was a little bit of confusion, though, that I wanted to clear up (because there's nothing I enjoy quite as much as belaboring a point, you know). My list wasn't intended to be a "best of" or "top 5" or "essential" list by any means. I specifically and intentionally avoided those qualifiers, because I feared people would argue about what was and wasn't on the list, and miss the entire point of my column. I chose "should read" because I thought these were five books that anyone with a geeky streak would enjoy, and I certainly didn't suggest or imply that these should be read and enjoyed at the exclusion of anything else, or that you're any less of a $thing is you disagree with me or haven't read them. As many have pointed out, Dune, Snowcrash, 2001, Watchmen and GEB are just a few that are clearly missing from a "best of" list. But this isn't a "best of" list. I just looked at my shelf, saw five books that I would recommend to my friends who are geeks because I thought they'd like them, and put the resulting five books into my column.
It's insanely cool that, though they average out to 31 years old, the books I listed are still relevant and readable today; it's one of the main reasons I love Sci-Fi as much as I do.
