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Too Many Books

gemini://box.matto.nl/somanybooks.gmi

There are various lists of Important Books. One such list might be found somewhere within "Le Comte de Monte-Cristo". Usually these are The Classics by men long dead. It may not hurt to familiar with some of these. A good translation will help, or maybe first try a good summary and from that explore works that seem most interesting. (Commentary points out that we have too many lists of books. A problem of abundance. Others point out that only a few leaves from the forest might be worth teaching.)

Another method is to find good reviews,

https://www.sacrideo.us/source-code-readability-elegance-and-complexity/

Of course, the opposite problem on the other extreme is that we reduce our expressiveness to the bare minimum necessary, at which point we have a fully powerful Turing machine, but which is incapable of being used well because we must be so explicit about everything that we do that we are unable to "subordinate detail" (Iverson's Turing Award Lecture) at any point in the programming process. We would be maximally precise and clear at all times and in all cases, but we would never be able to do anything great, because we would never be able to build hierarchies of concepts. The power of Naming isn't just for fantasy magic worlds in books (Rothfuss's Name of the Wind).

Knowing a bit about Tao may help to see what some authors are up to (Ursula K. Le Guin comes to mind), which loops back to the need to know at least a few old books, especially those that are catnip to writers. "El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha" is one such book: where did the "Rocinante" in "The Expanse" come from?