Welcome to Genius & Ink Library 📚

Recent volumes: Botticelli's Secret by Joseph Luzzi, The Genealogy of Morals by Nietzsche and much (much!) more...

Welcome to the

Genius & Ink 🖌

Library!

Each post of my newsletter is inspired by a remarkable book. Here, you’ll find a catalog of all the books that have sparked my inspiration, arranged from the most recent to the earliest. If you are browsing this from your laptop, you can navigate the collection by the ‘Table of contents’ on the left side of your screen. I’ll be updating this library monthly, and you can catch the latest additions in the Footnotes 🍂 edition of my newsletter.

My unfinished library. Still deciding on colour, trying to find door handles and many other small decisions.

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It would be too hard to list the list of lists that Umberto Eco lists in his book called The Infinity of Lists. Eco’s book tells us that we humans are creatures that incessantly try to give form to the infinite universe that surrounds us, and we do this by making lists. That is why we make infinite types of them, we make visual lists, geographical lists, travel lists, lists of collections, to-do lists, and many others.

‘We like lists because we are afraid to die’ he writes, but what does Eco mean exactly by saying this?

There is an innate desire in us for control and order in the face of life’s overwhelming complexity and uncertainty. Lists offer us a way to impose structure on the chaos of existence, providing a sense of control. By breaking down life into manageable pieces, lists give us a feeling of progress, helping to stave off the existential anxiety of life’s unpredictability and mortality.

Eco implicitly advises us to pay attention to how well we create our life lists. It is after all a tool. It is like a chisel in the hands of a sculptor. A block of marble can take an infinite amount of shapes, it can become an angel or a simple floor slab. Its potential depends on the clarity of your vision and how masterfully you can use the chisel you have in hand.

The list you see below is aimed to organise my past. To see which books provoked me into thinking so much that I had an urge to write about them. It is not just ‘books that I enjoyed and I hope you will enjoy reading too’. These books were thought-provoking enough that they made me sit down and write in an attempt to organise my thoughts and form connections.

‘The list is the origin of culture.’ - said Eco in his interview to Der Spiegel - ‘It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums, and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.’

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📕 How to use your enemies by Baltasar Gracìan

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📕 Botticelli’s Secret by Joseph Luzzi

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📕 The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche

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📕 Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

Writing is nothing but a guided dream.

Also mentioned in this post is Iain McGhilchrist’s Master and His Emissary.

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📕 Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson & Why Read Classics by Italo Calvino

A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a re-reader.

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📕 Greek Lives by Plutrach

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📕 Philosophy as a way of life by Pierre Hadot

What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

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📕 The Fantastic Gustave Doré by Alix Pare

People do not know what it costs in time and effort to learn to read. I needed eighty years for this and I’m not even able to say if I have succeeded.

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📕 Seneca’s Letters

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📕 Boccacio’s Decameron

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📕 Conversations with Goethe by Eckermann

‘Beware of embarking on a great work. This is the mistake that our best minds make, the very people with the most talent and the fiercest ambition.’

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📕 Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard

“Yesterday I was clever and I wanted to change the world; Today I’m wise and I want to change myself.”

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📕 The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen

In this episode, we explore a wonderful book called The Library: A Fragile History written by Arthur der Weduwen and Andrew Pettegree. In one of the chapters, they mention a powerful brewers’ lobby that tried to stop the expansion of public libraries in England. 👉

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📕 Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer

Our minds often resemble a disordered library. We might be well-read, but not be able to use knowledge when we need it. In this episode we explore a short passage from Schopenhauer’s essay ‘On Thinking for Yourself’.

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📕 Life by Leo Tolstoy

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📕 The Subversive Simone Weil by Robert Zaretzky

Instead, ‘to pay attention’ for Weil is more about the withdrawal of the self. To explain this, let’s take a look at Weil’s teaching style. (I bet you would like to have a teacher like her in your school.)

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📕 How to Live: A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell

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📕 Love, Life, Goethe by John Armstrong

The moral is simple: don't just stare at my life as if it were a puppet show: create your own life, and feel free to take your plots from me.

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📕 The Bookseller’s Tale by Martin Latham

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📕 Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

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📕 The Madman by Kahlil Gibran

Why excessive sanity might prove to be lethal?

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📕 Borges and Me by Jay Parini

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📕 Humanly Possible by Sarah Bakewell

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📕 The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin

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📕 Anaximander by Carlo Rovelli

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📕 Genius & Ink by Virginia Woolf

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📕 This is not the end of the book by Umberto Eco

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📕 A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck