All 3 are very difficult subjects to write about.
To this day I haven’t seen a better book on psychology than Eric Berne’s A Layman’s Guide to Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis.
It’s the only one I remember out of the dozens I have read.
I’ve yet to read a really good book on either Freud or Jung.
What about hypnosis? Is there even a single decent book written about it?
Henry Hazlitt’s Thinking as a Science is certainly a book I wish I’d read much earlier in life. As is Rolf Dobelli’s The Art of Thinking Clearly (which was impossible as it was only published in 2013).
Both books are a distillation of an enormous amount of experience and knowledge gathered in an easy to read volume.
I’ve read dozens of books on the Beatles but Mark Lewisohn’s renders most of them redundant.
Best book on Lennon?
How about Albert Goldman’s The Many Lives of John Lennon?
I’ve yet to read his book on Elvis but I’m hoping it will be more memorable than Peter Guralnick’s efforts.
Heinrich Harrer’s 1959/64 book ’The White Spider’ remains my favourite book on mountaineering.
When it comes to books on personal computers apart from Carey Holzman’s The Healthy PC (now sadly out of both print and date) I found nothing memorable.
What about novels?
How many can you call truly great?
Anna Karenina, A Christmas Carol, The Great Gatsby, The Trial, 1984, Tropic of Capricorn, Remembrance of Things Past, Young Man in the Sun, Tom Sawyer, The Rose (Charles L Harness), Wuthering Heights are the ones that immediately come to mind though I must have read hundreds.
The vast majority of which I now have little recollection.
Life is too short and time is too precious to waste on books.
Just like with audio playback, you want the very best that’s out there.
It’s also very important to be able to put what you read into some form of practical use.
There’s nothing wrong with reading for entertainment or escapism, and I should know, but just how many decent reads are out there when you have mostly mountains of dross being churned out on a daily basis.
There’s also mountains of books being pulped and deleted forever everyday but sadly not all of them are dross either.
We all might have different tastes, but what you read can really matter and make a difference.
Here’s a writer I’ve never read (along with Dostoevsky), but I’ve always liked this quote.
"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer." E.M. Forster, Howards End
Here’s another by our good friend @mahgister
"If you are about to die, because life is short, almost all books are not so much important... Save very few one...."
Indeed.