It’s probably not accurate to say I learn better through auditory means than visual, but I do absorb information significantly more quickly when listening to a book read or a lecture spoken than I do when skimming my eyes across a page of ink or pixels. I am a reader, but much of what I learn and process comes through a combination of audio books (via audible.com), articles read to me via “Speak Screen” on my iPhone (you can turn that on in Settings–>General–>Accessibility–>Speech then activate it by swiping down from the top of the phone with two fingers – try it in Safari with the Reader tab open) or Mac in Safari (highlight all, right-click, Speak), Umano.com, and videos via (mostly YouTube) from my phone with the Swift Player app or SpeedUpTV app (gestures control playback speed and position).
I typically absorb more content via YouTube than via audio books through audible.com, but I’ll list most of my recently “read” audio books that aren’t work-related on this page. The goal is to give you a sense of the types of ideas that shape my thinking. This is not exhaustive, but it is pretty exhausting to create all the links. 🙂 For that reason, I’m leaving off the YouTube videos entirely for now, but they tend to be focused on the same basic topics, but a much stronger emphasis on both science (mainly physics, the philosophy and science, and meta-physics) and many, many theological debates. I created a new pinterest account for this rather than using the table format we set up for Pascal’s Bookshelf, but I’m regretting that now. I thought it would be faster to pin things and link to one or two big boards, but only a few books show on this site for each board, so I needed multiple boards. Organizing them took some time.
The following is a flavor of my subjects of interest. I left off well over two hundred science-fiction and fantasy books over the years (some recent) because they would take too long to list and they don’t individually contribute as much to my reasoning. I hope this list is helpful to someone, especially Pascal who originally requested it.
Of all the books linked below, this first set includes the ones that stand far above the rest for me. They are my favorite of the bunch and I very strongly recommend each of them. If you’re looking for a new book, please see if any of these are of interest – they were all well-worth the time for me…
Here’s the main list…
Philosophy
Physics, science, evolution & metaphysics
Theology
Biblical textual criticism
Psychology, cognitive science, education & human behavior
History
Biographies
Miscellaneous
Gentleness and respect,
–Russell
russell & pascal 