Reddit mentions of An Incomplete Education: 3,684 Things You Should Have Learned but Probably Didn't

Another great book is An incomplete Education

It covers many subjects including history and is fun to read.

Found one on The Pirate Bay, but this looks like it's worth it to have a copy on the shelf, so buy it from Amazon.

Start with googling "What you didn't learn in high school history" and then follow the path to what interests you.

Incomplete Education is good - it touches on more than history though

http://www.amazon.com/Incomplete-Education-Things-Learned-Probably/dp/0345468902/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1457314579&sr=8-2&keywords=what+you+didn%27t+high+school+history

Well, you can start by learning what a run-on sentence is.

I kid, I kid.

• Try reading An Incomplete Education. I haven't read it, but I've met people who swear by it.
  
  
• If you're worried about how to approach conversations, try reading up on etiquette. Basic table-manners are also useful. I'm always amazed by how many people know nothing about the societal conventions around dining out.
  
  
• General-purpose books on world history and science are always good; they'll give you a foundation to work from for a lot of other things.
  
  
• Practice, practice, practice. You can read all the books you want but if you don't talk to people you'll never get better at conversation.
  
  edit: SHE_LOVES_YOU had another great idea: Read up on greek/roman myths and history. The references pop up all the time. You don't need to know all the little details (Like what Pompeiius of Ganymede taught in his school at Megatron); knowing that Odysseus made his men pour wax in their ears to stop them from hearing the sirens' song,or that the Oracle of Delphi had plaques above its entrance that said "Know Thyself" and "Avoid Excess" is enough.

As someone who is more years out of college than I care to admit, I find that for most of the subjects outside of my major I can really only give brief overviews. I understand how things work in context, but there is just a whole lot of detail that is lost.

With that in mind, I absolutely love An Incomplete Education, it gives you that high level overview of a lot of subjects to fill in the gaps you are missing and pique your interest to dig deeper into subjects you may have never given much thought to.

I don't really know anything about this myself, but fibonacci sequences definitely do appear in nature, and according to wikipedia, tree branching is one of the places they pop up.

That said, the assertion isn't really sourced in the wikipedia article, unless the seventh citation (this book), is meant to apply to that entire preceding list of examples. I don't know anything about the reliability of the source. Seems like it's decent, but everything has good reviews on its Amazon page, so it's tough to say.

Hopefully someone else has more direct knowledge...

there's lots to read of course but a good one to add to your list is "An Incomplete Education"

http://www.amazon.ca/An-Incomplete-Education-Learned-Probably/dp/0345468902

Here is the mobile version of your link

Starting to build a personal library since I am quiet young at the moment. Wish is too to have a 30000+ library like Umberto Eco’s. But would be happy if I happen to manage 15000+ like Nassim Taleb since it takes lot of money to build a good library.

Have around 700+ physical books having started 4 years back. Many of them are in my mother tongue(not Hindi). Handpicked 1000+ books as epub/mobi/pdf since I was initially reading in a computer and Western books were very costly and were difficult to source to my tier-3 city(Thanks to amazon I get these days now-a-days and when deals like this are announced they are god-send).

I haven’t read completely though. I have skimmed and read here and there a minority of them so have a transactional memory of those stuff. Only read a few completely.

Another 30 GB of book dump(somewhat computer related stuff) is all also there but it includes lot of .txt and .doc other than pdf collected during my teenage years.

Personal rule is to buy books below 300 bucks( but RandomHouse or Penguin mark most of the books above 500+ esp Western ones or wait till I find a good deal).In book deals, Amazon beats all other sites hands-down) . Mostly into non-fiction.

Costliest purchase is An Incomplete Education by Judy Jones and Willam Wilson purchased back in 2008 when Flipkart was a newbie. If you like trivia stuff and non-fiction it is a pure diamond, which I heartily recommend.

Here is a quote from The Black Swan about library :
> The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have. How many of these books have you read?” and the others—a very small minority—who get the point is that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendages but a research tool. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at your menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Another one by Arthur Schopenhauer on books:
> Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

I know, mea culpa :)

Read. The book to start with is An Incomplete Education. Build from there, reading widely in many fields and using your reading to find new areas of inquiry. Be curious. Talk to smart people, follows the news and cultural criticism, read The Atlantic, The Economist, The New Yorker, and a dozen other magazines, read a few papers every day, etc etc. etc. Do this for a couple of decades and you'll have a start.

If you want to just know buzzwords to throw around, spend a bunch of time clicking around on Wikipedia, and watch stuff like Crash Course on YouTube. It's easy to absorb, and you'll learn stuff, even if it's biased, but at least you'll be learning.

If you want to become SMARTER, one of my biggest pieces of advice is to either carry a notebook with you, or find a good note taking app you like on your phone. When someone makes a statement you don't understand, write it down and parse it up.

So for instance, write down "Social Democracy", and write down "The New Deal", and go look them up on simple.wikipedia.com (Put's all of it in simplest language possible), it's a great starting point for learning about any topic, and provides you a jumping board to look more deeply into it.

If you are really curious about starting an education, and you absolutely aren't a reader, some good books to start on are probably:

"Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words" by Randall Munroe

"A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson

"Philosophy 101" by Paul Kleinman, in fact the ____ 101 books are all pretty good "starter" books for people that want an overview of a topic they are unfamiliar with.

"The World's Religions" by Huston Smith

"An Incomplete Education" by Judy Jones and Will Wilson

Those are all good jumping off points, but great books that I think everyone should read... "A History of Western Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell, "Western Canon" by Harold Bloom, "Education For Freedom" by Robert Hutchins, The Norton Anthology of English Literature; The Major Authors, The Bible.

Read anything you find critically, don't just swallow what someone else says, read into it and find out what their sources were, otherwise you'll find yourself quoting from Howard Zinn verbatim and thinking you're clever and original when you're just an asshole.