Books Recommended by Ed Cooke

I was traveling around the world at the age of 18, which is what people in England do between high school and university. In my coat, I had Goethe's aphorisms, his short little thoughts in my pocket. I read and reread this book... It's actually had quite a fundamental [impact] on my life because these are his little snipets of wisdom on almost any imaginable topic, and all of them are brilliant. There are things like, 'The company of women is schooling in good manners', or 'Boldness has genius, power and magic'. Ones you don't remember in their precise form, but which nonetheless act as little micro filters for interpreting reality.

This is about a man's slow descent into blindness over 20 years. "He's a kind of theologian, but he has these wonderful reflections on how he came to enjoy the world [as a blind man]. One go-to example is that rain is the best thing for blind people, because you can hear the world in three dimensions. The pattering of the raindrops on the roofs, the pavement, the lampposts, and the buildings, gives you - because of the echo - a sense of 3-D space, where most of the time your 3-D space only goes a couple of yards in front of you, and otherwise is just the void."