The Library of Congress recently acquired a wealth of papers from a personal hero, Carl Sagan.

Among these is a kind of syllabus entitled “Outside Reading, Autumn Quarter, 1954.”

Notable about this list is that:

a) A badass wrote it

b) It includes texts both in whole and in part

c) In addition to including works that pertain directly to physics, it also includes the following:

• Extraordinary Popular Delusions by Charles Mackay
• The Uses of the Past: Profiles of Former Societies by Herbert Joseph Muller
• The Immoralist by André Gide
• Young Archimedes and Other Stories by Aldous Huxley
• Timaeus by Plato
• The Republic by Plato
• The History of Western Philosophy by W. T. Jones
• But We Were Born Free by Elmer Holmes Davis

Looks like I have some shopping at Powell’s to do…