The Brain Box series.

So for Christmas last year I got these two box sets from the Oxford Uni press, ones called 'The Brain Box' and the other is 'The Thought Box'. Each contains five of the Oxford Press' best sellers from the 'Very Short Introduction' series.

'The Brain Box' contains 'Short Introduction[s] To...
Evolution, Cosmology, Quantum Theory, Consciousness and Intelligence"
Consciousness is my favourite and within 144 pages (with pictures) there is enough information, perfectly delivered to give anyone a broad understanding of the fundamentals.
'The Though Box' is a lot more philosophical and contains books on:
Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Existentialism and 'A Short Introduction to Everything!'

All the books are written the same way; simply and brilliantly with plenty of explination. I am currently reading 'A Short Introduction to Existentialism' and as with the others I am finding it a pleasure to digest. Now I know these books my be considered 'noob' books, but if you want some good referencing and citation material these are perfect and have a very comprehensive last few pages describing the authors influences (and references of course) and what you might like to try next.

Can't say enough good things about the box sets, and now- since the box sets were composed for Christmas, they are a good price on amazon.co.uk, most of the sets are now ?17.00 ($34.00) and there are a lot more box sets than just these two to chose from. Happy reading.

Dan.

p.s. I also just read a short book called 'How to Be a Genius: A Handbook for the Aspiring Smarty-Pants' which had me smiling for ages. Plenty about Plato and Socrates in there.