I’m currently reading The Case for Space by Robert Zubrin and it’s really good. You can tell the guy dedicated his career and life to really thinking about how humans might live in Space, whether that be on the Moon, Mars or in the Asteroid Belt.
I recently read Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoğlu and that was also very good, it explained the shortcomings of other theories such as the geographic determinism espoused by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel although I think Why Nations Fail was a bit repetitive at times.
One that I have fond memories of is Oliver Rackham’s The History of the Countryside, which is a thoroughly enjoyable and comprehensive view of why the British countryside is as we see it now.
On a very different note there is Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. A classic and extraordinary dive into logic.
And then there is Eric Berne’s Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, which introduced me (and thousands of others) to Transactional Analysis and certainly called some of my games out, as I expect it does with everyone.
How Music Got Free
Yeah, it was a good nostalgia trip back to the days of LimeWire and Kazaa. When you didn’t know if the_kids_arent_alright.mp3 was going to be The Offspring or a Bill Clinton speech…
Or even
the_kids_arent_alright.mp3.exe
My favorites that I re-read often, actually re-listen on audiobook (shout out libro.fm) are A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster both by David Foster Wallace. I find his writing to be funny, erudite, and addictive. It’s like hearing someone else’s conversation with their brain.
Honorable mention goes to Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Taleb. One of those books that makes you look at the world differently when you finish.
Recently finished The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya, a biography of John von Neumann and it was fascinating to hear his impact on so many different fields, e.g. mathematics, the atom bomb, the first computers, game theory, and automata. And all the secondary characters could be subjects of equally fascinating books themselves, e.g. Teller, Oppenheimer, Turing, Gödel, Einstein, Nash, etc.
Yeah, von Neumann was a true genius. I’ll definitely check that book out.
The first non-fiction book I read for fun is probably still my favorite. I used to hate nonfiction books, but randomly picked up Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident one day. A group of experienced mountain climbers died on a Russian mountain in very mysterious circumstances, leading to all kinds of wild theories from the KGB to the supernatural.
The author essentially becomes a detective, and the book alternates between his experience piecing together the mystery and the journal entries of the group that died. It’s fascinating and was impossible to put down.
It sparked my love of non-fiction and I have since read dozens of others. I left the book a glowing review on goodreads and the author actually liked my review, I fangirled for a bit ngl.
I know the Dyatlov Pass case but that sounds pretty interesting. Does he manage to find out any more about how they died? I understood it was thought to be
spoiler
exposure to the cold, which caused the paradoxical undressing, I can’t remember what caused the cold exposure orignally though as there was like a cut in their tent and stuff too, super creepy haha
He does! I’m not sure if it’s been widely accepted as I haven’t seen his theory pop up in many places, but he spoke to some scientists and it sounds plausible to me. Explanation below, hopefully the spoiler works.
spoiler
It wasn’t just cold exposure. They unfortunately camped at a point on the mountain that funneled air into a whirlwind that would have sounded like a freight train passing their tent. It would have also created infrasound waves, which at certain frequencies/volumes can make people essentially go temporarily insane. It is the best explanation (imo) for why they would have cut out of their tent, partially undressed, and scattered in random directions. They eventually got far enough away to realize what happened and some of them started trying to salvage the situation, but most of them were too poorly dressed and one or two fell down a ravine to their deaths.
Pretty much anything by Yuval Noah Harari: Sapiens, Homo-Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Taken as a trilogy of sorts, they manage to do a great job of explaining how humanity got to where we are now, and assuming current trends continue, where we’re headed in the future. All without being super dense and academic.
I have read Sapiens. I haven’t read the others although I have had Homo Deus on my reading list for a while.
Not necessarily a favorite, but the next to last one I read recently was Hollywood’s Copyright Wars by Peter Decherney, which was a fascinating historical overview of the emergence of today’s film/tv copyright situation in the United States.
It doesn’t get deep into the differences between the U.S. and Europe, but it does highlight them and it’s interesting how they initially caused a delay in international agreements. I’d have to review it, but as I recall it had a fair amount to do with the creators ceding rights to businesses vs. retaining them respectively.
Anything by James Rebanks. His two books are on my mind a lot. It’s about sheepherding in the fells of England.
Everything Mark Kurlansky has written (food history).
The last non-fiction book I read, that I enjoyed, was The Winter Fortress by Neal Bascomb. It’s about a team of saboteurs hiding out from the Nazis. They were instrumental in delaying Hitler from creating the components necessary to make nuclear weapons.
Into Thin Air was a great read! I also highly recommend Devil in the White City.
A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt
