I might suggest a category along the lines of “self-optimization” / “lifestyle design” / “things that suggest options you might not have considered otherwise existed”—specifically, to share “Early Retirement Extreme”, Jacob Lund Fisker—and because I am the sort of peculiar person who enjoys reading about how to fold my shirts the best (“Spark Joy”, Marie Kondo).
I guess I’d like to distinguish books that feel more like rationalist-style habit-design from (the hypothetical, prototypical) “self-help” “Do More With The Power of Doing More: A Guide to More Doing”.
When someone recommends a non-fiction book to me I usually search the author's name in Google Podcasts. I can usually find an episode of them talking about the book's subject.
An Introduction to Climate, by Trewartha and Horn. I loved this book so much that I purchased two versions: The final 1980 version, and the older 1968 4th edition. It has almost everything a person might want to read about how climates differ, which is actually a lot - they don't just get colder from equator to pole, but vary in beautiful and systematic ways across entire continents. Trewartha's system for classifying these climates is easy to learn, and the maps he provide in the covers are lovely and engaging.
It might seem preferable to read the later version for better images and updated material. But the 1968 version, where he discusses each of his 14 climate types individually, is rich with memorable quotes capable of transporting the reader to strange and distant realms. For example, in his section on the Savannah climate:
“The winter months, or dry season, extend, with a slight variation, from April to November. They are, as I have said, pleasant and healthy in the extreme. Now the traveller and hunter of big game make their appearance; the deciduous trees are leafless; the grasses dry, yellow, and ready for the chance spark or deliberate act which, with the aid of a steady breeze, will turn vast expanses of golden grasslands into so many hideous, bare deserts of heat-tremulous black. All nature seems to be at a standstill, hibernating. The rivers are low. Where, but a few short months since, wide, watery expanses rushed headlong toward the sea . . . there now remain but tranquil, placid channels, flowing smilingly at the bottom of steep, cliff-like banks. . . .
“With October the heat becomes very great... and then Nature arises like a strong man in anger and looses the long pent-up voice of the thunder and the irresistible torrents of the early rains... the change is startling; the paths and roadways choke themselves with a rich clothing of newly sprung grasses, whilst the trees, the extremities of whose twigs and branches have been visibly swelling, now leap into leaf and blossom. The mosses, which for months past have looked like dry, bedraggled, colourless rags, regain once more their vivid, tender green. Now the forest throws off its puritanical greyness and, with an activity and rapidity beyond belief, decks itself in flowers of a thousand gorgeous shades of colour, from chrome-yellow and purple to grateful mauve...
"April comes, and suddenly Nature holds her hand. The swollen rivers and inundated plains shake themselves free from the redundant waters. The grasses have now reached a formidable height. The rains now cease, and the land begins to dry up. Rich greens turn to copper, and brown, and yellow, and little by little, with the advent of May, the winter returns with its sober greyness.”
For anyone uninterested in the particulars of Trewartha's system, these descriptions of Earth's fascinating climates can actually be found online for free in a still earlier version of his book, where he organizes his material in the earlier Koeppen system. I grabbed the above quote from page 272, and there are many more at https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.261708/page/n271/mode/2up
Not sure if these should be in the other categories but each one built on my understanding of the others, so I'll list them together:
Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich. Summarises the latest archeo-genetics findings and lays out the origins of the modern races, ethnicities and castes. Also demonstrates that violent population replacements were a lot more common in prehistory than the post-war archaeology establishment had previously acknowledged.
War in Human Civilisation by Azar Gat. The definitive account of warfare in human history, with a strong focus on evo-theory and game theory considerations. Argues that group conflict has been the main driver of progress throughout history. Also gives a perspective on 20th century geopolitical conflict and the causes of the current peace that's outside the orthodoxy but persuasive.
Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze. Fantastically detailed economic account of the Third Reich. Extremely challenging to conventional accounts of WW2, imo.
A Farewell to Alms and the Sun also Rises by Gregory Clark. Details the Malthusian nature of most pre-industrial societies, and the second book argues that those Malthusian pressures have resulted in significant selection effects on some populations.
The Descent of Man by Darwin. Origin of Species is a fun read but wont offer many new ideas to a modern reader. The Descent of Man is stuffed with ideas that were new to me and that I found interesting at least. When I first read it as a teenager a lot of it just seemed weird or ridiculous, but a lot of Darwin's more fringe hypothesis have been supported by the books above, so it's a great read if you already understand some of the context of how pre-war/ late 19th century people understood the world, and the ways it might actually have been more accurate than the common modern perspective.
Not to sound dramatic, but taken together those books outline a world view that'll be very alien, and maybe disturbing, to anyone born in the post-war West, but that used to common before the war and that I at least find persuasive on it's own terms.
The Nature and Aesthetic of Design + The Nature and Art of Workmanship David Pye
These two books can be read in either order, but they are a two volume set, so you ought to read both of them. There is nothing difficult about the language, but the ideas take a lot of thinking to absorb. It is about how we design and make anything -- the concepts work for software design as well as for the woodworking and architecture examples that the book relies on. David Pye was Professor of Furniture Design at the Royal College of Art, London and the maker of some of the most beautiful wooden boxes I have ever seen which still come up for sale on auctions in the UK from time to time.
“All the Pretty Horses”, Cormac McCarthy: the best novel that I can recall reading in school—I would consider reading more McCarthy for the unique flow and style of his writing, so I’d recommend giving it a test reading to see if it matches your taste.
Politics of AI: power, exploitation, colonialism, global surveillance and control. Fascinating view on the rising hot new technology as a tool of power and oppression.
Black Hole Blues - Janna Levin. It's about the multi-decade project to build the gravity wave detector : LIGO. Most fascinating science book I've read - a real "hero's journey" for scientists.
The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris. This was a science book published in 1967, and it shows - it's a book about human biology written before the genomic revolution. But what makes this book worthwhile is timeless: it provides an orientation to the idea that evolution tells us where we came from, and who we are. And its very best feature is a wonderful description of human mating habits which I have never encountered anywhere else.
Human sexuality classes tend to take a clinical and fragmentary attitude to the subject of sex, and academic works focus on extremely specific aspects which can leave the big picture of human courtship feeling very vague. Morris gives a very clear account of typical Western mating behaviors, grounding everything in the framework of evolution. Along the way you'll encounter some interesting speculation (e.g. aquatic ape hypothesis) and anthropological details presented in a very candid and easy-to-read way. Either The Naked Ape, or something very like it, should be ubiquitous across high school and college curricula.
Esther Perel - Mating in Captivity, and The State of Affairs.
Mating is about how in the Western world, we have been culturally shackled into thinking that our Significant Other has to be everything: We expect sex, companionship, friendship, psychological counseling and support, workout buddies, people who are fun in downtimes, people who are fun in uptimes, people who are compatible with all our interests and friends and diets, and much more from our partners. And it's ridiculous! She doesn't go the obvious direction and just tell people they should consider being poly, and I guess I can't blame her, because most people can't do it well. But she has some tips to make the best of a bad situation.
State of Affairs is about infidelity - why it happens, the various failure modes leading there, the various recovery modes afterwards, and so on.
Both interesting and well written, she's got a great style and a fairly non-judgmental default stance.
I'm astonished to see I'm the first to bring up Selfish Reasons to Have more Kids, by Brian Caplan.
The basic thesis of Selfish Reasons is "twin studies show that adult outcomes are entirely due to genes, so relax - as long as you don't abuse your kids, you don't need to do the insufferable Red Queen's Race of 'we need to get Jayden into the right preschool and then grind relentlessly for 18 straight years or their chances at getting into Harvard are RUINED' that so many parents fall into the trap of. Relax and enjoy having kids (and have more), because it doesn't have to be an un-ending 18-year sufferfest for both you and the kids."
And he has 4 kids, for the record, so he practices what he preaches.
I recently ran into a quote that I had recorded from Robert Reich's "The Work of Nations" (1992). It recognized the economic trends that were really starting to bite, particularly the movement of manufacturing to low-wage countries and the consequent effect on the traditional "working class". He also argued that the traditional conception of large corporations as somehow representative of the nations they are headquartered in, and thus "national champions", was obsolete. I think there's a revised edition, but it would be interesting to go through the original and see how its predictions have worked out.
A thorough critique of the absurdity of neoclassical economics.
Main points:
1° methodology: neoclassical economics is based on the dogma of free markets and rational human beings. Nothing solid can be built on such false foundations.
2° Needs and means: by evacuating the question of what is good and necessary towards morality and ethics, economics prevents itself from understanding human beings. In economics, what we want is good, full stop.
3° Growth: The sole aim of economics should be to abolish poverty and satisfy human needs. By redefining desires as needs, growth becomes a dogma whose usefulness cannot be questioned.
4° Equilibrium: Neoclassical economics postulates that equilibrium is the natural state of the market. This is totally contrary to experience and completely absurd.
5° Models and laws: economists rely on closed models. Their main tool is _ceteris paribus_, all other things being equal, which unfortunately never happens in reality...
6° economic psychology: homo economicus. Need we say more? Behavioural economists and the heirs of Kahneman raise the question of the irrationality of human beings. But in reality, since human beings always have to make decisions in the face of uncertainty and ignorance, are their choices really irrational?
7° Sociology and economics: sociology clearly highlights the importance of groups, and the ability of groups to act in a coordinated way. This does not exist in economics. Polanyi explains the problem.
8° Institutional economics: economics denies the identification of individuals with organisations.
9° Economics and power: neoclassical economics avoids the question of power by always assuming that relationships are non-coercive, ignoring the political aspects which are essential. By deliberately ignoring power games, economists support the structures in place.
10° Why study the history of economic thought? Because economic theories are not built up cumulatively like the exact sciences.
11° Economic history: economic theories are rooted in their time.
12° Ethics and economics: economists have rejected the ethical issues that were central to the thinking of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. In so doing, while denying it, they have turned neoclassical economics into a system that is both supposedly descriptive (in fact, not really) and prescriptive (while denying it).
13° abandoning omniscience
14° the future of economics: the political ends of economics
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - Julian Jaynes. An old classic now, Richard Dawkins said of it "one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between!"
The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World - Iain McGilchrist. A good followup to Jaynes, deals more with brain lateralization.
“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, Robert M. Pirsig: semi-fictional autobiography introducing Pirsig’s philosophy of “quality”—on a cross-country motorcycle trip with his son while his philosophy is driving him crazy, again, kind of. I found both the narrative and the philosophy remarkable.
Briefly, “quality” is what a bad essay lacks and that which cannot be pinpointed in a good essay (or repair job or design, etc.)—quality is just there (or not).
You can probably get a reasonable approximation of the book’s core ideas by browsing through Pirsig’s (far shorter) letters (etc.) in “On Quality: An Inquiry Into Excellence: Selected and Unpublished Writings”.
The books "How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of 'Intangibles' in Business" and "Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction" together provide powerful mental frameworks for making decisions in life when faced with uncertainty. The techniques presented across both texts, including methods to quantify qualitative factors and sharpen probabilistic reasoning skills, can be applied to high-stakes choices in one's personal life as well as to assessing risks and returns when investing and speculating in financial markets.
Literature, history and biography in one package. Gripping from the first paragraph to the end the last. Never have I felt more vividly nor understood more clearly the catastrophe that was the First World War, not just for the world it destroyed but for the evils it enabled, evils that live with us still.
Zweig was a close friend of Theodor Herzl, visited the Panama Canal as it was being built, had stay over at his house James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Paul Valéry, Richard Strauss, Bartok, Toscanini and a dozen other cultural figures whose names I do not recognize.
A pacifist intellectual of first rank who discovered in middle age that Hitler classified him as an Austrian Jew and, thus, that he must lose almost everything. Shortly after submitting the manuscript, just as the tide was about to turn, in February 1942 Zweig and his wife committed suicide.
One paragraph as a sample among hundreds of similar power:
"
Two charming girls, black-eyed and slim, well educated and well mannered, discreet and elegant, were on the same vessel. I noticed on the very first day that they kept at a distance, or were kept at a distance by some invisible barrier. They did not appear at the dances, they did not enter a general conversation, but sat apart reading English or French books. It was only on the second or third day that I became aware that it was not they who avoided the society of the English, but the others who drew back from these half-castes, although these two attractive girls were the daughters of a Parsi merchant and a Frenchwoman. For two or three years, in a boarding school in Lausanne and in a finishing school in England, there had been no discrimination, but on the ship going to India a cool, invisible but none the less horrid social exile had set in. This was my first sight of the pest of the racial purity mania which has become more dangerous for our world of today than the actual plague had been centuries ago.
Ghenghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World was pretty good. Talks about various military tactics, Tsubodai, his most famous general, the bureaucratic and information channels they created to actually make an empire that size function, which was fairly impressive, the largely catholic approach to both religions and skilled craftsmen, engineers, artisans, etc that allowed them to adopt complexity where useful and succeed against more advanced cities and countries. Overall a fairly interesting read, though like any historical book, not without some controversy on the details.
*The Gunpower Age*, Tonio Andrade. Kills once and for all the "cultural argument" that China fell behind because of Confucianism or political conservatism. It's not that simple. Fascinating look on the how and why industrial revolution happened here and not there.
Your writing is very good, here's a suggestion for you: The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution
this is beautiful, I am suggesting to have this article at the top menu pinned and at the bottom of every future newsletter for easy discoverability.
Good idea! Then I will finally have to learn to use the footer function.
General comments on book recommendations page
I might suggest a category along the lines of “self-optimization” / “lifestyle design” / “things that suggest options you might not have considered otherwise existed”—specifically, to share “Early Retirement Extreme”, Jacob Lund Fisker—and because I am the sort of peculiar person who enjoys reading about how to fold my shirts the best (“Spark Joy”, Marie Kondo).
I guess I’d like to distinguish books that feel more like rationalist-style habit-design from (the hypothetical, prototypical) “self-help” “Do More With The Power of Doing More: A Guide to More Doing”.
When someone recommends a non-fiction book to me I usually search the author's name in Google Podcasts. I can usually find an episode of them talking about the book's subject.
Books on subjects that do not fit in above
An Introduction to Climate, by Trewartha and Horn. I loved this book so much that I purchased two versions: The final 1980 version, and the older 1968 4th edition. It has almost everything a person might want to read about how climates differ, which is actually a lot - they don't just get colder from equator to pole, but vary in beautiful and systematic ways across entire continents. Trewartha's system for classifying these climates is easy to learn, and the maps he provide in the covers are lovely and engaging.
It might seem preferable to read the later version for better images and updated material. But the 1968 version, where he discusses each of his 14 climate types individually, is rich with memorable quotes capable of transporting the reader to strange and distant realms. For example, in his section on the Savannah climate:
“The winter months, or dry season, extend, with a slight variation, from April to November. They are, as I have said, pleasant and healthy in the extreme. Now the traveller and hunter of big game make their appearance; the deciduous trees are leafless; the grasses dry, yellow, and ready for the chance spark or deliberate act which, with the aid of a steady breeze, will turn vast expanses of golden grasslands into so many hideous, bare deserts of heat-tremulous black. All nature seems to be at a standstill, hibernating. The rivers are low. Where, but a few short months since, wide, watery expanses rushed headlong toward the sea . . . there now remain but tranquil, placid channels, flowing smilingly at the bottom of steep, cliff-like banks. . . .
“With October the heat becomes very great... and then Nature arises like a strong man in anger and looses the long pent-up voice of the thunder and the irresistible torrents of the early rains... the change is startling; the paths and roadways choke themselves with a rich clothing of newly sprung grasses, whilst the trees, the extremities of whose twigs and branches have been visibly swelling, now leap into leaf and blossom. The mosses, which for months past have looked like dry, bedraggled, colourless rags, regain once more their vivid, tender green. Now the forest throws off its puritanical greyness and, with an activity and rapidity beyond belief, decks itself in flowers of a thousand gorgeous shades of colour, from chrome-yellow and purple to grateful mauve...
"April comes, and suddenly Nature holds her hand. The swollen rivers and inundated plains shake themselves free from the redundant waters. The grasses have now reached a formidable height. The rains now cease, and the land begins to dry up. Rich greens turn to copper, and brown, and yellow, and little by little, with the advent of May, the winter returns with its sober greyness.”
For anyone uninterested in the particulars of Trewartha's system, these descriptions of Earth's fascinating climates can actually be found online for free in a still earlier version of his book, where he organizes his material in the earlier Koeppen system. I grabbed the above quote from page 272, and there are many more at https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.261708/page/n271/mode/2up
Not sure if these should be in the other categories but each one built on my understanding of the others, so I'll list them together:
Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich. Summarises the latest archeo-genetics findings and lays out the origins of the modern races, ethnicities and castes. Also demonstrates that violent population replacements were a lot more common in prehistory than the post-war archaeology establishment had previously acknowledged.
War in Human Civilisation by Azar Gat. The definitive account of warfare in human history, with a strong focus on evo-theory and game theory considerations. Argues that group conflict has been the main driver of progress throughout history. Also gives a perspective on 20th century geopolitical conflict and the causes of the current peace that's outside the orthodoxy but persuasive.
Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze. Fantastically detailed economic account of the Third Reich. Extremely challenging to conventional accounts of WW2, imo.
A Farewell to Alms and the Sun also Rises by Gregory Clark. Details the Malthusian nature of most pre-industrial societies, and the second book argues that those Malthusian pressures have resulted in significant selection effects on some populations.
The Descent of Man by Darwin. Origin of Species is a fun read but wont offer many new ideas to a modern reader. The Descent of Man is stuffed with ideas that were new to me and that I found interesting at least. When I first read it as a teenager a lot of it just seemed weird or ridiculous, but a lot of Darwin's more fringe hypothesis have been supported by the books above, so it's a great read if you already understand some of the context of how pre-war/ late 19th century people understood the world, and the ways it might actually have been more accurate than the common modern perspective.
Not to sound dramatic, but taken together those books outline a world view that'll be very alien, and maybe disturbing, to anyone born in the post-war West, but that used to common before the war and that I at least find persuasive on it's own terms.
Invitation to a Banquet by Dunlop. A primer on Chinese food and Chinese history in one, legible to a western reader!
Two books on emotion - How Emotions Are Made, and Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain, Lisa Feldman-Barrett
The Nature and Aesthetic of Design + The Nature and Art of Workmanship David Pye
These two books can be read in either order, but they are a two volume set, so you ought to read both of them. There is nothing difficult about the language, but the ideas take a lot of thinking to absorb. It is about how we design and make anything -- the concepts work for software design as well as for the woodworking and architecture examples that the book relies on. David Pye was Professor of Furniture Design at the Royal College of Art, London and the maker of some of the most beautiful wooden boxes I have ever seen which still come up for sale on auctions in the UK from time to time.
Entertainment
“All the Pretty Horses”, Cormac McCarthy: the best novel that I can recall reading in school—I would consider reading more McCarthy for the unique flow and style of his writing, so I’d recommend giving it a test reading to see if it matches your taste.
Technology
*Atlas of AI*, Kate Crawford
Politics of AI: power, exploitation, colonialism, global surveillance and control. Fascinating view on the rising hot new technology as a tool of power and oppression.
Space
Black Hole Blues - Janna Levin. It's about the multi-decade project to build the gravity wave detector : LIGO. Most fascinating science book I've read - a real "hero's journey" for scientists.
Sexuality
The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris. This was a science book published in 1967, and it shows - it's a book about human biology written before the genomic revolution. But what makes this book worthwhile is timeless: it provides an orientation to the idea that evolution tells us where we came from, and who we are. And its very best feature is a wonderful description of human mating habits which I have never encountered anywhere else.
Human sexuality classes tend to take a clinical and fragmentary attitude to the subject of sex, and academic works focus on extremely specific aspects which can leave the big picture of human courtship feeling very vague. Morris gives a very clear account of typical Western mating behaviors, grounding everything in the framework of evolution. Along the way you'll encounter some interesting speculation (e.g. aquatic ape hypothesis) and anthropological details presented in a very candid and easy-to-read way. Either The Naked Ape, or something very like it, should be ubiquitous across high school and college curricula.
Esther Perel - Mating in Captivity, and The State of Affairs.
Mating is about how in the Western world, we have been culturally shackled into thinking that our Significant Other has to be everything: We expect sex, companionship, friendship, psychological counseling and support, workout buddies, people who are fun in downtimes, people who are fun in uptimes, people who are compatible with all our interests and friends and diets, and much more from our partners. And it's ridiculous! She doesn't go the obvious direction and just tell people they should consider being poly, and I guess I can't blame her, because most people can't do it well. But she has some tips to make the best of a bad situation.
State of Affairs is about infidelity - why it happens, the various failure modes leading there, the various recovery modes afterwards, and so on.
Both interesting and well written, she's got a great style and a fairly non-judgmental default stance.
Pronatalism
I'm astonished to see I'm the first to bring up Selfish Reasons to Have more Kids, by Brian Caplan.
The basic thesis of Selfish Reasons is "twin studies show that adult outcomes are entirely due to genes, so relax - as long as you don't abuse your kids, you don't need to do the insufferable Red Queen's Race of 'we need to get Jayden into the right preschool and then grind relentlessly for 18 straight years or their chances at getting into Harvard are RUINED' that so many parents fall into the trap of. Relax and enjoy having kids (and have more), because it doesn't have to be an un-ending 18-year sufferfest for both you and the kids."
And he has 4 kids, for the record, so he practices what he preaches.
Politics
I recently ran into a quote that I had recorded from Robert Reich's "The Work of Nations" (1992). It recognized the economic trends that were really starting to bite, particularly the movement of manufacturing to low-wage countries and the consequent effect on the traditional "working class". He also argued that the traditional conception of large corporations as somehow representative of the nations they are headquartered in, and thus "national champions", was obsolete. I think there's a revised edition, but it would be interesting to go through the original and see how its predictions have worked out.
*What's wrong with economics?*, Robert Skidelsky
A thorough critique of the absurdity of neoclassical economics.
Main points:
1° methodology: neoclassical economics is based on the dogma of free markets and rational human beings. Nothing solid can be built on such false foundations.
2° Needs and means: by evacuating the question of what is good and necessary towards morality and ethics, economics prevents itself from understanding human beings. In economics, what we want is good, full stop.
3° Growth: The sole aim of economics should be to abolish poverty and satisfy human needs. By redefining desires as needs, growth becomes a dogma whose usefulness cannot be questioned.
4° Equilibrium: Neoclassical economics postulates that equilibrium is the natural state of the market. This is totally contrary to experience and completely absurd.
5° Models and laws: economists rely on closed models. Their main tool is _ceteris paribus_, all other things being equal, which unfortunately never happens in reality...
6° economic psychology: homo economicus. Need we say more? Behavioural economists and the heirs of Kahneman raise the question of the irrationality of human beings. But in reality, since human beings always have to make decisions in the face of uncertainty and ignorance, are their choices really irrational?
7° Sociology and economics: sociology clearly highlights the importance of groups, and the ability of groups to act in a coordinated way. This does not exist in economics. Polanyi explains the problem.
8° Institutional economics: economics denies the identification of individuals with organisations.
9° Economics and power: neoclassical economics avoids the question of power by always assuming that relationships are non-coercive, ignoring the political aspects which are essential. By deliberately ignoring power games, economists support the structures in place.
10° Why study the history of economic thought? Because economic theories are not built up cumulatively like the exact sciences.
11° Economic history: economic theories are rooted in their time.
12° Ethics and economics: economists have rejected the ethical issues that were central to the thinking of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. In so doing, while denying it, they have turned neoclassical economics into a system that is both supposedly descriptive (in fact, not really) and prescriptive (while denying it).
13° abandoning omniscience
14° the future of economics: the political ends of economics
Medicine
I think your audience might like Burn by Herman Pontzer. It's an anthropological view of how we burn calories. It does contain a lot of physiology.
Human evolution
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - Julian Jaynes. An old classic now, Richard Dawkins said of it "one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between!"
The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World - Iain McGilchrist. A good followup to Jaynes, deals more with brain lateralization.
Philosophy
“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, Robert M. Pirsig: semi-fictional autobiography introducing Pirsig’s philosophy of “quality”—on a cross-country motorcycle trip with his son while his philosophy is driving him crazy, again, kind of. I found both the narrative and the philosophy remarkable.
Briefly, “quality” is what a bad essay lacks and that which cannot be pinpointed in a good essay (or repair job or design, etc.)—quality is just there (or not).
You can probably get a reasonable approximation of the book’s core ideas by browsing through Pirsig’s (far shorter) letters (etc.) in “On Quality: An Inquiry Into Excellence: Selected and Unpublished Writings”.
Psychology
The books "How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of 'Intangibles' in Business" and "Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction" together provide powerful mental frameworks for making decisions in life when faced with uncertainty. The techniques presented across both texts, including methods to quantify qualitative factors and sharpen probabilistic reasoning skills, can be applied to high-stakes choices in one's personal life as well as to assessing risks and returns when investing and speculating in financial markets.
History
The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig
Literature, history and biography in one package. Gripping from the first paragraph to the end the last. Never have I felt more vividly nor understood more clearly the catastrophe that was the First World War, not just for the world it destroyed but for the evils it enabled, evils that live with us still.
Zweig was a close friend of Theodor Herzl, visited the Panama Canal as it was being built, had stay over at his house James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Paul Valéry, Richard Strauss, Bartok, Toscanini and a dozen other cultural figures whose names I do not recognize.
A pacifist intellectual of first rank who discovered in middle age that Hitler classified him as an Austrian Jew and, thus, that he must lose almost everything. Shortly after submitting the manuscript, just as the tide was about to turn, in February 1942 Zweig and his wife committed suicide.
One paragraph as a sample among hundreds of similar power:
"
Two charming girls, black-eyed and slim, well educated and well mannered, discreet and elegant, were on the same vessel. I noticed on the very first day that they kept at a distance, or were kept at a distance by some invisible barrier. They did not appear at the dances, they did not enter a general conversation, but sat apart reading English or French books. It was only on the second or third day that I became aware that it was not they who avoided the society of the English, but the others who drew back from these half-castes, although these two attractive girls were the daughters of a Parsi merchant and a Frenchwoman. For two or three years, in a boarding school in Lausanne and in a finishing school in England, there had been no discrimination, but on the ship going to India a cool, invisible but none the less horrid social exile had set in. This was my first sight of the pest of the racial purity mania which has become more dangerous for our world of today than the actual plague had been centuries ago.
"
The Silk Roads: A New history of the world by Frankopan
Ghenghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World was pretty good. Talks about various military tactics, Tsubodai, his most famous general, the bureaucratic and information channels they created to actually make an empire that size function, which was fairly impressive, the largely catholic approach to both religions and skilled craftsmen, engineers, artisans, etc that allowed them to adopt complexity where useful and succeed against more advanced cities and countries. Overall a fairly interesting read, though like any historical book, not without some controversy on the details.
I've heard this is great and has been on my list for a long time.
*The Gunpower Age*, Tonio Andrade. Kills once and for all the "cultural argument" that China fell behind because of Confucianism or political conservatism. It's not that simple. Fascinating look on the how and why industrial revolution happened here and not there.
Gender relations