A couple notes to start things off: Special thanks to my one and only reader for reminding me about doing this! Second, apologies to my family: I know it’s time to write about what I’m reading when half the things I say start with “This book I just read talked about…”, and I’ve surely passed that threshold in the last few weeks. 😉
The collection of books I’ve read recently (see below for the full list from the past three months) makes up what I just learned is probably a “small-world network.” That is, most are clustered around similar topics (the environment, politics, philosophy, medicine, dogs), with a few linking the disparate fields together. Other examples include the neurons in our brain, actors in movies (Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?), online social networks, and real life social networks (interestingly, behaviors like smoking also propagate along these!).
If I were more motivated, I’d draw out a graph to prove my books were one of these… but I’m not. Instead, here are some of the coincidental and maybe interesting links that emerged, and also (as usual) random things I thought were cool. Most of these are concentrated from the most recent readings, since… memory, and all.
- The oh-so-clever line “…research… or rather, just search!” to highlight the novelty of an investigation. (Loonshots, How to Do Nothing)
- “In God we trust. All others [must] bring data.” — attributed, respectively, to NASA and surgeon Bernard Fisher. In the first case, the over reliance on quantitative data led to the Challenger catastrophe, but in the second, lack of adherence to the principle led to decades of unnecessary traumatic and ultimately ineffective surgeries to treat breast cancer. Moderation, it seems, is key. (Range, The Emperor of All Maladies)
- “Slow is efficient. Efficient is fast. Slow is fast. “, and variations — the Navy SEALS. I really like this concept, and it’s a reminder that sustainable, thoughtful progress ultimately can trump a mad dash for gratification. I need to remember that a little more. (Endurance, Creativity, Inc.)
- Discussions of Vannover Bush, the guy who designed America’s approach to scientific research (…search) (Loonshots, The Emperor of All Maladies)
- The toxic green-blue algae that threatens water supplies around the Great Lakes and can almost instantaneously kill a dog (The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, a NYT article)
- The terrifying nature of much of scientific and especially medical research, in hindsight, and its susceptibility to our own biases and personal desires. If nothing else, a striking reminder to stay skeptical, humble, and doubtful about anything that seems obvious (She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, How to Change Your Mind, The Emperor of All Maladies)
- Similarly, the terrifying influence and leverage of big industries (tobacco, fossil fuels, and the like) to affect the decisions and trajectory for basically everyone on Earth (Losing Earth, Falter, The Emperor of All Maladies)
- On the other hand, the people that do some of these things believe just as passionately that they are somehow doing the “right” thing, regardless of how absurd it seems to me. So many high-level and impactful decisions are made by people driven by arbitrary beliefs, shaped by chance and circumstance. While I don’t think I’d make those same decisions if I today were placed in their shoes, I have to believe that if I lived their life — and had walked the metaphorical 10,000 steps in their shoes — beforehand, I probably would (The Chief, The Hill to Die On, Losing Earth).
- (This has nothing to do with books, but coincidental none the less.) The similarity of the behaviors and our treatment of one-year-old babies and one-year-old puppies- playing with toilet water, eating mulch, running in fields with pure joy, demanding and receiving, alternating, adoration and loving frustration.
Maya’s 2019 Summer Books, In Chronological Order
[* = recommended; ~ = favorite!] I’ve got notes written up for some of these… ask and you shall receive!
- Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World — Marcia Bjornerud
- Liquid Rules: The Delightful and Dangerous Substances That Flow Through Our Lives — Mark Miodownik
- *She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity — Carl Zimmer
- *The Beautiful Cure: Harnessing Your Body’s Natural Defenses — Daniel M. Davis
- The Common Good — Robert B. Reich
- How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them — Jason Stanley
- *Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages — Gaston Dorren
- Every Tool’s a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It — Adam Savage
- On the Nature of Things — Lucretius
- ~Fascism: A Warning — Madeleine K. Albright
- A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age — Daniel J. Levitin
- *Losing Earth: A Recent History — Nathaniel Rich
- ~How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain — Lisa Feldman Barrett
- *Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery — Scott Kelly
- Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen — Mary Norris
- *Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know — Alexandra Horowitz
- Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past — David Reich
- ~The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring — Richard Preston
- The Fourth Industrial Revolution — Klaus Schwab
- *The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Groundbreaking Scientists and Their Conflicting Visions of he Future of Our Planet — Charles C. Mann
- ~The Hill to Die On: The Battle for Congress and the Future of Trump’s America — Jake Sherman, Anna Palmer
- One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Control of Nature — John McPhee
- Being a Dog: Following the Dog into a World of Smell — Alexandra Horowitz
- ~Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel — Carl Safina
- Pilgrim at Tinker Creek — Annie Dillard
- The Kingdom of Speech — Tom Wolfe
- *The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future — Jon Gertner
- Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? — Bill McKibben
- I’ve Been Thinking… Reflections, Prayers, and Meditations for a Meaningful Life — Maria Shriver
- ~On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes — Alexandra Horowitz
- Meditations — Marcus Aurelius
- *The Death and Life of the Great Lakes — Dan Egan
- Once a Wolf: The Science Behind our Dogs’ Astonishing Genetic Evolution — Bryan Sykes
- *The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World — Simon Winchester
- The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us and What We Can Do About Them — Lucy Jones
- ~The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts — Joan Biskupic
- In Oceans Deep: Courage, Innovation, and Adventures Beneath the Waves — Bill Streever
- *This Idea Is Brilliant: Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know — John Brockman
- Skeleton Keys: The Secret Life of Bone — Brian Switek
- How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy — Jenny Odell
- ~Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World — David Epstein
- *How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence — Michael Pollan
- Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People — Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein
- *Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration — Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
- Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries — Safi Bahcall
- ~The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer — Siddharta Mukherjee