Nikita S
work in healthcare and bio, play @otherinternet__ 👩🏾💻 exploring spaceship earth 🌏
70+ Book Recommendations by Nikita S
Blockchain Chicken Farm (FSG Originals x Logic)
Xiaowei Wang
From FSGO x Logic: stories about rural China, food, and tech that reveal new truths about the globalized world In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today. From pork farmers using AI to produce the perfect pig, to disruptive luxury counterfeits and the political intersections of e-commerce villages, Wang unravels the ties between globalization, technology, agriculture, and commerce in unprecedented fashion. Accompanied by humorous “Sinofuturist” recipes that frame meals as they transform under new technology, Blockchain Chicken Farm is an original and probing look into innovation, connectivity, and collaboration in the digitized rural world. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.@kytalli Screenshot is from my iPad - it’s from Blockchain Chicken Farm. Heinous name for a solid book lol https://t.co/v7J4J9O0Tp
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being.” A major achievement from one of the world’s truly great writers, Milan Kundera’s magnificent novel of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.@xaelophone @itunpredictable The only way to describe it - not necessarily the best book, but the perfect book
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being.” A major achievement from one of the world’s truly great writers, Milan Kundera’s magnificent novel of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.@alex A Little Life (phenomenal book you’ll never want to read again), Dune, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (the book I describe to everyone as the •perfect• book)
Inventing the Future
Nick SRNICEK
@imdilick @sambwinslow Great book, and if you read it, always down to chat Srnicek! Changed my thinking on “localism” too - I see it much more as a provincial hindrance now in a globally connected world
Entangled Life
Merlin Sheldrake
"Living at the border between life and non-life, fungi use diverse cocktails of potent enzymes and acids to disassemble some of the most stubborn substances on the planet, turning rock into soil and wood into compost, allowing plants to grow. Fungi not only help create soil, they send out networks of tubes that enmesh roots and link plants together in the "Wood Wide Web." Fungi also drive many long-standing human fascinations: from yeasts that cause bread to rise and orchestrate the fermentation of sugar into alcohol; to psychedelic fungi; to the mold that produces penicillin and revolutionized modern medicine. And we can partner with fungi to heal the damage we've done to the planet. Fungi are already being used to make sustainable building materials and wearable leather, but they can do so much more. Fungi can digest many stubborn and toxic pollutants from crude oil to human-made polyurethane plastics and the explosive TNT. They can grow food from renewable sources: edible mushrooms can be grown on anything from plant waste to cigarette butts. And some fungi's antiviral compounds might be able to ease the colony collapse of bees. Merlin Sheldrake's revelatory introduction to this world will show us how fungi, and our relationships with them, are more astonishing than we could have imagined. Bringing to light science's latest discoveries and ingeniously parsing the varieties and behaviors of the fungi themselves, he points us toward the fundamental questions about the nature of intelligence and identity this massively diverse, little understood kingdom provokes"--@DrSynbio @futureprocess @MerlinSheldrake I know! Been thinking a lot about ecological economics (currency of energy and materials cycle among producers and consumers) since I picked up Merlin’s book https://t.co/Li2fnXodCw
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being.” A major achievement from one of the world’s truly great writers, Milan Kundera’s magnificent novel of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.@mariodgabriele The best book I've ever read (I don't say this lightly) is the Unbearable Lightness of Being. I swear by Kundera.
Learning by Heart
Corita Kent
Tap into your natural ability to create! * Engaging, proven exercises for developing creativity * Priceless resource for teachers, artists, actors, everyone Artist and educator Corita Kent inspired generations of artists, and the truth of her words "We can all talk, we can all write, and if the blocks are removed, we can all draw and paint and make things" still shines through. This revised edition of her classic work Learning by Heart features a new foreword and a chart of curriculum standards. Kent's original projects and exercises, developed through more than 30 years as an art teacher and richly illustrated with 300 thought-provoking images, are as inspiring and as freeing today as they were during her lifetime. Learn how to challenge fears, be open to new directions, recognize connections between objects and ideas, and much more in this remarkable, indispensable guide to freeing the creative spirit within all of us. With new material by art world heavyweights Susan Friel and Barbara Loste, Learning by Heart brings creative inspiration into the 21st century!Reading @aaronzlewis’s copy of Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit https://t.co/tXV3TyGTBq
Literary Machines
Theodor Holm Nelson
I find myself often referencing Ted Nelson and his book Literary Machines. He coined the expression hypertext and hypermedia in the 1960s; he later theorized and created an open source software (Xanadu) that displayed media and text non-sequentially and interconnected like a web. https://t.co/E0UmZoqSoV
The Color of Law
Richard Rothstein
Lauded by Ta-Nehisi Coates for his "brilliant" and "fine understanding of the machinery of government policy" (The Atlantic), Richard Rothstein has painstakingly documented how American cities, from San Francisco to Boston, became so racially divided. Rothstein describes how federal, state, and local governments systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning, public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities, subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs, tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation, and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. He demonstrates that such policies still influence tragedies in places like Ferguson and Baltimore. Scholars have separately described many of these policies, but until now, no author has brought them together to explode the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces. Like The New Jim Crow, Rothstein's groundbreaking history forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.@yrechtman @zmholland Excellent read on both white flight and redlining: https://t.co/Lt960Ncu4V
The Emissary
Yoko Tawada
Yoko Tawada's new novel is a breathtakingly light-hearted meditation on mortality and fully displays what Rivka Galchen has called her "brilliant, shimmering, magnificent strangeness"Haven’t been on Twitter as much this week. I spent time with family and consumed myself in books I’ve put off for too long. Some recommendations of stories that hum with beautiful strangeness: The Emissary, Yoko Tawada Bluets, Maggie Nelson Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
Bluets
Maggie Nelson
Bluets is a lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue, while folding in, and responding to, the divergent voices and preoccupations of such generative figures as Wittgenstein, Sei Shonagon, William Gass and Joan Mitchell.Haven’t been on Twitter as much this week. I spent time with family and consumed myself in books I’ve put off for too long. Some recommendations of stories that hum with beautiful strangeness: The Emissary, Yoko Tawada Bluets, Maggie Nelson Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino
“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” — from Invisible Cities In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo — Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear. “Invisible Cities changed the way we read and what is possible in the balance between poetry and prose . . . The book I would choose as pillow and plate, alone on a desert island.” — Jeanette WintersonHaven’t been on Twitter as much this week. I spent time with family and consumed myself in books I’ve put off for too long. Some recommendations of stories that hum with beautiful strangeness: The Emissary, Yoko Tawada Bluets, Maggie Nelson Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
The Emissary
Yoko Tawada
Yoko Tawada's new novel is a breathtakingly light-hearted meditation on mortality and fully displays what Rivka Galchen has called her "brilliant, shimmering, magnificent strangeness"@HipCityReg @aweissman I’m on The Emissary by Yoko Tawada, another sci fi short story.
@idlebell @sebs_tweets @AdamSinger @david_perell @shl @holland_tom @BrianTHeligman @simonsarris @awilkinson @tutubuslatinus @vgr @kootlan @Oniropolis @luciensteil A little light reading.. https://t.co/rXRx874V7W
Three Versions of Judas (BibleWorld)
Richard G. Walsh
The gospel character of Judas clearly indicates Christian myth making. As the insider become outsider he demarcates Christian boundaries and, therefore, helps define insider identity and locate evil. Three Versions of Judas explores the mythic work transpiring in the Judases of the gospels and of subsequent scholarly and artistic interpretation from the perspective of Jorge Luis Borges' Three Versions of Judas. In that short story, Borges creates a modern Gnostic, Nils Runeberg, who doubts the canonical story of Judas and, therefore, creates seriatim three alternative versions: (1) a Judas who is the necessary, human complement to Christs redemptive work, (2) a Judas who denies himself the spirit for Gods greater glory, and, finally, (3) a Judas who is himself the incarnation. Three Versions of Judas finds three similar Judases in the gospels (and in subsequent interpretation).@dvasishtha I’m rereading it now! Three Versions of Judas is breathtakingly creative. I don’t think I fully appreciated it until this read (was always clinging to Funes as the best story).
Sex & Violence, Death & Silence
burn-gordon
'The Pop artists were among the first to understand the desire of consumers to change their lives through the purchase of clean, manufactured commodities. YBA, on the other hand, was more interested in the dirt that accrues beneath the laminate surface of shiny things. Their special perception was that cheap language and cheap materials didn't have to equal cheap thinking. The trick was to tell it in a jaunty, unportentous, off-hand, unliterary - anti-literary - way. And then there were the drugs.'Spanning nearly 35 years, Sex & Violence, Death & Silence is a collection of the best of Gordon Burn's writing on art. Focusing on two principle generations - the Royal College pop art of Hockney and his contemporaries, and the YBA sensations of the 1990s - it explores how these artists rose to prominence with their friends and contemporaries, and what happened next.Burn's work is fast becoming a kind of chronicle. Its factuality always connects with the broader poetic rythms of cultural life. Displaying all his customary insight and empathy, his writing adds up to much more than a collection of pieces on art: superbly evocative and engaging, it offers a pathway through two of the most important and vibrant periods in recent art history, and is another compelling and ruminative look at our culture.@JPrendergass @aweissman I haven't read this one (heard good things) but I'm part way through Sex & Violence, Death & Silence about the punk Young British Artists that Saatchi backed. https://t.co/V2ZjfHyURB
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being.” A major achievement from one of the world’s truly great writers, Milan Kundera’s magnificent novel of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.@lolawajs You have my two favorite books! Unbearable Lightness of Being and God of Small Things.
The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy
The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is stranded on the highway amid a Marxist workers' demonstration. Inside the car sit two-egg twins Rahel and Esthappen, and so begins their tale.... Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family - their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts). When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen. With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it."@lolawajs You have my two favorite books! Unbearable Lightness of Being and God of Small Things.
The Spirit of Terrorism (Radical Thinkers)
Jean Baudrillard
No Marketing Blurb@ProfJeffJarviss Yes. I haven’t read his stuff on the Gulf War but Spirit of Terrorism (on reality collapsing into fiction) is really excellent.
Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card
"The classic of modern science fiction"--Front cover.“Why read fiction? Because we’re hungry for another kind of truth. The mythic truth about human nature, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story” Orson Scott Card, Intro to Ender’s Game
The Dispossessed
Ursula K. Le Guin
One of the very best must-read novels of all time - with a new introduction by Roddy Doyle 'There was a wall. It did not look important - even a child could climb it. But the idea was real. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on...' Shevek is brilliant scientist who is attempting to find a new theory of time - but there are those who are jealous of his work, and will do anything to block him. So he leaves his homeland, hoping to find a place of more liberty and tolerance. Initially feted, Shevek soon finds himself being used as a pawn in a deadly political game. With powerful themes of freedom, society and the natural world's influence on competition and co-operation, THE DISPOSSESSED is a true classic of the 20th century.@andrewchen The Dispossessed - Ursula K Le Guin How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy - Jenny Odell
How to Do Nothing
Jenny Odell
"When the technologies we use every day collapse our experiences into 24/7 availability, platforms for personal branding, and products to be monetized, nothing can be quite so radical as...doing nothing. Here, Jenny Odell sends up a flare from the heart of Silicon Valley, delivering an action plan to resist capitalist narratives of productivity and techno-determinism, and to become more meaningfully connected in the process"--@andrewchen The Dispossessed - Ursula K Le Guin How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy - Jenny Odell
The Sirens of Titan
Kurt Vonnegut
When Winston Niles Rumfoord flies his spaceship into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum he is converted into pure energy and only materializes when his waveforms intercept Earth or some other planet. As a result, he only gets home to Newport, Rhode Island, once every fifty-nine days and then only for an hour. But at least, as a consolation, he now knows everything that has ever happened and everything that ever will be. He knows, for instance, that his wife is going to Mars to mate with Malachi Constant, the richest man in the world. He also knows that on Titan - one of Saturn's moons - is an alien from the planet Tralfamadore, who has been waiting 200,000 years for a spare part for his grounded spacecraft ...@HipCityReg @itunpredictable you have to read Sirens of Titan, immediately
Designing Freedom
Stafford Beer
If you're interested in systems theory like me, highly rec reading - W. Ross Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety (known as the 1️⃣ law of cybernetics which states that "variety can destroy variety") - Stafford Beer's Designing Freedom (describing organization of department stores)
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara
"A little life, follows four college classmates --broke, adrift, and bouyed only by their friendship and ambition--as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara's stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves." --Back cover@primary_alt A Little Life, if you want to feel raw (cried numerous times reading this)
Dune
Frank Herbert
Follows the adventures of Paul Atreides, the son of a betrayed duke given up for dead on a treacherous desert planet and adopted by its fierce, nomadic people, who help him unravel his most unexpected destiny.Reading Dune, and this epigraph moved me: “The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in.. he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions.. even occasional greatness will destroy a man.” https://t.co/Hl35uBOUkq
Future Shock
Alvin Toffler
Predicts the pace of environmental change during the next thirty years and the ways in which the individual must face and learn to cope with personal and social change@seyitaylor One Dimensional Man - Marcuse K-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher Capitalist Realism - Mark Fisher Future Shock - Alvin Toffler
@cheriehu42 Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man
One-dimensional Man
Herbert Marcuse
The influential political theorist attacks the uncritical and conformist acceptance of existing social structures and behaviors, arguing that members of Western societies must reassert their individuality and personal freedom against the oppression of the status quo.@cheriehu42 Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man
Health Justice Now
Timothy Faust
Single payer is the tool--health justice is the goal! Single payer healthcare is not complicated: the government pays for all care for all people. It's cheaper than our current model, and most Americans (and their doctors) already want it. So what's the deal with our current healthcare system, and why don't we have something better? In Health Justice Now, Timothy Faust explains what single payer is, why we don't yet have it, and how it can be won. He identifies the actors that have misled us for profit and political gain, dispels the myth that healthcare needs to be personally expensive, shows how we can smoothly transition to a new model, and reveals the slate of humane and progressive reforms that we can only achieve with single payer as the springboard. In this impassioned playbook, Faust inspires us to believe in a world where we could leave our job without losing healthcare for ourselves and our kids; where affordable housing is healthcare; and where social justice links arm-in-arm with health justice for us all.Got a sneak peek earlier this year.. @crulge is on the forefront of health justice activism and this book is a tour de force. Giving away my copy ~free~! Let me know below / in the DMs. https://t.co/8TPyCHJB6S
The Passage of Power
Robert A. Caro
Examines Lyndon Johnson's volatile relationships with John and Robert Kennedy, describes JFK's assassination from Johnson's viewpoint, and recounts his accomplishments as president before they were overshadowed by the Vietnam War.@lpolovets @kevinakwok Just finished book three and ordered The Passage of Power! Also taking a look at some of the other books that have won Biography Pulitzers and seeing if there's anyone that rivals Caro.. https://t.co/WHfLLrd9Kp
Shoe Dog
Phil Knight
In this candid and riveting memoir, for the first time ever, Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company’s early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world’s most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands. In 1962, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed $50 from his father and created a company with a simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost athletic shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his lime green Plymouth Valiant, Knight grossed $8,000 his first year. Today, Nike’s annual sales top $30 billion. In an age of startups, Nike is the ne plus ultra of all startups, and the swoosh has become a revolutionary, globe-spanning icon, one of the most ubiquitous and recognizable symbols in the world today. But Knight, the man behind the swoosh, has always remained a mystery. Now, for the first time, in a memoir that is candid, humble, gutsy, and wry, he tells his story, beginning with his crossroads moment. At 24, after backpacking around the world, he decided to take the unconventional path, to start his own business—a business that would be dynamic, different. Knight details the many risks and daunting setbacks that stood between him and his dream—along with his early triumphs. Above all, he recalls the formative relationships with his first partners and employees, a ragtag group of misfits and seekers who became a tight-knit band of brothers. Together, harnessing the transcendent power of a shared mission, and a deep belief in the spirit of sport, they built a brand that changed everything.@Visage_1 @nachkari So far... The Firm (McKinsey), Shoe Dog (Nike), The Fish Who Ate the Whale (United Fruit), Bitter Brew (Anheuser Busch)
Bitter Brew
William Knoedelseder
“Bitter Brew deftly chronicles the contentious succession of kings in a uniquely American dynasty. You’ll never crack open a six again without thinking of this book.” —John Sayles, Director of Eight Men Out and author of A Moment in the Sun The creators of Budweiser and Michelob beers, the Anheuser-Busch company is one of the wealthiest, most colorful and enduring family dynasties in the history of American commerce. In Bitter Brew, critically acclaimed journalist William Knoedelseder tells the riveting, often scandalous saga of the rise and fall of the dysfunctional Busch family—an epic tale of prosperity, profligacy, hubris, and the dark consequences of success that spans three centuries, from the open salvos of the Civil War to the present day.@gerstenzang @kylebrussell Would also recommend Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer
The Fish That Ate the Whale
Rich Cohen
The author of Sweet and Low presents a historical profile of Samuel Zemurray that traces his rise from a penniless youth to one of the world's wealthiest and most powerful men, offering insight into his capitalist talents and the ways in which his life reflected the best and worst of American business dealings.@gerstenzang @kylebrussell Sam, I was inspired by your business history thread a while ago and read several books from the list including The Fish That Ate the Whale and The Firm.
The Firm
Duff McDonald
A behind-the-scenes, revelatory history of the controversial consulting firm traces its decades-long influence in both business and political arenas, citing its role in the establishment of mainstream practices and modern understandings about capitalism while evaluating the failures that have compromised its reputation. 60,000 first printing.@gerstenzang @kylebrussell Sam, I was inspired by your business history thread a while ago and read several books from the list including The Fish That Ate the Whale and The Firm.
Capitalist Realism
Mark Fisher
After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. But it will also show that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the capitalist reality program capitalism in fact is anything but realistic.@aweissman He’s incredible! Committed suicide a few years ago, but his texts Capitalist Realism and Exiting the Vampire Castle are must reads.
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
R. Buckminster Fuller
One of Fuller’s most popular works, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, is a brilliant synthesis of his world view. In this very accessible volume, Fuller investigates the great challenges facing humanity. How will humanity survive? How does automation influence individualization? How can we utilize our resources more effectively to realize our potential to end poverty in this generation? He questions the concept of specialization, calls for a design revolution of innovation, and offers advice on how to guide “spaceship earth” toward a sustainable future.(Everyone needs to read Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, it’s blowing my mind! He’s a genius who truly thought about the world creatively)
- The Three-Body Problem is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience this multiple award winning phenomenon from China's most beloved science fiction author, Liu Cixin. Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.
@levilian1 Three Body Problem is in my backpack right now! Finishing Hegel's Introduction to the Philosophy of History first.
Introduction to The Philosophy of History
G. W. F. Hegel
"An elegant and intelligent translation. The text provides a perfect solution to the problem of how to introduce students to Hegel in a survey course in the history of Western philosophy." -- Graham Parkes, University of Hawaii@levilian1 Three Body Problem is in my backpack right now! Finishing Hegel's Introduction to the Philosophy of History first.
Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist)
Min Jin Lee
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW TOP TEN OF THE YEAR * NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017 *A USA TODAY TOP TEN OF 2017 Roxane Gay's Favorite Book of 2017, Washington Post NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * #1 BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER * USA TODAY BESTSELLER In this gorgeous, page-turning saga, four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan, exiled from a home they never knew. "There could only be a few winners, and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones." In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters--strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis--survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.Ever year I set a goal to read 50 books 📚. Here's what I've read so far as I near the halfway mark (with a thumbs up if I'd recommend the book to a friend)! I've queued up Walter Benjamin, LeGuin, Frank Herbert, Michael Lewis, Celeste Ng, Dostoevsky. What else should I read? https://t.co/WENcdh8T55
Means of Ascent
Robert A. Caro
Traces Johnson's life from his Texas childhood through his rise to political power and his successful 1948 senatorial campaign and eventual presidency.Ever year I set a goal to read 50 books 📚. Here's what I've read so far as I near the halfway mark (with a thumbs up if I'd recommend the book to a friend)! I've queued up Walter Benjamin, LeGuin, Frank Herbert, Michael Lewis, Celeste Ng, Dostoevsky. What else should I read? https://t.co/WENcdh8T55
How To Win Friends and Influence People
Dale Carnegie
Provides a new hardcover edition of the classic best-selling self-help book, which includes principles that can be applied to both business and life itself, in a book that focuses on how to best affectively communicate with people.Ever year I set a goal to read 50 books 📚. Here's what I've read so far as I near the halfway mark (with a thumbs up if I'd recommend the book to a friend)! I've queued up Walter Benjamin, LeGuin, Frank Herbert, Michael Lewis, Celeste Ng, Dostoevsky. What else should I read? https://t.co/WENcdh8T55
Freshwater
Akwaeke Emezi
An extraordinary debut novel exploring the metaphysics of identity and mental health, centering on a young Nigerian woman as she struggles to reconcile the proliferation of multiple selves within herEver year I set a goal to read 50 books 📚. Here's what I've read so far as I near the halfway mark (with a thumbs up if I'd recommend the book to a friend)! I've queued up Walter Benjamin, LeGuin, Frank Herbert, Michael Lewis, Celeste Ng, Dostoevsky. What else should I read? https://t.co/WENcdh8T55
Be Here Now
Ram Dass
This book is enhanced with content such as audio or video, resulting in a large file that may take longer to download than expected. The enhanced edition of Be Here Now includes: Two guided video meditations, 30 minutes in length * Twenty minute video retrospective of Ram Dass' spiritual journey *The first chapter of Ram Dass' new book, Be Love NowEver year I set a goal to read 50 books 📚. Here's what I've read so far as I near the halfway mark (with a thumbs up if I'd recommend the book to a friend)! I've queued up Walter Benjamin, LeGuin, Frank Herbert, Michael Lewis, Celeste Ng, Dostoevsky. What else should I read? https://t.co/WENcdh8T55
Ever year I set a goal to read 50 books 📚. Here's what I've read so far as I near the halfway mark (with a thumbs up if I'd recommend the book to a friend)! I've queued up Walter Benjamin, LeGuin, Frank Herbert, Michael Lewis, Celeste Ng, Dostoevsky. What else should I read? https://t.co/WENcdh8T55
- Ken Liu is one of the most original, thought-provoking and award-winning short-story writers of his generation. This is the first collection of his work - sixteen stories that invoke the magical within the mundane, by turns profound, beguiling and heartbreaking. Included here are: The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary (Finalist for Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Awards), Mono No Aware (Hugo Award winner), The Waves (Nebula Award finalist), The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species (Nebula and Sturgeon award finalists), All the Flavors (Nebula Award finalist), The Litigation Master and the Monkey King (Nebula Award finalist) ,and the most awarded story in the genre's history, The Paper Menagerie (the only story ever to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).
Ever year I set a goal to read 50 books 📚. Here's what I've read so far as I near the halfway mark (with a thumbs up if I'd recommend the book to a friend)! I've queued up Walter Benjamin, LeGuin, Frank Herbert, Michael Lewis, Celeste Ng, Dostoevsky. What else should I read? https://t.co/WENcdh8T55
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane Jacobs
Penetrating analysis of the functions and organization of city neighborhoods, the forces of deterioration and regeneration, and the necessary planning innovationsEver year I set a goal to read 50 books 📚. Here's what I've read so far as I near the halfway mark (with a thumbs up if I'd recommend the book to a friend)! I've queued up Walter Benjamin, LeGuin, Frank Herbert, Michael Lewis, Celeste Ng, Dostoevsky. What else should I read? https://t.co/WENcdh8T55
Just Kids
Patti Smith
It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation. Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max's Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous—the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years. Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame.Reading Patti Smith's Just Kids... her prose, in particular, makes me wish all memoirs came with an accompanying playlist/soundtrack. https://t.co/s7UzFi73zA
Spotify Teardown
Maria Eriksson
An innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience. Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of “teardown” from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify's product and the way it is commonly understood. Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online. Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify's “front end” with experimental, covert investigations of its “back end.” The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.👀 learnings from Spotify Teardown: 1️⃣Founders have advertising backgrounds 2️⃣Spotify originally pulled content from torrent site Pirate Bay! 3️⃣Before entering the US, Spotify raised $ from Coke Ad monetization ALWAYS a priority (more than artist careers + curation/discovery?) https://t.co/770FEUtndm
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
Traces the unlikely friendship of a wealthy Afghan youth and a servant's son, in a tale that spans the final days of Afghanistan's monarchy through the atrocities of the present day.@AshleyBrasier Some fic and non-fic: Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera; LBJ Series - Robert Caro; The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy; Kite Runner - Khalid Hosseini
H. G. Wells, writer and notable war gaming enthusiast, was so fed up with having to use toy soldiers when he played with his sons that he designed civilians and suggested them to toy manufacturers in his 1911 book Floor Games. https://t.co/tBcBnPTnSk
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being.” A major achievement from one of the world’s truly great writers, Milan Kundera’s magnificent novel of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.@jGage718 @gooderdle I’ve heard that from a lot of people. Have you read The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera? That’s one of my favorite books about love and human condition. I’d encourage that 📖 next!
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
Decisions: You make hundreds every day, but do you really know how they are made? When can you trust fast, intuitive judgment, and when is it biased? How can you transform your thinking to help avoid overconfidence and become a better decision maker? Thinking, Fast and Slow ...in 30 Minutes is the essential guide to quickly understanding the fundamental components of decision making outlined in Daniel Kahneman's bestselling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Understand the key ideas behind Thinking, Fast and Slow in a fraction of the time: Concise chapter-by-chapter synopses Essential insights and takeaways highlighted Illustrative case studies demonstrate Kahneman's groundbreaking research in behavioral economics In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, best-selling author and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, has compiled his many years of groundbreaking research to offer practical knowledge and insights into how people's minds make decisions. Challenging the standard model of judgment, Kahneman aims to enhance the everyday language about thinking to more accurately discuss, diagnose, and reduce poor judgment. Thought, Kahneman explains, has two distinct systems: the fast and intuitive System 1, and the slow and effortful System 2. Intuitive decision making is often effective, but in Thinking, Fast and Slow Kahneman highlights situations in which it is unreliable-when decisions require predicting the future and assessing risks. Presenting a framework for how these two systems impact the mind, Thinking, Fast and Slow reveals the far-reaching impact of cognitive biases-from creating public policy to playing the stock market to increasing personal happiness-and provides tools for applying behavioral economics toward better decision making. A 30 Minute Expert Summary of Thinking, Fast and Slow Designed for those whose desire to learn exceeds the time they have available, the Thinking, Fast and Slow expert summary helps readers quickly and easily become experts ...in 30 minutes.@BoatShuman If you like Nudge, you should read Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman), Phishing for Phools (Akerlof and Shiller), The Rule of Nobody (Howard) and Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking (Hayes)!
Phishing for Phools
George A. Akerlof
Akerlof and Shiller argue that markets harm as well as help us. As long as there is profit to be made, sellers will systematically exploit our psychological weaknesses and our ignorance through manipulation and deception. Based on the intuitive idea that markets both give and take away, they show how phishing affects everyone, in almost every walk of life. We spend our money up to the limit, and then worry about how to pay the next month's bills. The financial system soars, then crashes. In doing so they explain a paradox: why, at a time when we are better off than ever before in history, all too many of us are leading lives of quiet desperation.@BoatShuman If you like Nudge, you should read Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman), Phishing for Phools (Akerlof and Shiller), The Rule of Nobody (Howard) and Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking (Hayes)!
The Rule of Nobody
Philip K. Howard
Discusses how dead rules and outmoded laws inhibit policy changes and paralyze officials and citizens and argues how setting goals and boundaries instead of dictating choices can mobilize the democracy.@BoatShuman If you like Nudge, you should read Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman), Phishing for Phools (Akerlof and Shiller), The Rule of Nobody (Howard) and Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking (Hayes)!
Cognitive Gadgets
Cecilia Heyes
How did human minds become so different from those of other animals? What accounts for our capacity to understand the way the physical world works, to think ourselves into the minds of others, to gossip, read, tell stories about the past, and imagine the future? These questions are not new: they have been debated by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and neurobiologists over the course of centuries. One explanation widely accepted today is that humans have special cognitive instincts. Unlike other living animal species, we are born with complicated mechanisms for reasoning about causation, reading the minds of others, copying behaviors, and using language. Cecilia Heyes agrees that adult humans have impressive pieces of cognitive equipment. In her framing, however, these cognitive gadgets are not instincts programmed in the genes but are constructed in the course of childhood through social interaction. Cognitive gadgets are products of cultural evolution, rather than genetic evolution. At birth, the minds of human babies are only subtly different from the minds of newborn chimpanzees. We are friendlier, our attention is drawn to different things, and we have a capacity to learn and remember that outstrips the abilities of newborn chimpanzees. Yet when these subtle differences are exposed to culture-soaked human environments, they have enormous effects. They enable us to upload distinctively human ways of thinking from the social world around us. As Cognitive Gadgets makes clear, from birth our malleable human minds can learn through culture not only what to think but how to think it.@BoatShuman If you like Nudge, you should read Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman), Phishing for Phools (Akerlof and Shiller), The Rule of Nobody (Howard) and Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking (Hayes)!
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
The author of A Walk in the Woods traces the Big Bang through the rise of civilization, documenting his work with a host of the world's most advanced scientists and mathematicians to explain why things are the way they are. Reprint. 125,000 first printing.And 50. A Short History of Nearly Everything 🌏- Bill Bryson I only read 14 books by women, non-gender binary, and POC authors this year (an increase since July but definitely needs improvement). Would love your recs as I continue my 50 books 📚 commitment in 2019!
The Chickenshit Club
Jesse Eisinger
"Why were no bankers put in prison after the financial crisis of 2008? Why do CEOs seem to commit wrongdoing with impunity? The problem goes beyond banks deemed Too Big to Fail to almost every large corporation in America--to pharmaceutical companies and auto manufacturers and beyond. [This book]--an inside reference to prosecutors too scared of failure and too daunted by legal impediments to do their jobs--explains why"--Amazon.com.45. The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives - @eisengerj 46. Neuromancer ☢ - William Gibson 47. A Visit from the Goon Squad 🎶🎸- Jennifer Egan 48. The Refugees - Viet Thanh Nguyen 49. Lord of the Flies 🐷- William Gibson
Neuromancer
William Gibson
Case, a burned out computer whiz, is asked to steal a security code that is locked in the most heavily guarded databank in the solar system45. The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives - @eisengerj 46. Neuromancer ☢ - William Gibson 47. A Visit from the Goon Squad 🎶🎸- Jennifer Egan 48. The Refugees - Viet Thanh Nguyen 49. Lord of the Flies 🐷- William Gibson
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan
Working side-by-side for a record label, former punk rocker Bennie Salazar and the passionate Sasha hide illicit secrets from one another while interacting with a motley assortment of equally troubled people from 1970s San Francisco to the post-war future.45. The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives - @eisengerj 46. Neuromancer ☢ - William Gibson 47. A Visit from the Goon Squad 🎶🎸- Jennifer Egan 48. The Refugees - Viet Thanh Nguyen 49. Lord of the Flies 🐷- William Gibson
Lord of the Flies
William Golding
William Golding's Lord of the Flies is a dystopian classic: 'exciting, relevant and thought-provoking' (Stephen King). When a group of schoolboys are stranded on a desert island, what could go wrong? 'One of my favorite books - I read it every couple of years.' (Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games) A plane crashes on a desert island. The only survivors are a group of schoolboys. By day, they discover fantastic wildlife and dazzling beaches, learning to survive; at night, they are haunted by nightmares of a primitive beast. Orphaned by society, it isn't long before their innocent childhood games devolve into a savage, murderous hunt ... 'Stands out mightily in my memory ... Such a strong statement about the human heart.' (Patricia Cornwell) 'Terrifying and haunting.' (Kingsley Amis) 'Beautifully written, tragic and provocative.' (E. M. Forster) ONE OF THE BBC'S ICONIC 'NOVELS THAT SHAPED OUR WORLD' What readers are saying: 'Every real human being should read this ... This is what we are.' 'It's brilliant, it's captivating, it's thought provoking and brutal and for some, its truly terrifying.' 'It can be read and re-read many times, and every time something new will appear.' 'There is a reason why this is studied at school ... Excellent read.' 'This is one of the few books I've read that I keep on my Kindle to read again.' 'I revisit this every few years and it's always fresh and impressive ... One of the best books I've ever read.'45. The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives - @eisengerj 46. Neuromancer ☢ - William Gibson 47. A Visit from the Goon Squad 🎶🎸- Jennifer Egan 48. The Refugees - Viet Thanh Nguyen 49. Lord of the Flies 🐷- William Gibson
The Elephant Vanishes
Haruki Murakami
Fifteen tales encompass the story of a man obsessed with the disappearance of an elephant from a local zoo and that of a young mother whose sleeplessness provides her with a foretaste of death41. The Elephant Vanishes and other Stories - Haruki Murakami 42. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work 🔨 - Nick Srnicek 43. The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power - Robert Caro (💯💯) 44. Of Mice and Men 🐁 - John Steinbeck
Inventing the Future
Nick SRNICEK
41. The Elephant Vanishes and other Stories - Haruki Murakami 42. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work 🔨 - Nick Srnicek 43. The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power - Robert Caro (💯💯) 44. Of Mice and Men 🐁 - John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck
The tragic story of the friendship between two migrant workers, George and mentally retarded Lenny, and their dream of owning a farm41. The Elephant Vanishes and other Stories - Haruki Murakami 42. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work 🔨 - Nick Srnicek 43. The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power - Robert Caro (💯💯) 44. Of Mice and Men 🐁 - John Steinbeck
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
Richard Phillips Feynman
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965, Richard Feynman was one of the world's greatest theoretical physicists, but he was also a man who fell, often jumped, into adventure. An artist, safecracker, practical joker and storyteller, Feynman's life was a series of combustible combinations made possible by his unique mixture of high intelligence, unquenchable curiosity and eternal scepticism. Over a period of years, Feynman's conversations with his friend Ralph Leighton were first taped and then set down as they appear here, little changed from their spoken form, giving a wise, funny, passionate and totally honest self-portrait of one of the greatest men of our age.38. Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman - Richard P. Feynman 39. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End 🌱- Atul Gawande 40. American Sickness: How Healthcare became Big Business - Elisabeth Rosenthal (must-read for anyone working in US 🏥 )
Being Mortal
Atul Gawande
A prominent surgeon argues against modern medical practices that extend life at the expense of quality of life while isolating the dying, outlining suggestions for freer, more fulfilling approaches to death that enable more dignified and comfortable choices.38. Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman - Richard P. Feynman 39. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End 🌱- Atul Gawande 40. American Sickness: How Healthcare became Big Business - Elisabeth Rosenthal (must-read for anyone working in US 🏥 )
An American Sickness
Elisabeth Rosenthal
"An award-winning New York Times reporter Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal reveals the dangerous, expensive, and dysfunctional American healthcare system, and tells us exactly what we can do to solve its myriad of problems. It is well documented that our healthcare system has grave problems, but how, in only a matter of decades, did things get this bad? Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn't just explain the symptoms; she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. Rosenthal spells out in clear and practical terms exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. She takes you inside the doctor-patient relationship, explaining step by step the workings of a profession sorely lacking transparency. This is about what we can do, as individual patients, both to navigate a byzantine system and also to demand far-reaching reform. Breaking down the monolithic business into its individual industries--the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, drug manufacturers--that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal tells the story of the history of American medicine as never before. The situation is far worse than we think, and it has become like that much more recently than we realize. Hospitals, which are managed by business executives, behave like predatory lenders, hounding patients and seizing their homes. Research charities are in bed with big pharmaceutical companies, which surreptitiously profit from the donations made by working people. Americans are dying from routine medical conditions when affordable and straightforward solutions exist. Dr. Rosenthal explains for the first time how various social and financial incentives have encouraged a disastrous and immoral system to spring uporganicallyin a shockingly short span of time. The system is in tatters, but we can fight back. An American Sicknessis the frontline defense against a healthcare system that no longer has our well-being at heart"--38. Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman - Richard P. Feynman 39. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End 🌱- Atul Gawande 40. American Sickness: How Healthcare became Big Business - Elisabeth Rosenthal (must-read for anyone working in US 🏥 )
The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy
The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is stranded on the highway amid a Marxist workers' demonstration. Inside the car sit two-egg twins Rahel and Esthappen, and so begins their tale.... Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family - their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts). When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen. With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it."34. The God of Small Things - Arundhuti Roy (@SHeavenrich bears witness to me crying at the ending in a kid’s playground) 35. Human Acts 👐🏾- Han Kang 36. Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi 37. History of the Paradox ⁉️Philosophy and Labyrinths of the Mind - Roy Sorensen
Human Acts
Han Kang
From the internationally bestselling author of THE VEGETARIAN, a "rare and astonishing" (The Observer) portrait of political unrest and the universal struggle for justice In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed. The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho's best friend who meets his own fateful end; to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother; and through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope is the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice. An award-winning, controversial bestseller, HUMAN ACTS is a timeless, pointillist portrait of an historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.34. The God of Small Things - Arundhuti Roy (@SHeavenrich bears witness to me crying at the ending in a kid’s playground) 35. Human Acts 👐🏾- Han Kang 36. Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi 37. History of the Paradox ⁉️Philosophy and Labyrinths of the Mind - Roy Sorensen
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Azar Nafisi
Describes growing up in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the group of young women who came together at her home in secret every Thursday to read and discuss great books of Western literature, explaining the influence of Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, and other works on their lives and goals. Reader's Guide included. Reissue. 75,000 first printing.34. The God of Small Things - Arundhuti Roy (@SHeavenrich bears witness to me crying at the ending in a kid’s playground) 35. Human Acts 👐🏾- Han Kang 36. Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi 37. History of the Paradox ⁉️Philosophy and Labyrinths of the Mind - Roy Sorensen
A Brief History of the Paradox
Roy Sorensen
A narrative history of paradoxes explores how the greatest minds in humanity have addressed challenging problems, in a chronologically organized volume that considers perspectives on the chicken and the egg riddle and more. (Philosophy)34. The God of Small Things - Arundhuti Roy (@SHeavenrich bears witness to me crying at the ending in a kid’s playground) 35. Human Acts 👐🏾- Han Kang 36. Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi 37. History of the Paradox ⁉️Philosophy and Labyrinths of the Mind - Roy Sorensen
Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez
Set on the Caribbean coast of South America, this love story brings together Fermina Daza, her distinguished husband, and a man who has secretly loved her for more than fifty years.31. ❤️ Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 32. Another Birth and Other Poems - Forough Farrokhzad 33. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor 📲- Virginia Eubanks @poptechworks
31. ❤️ Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 32. Another Birth and Other Poems - Forough Farrokhzad 33. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor 📲- Virginia Eubanks @poptechworks
Automating Inequality
Virginia Eubanks
Naomi Klein: "This book is downright scary." Ethan Zuckerman, MIT: "Should be required reading." Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: "A must-read for everyone concerned about modern tools of inequality in America." Astra Taylor, author of The People's Platform: "This is the single most important book about technology you will read this year." A powerful investigative look at data-based discrimination—and how technology affects civil and human rights and economic equity The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years—because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect. Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems—rather than humans—control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile. The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values. This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely.31. ❤️ Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 32. Another Birth and Other Poems - Forough Farrokhzad 33. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor 📲- Virginia Eubanks @poptechworks
The Refugees
Viet Thanh Nguyen
A collection of stories written over a twenty-year period that examines the Vietnamese experience in America as well as questions of home, family, and identity.@ellenchisa The Refugees - Viet Thanh Nguyen. Collection of short stories (romantic, tragic, funny, angry) about relationships and the post-Vietnam War diaspora.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan Didion
Beautifully repackaged as part of the Picador Modern Classics Series, this special edition is small enough to fit in your pocket and bold enough to stand out on your bookshelf. Celebrated, iconic, and indispensable, Joan Didion’s first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, is considered a watershed moment in American writing. First published in 1968, the collection was critically praised as one of the “best prose written in this country.” More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion’s focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture. As Joyce Carol Oates remarked: “[Didion] has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control.”@aweissman @mailemeloy Loved Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I'm also thinking of sending her some DFW (Big Red Sun, Consider the Lobster) but we'll see if she enjoys dabbling in fiction first.
Consider the Lobster
David Foster Wallace
A collection of essays by the award-winning author of Infinite Jest shares whimsical and biting observations about such topics as the Bush-Kerry presidential race, the pain experienced by lobsters while they are being prepared for the feast, and Franz Kafka's questionable sense of humor. Reprint.@aweissman @mailemeloy Loved Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I'm also thinking of sending her some DFW (Big Red Sun, Consider the Lobster) but we'll see if she enjoys dabbling in fiction first.
- Traces Johnson's life from his Texas childhood through his rise to political power and his successful 1948 senatorial campaign and eventual presidency.
@samgdf The first of the series, The Path to Power.