Books

One that I have fond memories of is Oliver Rackham's The History of the Countryside, which is a thoroughly enjoyable and comprehensive view of why the British countryside is as we see it now.

On a very different note there is Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. A classic and extraordinary dive into logic.

And then there is Eric Berne's Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, which introduced me (and thousands of others) to Transactional Analysis and certainly called some of my games out, as I expect it does with everyone.

Anything by James Rebanks. His two books are on my mind a lot. It's about sheepherding in the fells of England.

The first non-fiction book I read for fun is probably still my favorite. I used to hate nonfiction books, but randomly picked up Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident one day. A group of experienced mountain climbers died on a Russian mountain in very mysterious circumstances, leading to all kinds of wild theories from the KGB to the supernatural.

The author essentially becomes a detective, and the book alternates between his experience piecing together the mystery and the journal entries of the group that died. It’s fascinating and was impossible to put down.

It sparked my love of non-fiction and I have since read dozens of others. I left the book a glowing review on goodreads and the author actually liked my review, I fangirled for a bit ngl.

My favorites that I re-read often, actually re-listen on audiobook (shout out libro.fm) are A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster both by David Foster Wallace. I find his writing to be funny, erudite, and addictive. It's like hearing someone else's conversation with their brain.

Honorable mention goes to Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Taleb. One of those books that makes you look at the world differently when you finish.

Recently finished The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya, a biography of John von Neumann and it was fascinating to hear his impact on so many different fields, e.g. mathematics, the atom bomb, the first computers, game theory, and automata. And all the secondary characters could be subjects of equally fascinating books themselves, e.g. Teller, Oppenheimer, Turing, Gödel, Einstein, Nash, etc.

Not necessarily a favorite, but the next to last one I read recently was Hollywood's Copyright Wars by Peter Decherney, which was a fascinating historical overview of the emergence of today's film/tv copyright situation in the United States.

It doesn't get deep into the differences between the U.S. and Europe, but it does highlight them and it's interesting how they initially caused a delay in international agreements. I'd have to review it, but as I recall it had a fair amount to do with the creators ceding rights to businesses vs. retaining them respectively.

Pretty much anything by Yuval Noah Harari: Sapiens, Homo-Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Taken as a trilogy of sorts, they manage to do a great job of explaining how humanity got to where we are now, and assuming current trends continue, where we're headed in the future. All without being super dense and academic.

How Music Got Free