Books to remember
Books I’ve liked, thoughts on some, and friends with great recommendations.
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
– Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Reviews and thoughts
→ Book review: Those magnificent women
In the last decade or so, women have been assuming increasingly higher positions inside India's premier space organization, ISRO. This was not an overnight development. This book profiles some of the underrepresented Indian women scientists who enabled the country to send a mission to Mars.
→ How science fiction helps us contemplate reality
→ How Isaac Asimov used science fiction to point out our biases
Feel free to recommend me a book or two. I generally enjoy Science fiction, History, Future, Productivity, and Popular Science. If a book is a mix of science fiction and dystopia, like 1984, even better. I’m known to my friends to be a bit addicted to depressing future timeline predictions for humanity.
Favorite highlights
The threat of nuclear holocaust fosters pacifism; when pacifism spreads, war recedes and trade flourishes; and trade increases both the profits of peace and the costs of war. Over time, this feedback loop creates another obstacle to war, which may ultimately prove the most important of all. The tightening web of international connections erodes the independence of most countries, lessening the chance that any one of them might single-handedly let slip the dogs of war. Most countries no longer engage in full-scale war for the simple reason that they are no longer independent.
– Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Friend recommends
Here are links to book-profiles of some friends who give great recommendations.
There are some more friends who are avid readers but aren’t on Goodreads, or any book network, for me to link to them. So this is an open invitation to them to get their book recommendations online in any form on any website, and let me know!
Happy reading.