Some Recommended Books

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Picture: The cover of my edition of ``The Martian Chronicles", by Ray Bradbury. Painting by Ian Miller.

Best books I've read in the last few years: 2024: Black holes & Time Warps (Kip Thorne)
2024: T-rex and the Crater of Doom (Walter Alvarez)

2023: The growth of biological thought (Ernst Mayr)
2023: Darwin's Ghosts (Rebecca Stott)
2023: Autobiography of Charles Darwin
2023: South of the Border, West of the Sun (Haruki Murakami)
2023: A Wild Sheep Chase (Haruki Murakami)
2023: Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)

2022: The Russian revolution (Richard Pipes)

2021: Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction: The Late Paleozoic Ice Age World (George R. McGhee Jr.)
2021: The Cambrian Explosion - The construction of animal biodiversity (Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine)
2021: Woke - a guide to social justice (Titania McGrath)

2020: Apocalypse Never (Michael Shellenberger)
2020: The Sleepwalkers (Arthur Koestler)
2020: Antarctica (Gabrielle Walker)
2020: Mars Up Close (Marc Kaufman)

2019: Solaris (Stanislaw Lem)
2019: IQ84 (Haruki Murakami)

2019: Factfulness (Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund)

2018: Chasing New Horizons (Alan Stern and David Grinspoon)

Science:
Daniel Boorstin The Discoverers

Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy
Simon Singh The Code Book.
Marcia Bartusiak Archives of the Universe: 100 Discoveries That Transformed Our Understanding of the Cosmos - This book puts a lot of the subjects discussed in the works below in a nice, coherent historical perspective. It is a great summary of the history of astronomy, and it has improved my understanding of many areas of astronomy outside my direct expertise. One of the great things about this book is it use of the original sources, which are very well written and make reading the text much more fun.
If you like her style of writing, then I strongly recommend Einstein's Unfinished Symphony.
Galileo Galilei Sidereus Nuncius - Follow Galileo as he discovers the mountains on the Moon, the moons of Jupiter, that the Milky Way is made of more stars than anyone had imagined... The writing is very clear and feels like it is just being written - you feel like its 1610 and you're looking over Galileo's shoulder as he discovers all this new stuff. Wonderful!
Arthur Koestler The Sleepwalkers - An eye-opening book on the beginning of the scientific revolution. The story of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler really comes to life, with many revealing details and (often overlooked) facts. Example: Galileo's many errors (in particular regarding comets, his clinging to circular motion for planets, his obsession with his wrong theory of tides), which stem from shortcomings of character, in particular a strong wish to prove others wrong. Many of the things were very surprising to me. Extremely readable. Some allowance has to be made for the author's remarks on the paranormal, however, these are just asides that are presented in an earnest and engaging way. For more by A. Koestler, see ``Darkness at Noon" below.
Michael J. Crowe Modern Theories of the Universe: From Herschel to Hubble - An accessible, but rigorous and very informative book on astronomy from the 18th to the 20th centuries, with a particular focus on the Great Debate. Like Bartusiak's book, it resorts to many of the original sources, to excellent effect.
Clifford M. Will Was Einstein Right? - This is the book that brought me to my field of research (pulsars). Most popular books on physics nowadays deal with arcane subjects, like string theory, so far removed from reality that (to me) they lose urgency. This book was a very nice and refreshing surprise: it describes a real theory (general relativity) that really works in the real world. Amazingly, despite being nearly 100 years old, it has passed all experimental tests to date! This means it describes Nature in a true and deeply intimate way. Checking this theory has become one of my main topics of research.

There is a 2020 update to this book: Is Einstein still right?, by C. M. Will and Nicolàs Yunes.
Kip Thorne Black holes & Time warps: Einstein's outrageous legacy - This is one of the best examples of science communication I have ever read. It is an explanation of general relativity and its consequences (especially black holes) aimed at the general public. However, there is a lot here for everyone, including professional scientists like myself: I learned a lot about black holes themselves (things like the membrane paradigm and the interiors of black holes were great surprises), and especially how the concepts evolved with time, with many interesting historical details, which tell the reader why many of the issues arose and why they are important. Even in my own specialty (radio astronomy) I learned a lot about the early evolution of the topic, especially in what concerns radio galaxies and active galactic nuclei. The book covers a lot of fantastic material in its 527 pages, making it an incredibly satisfying read. My only regret is not having read it earlier, its is now more than 30 years since its publication!

Planetary astronomy and space exploration
William Sheehan The Planet Mars: A History of Observation & Discovery - Canals!!!
Andrew Chaikin A Man on the Moon - An excellent book on the Apollo program.

If you like the topic, I can recommend four other outstanding works I have read:
First Man, by James Hansen - A biography of Neil Armstrong.
From the Nazis to NASA - The life of Werner von Braun, by Bob Ward.
Full Moon, by Michael Light, and
Apollo VII-XVII, by Heyne et al. - the last two books are the best collections of pictures on the Apollo program.
James Oberg Red Star in Orbit - A very clearly written, short description of the Soviet space program. The fact that this was written in 1981 counts to me as a plus, since it covered all the interesting accomplishments. However, it is a bit out of date at points, since the "Glasnost" policy later brought up many details of the lunar program and others. Sometimes a bit heartbreaking, at parts I resented so much emphasis being put on the failures, particularly the deaths - the author seems to like funerals. This is annoying at points: a cosmonaut being barred from flying in space is a "casualty", he spends more time on that than describing the Venera probes, which obtained the first (and still only) pictures of the Venusian soil - many such achievements are completely ignored. In fact, the whole planetary program is barely mentioned! However, the great ability of the author at digging up embarrassing facts hidden by Soviet secrecy and propaganda (like the great tragedy he names "The Nedelin Catastrophe") make the book well worth reading, this is likely to be the reason why at times the book reads like it is denouncing the Soviets (There are definitely good reasons for that!). If you like this topic and want more detail on the Soviet space program, I recommend the monumental biography of Korolev by James Harford and "Starman", the biography of Yuri Gagarin by Jamie Doran.
William K. Hartmann A Traveler's Guide to Mars - The best account I've read about what has been learned so far about Mars, mainly focused on space age results.
Jim Bell Postcards from Mars: The First Photographer on the Red Planet - A photographical journal of the two first travelers on the Martian surface.
Marc Kaufman Mars Up Close: Inside the Curiosity Mission - The best account I have seen to date on the Curiosity mission. Extremely informative, but also highly readable.
Alan Stern and David Grinspoon Chasing New Horizons - This is a superb book on the New Horizons mission to Pluto. It is a page turner, with dramatic turns of events and unexpected twists all the way until the end. A fantastic, entertaining, informative, and truly enjoyable read.
Robert Zubrin The case for Mars - This would be awesome!
...but as it turns out, the future is no longer about exploring space, going into the unknown.



It is about social networks.



On the issue of how awesome it could have been...
James A. Dewar To The End of the Solar System: The Story of the Nuclear Rocket - I found this book surprising on many aspects. It made very clear to me that the United Sates developed fully usable nuclear rockets in the 1950s - 1960s. These could have made trips to Mars and other destinations much faster than any current plans.
George Dyson Project Orion - A description of an even more interesting idea from the 1950s-1960s, project Orion - space travel powered by small nuclear explosions - written by George Dyson, son of one of the participants in the project, Freeman Dyson. The capabilities of such a spacecraft would go far beyond any technology currently in development and would make the vast distances of even the outer solar system easily reachable. Perhaps more surprisingly, the preliminary studies found that the idea is very likely to be feasible!

Earth Sciences
Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee The Life and Death of Planet Earth - On the border between geology and astronomy. More concise, focused and well-argued than the better known "Rare Earth".
Gabrielle Walker Snowball Earth - The Earth has been deep frozen on several occasions. A grand new idea. Should be read after the previous recommendation.
Antarctica - A great introduction to a place that has always fascinated me. I hope to be able to go there some day. Very entertaining and readable.
Robert Kunzig Mapping the Deep - Also belongs to the "life sciences" section. A box of jewels.

Life Sciences
Ernst Mayr The growth of biological thought - This is a truly great book on the evolution of the science of biology. Even though I thought I had a reasonably good understanding of biology, and evolutionary theory in particular, this book highlighted many things that were new to me. First was to understand the deep philosophical barrier represented by essentialism, a Platonic idea that works well with mathematical concepts or electrons, but not with living beings. For the latter, a totally different concept was necessary, that of a heterogeneous population, in particular the creation of a concept of species as a reproductive community. Second, I did not know that the concept of common descent had originated with Darwin. This concept, one part of evolutionary theory, was so powerful in explaining the similarities between different groups of living creatures - in a word, giving a scientific basis for classification - that it was immediately accepted after the publication of the Origin of Species, unlike other related ideas like natural selection. Third, it was not clear to me how important biological variation is - without inheritable variation, evolution by natural selection cannot occur. Darwin got important ideas from animal breeders, who recognised clearly that not a single animal corresponds to an abstract "species" and that the deviations from the idealised "norm" are to a large extent inheritable. Fourth, most of part III (on inheritance) was new to me. I got a deep appreciation of the great scientific struggle which was understanding the mechanisms of heredity, which started with the works of Mendel and culminated with the discovery of the structure of DNA. This crowning achievement represented the final death of the idea of inheritance of acquired characters, the final triumph of Darwin's idea of natural selection, and the cementing of evolution as the unifying theme of all biology. Finally, I realised how often philosophical ideas, in particular ideas from the physical sciences, hindered real progress in biology. The realisation that biology requires its own philosophy of science, which is many ways is different from the philosophy of the physical sciences, is clearly demonstrated, this was to me a surprise.

I enjoyed this book immensely. Understanding the concepts was exciting. The book is rare by making a rigorous presentation of a very large number of interesting, but challenging ideas in a language that is clear to non-specialists. Although it is now a bit dated (it was first published in 1982), it does cover the solid foundations of biology (the "synthesis"), which had already been laid before that time.
Charles Darwin The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - On the 8th of April 2023, I visited Charles Darwin's Down house, and there I bought this book. It is the basis of much of the text on the exhibits. I enjoyed immensely visiting the place (which to me is almost magical), and reading the book, where we get interesting details on how Darwin arrived at his theories (common descent, evolution by natural selection) - perhaps the best ideas anyone has ever had. This was truly a life well spent!

If you enjoy this book, then I recommend another book I bought in the Down House, Darwin's ghosts, by Rebecca Stott. This book actually provides some preparation for the main title listed above, "The Growth of Biological Thought".
James D. Watson The Double Helix - A great story on the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule. Science can be great fun!

DNA - All you ever wanted to know about genetics and were too embarrassed to ask.
Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene - Everyone should read this book, because it tells us about the real (an in my opinion, the only discernible) purpose of all life on Earth: gene replication. And even that is not a real purpose, it just happens that the "struggle for survival" in an external environment filters the best genetic combinations ("natural selection"), which then automatically become the most abundant in the gene pool. The appearance of the first molecule capable of reliable self-replication was the central event of Earth's history; living organisms are merely the machinery that these molecules use to compete with each other. This book is fundamental for a true understanding of ourselves and all remaining life on Earth. This is important because, if you understand what your genes programmed you to do, and why they did so, then you will no longer be their slave. Knowledge is liberating indeed!

If you like this book, then I strongly recomment many of his other books, particularly The Blind Watchmaker, The Extended Phenotype and The Ancestor's Tale.
Andrew H. Knoll Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth - This book describes what happened from the origins of life to just before the Cambrian explosion.
Stephen Jay Gould Wonderful Life - This book describes the discovery and interpretation of the Burgess Shale, the most famous Cambrian fossils, and perhaps the most scientifically important fossils ever discovered. They document a time soon after the appearance of modern animal life on Earth, where full experimentation in body form was still possible. In this brief Spring of life we can see, like never since, how creative Nature can really be. Many animals were so strange as to seem alien, they are so removed from us in time and shape that they tell us of long lost kingdoms of life. Others are strangely familiar - they are the ancestors of all the animals we know today, including us. Life in this distant past truly was wonderful.
Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine The Cambrian Explosion - The construction of animal biodiversity This is a book about the same event as "Wonderful Life" - the Cambrian explosion - but at a more technical level and also updated to encompass a few more decades of research. Although is mainly about the Cambrian period, it covers much more than that - especially the vast amounts of time before the Cambrian, which get progressively more eventful as we approach the fateful explosion. This is background material that is necessary for a better understanding of what really happened. I truly enjoyed reading this book - as I was reading, and learning, I really felt transported to that distant past that we can now only faintly perceive, I felt like an explorer travelling through a mind-boggling and alien planet, as our Earth was back then. However, the more I read, and the more I know, the deeper and more fascinating these mysteries of deep time become: one thing the book is very good at is highlighting the things we still don't know. I don't know how many of you might enjoy reading this book, I enjoyed it immensely, and plan to re-read it several times.
Michael Benton Vertebrate Paleontology - A technical book on the origin and evolution of vertebrates. It is far more fun that the previous sentence suggests. To me, at least...
Jeniffer Clack Gaining Ground: The Origin and Early Evolution of Tetrapods - This book focuses on one of the events described by the previous book, the origin of Tetrapods and their adaptation to land, but with much more (technical) detail. A very hard, but rewarding read.
George R. McGhee Jr. When the Invasion of Land Failed - This book describes a wonderful time, the end of the Devonian period, when the world's oceans had monumental reefs of a size far surpassing anything that has been since, with an unmatched richness of marine life. It was in this world that our fish ancestors started coming into land - to be killed. This was one of the five great extinction events, even more dramatic than the end-Cretaceous event: the late Devonian extinction. This event eliminated all the strange animals in the morphological gap between fish and amphibians we see today, and also the different groups of ostracoderms and the placoderm fishes, all but one order of trilobites, graptolites, most Tabulate and Rugose corals and many, many others. This was a tremendous loss of diversity with a dramatic effect on all subsequent evolution of life. No reefs like the Devonian ever formed again. Its is not clear from the fossil record how land was eventually re-settled by 5-digit vertebrates: they don't (yet) appear in the fossil record. The early vertebrate colonists that appear in the fossil record before the end-devonian extinctions (like 7-digit Icthyostega and the earlier 8-digit Acanthostega) did go extinct without leaving any lineage: they are not our ancestors. How much richer would be the world today if still had 7 and 8-digit walking fish and their own "amphibian" and "reptile" descendants? What other possibilities would be open to evolution? We will probably never know.
Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction: The Late Paleozoic Ice Age World - This is in essence a scientific description of life on Earth during the Carboniferous and Permian periods, when our first land-walking ancestors were living and evolving among the giant tropical forests that formed the coal deposits in our current world. This was an Ice age, with unusual cool weather, like we've had in the last few million years. It was an ice-age paradise, a super-oxigenated safe haven that fostered the appearance of the synapsids, the ancestors of the mammals and of many other extinct groups. Their evolution and their near demise - in the horrendous, catastrophic events at the end of the Permian period, 251 million years ago, that made the Earth into an almost unlivable poisonous hothouse - represent the highest drama in the history of our Earth. This event almost erased the previous 300 million years of animal evolution: It killed the paleozoic sea life, that had existed for more than 200 million years; on land, it weakened the synapsids so much that the Earth was nearly left free to the reptiles, and in particular the dinosaurs, which started a long 150 000 000 year nightmare for the mammals, which only ended with the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. I enjoyed immensely reading this book, I learned a lot, but also felt heartbroken about the truly unbelievable cruelty an unthinking Nature is capable of.
Walter Alvarez T. Rex and the creater of doom - The story of the extinction of the dinosaurs by the impact of a large asteroid, or comet, is exceedingly well known - it has become a well known meme in popular culture. It is a story of fundamental importance: without this event, the Mesozoic might have continued indefinitely, and the world would still be dominated by the dinosaurs, with the mammals still confined to a secondary role. This book is interesting in telling the tale of scientific discovery behind it, where we learn the details of how the discovery was made and what motivated it. The book also highlights the mental barriers to the acceptance of the idea, especially the strictly uniformitarian view of geologists at the time. In this sense, the discovery of Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan peninsula had a broad impact (pun intended) on the history of ideas, forcing the acceptance that the past cannot be seen in a strictly uniformitarian way, and leading to a intersection of many areas of research, especially geology and astronomy. The book is short, but it conveys a lot of factual information in a light, delightful way. Very entertaining!
Donald Symons The Evolution of Human Sexuality - Everyone should read this exciting book. The game theory rules presented in "The Selfish Gene" are here applied with full force to the human species, i.e., this book concentrates on the "know thyself" bit that was, to a large extent, left aside in the more general treatment of Dawkins. It is great to see that so many zoologic rules can be derived from such basic premises as those listed in the ``selfish gene''.
Steven Pinker
 The Blank Slate - Psychologist David Buss stated "This may be the most important book so far published in the 21st century." I agree with this assessment. Apart from the importance of the topic (human nature), the book is just a great pleasure to read. See also, below: The Better Angels of our Nature.

History, Economics and the Environment
Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel - There are some universal features of human cultures that are dictated by humanity's evolutionary past (e.g., "The Evolution of Human Sexuality"), and apply to many other species as well. However, most features in human cultures are highly variable. This book presents some important clues regarding these differences. Great fun to think about!
Eric H. Cline 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed - Around 1177 BC, the sophisticated Bronze Age civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean collapsed. The following Dark Ages were so deep that even Greece lost the capability of writing - the old Linear B script was forgotten; only centuries later do they start writing again, with a new alphabet derived from the Phoenician alphabet. The enormous magnitude of this collapse, the rich and sophisticated civilizations that predate it are described in this book with great detail; the causes are, however, still shrouded in mystery. A very interesting (and haunting) read.
Howard Fast The Jews: Story of a People - This is an incredible book on a most incredible story, that of the Jewish People. Ansolutely fascinating, but also tragic and sad beyond words. Also, a most enlightening read on many topics, in particular the origin of Christianity. Not a scholarly book, that would need to be much longer.
John Julius Norwich A Short History of Byzantium - I have been fascinated with the Byzantine Empire ever since reading "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", by Edward Gibbon. This is one of the reasons why I went to Instanbul in 2011, where I could appreciate first hand some of the wonderful Byzantine art, one of the many reasons for my more than passing interest in Byzantium. There I bought this extremely entertaining book. So many lives covered here, in such necessarily short passages. The emperors especially, were either nobles or monsters, some of them pathetic, but never, never dull. Through this book, these ancient lives, with their all too-human fears, joys and hopes are re-lived inside the reader's head, with an effect similar to remembering events in one's former lives.
Norman Davies Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe - One of my old fascinations are countries and kingdoms that no longer exist, like Byzantium. This book, full of of wonderful stories and anecdotes, far exceeed my expectations. Apart from being oviously a very accomplished historian, Norman Davies is an outstanding writer.
Christopher Clark The Iron Kingdom - The history of one of the lost Kingdoms of Europe, Prussia, one that had a major importance for understanding the history of the modern world. Nicely complementary to the section on Prussia in Norman Davies's "Vanished Kingdoms".
The Sleepwalkers - Winston Churchill once said that the most interesting thing about World War I was not the actual war, but how it started. This is an absolutely excellent book on European history during the years preceding that fateful assassination in Sarajevo which gave me a whole new perspective on the causes of the greatest of all catastrophes in Human history, WWI: its consequences (the Communist catastrophe in the Soviet Union, China and many other countries, Nazism in Germany and consequent World War II, the disarray in the Middle East) defined the 20th century and continue to disrupt the 21st. Essential for an understanding of the modern world.
Richard Pipes The Russian Revolution - This is the history of one of the most horrendous results of WWI, the destabilization of the Russian empire and the resulting Bolchevik coup. This catastrophe was especially awful, because it self-reproduced in other countries. The result was apalling beyond measure: the creation of truly evil empires, and more than 100 million deaths from political violence, wars, gulags and artifical famines around the world, more than WWI and WWII combined. Not rivers, but oceans of death. How such an evil regime could take over Russia - in small, imperceptible steps, with a slow solidifcation of its power - in a country where most educated people wanted a Western-style democracy is a great cautionary tale, offering many lessons on how such things might be avoided in the future.
Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson Why Nations Fail - A very interesting and very readable book on the importance of institutions for the economic development of countries. I found it very illuminating, even though some of the comments on "Guns, Germs and Steel" are not entirely accurate.
Timothy Snyder On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century - A book that has become urgent reading since 2016.
Matt Ridley
 The Rational Optimist - Matt Ridley argues convincingly, based on the overall trends and past history, that Humanity's great ascent since the Industrial revolution is likely to continue indefinitely. He also argues that, no matter how much Humanity's lot improves, pessimism will always be fashionable and pessimists held as sages.
Steven Pinker
 The Better Angels of Our nature - Many people will say ``What Great ascent since the Industrial Revolution? Look around you - the world has never been so violent!''. Such people will them dream about the old days, when we lived peacefully and in harmony with Nature. The problem with this view is that in the old days we didn't leave peacefully and in harmony with Nature - it was pretty awful. In primitive societies, the average rates of death by violence were worse than those of Europe during Wold War II; modern day Europe is the most peaceful society that has even been in the history of the world. In this amazing book, Steven Pinker thoroughly documents this gigantic (and, to may people, unbelievable) historical reduction of all kinds of violence and attempts to explain it. These explanations are still somewhat tentative, but they ring true and are extremely interesting (read the book if you want to find the answers).
P.S. I have read some of the critic's opinions listed in the Wikipedia site, and I have a feeling most of these people did not read the book before criticizing it. But this is understandable, not everyone has time to read 696 pages, even if they are exceptionally well written.
Enlightenment Now - With a similar aim as the preceding book, but with a much broader view, which considers the enormously positive effect of reason, science, technology and the Enlightenment ideals on the general welfare of Humananity. A book that gives any thinking person many great reasons to expect (and fight for) a much better future.
Bjørn Lomborg
 The Skeptical Environmentalist - One might be tempted to say "OK, the world has become more peaceful. But look, the environment is ruined!" The problem with this sentence is that, as we see from this book, this is not true. The "Skeptical Environmentalist" was written by one of the few voices of reason that has emerged from the ranks of the Seventh Day Adventists of our times, Greenpeace. This man has the nerve to say (based on ample evidence) that the world (both Nature and Humanity) is not doing so bad after all. My favorite periodical, The Economist, gave it this review: ``This is one of the most valuable books on public policy - not merely on environmental policy - to have been written for the intelligent general reader in the past ten years. ... The Skeptical Environmentalist is a triumph.''
Hans Rosling
 Factfulness - Continuing along the lines of Lomborg's book, this interesting book not only documents how things have generally gotten better over the last few centuries, and especially decades, but also the incredible, and rather monumental ignorance about this point, particularly from people that should know better. He also goes into the reasons for this, one of them the fact that media focuses almost exclusively on negative stories, with a preference for dramatic (and almost always false) perspectives. A must read!
A nice complement to this book is the site with the relevant data, which does a wonderful job of presenting and displaying it, the gapminder.
Mark Lynas The God Species - After this, you might say: "Hang on: things are getting better, but if we continue like this they will surely get worse. We should protect our environment and our planet!" However, making environmentalism a religion - were we are supposed to feel guilty for our sins and suffering by material deprivation is the only hope of appeasing the deity (Mother Nature) and avert the end of the world (Climate Change) is not the best way of accomplishing this goal. In fact, its has in many cases been counter-productive. In this book, Mark Lynas advocates a more scientific and, more importantly, much more effective form of environmentalist, where technological innovation (including, importantly, nuclear power, renewable energies and genetic engineering) and economical growth make us less and less reliant on the world's ecossystems while still allowing for much improved living standards (for instance, the Green revolution saved many of the world's forests from the plow and significantly reduced hunger and food prices, even in a world of rising population). Technology and economic growth are not the problem - they are the only desirable solution.
Michael Shellenberger
 Apocalypse Never - A great source on how environmental alarmism not only hurts humanity, but also hurts natural ecosystems as well. The book is surprising in showing how almost every solution that has been advocated by the environmental lobby (in particular the shutdown of nuclear power) ends up being bad not only for the economy but also for nature. This comes from one of the most committed environmentalists, who nevertheless had the intellectual honesty to see and openly discuss the many things that environmentalists are doing wrong. If you want to get the gist of what he's saying, see his Ted talk on how renewables can't save the planet. The book is even better. One particular part that everyone should read is the chapter "False Gods for Lost Souls" (see review here).

This book is very relevant for Germany, where I live. The German move away from nuclear power and into renewables (look at details here) has cost so far 160 billion euros (some estimates put the expenditure much higher, at 560 billion euros). However, the extra power from renewables has been clealy insufficient to replace the nuclear power stations that have been closed, with the consequence that Germany is now burning more coal than ever, and the electricity supply is now more unstable and 40 % more expensive than for other European countries, hurting Germany's industrial competitivity. Thus, the result of the misguided Environmentalist opposition to nuclear power has produced an increase of CO2 emissions at substantial economic cost - thus hurting people and the environment. Energy grid expert Manfred Haferburg criticized the program for "throwing away the world's best nuclear power plants like garbage" and, in the wake of COVID-19 pandemics, likened the program to a hypothetical takeover of German healthcare sector by "homeopaths and naturethreapists". Unfortunately, it looks like this idiocy is not going to stop any time soon.

Philosohpy and Religion
Stephen Greenblat The Swerve: How the World Became Modern - To my surprise, I found in this book the description of a philosophical system that has been right about pretty much everything of importance (in particular on the nature of things and the Universe) since ancient Greek and Roman times: Epicureanism. One of the Epicureans, the Roman poet Lucretius, pretty much laid out the whole thing in the form of a suppremely accomplished poem, On the Nature of Things. In Stephen Greenblat's book, the rediscovery of this ancient poem by Poggio Bracciolini in the 15th century is narrated as the great story it is: A find greater than any archaeological treasure that changed our world and indeed, in a sense, made it modern. I find it incredible that the modern scientific materialist mindset (complete with a sophisticated and rational philosophical system to match that is basically flawless) was already fully formed and matured more than 2000 years ago! Extremely entertaining, a great pleasure to read, most thought provoking.
Carl Sagan The Daemon Haunted World - The book that sums up nicely my thoughts on astrologers (fraudsters) and the supernatural (it does not exist).
Sam Harris The End of Faith - My recommendation here cannot be strong enough. This book sums up what I think about religion.
The Moral Landscape The idea of science being morally neutral is a false, but widespread idea. An awful idea, because science and reason represent the best (or perhaps even the only proper) way of defining a system of morality. Certainly much better than religion, which in this topic has an awful track record.
Richard Dawkins The God Delusion - This book did not do much for me, because I totally agree with it. For many religious people, it won't do much either, because they will totally disagree with it. However, if you are somewhere in the middle, and have some healthy doubts, then read it.
Raymond Ibrahim The Al-Qaeda Reader- Following the September 11th attacks, most commentators in the US and Europe were trying to make sense of what happened. They said a lot of nonsense. In this book, we hear from the perpetrators themselves: the true, fundamental issue is simple: religion. And Islam, as interpreted by Al Quaeda, is definitely not compatible with democracy, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, women's rights and rights of homosexuals, i.e., all civilized (sorry, "Western") stuff. The book is particularly shocking for showing how strongly and clearly the holy scriptures favour the Al Qaeda interpretation, with one single exception, suicide bombers. Terrorizing the infidels is a clear order there. The idea is present in the Bible as well, particularly in Deuteronomy, but that doesn't make it less bad.
Graeme Wood The Way of the Strangers- In this book, Graeme Wood interviews several of the leading recruiters and ideologues of the Islamic State. He asks them: ``What do you guys want?''. The answers are clear, concise and very well formulated. They are not the answers most people want to hear. They are also powerful testimony to the immense, enduring and almost unstoppable power of human stupidity. Reading this, the words of Schiller came to my mind: Gegen Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst Vergebens.
I could not put this book down. Extremely well written, extremely entertaining and satisfying.
Ayan Hirsi Ali Infidel- This is one of the most important and courageous autobiographies written in the last decade, written by an ex-Muslim Somali woman. Apart from touching on the important issues of (Muslim) religious intolerance, it is a description of the evil consequences of multiculturalism.

On things made by people

Technology
Dava Sobel Longitude - If you ever read "Galileo's Daughter", I'll tell you: ``Longitude'' is way better - and shorter.
Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age - A great account of the birth of one of the greatest inventions of all time, the Transistor. This book is part of the excellent Sloan Book Series.
Richard L. Garwin and Georges Charpak Megawatts and Megatons - An excellent book on nuclear technology and its enormous potential.
Richard Rhodes The making of the Atomic Bomb - The definitive book on the Manhattan Project. One thought that came to my head reading this: even at its worst and most destructive, science has an enormous, unique advantage over all other belief systems - it damn works!

If you like this book, then you will find the sequels extremely interesting: Dark Sun (also part of the Sloan Book Series), The Arsenals of Folly and The Twilight of the Bombs.
These books are beautifully complemented by Michael Light's 100 Suns.

Architecture and Painting
Alain de Botton The Architecture of Happiness - A really intelligent book not just about architecture, but wider aesthetics as well, full of provocative and interesting, but surprisingly logical ideas.
Gregory Curtis The Cave Painters - A relatively short but absolutely fascinating description of the caves in Southern France and Northern Spain, which were painted between 33000 and 12000 years ago. The first art that has ever survived to our times includes some of the most powerful and haunting paintings ever painted. The society that created these works of art lasted for 20000 years, an immense period of time of apparent plenty and stability. This was the European glacial Eden.
One of the many reasons why this period is so fascinating is that, about 47000 years ago, all of a sudden, Homo Sapiens started behaving as we do today, the cave paintings are just one of the signs of this enormous change. It is as if suddenly everyone woke up. No one knows what caused this sudden change, as mysterious, apparently instantaneous and consequent as the Cambrian Explosion and equally fascinating.
Another unusual thing about the environment where these paintings were created is that it is one of the very few where modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted for a long time. I can't help speculate on whether the two facts are interlinked. It is almost with sadness that one reads about the demise of this culture about 12000 years ago, which coincides with the end of the last Ice age.

See also ``The Clan of the Cave Bear'' below.

Literature: Fiction
Voltaire Short Stories - If you love this book as I loved it, then read Candide.
Alexandre Dumas The Three Musketeers
Victor Hugo Les Miserables
Emile Zola Nana- A great description of the corrupting power of sex in human society.
Flaubert Madame Bovary - A cynical, detached and perfect work of art. One of the three best novels I have ever read.
Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina - More entertaining than his better known "War and Peace". More concise, insightful and elegant as well. One of the three best novels I have ever read.
Oscar Wilde The picture of Dorian Gray
Alexander Soljenitsine The Gulag Archipelago - It is not a piece of cake to read this, but perhaps a salutary exercise for those silly but deluded people that still insist on wearing Che Guevara T-shirts. This and the next 3 recommendations are for them.
Jung Chang The Wild Swans - Communism (again!) in China. Different setting than Russia, same horrifying results, if not worse.
George Orwell Animal Farm

1984 - The ultimate nightmare, the one from which one cannot escape. Winston's recollections of his doomed mother are truly poignant.
Aldous Huxley A Brave New World - A great description of a world where suffering has been scientifically eliminated, and where everyone is happy. We are supposed to think it is a nightmare, but I found the place strangely pleasant, particularly when compared to the world described in Orwell's "1984".
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Cien Anos de Soledad (One hundred years of solitude) - Great story. Magic Realism has its definition here. This also did wonders for my Spanish.
Patrick Susskind
 The Perfume
Yukio Mishima
 The Temple of the Golden Pavillion - This reminds me of a magical week in Kyoto :-)
Yasunari Kawabata Snow Country - Beautiful, sad, extremely elegant - and very short. Wonderful.
The Master of Go - A wonderful read.

The Old Capital - I cannot but totally agree with the Nobel committee on this one.
Haruki Murakami A Wild Sheep Chase - A very entertaining book, I really enjoyed it, even more because I was travelling in Asia at the time (2023), making me feel partially inserted in the story.
Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - This is the sort of book no one ever forgets. He created a parallel world, where it is always Winter, full of haunting beauty and sadness. What makes it so sad and touching is that in that world a little bit of happiness is possible, and does happen.
Norwegian Wood - A very entertaining read, this if the book that made Murakami famous.
Kafka on the Shore - Another wonderful and deeply mysterious parallel dream world created by Murakami. One feels at the same time soothed and fascinated while glazing lazingly at it, and one feels sorry when the story ends. Reading it in Japan (2023) made many of the details much more present, and made the story feel even more real. I wish I could forget it so I could have the pleasure of reading it anew!
IQ84 - Another wonderful parallel reality, written in a more realistic style, and yet sharing the same dream-like, mysterious atmosphere, where life feels more eventful - and even more real - than in our own reality. It is like our dreams, where we are more emotional than when awake. It is a long book, but it is a real page turner.
South of the border, West of the Sun - A short, spare book, one of the few "realistic" novels, yet again having the mysterious, dream-like atmosphere typical of Murakami's books. The book is about first love and moving on, topics that I find very beautiful.
José Saramago O Evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo - This book contains my opinions on Catholicism. A very sophisticated text, written by a well known Portuguese (communist) writer that got the Nobel prize of literature because of this book and the two listed below:

O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis

Memorial do Convento
Albert Camus La Peste - One of the best writers ever, this is perhaps the best written novel I've ever read (please read the French edition, if you understand the language!).
L'Étranger.
Michel Houellebecq The Elementary Particles - This is one of the funniest books I have ever read, but one of the most bleak and depressive as well. Still my favourite novel after all these years.
If you love this book as much as I do, then you will get all his other books, which are extremely rewarding as well.

For something slightly different from him, I also recommend "La Carte et le Territoire".

Pre-historic and Historical Novels
Jean M. Auel The Clan of the Cave Bear - This extremely entertaining story explores one of my fascinations, namely the human past. In particular, it deals with Neanderthals and their psychology. They were human, but they were different from us, separated by hundreds of thousands of years of separate and parallel evolution. Compared to us, what capacities did they lack? What capacities did they have that we lack? The book explores these differences by narrating the story of a 5-year old modern human girl (Ayla) that is orphaned and is then adopted by a Neanderthal tribe (the Clan of the Cave Bear). One of the interesting things about this book is the realistic detail, faithfully based on real archaeological evidence and then blended with fanciful (and wonderful) ideas, like the ancestral memories of Neanderthals. These details really transport the reader to the recent pre-history, and makes one really wonder about the lost inner world of those other humanities. If you really like this book, then I absolutely recommend the sequel, "The Valley of Horses".
Jane Smiley The Greenlanders - This book describes a society (the old Norse country of Greenland) marching inexorably to its dark, cold oblivion sometime in the fifteenth century. The actual historical reasons for the demise of this society are still not understood, but this novel gives us some clues. One is truly transported to a very different time and place, so remote that all contact with Europe was lost at the end of the Middle Ages, and with it the memory of the place vanished almost entirely. A wonderful lost realm... This book is perfect for reading over 100 snowy winter nights, as one of its reviewers put it.
Like the previous book in this section; this is thoroughly researched, in this case making the story almost more vivid and real than my own life. I later learned (reading "The Frozen Echo - Greenland and the Exploration of North America ca A.D. 1000-1500", by Kirsten Seaver) that many of the characters and events described in the "Greenlanders" are historically accurate, which in my opinion adds to its appeal.
What would have happened if the Greenlanders had managed to create a self-sustained society in North America?
Ken Follet The Pillars of the Earth - This is an extremely entertaining book about some of the greatest works of art in all history - the medieval European cathedrals! This book is so good that, despite its apparent length, it felt short in the end.
World without End - The sequel to ``The Pillars of the Earth, and not less interesting (which is in itself a major feat). VERY entertaining.

Science Fiction / Fantasy / Horror:
Edgar Allan Poe The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket - It's just fantastic.
H. G. Wells The Time Machine - even better than The War of the Worlds.
The War of the Worlds - a great classic, still a great read.
Ray Bradbury The Martian Chronicles - A wonderful set of short stories that capture the vastness, loneliness and alienness of Mars better than anything I have read to date. Truly majestic, nostalgic, sad, beautiful and evocative. In a word, magical.
H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu and other weird stories - The works of H.P. Lovecraft are a fascinating combination of Science Fiction with the sort of horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe. They warn us of unspeakable horrors that might be waiting for us in the deep, dark corners of the Universe - and sometimes very near our doorsteps.

The Thing at the Doorstep and other weird stories - More Cosmic Horror, further elaboration of the Cthulhu Mythos. His story "At the Mountains of Madness" is directly inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's "Gordon Pym", and at least as amazing.
J. R. R. Tolkien Silmarillion

The Lord of the Rings
Anne Rice Interview with the Vampire - A great story, which inspired a great movie.

The Vampire Lestat - In my opinion, this is even better than "Interview with the Vampire"! Unfortunately, the film adaptation was mediocre.

The Queen of the Damned - The conclusion to "The Vampire Lestat". Also pretty good, but not as amazing as the preceding book.
Brian Aldiss The Long Afternoon of Earth
Frank Herbert Dune - This has been for a long time my favourite science fiction novel, for several reasons. First, the Universe being presented is absolutely fascinating, and really made my imagination run. Second, the plot is also very well developed; the action proceeds always in a satisfying way, and the end has a satisfying conclusion. Third, the characters are vey well developed as well, their motivations are clearly human, despite living in a strange distant future; this allows a clear emotional connection with them: there is not a single character we're indifferent to. However, the culminating pleasure of this book is the way it is written. This gripped me from the start. The writing is what makes everything seem so real and self-consistent, even poetic. It is greatly aided by his deep knowledge of linguistics, which shine through the book and give elegant, sometimes wonderful names to the many fascinating concepts of this distant future. I have read this book four times, and I will doubtless read it again, also because I am very inspired by his writing and I'd like to learn how to write better.
I am very glad to see that there is finally a movie adaptation (by Villeneuve) that does the book some justice!
Regarding the five sequels by Frank Herbert, I though they were in comparison very minor works; I cannot recommend them. This is a pity, I really wish he has shown us more of his Universe and how it came to be.
Isaac Asimov The Foundation trilogy - One of the great classics. Great writing, super entertaining, absolutely recommended.
Stanislaw Lem Solaris - This book is a classical of science fiction, and it well deserves to be. Wonderful and haunting. The movies don't do it justice.
Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - An extremely funny book, full of ridiculous but interesting ideas.
Kim Stanley Robertson Red Mars - Green and Blue Mars are good as well, but they don't match the first.

Humour:
Scott Adams Dilbert - A funny and sarcastic take on corporate culture and more broadly on the negative features of capitalism, human nature, and a lot of the bullshit illogical thinking that has become so pervasive.
``Mohammed Jones'' Jesus and Mo - Brilliant discussions on religion.
Titania McGrath Woke: a guide to social justice- As a cis-gender, white male, I have found Titania's book as a wake-up call to my role as an opressor of minorities, women and non-binary people. As she says: ``We need to change the assumption that people aren't racist just because they never say or do racist things. Unconscious bias is real.'' To my horror, I found that I have been opressing people despite thinking I am way too lazy for that - in fact, even while I am unconscious! I opress people merely by existing as a while, cis-gender male. There are plenty of other clues: My personal preferences oppress other people as well: I like science and mathematics, and ``As Professor Rochelle Gutierrez from the University of Illinois has pointed out, `On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness.' ''

This book has woked me in countless ways:
  • I used to think that poverty is a big problem, and that we should fight for equality of opportunity and social mobility for everyone, in a color and gender-neutral way. Titania set me straight on that: ``If there were no poor people, then there would be no point in socialism, which would make us all capitalists by default. And why would anyone want that?". After this, she comes to the central point: ``On the whole, class is something of a distraction. (...) sexuality, gender and race are far more likely to affect your potential for social mobility than economic circumstances, education or nepotism." Ditto for effort or character, I imagine. Everything is determined by characteristics I was born with, there is no escaping that. None of my failures was my fault: I am a straight white man, so nothing good can be expected from me. Nothing I have achieved was earned either, the effort was an illusion: white privilege did it all for me.
  • I used to think that gender has a hard biological basis. Once again, I was wrong: ``Children need to understand that vaginas, penises, ovaries, testes and fallopian tubes are all mere social constructs. It is essential that we teach them that the very concept of gender is a fabrication, but is simultaneously the most essential aspect of their self-identity".
  • I used to think that feminists only complained about the lack of women in cool jobs. Titania set me straight once again: ``In the USA, women make 97.7 % of pre-school and kindergarten teachers but only 1.1 % of mining machine operators. We need to rectify such appalling inequality (...). Let's start throwing our daughters into pits with pneumatic drills from time to time".
And on, and on, and on.

So now I am woke. I now hate myself for choosing to be born white, male and for choosing to find women attractive. What was I thinking? And, more importantly, what can I do about it now?

Fortunately, Titania is never short of advice on how other people should live their lives. Change is possible! Even better, it does not need to be anything hard or unpleasant, like becoming a vegan, or embracing my gender fluidity, although these things would surely be beneficial. It is actually quite easy: ``By simply adding a rainbow flag to your Facebook profile or calling out an elderly person who doesn't understand what `non-binary' means, you can change the world for the better. Indeed, social media has now made it possible to show how virtuous you are without having to do anything at all."

I cannot thank Titania enough for this illuminating tome. I can't believe how totally woke I've become. Now I care. Now I get it.

P. S. The poetry is... challenging. But it is perhaps the major achievement in this tour de force. Like all great works of art, it is hard (very hard) to grasp at first, but the hard work required to slog through it is greatly rewarded, because at some point we begin to grasp how much of a saint - and a martyr - she truly is.
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