I’m gonna make a list and hit the library
Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins
The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan and Ann Driyan
Read them when I was in my early 20s. Changed the way I see the world.
I was gonna read the selfish gene by Dawkins, but since it’s probably gonna be such a tough read, do you think your suggestion is a bit easier to digest?
Definitely. As a total layman in this kind of stuff, I believe I’ve read The Selfish Gene first, but at the time I was so eager to consume as much knowledge as possible in this subject, that I could maybe be misremembering all the effort and research it took for me to understand it. It’s a fascinating book, but more specific.
Imo, Unweaving the Rainbow has a much broader appeal and is much easier reading. They’re both very different books.
Not sure if they all fit entirely but:
- The Story Of Stuff (Annie Leonard)
- How The World Works (Noam Chomsky)
- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (Dan Ariely)
- The Hidden Brain (Shankar Vedantam) / Idiot Brain (Dean Burnett)
- The Myth Of Choice (Kent Greenfield) / The Paradox Of Choice (Barry Schwartz)
- The Free Will Delusion: How We Settled For The Illusion Of Morality (James B. Miles)
- Getting Free: Creating An Association Of Democratic Autonomous Neighborhoods (James Herod)
- The Best That Money Can’t Buy (Jacque Fresco)
- No Contest: The Case Against Competition (Alfie Kohn)
I’ve been meaning to start reading some Chomsky & Alfie Kohn! Both very revolutionary writers from the reviews I’ve been checking out
Predictably Irrational is really good.
I feel like I read Chomsky’s books at a key point in my life where I didn’t really get all of it but it primed me for later learning. Good list overall 👍🏼
Against the Grain
Internal Combustion
Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia
These all caused me to examine aspects of modern society that we usually just accept blindly
Carl Sagan - A Demon-Haunted World. Explains the key difference between a scientific vs religious mindset.
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
Completely upended the way I look at how humans have organized ourselves and adjusted them periodically based on changes and advances in our environment and society. Shows that we are capable of taking the advancements we make that are beneficial and ridding ourselves of the negatives that emerge alongside them. Regardless of how big and difficult those shifts may seem
The Tao of Pooh, the Te of Piglet, and the Tao Te Ching.
A People’s History of The United States, Howard Zinn
The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus
A Short History of Decay, E. M. Cioran
The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Alan Watts
Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault
The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett
On Writing - If you want to write and and are able to ignore advice that doesn’t fit your style, I’ve always found this a nice inspiring comfort read (the audiobook is great!)
I’ve read Taking the War Out of Our Words and found it really enlightening. It wasn’t a paradigm shift, but it really shows how the way we speak is naturally adversarial and how we can overcome that. It’s especially useful when talking with people you disagree with.
Thank You For Arguing.
Learning about rhetoric and how the truth isn’t necessarily persuasive has been really valuable in the post-truth era.
The Zhuangzi.
I tried a few times to describe why but I’m having a hard time of it. I guess it made me accept that I can’t control everything and that there’s a natural ebb and flow in most things. Not in a defeatist kind of way. But more like you ride out the bad and find joy where you can. You never know if the alternative could have been worse.
Basically it made me appreciate the weird and little things in life and not overthink the big.
There’s a lot more to it, but it’s one of the lasting benefits it gave me.Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence helped me get better at every relationship in my life.
Can you elaborate a bit? Amazon reviews make it sound more academic and less actionable.
Yes, it’s definitely more academic than practical, but that’s really what I needed. I had read plenty of books that told me what I should do, but not why I’m doing it. By learning the theory I could be more improvisational in my interactions with confidence.
Immune by Philipp Dettmer. Made me appreciate my body and immune system
When I was about 12, my father brought from the airbase thrift shop two books of the “Tell me why” series. It blew my mind knowing how stuff, iI never paid attention to, worked.
From then on I knew that there was an explanation for almost everything, it just required looking for the right book :-)
Scale by Geoffrey West is an insanely interesting read if you’re a bit into superficial science!
The Art of War- expressed better than any other piece I’ve read the rationale of war. War is conflict and understanding both the enemy and yourself is the only way to effective success.
Atomic Habits- the best way to improve your life is to improve the minutia of it by just 1%. Applies rationale to how we operate while on auto pilot and gives effective solutions to combat the negative habits we fall into.
The Way of Monkey Book- an amazing, modern lens to stoicism and individually written in the style of eastern texts. While the author is deplorable to say the least, the message and morals of the work brilliantly reflect the ebb and flow of nature and the distortion of such through the actions of the average man.
