Don Quixote

The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin.

Few other sci-fi books do as good a job of depicting how a gift/library economy could work like in practice. It’s quite a hopeful vision of where can collective go in the future.

The Tartar Steppe,

it’s been a life altering book for me and it so come in my mind from time to find when I’m thinking about what I’m doing with my life.

Anything by E.B. White. While the narratives are simplistic, there is a gentile under tone of trauma in each one that I feel might be rather meaningful and resonant to today’s emotionally fragile youth. These are books that deal with inevitable death, discrimination and ableism in frank, but subversively subtle ways.

The egg by Andy Weir. It gave me the basis for Gnosticism / the spirituality that I genuinely think is closest to the truth ie: humans do have a soul, but it’s all the same soul / consciousness that just splits up into sperate little chunks of perception for a little bit at a time before rejoining the whole in different places and splitting off again from and to a completely different place. Honestly the main thing I learned from psychology, neurology, and physics classes is that time, or at least the human perception of it, is almost completely bullshit, and that our perception of our brain as a separate thing that controls the rest of our body, or even as our body as a separate thing from the world like a suit in space is a significant cause of mental illness.

Why does our sense of self so often stop at our brain when most of our neurotransmitters are in our gut? How can you be the cells but not the fluid you filter then piss out? Your upper layers of skin and hair are dead how can they be more you than the air trapped between them? There’s a reason drugs dissolving your sense of self, even temporarily, is often described as a positively transformative experience.

The Stranger by Albert Camus. It’s very short, barely over 100 pages, and it helped me realize that nothing really matters.

Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I’d have never picked it up if I hadn’t been bored and trying to kill time, but it really put life in a new perspective. Genuinely think it’s made everything lighter since reading that one.

1984, so that people mentioning it online will stop sounding like complete fucking idiots.

Or perhaps The Jungle; it sparked public outcry and major overhauls the last time it became popular, maybe it can work its magic again.

State and Rev

Hah. I’d be happy to hear that everyone read at least one book in their lifetime.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Just the intermissions would get everyone’s blood boiling.

Flowers for Algernon

The Master and Margarita

Probably won’t get as much out of it as someone who lived in the Soviet union, but it’s an interesting dissection of the absurdity of authority.

Grapes of Wrath is a good one that’s relevant now as when it was made.

My summer reading list (not that I get to read both every year):

• The Songs of Distant Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke
• The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco

The first is about what we never prepared for, but could try to thrive through. (Mike Oldfield made a cool concept album about this. One of the songs is called “Only time will tell”)

The second is a murder mystery set in a medieval monastery. But wait! Is it actually a multilayered examination of our notions about information? Oh hell yeah.