The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova is a ground breaking (like you do in a grave yard!) and illuminating (as in don’t go out in the sun) work of fiction that I know many of you have read because we’ve talked about it. So you have a copy. But maybe you don’t have a Kindle copy, which is now available for 4.99. But not in Transylvania.
The book* Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming edited by Paul Hawken is a must have resource if you want to have useful conversations, and carry out effective activism, related to Global Warming. I actually recommend you get the print version, but at the moment, the Kindle version available cheap (at least in the US) so I wanted to let you know about it. Two bucks, and also, lower carbon footprint (on the other hand, books are carbon sinks, right?)
Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
Here was my idea. I call it “The Wedge.” See, there’s this wedge of, well, effect, emanating from the cluster of black hoes near the center of the galaxy, and sweeping around like a lighthouse beam, with one rotation every several thousand years (details to be worked out). While The Wedge is shining on your plant, things work one way. When it passes, things go back to normal. Our solar system has been within the Wedge Zone for thousand of years (except may be it flicked off now and then, say, during Egyptian times, or whatever). Never mind the details. Continue reading Poul Anderson totally stole my idea!
How many ways can I describe The Sympathizer: A Novel
Shocking. Revealing. Informative. Historic. Historical. Hard to put down. Won all the prizes (Pulitzer, Edgar, Andrew Carnegie, etc).
Do not read reviews of it. They tend to give some of the story away. Just read the book. Best novel of the last few years (it came out in 2016). I’ve recommended it before, but now, it is on Kindle for $1.99 (at least in the US) so NOW is the time to get it.
I didn’t even know this book existed, but here it is: Letters From Father Christmas
They told wonderful tales of life at the North Pole: how the reindeer got loose and scattered presents all over the place; how the accident-prone North Polar Bear climbed the North Pole and fell through the roof of Father Christmas’s house into the dining room; how he broke the Moon into four pieces and made the Man in it fall into the back garden; how there were wars with the troublesome horde of goblins who lived in the caves beneath the house, and many more.
No reader, young or old, can fail to be charmed by Tolkien’s inventiveness in this classic holiday treat.
The novel that started it all, A Game of Thrones
This is not the TV series, but it is the critically acclaimed novel.
Why do we do the things we do?
Over a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky’s genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky’s storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person’s reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its genetic inheritance.
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
And I mention this now because it is dirt cheap on Kindle.
People of the Book: A Novel
Speaking of this author, Geraldine Brooks also has another book, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague
A kindle version of The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World: Stories
This is an anthology including A Boy and his Dog.
And while we are on the topic, check out this lost video of Harlan Ellison:
Jailbird: A Novel
Jailbird takes us into a fractured and comic, pure Vonnegut world of high crimes and misdemeanors in government—and in the heart. This wry tale follows bumbling bureaucrat Walter F. Starbuck from Harvard to the Nixon White House to the penitentiary as Watergate’s least known co-conspirator. But the humor turns dark when Vonnegut shines his spotlight on the cold hearts and calculated greed of the mighty, giving a razor-sharp edge to an unforgettable portrait of power and politics in our times.
Also, while we are talking about cheap books, Powder Burn
Isaac Asimov’s robot books form a somewhat confusing and internally contradictory, but overall fantastic and important corpus of science fiction. One of the Asimov robot books is on sale right now super cheap in Kindle format: The Caves of Steel (The Robot Series Book 1)
Referring to Wikipedia (so get mad at them, not at me, if this seems wrong to you) the robot series of books (not counting short stories) in order of the stories themselves runs something like this:
The Caves of Steel (The Robot Series)
The Naked Sun (The Robot Series)
Did you ever wonder how Richard Dawkins got so smart? Or why he looks so much like Hermione Granger? Well, read this book to find out the answer to those two questions, and so very much more:
An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist
In An Appetite for Wonder, Richard Dawkins shares a rare view into his early life, his intellectual awakening at Oxford, and his path to writing The Selfish Gene. He paints a vivid picture of his idyllic childhood in colonial Africa, peppered with sketches of his colorful ancestors, charming parents, and the peculiarities of colonial life right after World War II. At boarding school, despite a near-religious encounter with an Elvis record, he began his career as a skeptic by refusing to kneel for prayer in chapel. Despite some inspired teaching throughout primary and secondary school, it was only when he got to Oxford that his intellectual curiosity took full flight.
Arriving at Oxford in 1959, when undergraduates “left Elvis behind” for Bach or the Modern Jazz Quartet, Dawkins began to study zoology and was introduced to some of the university’s legendary mentors as well as its tutorial system.
It’s to this unique educational system that Dawkins credits his awakening, as it invited young people to become scholars by encouraging them to pose rigorous questions and scour the library for the latest research rather than textbook “teaching to” any kind of test. His career as a fellow and lecturer at Oxford took an unexpected turn when, in 1973, a serious strike in Britain caused prolonged electricity cuts, and he was forced to pause his computer-based research. Provoked by the then widespread misunderstanding of natural selection known as “group selection” and inspired by the work of William Hamilton, Robert Trivers, and John Maynard Smith, he began to write a book he called, jokingly, “my bestseller.” It was, of course, The Selfish Gene.
Here, for the first time, is an intimate memoir of the childhood and intellectual development of the evolutionary biologist and world-famous atheist, and the story of how he came to write what is widely held to be one of the most important books of the twentieth century.
Cheap in Kindle format: Continue reading Cheap Bradbury Book, and more
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
It is a very good account of the incredibly important work on evolution done by the Peter and Rosemary Grant on Daphne Major island in the Galapagos. This is the study that demonstrated real time evolution of birds among the group initially studied by Charles Darwin. Those observations by Darwin helped shape is conception of natural selection, and the more recent work by the Grants is a modern day demonstration that Darwin was right.
