“Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.”
fiction
A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut
The Sailor of Life fumbles with crude navigation tools in the crossings of many stormy straights, when a beacon of light sings out to the Sailor from across the blackened waters, as if harmonizing a celestial song of paradise. Thus is how old man Kurt makes one feel.
Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang
What indeed, is science fiction, but the reinvention of science in the defiant cross-examination of life-as-we-know-it?
The Darkness and the Light, Anthony Hecht
"the fluted pleats
Of the antiphonal archangelic choirs
Singing their melismatic pax in terram"
Non-fiction
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Carl Sagan
"The Universe is lavish beyond imagining. [...] That's where we live. That's where we come from. The sky and the Earth are one." The lyrical introductory lens pans in from the cosmos to human kind, and takes us along for a wild ride in our search for origins, meaning, and purpose.
If intelligence is our most marked distinction, then all the more reason there is to acknowledge our primal facets, analyze how our social configurations evolved to contain them, and strip away our anthropocentric special-snowflakes security blanket.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Human Kind, Yuval Noah Harari
The humans species that didn't make it to the big kids table are rarely mentioned in history books. Sapiens, having come out on top and having conveniently named ourselves "wise humans", seem the most cut-throat, ruthless, humility-lacking, and utterly impressive.
"So why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural or inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine."
Complexity: A Guided Tour, Melanie Mitchell
Fascinating introduction to topics in complexity theory: information theory and computation, fractals and genetic algorithms, universal computers, network theory… consistently engaging, eye-opening, and thought-provoking.