5 great books for summer
It's time for my summer book recommendations.
Here are five books I really enjoyed reading.
“The Lincoln Highway” by Amor Towles.
Amor Towles is good.
I'd rank “A Gentleman in Moscow” the highest,
but this is still a very good book.
The characters are all pretty interesting.
That's the heart and soul of his book.
It's sort of a tale of morality,
that you need to watch what you do
and be careful out there.
There's definitely a sense that the world's
kind of a dangerous and unpredictable place.
The end has a lot of twists and turns.
Why did this happen?
Why did this guy behave this way?
And is kind of excitingly fantastical,
and by the end you understand those characters.
“Why We're Polarized” by Ezra Klein.
Well, sadly I have to say that literally,
until I read this book, I kept thinking,
we're just not making our arguments carefully enough.
This book aligns so many things
about open mindedness and therefore,
liking the past versus the present,
and thinking of immigrations as kind of threatening.
It's good to be reminded of how messed up things were,
particularly with respect to race, in the past.
His framework explains a broader set of things
than any other framework I'd seen.
But, it's kind of daunting, even though it's clarifying.
I feel like I have more understanding of what's gone on
and that it'll help me predict things better.
“The Ministry for the Future”, Kim Stanley Robinson.
It's a wild book because it has everything.
The way that it pushes socialistic solutions
or organic farming or this carbon coin thing.
Those are not real solutions.
But the idea of the incredible unrest
and how you go backwards,
if you don't get on top of this thing,
and that you should be thinking about
the people born in the future
and what the world is going to be like for them.
It's got some amazing stuff in it.
“How the World Really Works” by Vaclav Smil.
It's quite a readable book and explains the physical economy.
It's such important knowledge.
You know, wow, there's a lot of cement making.
There's a lot of steel making.
These are very optimized processes
that allow us to have roads and buildings,
and stay out of the weather.
He doesn't go so far back in history that it feels obscure.
It's a very foundational piece of work
to understand why climate change is so hard to solve,
because even once you have innovations,
scaling them out to replace all the physical economy is so difficult.
And if it's more expensive, that will feel like,
hey, living standards are going down instead of going up.
“How the World Really Works” is a profound book.
“The Power”, by Naomi Alderman.
“The Power” is very provocative.
It imagines a world where women end up
being able to use electricity as a weapon,
and it changes the gender balance of power so dramatically.
You meet people like Margot, Ally, Roxy.
They were all pretty tough.
Allie, who becomes Mother Eve
and has a religious slant and develops a big following.
It's certainly a troubling vision,
but I think it's part of getting people thinking
about gender imbalances.
I think it's a powerful story.
I hope you try these books.
I really enjoyed them.