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Hannah Arendt - The Origins of Totalitarianism - it's a gift that keeps on giving regarding many conteporary topics.
Isaac Asimov - The Robot Collection - reveals how old robot tropes are, and sheds some light on the position of robots and neighboring entities in society both today and 100 years ago. Hint: remarkably similar.
I have The Origins of Totalitarianism in my to-read list, how dated would you say it is in general? Is it more of a historical look of 70~ years ago or more political/philosophical?
It's not very dated. You could complain it doesnt talk about events like the rise of China or the North Korean totalitarism, or the weird (in hindsignt) issue it takes with evolutionism, but the events described are used as an example to dissect and extract the underlying political mechanisms, forms of which we still see today.
It's kind of boring in between the interesting parts though.
I'll recommend also Between Past and Future and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Arendt is not properly an historian but a political theorist, so history itself represents for her the background on which she bases a broader and timeless philosophical and anthropological debate
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Finished this recently: The Price You Pay — a fun and quick to read thriller.
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"How to Avoid a Climate Disaster" by Bill Gates. I've had strong opinions on climate change for a long time but I never felt like I was educated to the extent I wanted to be. This book has tons of very specific information on timelines, tradeoffs, and the ramifications of possible solutions. It's still an overview, but it assumes no knowledge and really digs in there. I feel like I finally have some rigor in the topic beyond what I've absorbed from random news articles and internet posts over the years.
"Abstract Algebra: Theory and Applications" by Thomas W. Judson. I never went to college and am self taught, but work in fields that often require various types of mathematics. I'd figured out workable amounts of abstract algebra here and there and just wanted to tie everything together. This book is fantastic for that. Like every math book it's dense and requires effort...but it's more approachable than most and it seems to fit right in the niche I needed.
"Altered Carbon" by Richard K. Morgan. Just a fun book. Not too far from the Netflix version, but in text form it gets away with alot more suspension of disbelief.
ursula k le guin's translation of the daodejing - i keep coming back to it
and, 'the garden of pleasure', a translation of Yang Zhu's remaining work, preserved in the Liezi