Summer Reading List

reading kind of overlap. So every now and then we throw up book recommendations. You guys write in and ask us about this book or another asked for us spelling on an author's name, and we chat back and forth.

And we've been talking about doing a summer reading episode for a while now where we just go ahead and eliminate any other content from a short episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind and just talk about a few books that are both near to our hearts but also near to the heart of the show and close to the themes that we often discuss and Stuff to Blow

Your Mind. Yeah, and the presumption is that it's summer's coming up, and we're all gonna laze around for at least two weeks, uh, you guys over in Europe, I don't know, a month or two. We'll have some time here to tackle a reading list and hopefully you guys will be interested in some of the stuff that we have to recommend. Yeah, you know, so you can hunt these down, check them out from your library, load them up on your kindle. I can't speak for your list.

I know on my list all these things are pretty readily available, so you shouldn't have to do any deep digging to find them. I like dusty books, like to crack them open, so but I'm assuming that most of the stuff is available. Yeah, I mean I do too, though I just switched. I finally jumped on the bandwagon and have a kindle. Now. Yeah, I'm going to get there soon, but it just hasn't happened yet. Put it that way, I mean, they don't smell near is nice. I'm just a cheap jerk and I'm not there yet.

Like when it drops to fifty nine, probably without any further ado, let's roll this baby out. Well, I'll go first then, and I'm just gonna let you know most well, all my choices here are actually fiction sci fi kind of books, and you're gonna bring more of the non

I'm gonna bring the nonfiction. There's definitely some nonfiction books that I've been reading or I've read recently, but they're not necessarily things that I would say, yes, you should plow through this as well, because there are books that are informative and enriching and well worth the time you spend with them, but it's not necessarily the kind of thing you might want to take on a vacation with you or you know, squirrel away for a little personal

enjoyment reading. Although you might be a nonfiction reader like I am. Mostly I enjoy great fiction, but a lot of times I just like to cozy up to something that's really going to stirre my brain. Said, I don't feel like I'm trapped in a certain world for a certain amount of time, because I tend to when that happens, you know, I get a really good piece of fiction, I want to squirrel myself away for seventy two hours and not eat or drink or talk to anyone else.

So that's a really big time commitment for me. So nonfiction I really love because it's a balanced way to consume some really cool bits of information. Okay, Well, my first pick is a non by an author by the name of our Scott Baker. Sometimes he's just so listed as Scott Baker, depending on if you're getting a like a Canadian, British, shore Us version of one of his books. He's the author of a really thought provoking epic fantasy series called well overall. It's called The Second Apocalypse, and

that includes the novels The Prince of Nothing. The Darkness That Came Before is the first trilogy in that series, and it's all very thought provoking stuff. He's a philosophy guy. He invokes a lot of neuroscience in his worlds, even if he's writing about a world full of magic. But those fantasy books are not always as accessible, I think to some readers. Luckily, he has written a couple of non fantasy books, and one of these is a book called Disciple of the Dog, and that's the one that

I'm gonna recommend here. It's a really fun read. It's short, and it is about a sleazy, pothead private investigator with an abnormal capacity for memory. He cannot forget anything that it's said to him. The capacity doesn't allow him to remember everything that he's read. But if somebody has said it, if he's seen it, then it's cemented in his mind. Is that similar to some people who have ability to recall dates like from twenty years ago or in in

the events connected to them. Yeah, that kind of thing should be helpful if you're a private investigator and you know, we've seen this kind of investigator before. To a certain incidentally, give me Sherlock Holmes is the classic investigator character. And certainly with Sherlock, you have a character that has just a phenomenal brain and it distances himself from various human

experiences and makes him kind of an enigma to normal people. Well, the character and disciple of the dog who's the character's name, is a disciple manning just kind of gimmicky but fun. He is kind of screw up because of his condition. Like his condition is he cannot forget anything, so anything that traumatizes him is there forever. So he's a character that has had some severe bouts with depression and self loathing based on this ability, but he's also managed to

use it for financial gain as a private investigator. And so our Scott Baker injects a lot of philosophical pondering into this because we get into questions that we've raised in the podcast before, to what extent are we shaped by our memory? And what to what extent are we

shaped by our memory errors. We discussed the seven Deadly sins of memory, the various ways that we misremember something or alter the memory of something in our head, and these are things that the character Disciple Man and cannot do. So it's interesting to see Baker play that out in

the novel and Disciple the Dog. The character is looking into a missing person's case that concerns a new age cult where the believers are of the opinion that it is actually the year A D fifty million, and life as we know it is all just the dream of a quantum computer, and the sun is actually about to swallow the earth as it goes into a red dwarf stage. So you also end up with ponderings about what is our future and the idea that you know, when yeah, yeah,

what would it look like? And ideas that what is reality? You know, what is it possible that reality could be the dreams of a quantum computer? And then this is all just a backward fantasy. The world around this is just this backward fantasy that we project for ourselves. So there are various levels of, to my mind, mind blowing

ideas that Baker has fun within this. And then on top of that, it's entertaining because you have a wonderfully sleazy but likable protagonist and you have this now air setting like industrial Jersey, so it's not really a new war setting, but it's got very much a new war kind of vibe to it. Classic detective case, what's gonna happen? He's gonna find the missing girl who's the heart of the conspiracy and all of this. So it's short, gets the point, have some fun with the character and brings

with it a lot of floor ideas. I like the dichotomy of a pothead with a really long memory too. Yeah, a sharp memory. Well, pretty great because it's like the sharp memory is bringing him such trauma. It distanced him from so many people. He kind of has to self medicate through it. Yeah, what's on your list? Okay? Um, well, I have the best nature in science running. That of course is a series, and this particular one is the guest edited by Mary Roach. She's at the Helm there, yes,

so she's made a lot of the selections here. You'll probably remember her from books like Stiff Pecking from Mars Bunk. She's just got a really great science journalism pedigree, and I think anybody familiar with her work knows that she has a great sense of humor and the ability to really deliver very accessible points of entry into some weighty subjects. If you go back through the catalog of our podcast far Enough, you're fun an interview with her from back

when the podcast was stuffed in the Science Lab. So she's got the selection of different pieces of essays and articles, about twenty five of them. Actually. Some of them are from well known writers like Oliver Sacks and Leonard Lednov and Stephen Hawking, and others not as well known, although definitely up and coming, like Brook Hollard Builder, people making a name for themselves for their ability to reframe our

understanding of the subject. In fact, Brook Hard Builder is the writer of the article that has to do with food safety, which right there sounds like incredibly wing. But this guy went into underground food movements like fermenting, which we talked about in a podcast, raw milk, the paleo diet, all these very different sort of movements going on right now, and what could have just been like a story about the safety of food became this incredible matrix of cultural

ideas and scientific theories that are proven and disproven. So anyway, that that's why I really love this series is that it does take this sort of everyday stuff and reframe it for us. Another really good example is an essay by jarn Lanier. It's called the First Church of Robotics, and it explores our fascination with robotics. If certainly we have a fascination with it, We've talked about it quite a bit, and our need to project ourselves onto these

machines and personify them. And he said that this is all going on at the same time we are increasingly treating our fellow humans like machines. So it's kind of interesting that you have this shift in the way that we are communicating with one another. We're communicating in way set rely on algorithms of technology instead of our own personal humanity. So if he's saying, hey, I mean it's

more like a cautionary tale, like it's very compelling. He's saying, let's not deify a machine quite yet doing so just makes us sort of like these grotesque ventriloquists. So that's just another example of one of the more mind blowing aspects of these different essays. Kind of a buffet, right ideas with this you do you do? You could say it's sort of a snapshot of the year of eleven

in journalism, and that would be absolutely true. But the fact of the matter is just that a lot of this has to do with topics that have been around. It's not just like, hey, this is the zeitgeist moment

right here for this subject. I knew that there's a one essay or that talks about prohibition and about the government's role and actually poisoning ethanol and in doing so taking the lot of many Americans during prohibition, And this is something that's probably not widely known, but here's a piece of journalism sort of bringing up the past and saying, did you know that at one point probhibition and it had taken hold so much of the government that they

were actually trying to discourage people by making them really sick, by mixing together ethanol and other chemicals and in doing so poisoning them, which resulted in thousands of deaths. So it does it takes everything from subjects like can animals be gay? To prohibition to even space junk, which we've talked about. And it's very entertaining because it does allow you to enter into these subjects in a way that

are very accessible. And I was even thinking about Leonard miledna Of and Stephen Hawking and their essay about m theory, membrane theory or string theory, right, which is this idea

that we can get this theory of everything together. They asked the reader to imagine themselves as goldfish looking through the distorted glass of their enclosures, and in order to understand the limitations of this theory of everything that we're after, and they say, imagine the goldfish as they formulate scientific laws from their distorted frames of reference that would always hold true and enable them to make predictions about the

future emotions of objects outside the bowl. So they're taking this really cool analogy of us being fish in the bowl and having a distorted view of reality and then this theory of everything and again a really good entry point into this subject matter. So that is why I recommend that book. Well, that does sound like a good one.

My next entry in this list is a book called The Wind Up Girl by a Paolo Bassa Gallupi, and this is a really fun sci fi novel and a really thought provoking sci fi novel, and that it takes a lot of our fears associated with our use of science today and extrapolates those into a very engaging, until our extent nightmaric vision of the future. It takes us

to the futuristic time. It's a post oil world, so we've used up all of our natural resources as far as oil goes, So the petroleum based system crashes to the ground and suddenly traveling across the globe is severely limited. The world in a way becomes much larger because when we have less ability to travel it and to intraverse it, the distances become vast because we can't just fly around

the world in a day anymore. There's no more oil. Also, you have genetically modified organisms, specifically genetically modified crops have backfired in this world to the point where you end up with massive starvations, massive famines, and it's really crippled the world. So in the Wine Up Girl, we find ourselves in Bangkok, Thailand, and this is one of the few places it's us shut itself off from the rest

of the world. It's managed to maintain a certain degree of non genetically altered vegetation, that has a certain amount of genetic purity to most of its vegetables, and it's able to feed itself. And you have these outside corporations that are interested, these colary companies they are called, that are interested in infiltrating Thailand and Bangkok and actually finding some of these examples so they can take them out

genetically tinker with them. Well, yeah, I mean really, I mean, the bad guys in this the villains are basically sci fi versions of some of the large companies like Monsanta that we have today. And then you also have a character in this book called Imaco, and Imaco is a wind up girl they call it. She's one of the

new people. She's a genetically engineered human. She's a very interesting character too, because she's originally bred as basically a pleasure person, like a roxy robot, but flesh human flesh one yeahs trying to say it in an acceptable way, but she's bred for this kind of life, engines up abandoned in Bangkok by her former master, and she's not engineered to really survive all that well, she's been conditioned to be this submissive, servant to businessman thing of pleasure.

Her horrors are extra small because it supposedly looks nicer for her to have very poor, less skin, but it also means that she has trouble managing her body heat. And so the author does a gred job of exploring what life might be like for this genetically modified person,

what kind of flaws are engineered into her. They call her a wind up girl because she's engineered so that she walks funny, with the idea being that new people will stand out if they're just seen on the streets, so there will be this threat of the new people taking over. And it heart's also just a story about a spy trying to steal something about political corruption and about the crimes of humanity and how they may fall out over the decades to come, what it is to

be human too, yea or even subjugated. It sounds like, are there any wind up men? I have to ask? I forget if there are. I feel like there's mention of mercenaries, none that are engineering. It's been a year or two since I read it, but I seem to remember there was a detail about that technically the book is I think they called biopunk, which I'm kind of a critic of overuse of the cyberpunk terminology where someone just puts in another steampunk Yeah, well yes, steampunk, diesel punk.

The more something fits one of those classifications, the less interesting. I think the biopunk stuff is really cool though. Yeah yeah, I mean the potential, I mean people are doing some really cool things with that. But any but but at heart, this book is really interesting because it's entertaining, because it is action and intrigue characters should care about. But it also takes a look at modern day a logical concerns and uses them to create this sci fi future that

really speaks to readers today. That sounds really cool. I like the premise of that a lot. I'm going to put that on my list. I gotta say, so, do you go? All right? Well, I think we let's take a quick break and when we get back we will talk about a book called Super Sad True Love Story. All right, we're back, So Super Sad True Love Story. You've mentioned this one before. I have. I've talked about it,

like sort of sputtered about it. But I thought, well, this is a good opportunity to talk about why I'm always bringing it up. It's by Gary Steingart and just to fly our little futurists freak flag a little bit higher. It is again, a dystopian futuristic novel not too far in the future that I think they're talking about, maybe

fifty years in the future. It is a fiction of work of fiction, of course, and it centers around a character not any enough, Lenny Abramof and he is a mid level drone for a massive multinational corporation in the future.

By the way, the not too distant future, like everything is small talent national conglomerate, so it's like kmart g E, something ridiculous, something other, sort of like large company all melded together, which is just again it's extrapolating like what's happening in the present in the fifty years and sort of taking it to the nth degree, which is why

it makes it such an interesting novel. Lenny is working in a division of this multinational corporation which promises to help the super rich live forever thanks to nanotechnology and super anti accidents and various other over hyped technologies. At this point, he falls in love with a beautiful young Korean woman named Unice. She lives with him, but and she really provides the perspective of the youth at that point. She's obsessed with consumerism. She's shallow, but she's not shallow me.

She's drawn actually pretty well as a character. She's oversharing. She's obsessed with electronic media culture, in which everybody when you go out in public in this future world, everything is revealed about you via this sort of like iPhone looking device hanging around everybody's next and it projects to everybody else's iPhone device. I think it's called apparatus or

something like that. Your credit score, your hotness score, every single thing about like, think about every piece of information about yourself that's out there that you could then just automatically transmit to someone. This is what's happening. So something you just posted on Facebook or Twitter. So you walk into a bar and all of a sudden, you can look down at your apparatus and you can see, like what your own hotness score is based on everybody at

that very moment looking at you and entering it. So the premise of it is just really interesting. Everyone is divided into high network net work individuals and low net worth individuals um and basically you have a collapsing America which is hugely in debt to China, and it definitely has traces of Brave New World in four And it's the reason I really like it is it could have been watered down satire, but shine Gard is really a very spressive writer, and he builds a very convincing world.

So you can easily imagine yourself walking through the streets of New York in this future America where the National Guard is ever present. You've got a collapsing banking system and yet this technology that really turns people inwards so that they're sort of ignoring all these different things happening around them, and really nice cohesive world building by shin Guard. There's also a running gag where the National Guard stops people at checkpoints and they're forced to deny and imply.

They deny that a conversation ever took place, and they imply their consent for an invasive search. It is funny because so many times and when you're online you're just agreeing to something. It's very much in that same sort of like, hey, you're agreeing to this right, but you're not really reading it and all right, let's go on and so on and so forth. Document you need to read it before you visit a website, and you just yes, yeah.

So again he's taken that idea to the degree and said that you know, you're now you are living in this this very public sphere where everything you do is being met with this idea of you deny and imply, and you're entering into these contracts that you don't even know about and the afterwards. Scheinert says that he read Ray Kurt's Wheels The Singularity Is Near while he was working in the book, as well as our friend Aubrey de Gray. I say our friend because I imagine this

as friends, the bearded one, the biogenontologists. His book ending aging the rejuvenation breakthrough that could reverse human aging in our lifetime, and he definitely takes these ideas which are really cool and very cutting edge, but he does look at it through a lens of pessimism. He says, in this future, sure all of this would be accessible, but only to the super rich. Everyone else would be labeled impossible to preserve or I t P in this world.

So that's why I think it's interesting. It touches on so many things that we've discussed, and it's done really well. Cool. Yeah, that's when I really need to add my reading list as well. You've mentioned it, i think in several times in relation to topics we've discussed, and it sounds like it's kind of funny too. Yeah. He's got a great

sense of humor and it really is. Actually, I mean, the title is apt It is a love story, but it's it's heartbreaking and it's beautiful, important and terrifying at the same time. Well, my next pick isn't very funny in fact, even though this is an author that I understand has written some things that have a lot more humor and absurdity to them, this is not one of those books. The book is Embassy Town by China me Evil. As we're recording this podcast, it is on the list

of nominees for two thousand and twelve Hugo Award. I have a suspicion it might win it. We'll see how that plays out. This is a science fiction novel takes place in a far future. Humans of colonized distance space and they travel through these kind of a warp situation where they kind of they move through a an alternate dimension to emerge into real space again, and one of the stopovers, well not only stopped over, it t really The Distant Frontier is a planet that has an alien

race on it called the Araiki. And in this story we have a human colonist named Abbess returning to this planet in the town their Inbassy Town after years of deep space adventure, and she ends up getting sucked into this adventure and they sell this intrigue between the human colonists and the Iraqis that live there, and a lot of it ends up having to do with language, in the nature of language, and not just ideas of like how might aliens communicate versus humans and how would humans

communicate with aliens, So there is a lot of discussion of that. It also gets into just deeper ideas of what language is. For instance, the Arakis in their language, they do not have lies, like they cannot tell lies because built into their linguistic machinery and not just lies, but they cannot speak things that cannot be physically proven, so they end up having to like just to form similars.

They end up having to an list actors and sort of construct them out of minor dramas and uh and so it's just thought provoking in terms of it's use of language, and it really makes you think about what languages, what lies are, and what the ramifications for these things could be when it comes to in contact with a potential alien species. So I recommend giving that one to read. It also has a strong female protagonist, which is always a nice change for sci fi, and like I said,

it might want a Hugo Award this year. So one of the more remarkable science fiction books of the last few years. I really like the idea that aliens couldn't why because it's not part of the skill set that they need. And I know we talked about this before we did a podcast online and how with humans it's like integral to the way that we enter into social contracts. You cannot actually be a human really without lying at some point however you define lying. Yeah, So that's that's

an interesting premise. Is this added level to where in order to actually communicate with them, you can't just have one person trying to speak the Araki tongue. You have to have two individuals who essentially have the same mind that are performing a duet. So, like I said the other, but in an tremendous amount of thought and research into language and what language is. So if you're at all interested in alien linguistics, then definitely give this book a read.

Very cool. Okay, So I have a nonfiction book called The Magic of Reality How We Know What's Really True? By Richard Dawkins. We've talked about him before, and he's offered many books. He's a big money time, selfish gene is one that probably a lot of people know. I love this book. I picked it up actually for my daughter because I'm creating sort of a library for her

when when she gets older. And she's only three, so it's just going to be the official library, or is this the secret library that you're actually tricking her into reading. It's just a bunch of books that she can pick up. I mean, I'm not gonna say like today we're going to pick up Richard Dawkins and you're going to go to page twenty six. It's just a book that I think would be really helpful for her as she develops at different stages in her life. So this book is

actually built for all ages. But I kind of see this more is like maybe a really precocious, tent and up. But the reason why I selected this is because Dawkins basically takes sort of like this whole, like, Hey, here's the universe and we're gonna explain it to you now in no, in certain terms, I mean, it's really cool. Like he he starts out by talking about magic, because magic and magical thinking is very much a human construct, right,

We've talked about this so many times. It can lead to errors on our thinking, it can lead to beautiful works of art. And he says that when it comes to science, that reality is actually much more magical than magic itself. I'm just going to read this little bit. This is actually a description of the book. Says magic takes many forms. Supernatural magic is what our ancestors used in order to explain the world before they developed the

scientific method. The ancient Egyptians explained the night by suggesting the goddess Nut swallowed the sun. The Vikings believe the rainbow was the god's bridge to Earth. The Japanese used to explain earthquakes by conjuring a gigantic catfish that carried the world on its back. That's not true, oh man, I've been I think I wrote that into an article. Bok you all right, I know what you're gonna be reading right after this. Yeah, it's not true that earthquakes

occurred each time it flipped its tail. Oh man, yeah, you're telling after revise your articles. My whole world view is completely twitched around now that. Yeah. Yeah, these are magical, extraordinary tales, and they're wonderful. But there's another kind of magic, and it laws in the exhilaration of discovering the real answers to these questions. It is the magic of reality science.

So there are twelve different questions or topics that he tackles, and they're all introduced with the supernatural explanation that we all know and love, and then Dawkins sprinkles his magic science dust on top and makes you realize that the rigors of scientific method uncover the old adage that the truth really is stranger than fiction, and it makes that even more glorious. Some of the areas that he covers are what is reality? Who was the first person? Um?

He talks about DNA, and he talks about three million years ago. You can point to this lizard and say, hey, man, you and me we share a lot in common. What is an earthquake? There really is stone left unturned in the section, the last section he takes on miracles. Uh, and he ends by saying, and I won't go into all the different things that he talks about in terms of what is a miracle that he ends the section by saying. The eminent science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark

summed up the point as Clark's third law. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If a time machine were to carry us forward a century or so, we would see wonders. Today we might think impossible miracles. The truth is more magical in the best and most exciting sense of the world than any myth or made up mystery or miracles. Science has its own magic, magic of reality.

So again he's going back to sort of the basics of very mind blowing stuff to us that we've talked about before, in terms of how did our planet form? Talking about stardust, talking about how how do we really

know that dinosaurs existed? Well, okay, you know, we've got fossils into um and and it's amazing even talks about like, okay, some of the things might have sounded like myth when scientists wore proposing them, especially with sci fi writers he talks about, he says, but they take these ideas and they create theories out of them, and then they create a model to test them. And DNA is the perfect

example of this. This was an idea that was then modeled and then you know, through a series of different things of research and data that came up, we came to realize that this was a truth. That's why it's so entertaining because he really he takes on these really heavy concepts and he writes very eloquently and very humorously, but very clearly. Because again, this is for all ages. And I do recommend it to adults because I think

that you would get a lot out of it. But I also think it's really worth its weight in gold because it talks about the skeptics. I not as someone who like, you know, let's pick apart everything and take the magic out of things, but more like, let's not be run by our superstitions or magical thinking. Let's you the magic of reality just in day to day life and be able to sort of to look at the invisible world and see how incredible it is. And I think that's a huge message to kids well into adults

as well well. The final book on my list of four summer reading recommendations is a book called The Player of Games by Ian M. Banks. And this is a book from the Culture series, which I've mentioned before. I generally bring it up because it takes place in a distant future where humanity and machines live in a symbiotic relationship. So it's a post technological singularity world where we see

the more positive ramifications. Not to say there's not some darkness in this world, oh yeah, yeah, this is the benign singularity. Definitely a benign singularity situation, though you do have some dark things that end up happening in this universe. And this book deals specifically with a clash between the culture again, robots humans living in harmony. Basically humans doing whatever they want while robots look after them and do the hard work, and so humans end up living lives

of complete freedom. In this book, we have a human by the name of Gurga, and he has used his

life to become a master of games. He's the Player of Games that we referenced in the title, So he's the master of all these different board games and travels around just having a good time and playing them in competition, very obsessive about winning, and he ends up being recruited by the culture, by the robots that run the culture, to serve as an emissary to this civilization that exists outside of the culture in non culture space, called the

Empire of Azad, and they are at cruel, incredibly wealthy, destructive alien race. But at the heart of their culture they have this one super complex game and it serves as the backbone not only their empire and its laws, but also the very cognitive development of the race. So imagine a civilization where there's one game, then, in all its complexity and reasoning, is the backbone of everything they

hold deer and everything that they are. And so the culture wants to send him in, and he's on this long journey, so he has plenty of time to practice and learn the game and play it against one of the AI's on the ship, and then when he gets there, he's expected to compete with members of this cruel alien race, the idea being that by playing a human in the scenario, though, somehow achieve a balance and they'll avoid war with the Empire of his odd So it's a great introductory read

to the Culture series, because the Culture Series is not one of these series where you need to like start with the book one and then read through book eight. Most of them, to my understanding, stand on their own. I haven't read them all, I've only read a handful, but everyone seems to exist well on its own, and the player of games certainly does that. It's a fascinating look at what a post singularity world might consist of,

when some of them were positive visions of that. It's a great analysis of what games mean to a civilization.

And Ian and Banks is great about throwing in some really cool science and stuff, like he's clearly clearly has a very scientific mind, so he'll do things like for instances of planet in this book, where the only land on the planet everything is water except for the single strip of land that goes all the way around the equator, and you have a firestorm that moves along that strip of land, so that the ecosystem on this planet is

a fire based ecosystem. And in the same way that you have plants that depend on forest fires to reproduce, all the life on this planet has evolved to deal with this ce cyclical firestorm that goes all the way around the world. So he'll throw in things like that when he's thinking about life and other worlds or planetary physics or whatever it happens to be. Andy'll incorporate that even if it's just a fascinating nugget along the way.

And unlike some of the other authors that I mentioned, Ian Ebanks tends to write with a certain degree of humor that is not necessarily prevalent in the other three works. So if you want something that is at times lighter and might get a giggle out of you, I find Ian in Banks tends to fit the bill on that. Yeah, and I'd say too, that seems like, uh, you know, one of the commonalities between all of these or most of these, is that there is some sense of humor.

That author enters into the the information with a good stance of humor. It sounds like, so, but you know it's important to us, all right, very cool. I was going to mention a book that I'm going to check out. It's called Internal Time, The Science of Chronotypes, Social jet

lag and more. You're so tired, And I thought it was really interesting because we are at a point in our history where we are not I think because of technology as tied to time as we used to be, and so it does seem like there is a bit of a shift in the way that people are approaching their schedules. Not only that, you know, as everybody knows, despite that and some sort of flexibility, we seem to be cramming so much into our time and really suffering

for it. So I I really am interested in finding out more about this, these chronotypes that supposedly all of us possess a different chronotype and internal timing type. So some people are early risers, some people are late risers, and this seems to be Historically we thought, okay, well that means that you're lay about if you get up late, or you know your go get or if you get up at six am or whatever. Those are just very

arbitrary terms that have been abscribed to people. That this idea of chronotype is something that is more hardwired into us. So I'm going to check that out. And then two quick mentions. I won't go into them too much. Some we love, some we hate, and some we eat. We've talked about this book. It's great. I am A relationship

with animals. A relationship with the animals are ten years relationship with animals, how confused we are kind of butt over tea kettle when it comes to us, right, and how we receive animals, and as the title says, some we love, some we hate, and some wheat. So I'm going to check that out a little bit more this summer because there are some things I want to revisit.

Especially there's a chapter on animal cruelty and this myth that serial killers start off as killers of animals, that this is actually not true, that children do this as sort of a mastery of their own places in the world, and this idea of trying to figure out what power is over another person or thing. So I want to check that out. And the next book, last book, The

Family Fang. It is a fiction book. It's about Caleb and Camille Fang, their performance artists, who use their two children, Annie and Buster are otherwise known as Child and Child be as parts of their performance pieces. And it seems like it's going to be like a pretty smart debate about the human cost of sacrificing everything for art and this idea of family. Everybody always thinks that they have the freakiest family, so it'll be interesting to see that

that idea played out with the family fang cool. Well, for my part, I'm I think this may be the summer I finally read Dan Simon's Hyperion. Oh yeah, classic SciFi booked at our our our boss. Many people's always read that, yet Yeah, I think I have a friend who's gonna try reading it, So hopefully this will be the summer. On that, I should also point out real quick that the fiction books that I mentioned here, if you're obviously, if you're a parent, you're involved then and

whatever your kid reads, that's your own deal. But I would like to point out that the author Polo basaka Loopy, the author of The Wind Up Girl, he also has a couple of young adult novels. One in particular that's out as we're recording. This is called The Shipbreaker, and it deals in the same setting, a post oil, ecologically ravaged world, but it's aimed to the younger audience, so you don't have to worry about there being anything inappropriate

in there. I would list that as an alternative or if you're just I mean end up playing of adults who prefer young adult novels. I mean, there are a lot of great young adult novels out there that can be enjoyed by any age. So because I take those as alternatives, so we present you this list of books. You can use this if you're trying to think of

something you want to you want to read. So if you do happen to pick one of these up, if you read something that we have recommended, or if you're reading something that we're planning to read this summer, or if you've you've read it already and have some thoughts on it, if you would like to encourage us in these choices that we have made, or say, actually, you're making a huge mistake by reading Hyperion or whatever, let

us know. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook and you can find us on Twitter. On Facebook, we're stuff to Blow your Mind on Twitter. Our handles Blow the Mind, and you can drop us a line at blow the Mind discovery dot com. Okay,