Recommended books

Most recent update: 21 April 2022 —  added Out of the Crisis, by W. Edwards Deming.

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These are books that I find myself repeatedly recommending. Links are generally to available secondhand copies of the book. In any event, check Abebooks.com for secondhand copies at good prices. Take note of “Book Condition” in the description; less than “Good” can be bad, and “Acceptable” usually is not. I look for “Very Good,” but will settle for “Good” if necessary.

Be careful, too, about buying an earlier edition when a revised edition is available (e.g., as for Pennebaker’s Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions—well worth reading, but the current edition has a title change: Opening Up by Writing It Down, Third Edition: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain.

I highly recommend Pennebaker’s book, and in our culture I particularly recommend the book to men, since many men are culturally trained not to open up. One example: men in the armed forces, who might also find Jonathan Shay’s two books invaluable: Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (and it might be good to read the Iliad first, and the Carolyn Alexander translation is the one to get, though there are other good translations (and some awful ones)) and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. Both of Shay’s books have quite a bit of impact, since he has worked with vets a lot on the issues about which he writes.

Ebooks for free

Several of books I recommend are among the many published by Standard Ebooks, which provides free downloadable ebooks in a variety of formats, including formats for popular ebook readers. The books Standard Ebooks offers are well-edited and carefully proofread (and are in the public domain), and when I can, the book-title link in this list is to the Standard Ebooks edition. They are constantly adding titles, though, so do check their catalog for books of a certain age. — And I just learned of Planet eBook, based in Australia, that also provides free well-edited ebooks.

Calibre and Ebook Management

I highly recommend importing ebooks from Standard Ebooks and other sources into Calibre, a free and powerful ebook management app, and then exporting the books from Calibre onto your ebook reader (something Calibre makes very easy — and it has many other capabilities, such as converting an ebook from one format to another).

By keeping your ebook library in Calibre (as well as on your ebook reader), you can export the books onto a replacement reader when your current reader fails. For example, Amazon has made sure that you cannot replace the battery on a Kindle ebook reader. When the reader eventually fails (as it will) and you replace it with a new Kindle, you can readily download from Amazon onto your new reader all the ebooks you purchased from Amazon. However, Amazon will not keep a copy of your free ebooks. But if you’ve kept a Calibre library of those books, you can easily export them to your new reader.

Print books provide better comprehension

One drawback of ebooks as compared to print books is that reading on electronic devices “reduces comprehension. The study found that reading on a smartphone promotes overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, less frequent sighing, and lower reading comprehension.”

“Sighing” seems an odd thing to mention, but:

Study authors Motoyasu Honma and team launched a study to explore a possible reason for this effect [lower reading comprehension – LG]. The researchers focused on two factors known to be associated with cognitive function and performance — the visual environment and respiration patterns. They proposed that the visual environment of reading on a screen may alter respiratory function and brain function, which may interact to impact cognitive performance.

I have certainly noticed that I remember better where to find a passage in a print book, and I assumed that was because of physical cues — roughly how far into the book, whether it was on the left page or the right, about where on the page it was. But perhaps it’s also because an ebook diminishes comprehension. Read the article, and for a significant book, consider reading a physical printed book.

Digital text does have some advantages: ebooks take up much less space than physical books, digital text is easily disseminated (I would never have seen the linked article if I read only printed text) and easily searchable, one can easily copy and paste passages of interest, and so on.

I would guess that the best bet is hybrid reading: some things — news, lighter fare, things otherwise inaccessible — read on electronic devices, but serious things — things you want to comprehend well and remember a long time — read as a printed book.

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Book List by Subject

List of categories:

• Management
• Unions
• Politics
• History
• Personal Development
• Literature
• Science and Math
• Nutrition
• Memes and Their Evolution
• Writing Well

Management

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic, by Stephen Covey. This one should be read by everyone. The weekly planning it requires, with the overall goal always in mind, is particularly valuable. Covey’s writing is sometimes labored and disorganized, so you may find this post useful to read along with the book — indeed, the post might help you decide whether to get the book. For the essential weekly planner, you have many options, some of which I review, along with a printable template in the post linked above.

Decision Traps: Ten Barriers to Brilliant Decision-Making and How to Overcome Them, by Edward Russo and Paul Schoemaker. When you make a big (life-changing) decision, you normally don’t want to do it based on a hunch or what you had for breakfast: you want to do it carefully, based on research and thought. But still, we fall into common traps. This book analyzes decision-making as a four-step process and describes the two most common errors committed at each step, as well as the most prevalent error in setting up the decision and in follow-through after the decision is made. Fascinating and invaluable for people who want to make good decisions. (You can download a four-page summary of the book (PDF). Though that certainly does not replace the book, it will give you an idea of the approach.) See also this post.

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, by Roger Fisher and William Ury. A product of the Harvard Project on Negotiation, this is the essential book on successful negotiation. If you are going to apply the method, I highly recommend Getting Ready to Negotiate, which takes you through all the prep work.

Managing Management Time, by Bill Oncken, offers excellent advice on making the transition from individual contributor to manager, including pointing out the most common mistakes and how to avoid them.  The book provides many insights and techniques and is also enjoyable to read. Highly recommended if you’re a manager or contemplating that step. His overall goal is to enable you to control the timing and content of your work, and he tells how to get there.

No Contest: The Case Against Competition — Why we lose in our race to win, by Alfie Kohn. It turns out that competition (instead of cooperation) is a losing proposition in almost every arena.

Out of the Crisis, by W. Edwards Deming. One of the first guides in how to build quality products — and, more important, quality processes that produce such products — on purpose rather than through guess and luck. Also highly entertaining to read.

Principles of Software Engineering Management, by Tom Gilb. Principles are the guidance that does not change. Well worth reading, IMO. The primary principle: “Early!” One valuable observation: in setting acceptance criteria, be sure to find out what criteria current best practices meet. If your acceptance criteria are more stringent than current best practice, you end up doing research rather than engineering.

Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes, by Alfie Kohn — Another surprise: incentive programs and rewards negatively impact achievement and creativity. Read the book and realign your thinking.

Where Do I Go from Here in My Life?, by John Crystal. The author served in WWII behind enemy lines, parachuting into enemy territory for intelligence purposes. When he was de-mobbed after the war, he had trouble finding a job. (Lots of men were looking for jobs right after WWII ended.) But, he thought, he’d been trained to work and live behind enemy lines. So why couldn’t he use that training in a friendly country (his native land, for example)? Wouldn’t be even easier? And so it was. Good book. And a good example of how a change of frame alters how one approaches a problem, and even perhaps what the problem is.

Winning Decisions: Getting It Right the First Time, by Edward Russo and Paul Schoemaker. This book is the successor to Decision Traps, listed above. It covers much the same ground, but differently enough to be worth reading. See also this post.

Unions

Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back, by Thomas Geoghegan. This book is oddly charming and a fun read; it includes the origin story of how Geoghegan got into working for unions in the first place. It involves a woman, as I recall.

Strike!, by Jeremy Brecher. Excellent explanation of the role unions have played, and why, and nature of the anti-union forces.

Politics

The Authoritarians — interesting and informative free book in PDF format on a mindset increasingly common on the Right. (Use Calibre to convert the file to an ebook format and load it onto your ebook reader.)

Beyond Machiavelli: Tools for Coping With Conflict, by Roger Fisher, Elizabeth Kopelman, and Andrea Kupfer Schneider — This is the Harvard Project on Negotiation applied to international conflict and negotiation. Worth reading.

The Kings Depart: The Tragedy of Germany – Versailles and the German Revolution, by Richard M. Watt. When the powers left Versailles after completing and signing the Treaty, they one and all said that the Treaty was a failure and that there would be war again. Since they themselves made the Treaty, why did they make such a bad one? The book explains.

The Path to Power, by Robert Caro. This is the first volume of Caro’s biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, and it paints a detailed and engrossing picture of not only the politics but the daily life in Texas hill country at the time, a life that for many was much the same as life in the Middle Ages.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert Caro. A study in applied power and politics and how Robert Moses shaped New York.

History

A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present, by Howard Zinn — The revised edition is the one to get. This has all the parts of history that the schools don’t teach.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, by Barbara Tuchman. The past may not repeat, but it rhymes.

The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the World’s Deadliest Plague, by John M. Barry. The influenza epidemic of 1917-18 killed millions, perhaps as many as 50-100 million worldwide. Barry writes a compelling narrative of its first appearance and the increasingly desperate fight against it.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared M. Diamond. A survey of how various natural conditions and encounters shaped our history.

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, by David Anthony. As enthralling as a great detective novel, and in the course of the history you witness the invention of the wheel, which was long after the days of cave men (despite all those cartoons of enormous wheels carved from stone), for reasons the author describes: creating a wheel and axle system requires specialized knowledge based on extensive experience. For that reason, the invention had to await the development first of agriculture and then of urban centers before such specialization could be supported. Fascinating book.

Plagues and Peoples, by William H. McNeill. A great recounting by a fine historian of how disease has shaped human history.

The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since 1000 A.D., by William H. MacNeill. This could just as well go under “Memes and Their Evolution,” since the history is largely a history of meme evolution, with some interesting meme discoveries. For example, having troops exercise and march in unison—imitating each other’s actions—results in the emergence of a larger meme-entity: the squad, or the company. The individual is ready to sacrifice his life to protect the entity of which he has become a part. (The book, admittedly, does not use meme terminology, but the phenomenon described is most easily explained with memes—what Harari in his book Sapiens, listed below, calls “fictions.”)

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt. You may want to read this (and perhaps De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), by Lucretius as well) before reading The Evolution of Everything, described below.

The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer. Newly relevant.

Personal Development

A Life of One’s Own, by Joanna Field — A wonderful memoir of an introspective exploration that begin with a journal: she thought that she’d just record what happened and how happy she was, and would in time discover the things that made her most happy. It turned out to be more than that. “Joanna Field” was the pseudonym Marion Milner used when the book was first published; it is now available with Milner shown as the author.

The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, by Julia Cameron. A 12-week program that includes writing 3 pages a day, by hand, in a journal. (You later review some of the earlier writing, so a book is better than loose pages.) There’s a weekly “artist’s date” where, basically, you get out of the house and talk a walk and enjoy receiving input instead of always producing output. Those artist’s dates are important. Blank and lined books are easy to find nowadays, but the old standby, drugstore composition book with the black and white marbled cover works just fine. — The New Yorker has an interesting interview of Julia Cameron. Worth reading.

Changing for Good: The Revolutionary Program That Explains the Six Stages of Change and Teaches You How to Free Yourself from Bad Habits, by James O. Prochaska, John C. Norcross, and Carlo C. Diclemente. A research-based structured program that is effective in making permanent changes.

Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, by Anthony Damasio. Fascinating book of findings, including that Dr. Spock, feeling no emotions, would be unable to make any decisions (as shown by people with a brain injury that prevents the feeling of emotion).

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, by David Burns, MD, is based on the principles of Cognitive Behavior Therapy, and CBT has been proven to work. The preface mentions several studies on the book’s effectiveness, and the book by itself proved to be more effective in treating depression than medication by itself; the book used with a CBT-trained therapist is even better. If you feel life is pointless and a burden, this book may help. Also check out the companion book, The Feeling Good Handbook.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. This book puts happiness into a scientific context, and the result is fascinating and useful. After reading that, you might read Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life, also by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.

Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples, by Harville Hendrix. Readable and valuable advice about making relationships work. Here’s just one tip from the book: if your partner does something that bothers/upsets you, communicate that using this template: “When you do/say X, I feel Y, because when I was young Z,” where X is what they say or do that bothers/upsets you; Y is a description of your feelings when that happens; and Z is some similar or related event or experience in your youth that produced the same feeling. Note that saying this is telling your partner about yourself, admitting a vulnerability. It is not an accusation, nor is it a request that the partner change. You simply are giving your partner information about yourself and letting them digest it and decide what to do.

Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans, by Michaeleen Doucleff. An extremely well-researched book on optimal parenting based on a cross-cultural investigation of best practices (as judged by outcomes: looking at the child’s character and behavior when acting autonomously). Plentiful anecdotes and a certain amount of useful repetition make the book easy to read while ensuring the principles are absorbed. Highly recommend for any new parent or as a gift to a new parent.

Learned Optimism, by Martin Seligman. Seligman is the guy who discovered and defined learned helplessness, and in this book he focuses on how some people seem immune and figures out how they do it. Many fascinating descriptions of how they discovered various things.

Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl, explains the choices you can make to gain control of your life. I originally read this because the book was mentioned and praised in every self-help book on planning that I read.

Mindset, by Carol Dweck. A Stanford psychologist discusses her research findings on why some people find learning new things easy and others struggle. Especially useful for parents, I would say, but everyone can benefit. I have several blog posts on this. But see this recent post on some detractors.

Operational Philosophy: Integrating Knowledge and Action, by Anatol Rapoport. This blew me away in high school, and I still think it’s pretty good. This is the guy who won the competitions described in Evolution of Cooperation.

Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, by Anne Lamott. My standard gift to those expecting their first child, though now I also give a copy of Hunt, Gather, Parent.

The Other Diabetes: Living and Eating Well With Type 2 Diabetes, by Elizabeth Hiser. An excellent book for those newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes: everything you need to know to live effectively with the disease. I found that my own type 2 diabetes was well controlled when I switched to a whole-food plant-based diet. (This post has more information on the diet.)

Po: Beyond Yes and No, by Edward de Bono. A great technique for creative thinking. De Bono invented the term “lateral thinking,” and wrote several books on creativity, books that I found strikingly useful. His CoRT (Cognitive Research Trust) foundation also publishes materials to teach critical thinking skills in elementary school, something that I wish schools universally would adopt but that faces strong parental and political resistance in conservative school districts.

Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, by Kató Lomb — how a woman learned 16 languages (and become completely fluent in 5) as an adult (after graduating from college in chemistry). (A recent article (gift link, no paywall) in the Washington Post profiles another hyperpolyglot.)

Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, by Timothy Wilson. It’s pretty clear that the adaptive unconscious runs the show, but it’s difficult to study (because it’s unconscious). Wilson describes the various trick and techniques to let us study something so hidden, and it’s an eye-opener.

Strong Women Stay Young (Revised Edition), by Miriam Nelson, PhD. An excellent guide to fitness with minimal time investment — and to the studies that show it makes a great difference no matter when in your life you begin.

Trances People Live, by Stephen Wolinksy, PhD.Slipping into a trance is not unusual, and a trance can last a long time — a person in a cult may be living in a trance for years and even decades. Being in a trance goes unrecognized by the person in the trance until they emerge from it — because it is a trance, one is as unconscious of it as the proverbial fish is of water because being always immersed in it makes it “just the way things are.” Inveterate gamblers are an example: they just find themselves in the casino again, doing things without really thinking about why or about alternatives. (Indeed, slot machines in particular are designed to trigger a trance.) Many people eat in a trance, consuming foods without conscious thought, but just in a sense drifting from bite to bite (and the goal of “intuitive eating” is to break the trance). Many spend money in a trance (for things in general or for specific types of things), as a compulsive habit done without thinking or being truly conscious of the full action (for example, what the effect will be on their overall budget). The trance becomes noticed only as one starts to break free of it. As that happens, one stops and suddenly (and consciously) thinks, “No. Why am I doing this? I don’t want to do it.” and feels some confusion about the source of the interrupted impulse.

Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception, by Dan Goleman. Fascinating book about a primal technique — denial — for avoiding pain. Goleman traces the technique almost from the cellular level, to the individual, to families, and to societies.

What We May Be, by Piero Ferrucci. An introduction to psychosynthesis, a theory of mind that works effectively and seems accurate. The book includes exercises to assist with your exploration. See also two books by Roberto Assagioli, who founded the discipline: The Act of Will and Psychosynthesis: A Collection of Basic Writings. In terms of self-knowledge, psychosynthesis is eye-opening.

Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century, by Joe Dominguez, Vicki Robin, and Monique Tilford. An excellent guidebook for finding out where your money’s going and how to make changes to live frugally and comfortably with no diminution in the pleasures of daily life. (See also this this post on the method that I developed from the ideas in the book; the post includes a free downloadable spreadsheet workbook.)

Literature

1984, by George Orwell. Read it now like never before.

Arkady Renko series by Martin Cruz Smith. Read the novels in publication order, since each is a chapter in an on-going story (cf. Charles McCarry’s Paul Christopher series, or Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin novels).

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. Again, a book to read now because of its prescience.

Among the Dangs, by George P. Elliott. Ten remarkable short stories.

A New Life, by Bernard Malamud. A fine novel and worth rereading—at least skim back over it. Some parts make sense only in a second reading.

The Cloister and the Hearth, by Charles Reade — terrific summer reading for junior-high kids. The Heritage Edition is especially nice. You would probably enjoy it, too.

Deadly Intentions, by William Randolph Stevens. This is a true crime report, but it reads like a novel and is amazing, especially toward the end when you realize what motivated Stevens to write it: to protect himself for the day the prisoner is released.

Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. The first modern novel and a touchstone for many that came later. It’s an amazing book, particularly if you think about what you are reading — that is, not read it passively, like an airport novel, but engage with it. I like the Edith Grossman translation, but the Burton Raffel translation is also excellent. There are bad translations and even abridged(!) editions, so be careful. Highly recommended as an accompanying book: Lectures on Don Quixote, by Vladimir Nabokov. You can also read my own posts prompted by thinking about the book.

The Enchanted Castle, by E. Nesbit (link is to a free ebook). This book, which I read as a child, remained in my mind for decades, various scenes vivid in my recollection. I searched for it in vain most of my adult life because I could not remember the title. (I was a dolt: if I had just described the plot to a librarian in the children’s book section, I would have immediately learned the title.) Highly recommended — a magical book, in subject and effect. (If you have children read this book aloud to them.)

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens. Probably his best novel. Note: the book has two endings. Read both. Avoid abridged editions. (For pure enjoyment, though Oliver Twist is wonderful.) The two links here are to free downloadable ebooks.

The Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin series of British Naval novels by Patrick O’Brian. The series should be read in order, since each novel continues the story from the previous novel(s). Read at least the first three, which constitute a trilogy. All books in the series are easy to find on ABEbooks.com.

1. Master and Commander (1969)
2. Post Captain (1972)
3. HMS Surprise (1973)

Iliad, and I recommend the Carolyn Alexander translation. The catalogue of ships and armies is a bit tiresome, but overall it is a gripping tale.

Madame Bovary, by Gustav Flaubert. Read this only if you are over 40. (Link is to free downloadable ebook.) This novel requires at least a couple of decades of adult life-experience. Those who are young will miss much in the novel that stands out clearly to those of middle age and later.

Morte d’Urban, by J.F. Powers. A National Book Award winner and a great novel, comic in tone, that seems to change from reading to reading as you learn more in life.

The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy. Another National Book Award winner and a very interesting novel about art, illusion, and realty — cf. Don Quixote.

The Paul Christopher series, by Charles McCarry. Each novel is a chapter in a larger and on-going story. I recommend reading them in story order, the order you see in the list at the link. In this series, one novel is out of sequence if you read the novels in publication order. (That’s somewhat unusual.)

Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen: A struggle for survival in a time when women lacked rights, but also a comic social novel. See this essay. (The book link is to free downloadable ebook.) Her other novels are also good, but this is as good a starting place as any. (I also like Emma and Sense and Sensibility — both links to free ebooks.)

Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini — Totally wonderful historical adventure novel. I read this originally around my sophomore year of high school, and I had to go to the dictionary two or three times a page. But a totally gripping story. Avoid at all costs Scaramouche the Kingmaker, which turned out pretty bad. But if you like Sabatini, you certainly will want to read Captain Blood and Captain Blood Returns, the story of Peter Blood, an English surgeon who became a pirate. Note: Scaramouche is available as a free ebook, and so is Captain Blood.

The Sot-Weed Factor, by John Barth. Cf. also Tristram Shandy, by Lawrence Sterne. Another good one by Barth: The End of the Road. And also The Floating Opera.

War and Peace, by Count Leo Tolstoy. I like the Maude translation (link is a free downloadable ebook of that translation), but the more recent Pevear and Volokhnosky gets very high praise. In reading it, I recommend that you create a document (e.g., in Google Docs), and as each character is introduced, enter the character’s name and a brief description of what you are told. As you see the character in later scenes, you will want to add to what you know about the character. If you do this, the characters achieve a memorable solidity that makes the novel more alive, and of course by the time you finish you know the characters and can discard your notes. Creating and updating such a document makes a big difference, at least it did for me. For one thing, it made me pronounce and remember the names instead of just seeing them as a bunch of letters that were hard to remember. And when you know the characters, the novel becomes three-dimensional. Also, watch this:

And then read the book.

Science and math

Climbing Mount Improbable, by Richard Dawkins. A highly readable and very informative stroll over the evolutionary plain.

The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses, by Chandler Burr. A fascinating account of Luca Turin and the mysteries of fragrance.

The Evolution of Cooperation: Revised Edition, by Robert Axelrod. A fascinating short book about a contest to find the best strategy for winning a competition based on the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The results of the competition were published so that everyone knew of Anatol Rapoport’s winning strategy, tit-for-tat. Then Axelrod held a second competition…  – But note this article.

The Scars of Evolution, by Elaine Morgan. A fascinating theory about humanity’s having gone through a semiaquatic phase in our evolution, something that left evidence in our bodies’ structure: the scars. Probably untrue, but great reading and a fascinating theory, well substantiated.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes. I don’t really know where to put this. I think it is a crackpot theory, but it is a fascinating crackpot theory. See also this article.

Nutrition

How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease, by Michael Greger M.D. This book is based solidly on research and statements come with endnote that references the study or studies whose findings support it. It’s very readable, and it turns out you can make major improvements with some small changes—for example, adding a pinch of spices or dried herbs to a dish boost its antioxidant properties significantly. After reading the book, I drastically changed my diet—details in this post, along with various cooking recommendations to make the change easier. The first third of the book deals with how diet relates to various chronic disease (type 2 diabetes, heart disease, some cancers, and so on), the next third provides a template for a good (healthful, sustainable) diet base on whole plant foods, and the final third consists of the endnotes.

How Not to Die Cookbook: 100+ Recipes to Help Prevent and Reverse Disease, by Michael Greger, MD. A companion to the book above and a practical cookbook with unfussy recipes. I recommend the hardbound edition since it will easily lie open, a benefit when working from a recipe.

The Other Diabetes: Living and Eating Well with Type 2 Diabetes, by Elizabeth Hiser. This book contains useful advice for those who have type 2 diabetes, a demographic that is unfortunately growing rapidly (mainly, I suspect due to the increasing consumption of convenient highly processed foods manufactured from refined ingredients using industrial processes and typically including additives such as artificial coloring, preservatives, refined sugar (often high-fructose corn syrup, because it’s cheap) and bad oils (such as cottonseed or soybean oil, because they’re cheap). HFCS turns out to be particularly bad.

“My current diet advice” is a lengthy post in this blog that summarizes what I have learned about a healthful diet and how I have applied that knowledge (successfully, no less). It’s a detailed post, providing information, links to tools, techniques, tips, tactics, and strategies to improve efficiency, recipe links, and attitude recommendations. One thing I finally learned: how to accept if not love the inevitable weight-loss plateaus (because they do good things). On 14 May 2019 I switched from  my low-carb diet (which has adverse long-term health effects) to a whole-food plant-based diet. (I floundered a bit for the first few days.) I still will avoid some carbs: foods containing refined sugar, foods made from refined flour, and some vegetables (potatoes, corn, and rice, which spike my blood glucose), while also cutting out meat, fish, eggs, and dairy. I was convinced to make this switch by Dr. Greger’s book listed above. After I had been on a whole-food plant-based diet for 10 weeks, my physician told me to discontinue my medications (metformin, a statin, and a med for hypertension) because I no longer needed them. He was right. My HbA1c is now around 5.2% and my fasting blood glucose bounces around between 5.4 mmol/L (97 mg/dL) and 5.9 (106 mg/dL).

Memes and their evolution

The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex, by Harold Morowitz. We live among emergent phenomena and in fact are such a thing ourselves. This book explains and explores emergence and what it has produced.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge, by Matt Ridley. The book discusses the evolution of lifeforms and of memes.

The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright. A fascinating and occasionally humorous history of the changing human conception of the divine, as revealed through a study of the rough chronology of our religious beliefs. Wonderful book—and a wonderful writer. His other books are recommended in general, and Nonzero is listed just below.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds, by Daniel Dennett. Best (and clearest) introduction I’ve found. Highly recommended.

The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore. She carefully works her way through the topic of memes: what they are, how they arise and evolve, and what we owe to them.

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright. A big-picture take on what drives evolution of both memes and lifeforms. Wright’s idea is ingenious and seems extremely well supported with clear arguments—as one would expect after reading his book The Evolution of God.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari. A great read, especially if you read it as the story of meme evolution. For example, in Part 1: The Cognitive Revolution, the second chapter, The Tree of Knowledge, describes in detail the power of memes (although Harari avoids the term “meme,” using “fictions” instead).

Writing well

The Reader Over Your Shoulder, by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge. I’m not sure it goes under “Memes,” but writing consists of using memes to create memes, so let me strongly recommend to would-be writers that they work through the exercises linked in this post using the method the post describes. Doing that will optimize meme selection and should greatly improve the final result of your writing by increasing your skill and insight in editing. (Note that if you buy that book, you should make sure you’re buying an unabridged edition.)

Italic Handwriting (aka chancery cursive). Pleasing penmanship is an easy skill to acquire but seems to have faded from public attention. Still, it’s one of those things that one can do on his or her own initiative, without involving others, and I can say from personal experience that it is satisfying. The post at the link provides some guidance in getting started. Like any skill, it will at first feel awkward at first, but that’s a good sign.