Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski
A big theme of my reading in 2024 was around answering “why am I like this?” The Worm at the Core has given that understanding a paradigm shift. The basic premise of the book is that the awareness of our own mortality is the hidden engine of human thought, emotion, and culture.
(more…)Arundhati Roy
I have been an unabashed fan of whatever Arundhati Roy writes, and Mother Mary Comes to Me is no exception. This is a memoir, but I’d say it’s her love letter to her mother, and to some extent, others whom she loves, including characters in her works of fiction. It is also very Arundhati Roy – poignant and visceral to the point of tear-jerking, and yet funny – sometimes with wit – both the scathing and irreverent as well as the loving kind, and sometimes with the inherent hilarity of situations.
(more…)Rutger Bregman
On one hand, I really hoped Humankind would be meaningful, and on the other, I am quite a cynic. Bregman writes towards the end of the book that cynicism is just another name for laziness, an excuse not to take responsibility. I am not sure I agree completely because I do feel the rage against injustice, and do take action sometimes, but largely my question has been ‘what is the point?’
(more…)I have to admit that I began reading Nexus with a bias – courtesy Harari’s earlier works. While I liked them when I first read them, further reading and critical takes reduced the good impression considerably.
So, while I really liked the first two chapters, I did find irony in him writing about information and truth after bring rebutted by experts on agricultural revolution and various other things he is not an expert on. And while I really like reading history, his meandering on Niall Ferguson mode in the first part of the book didn’t endear himself to me at all.
(more…)Oliver Sacks
The River of Consciousness is the final collection that Oliver Sacks oversaw, assembled just two weeks before his death in 2015. Ten essays across diverse subjects such as botany, chemistry, evolution, medicine, neuroscience, and even the arts. They are connected by the title – an exploration of how the river of consciousness has moved through evolution, and how it continues to manifest itself in ways beyond what we normally look at.
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