Books like To Be a Machine

Thanks to this beautiful book, I try to take a moment each day to look up at the sky.

The Cloudspotter’s Guide is so much more than just a guide to the science of how clouds form, or the different types – it’s a reminder to appreciate the unbelievably beautiful and epic natural forms that float above us every day.

Clouds, writes Pretor-Pinney, are ‘the most egalitarian of nature’s displays – we all have a good view of them’. And his guide is as much about how to take pleasure in this daily display as it is about the science of atmospherics, precipitation, and altitude. 

I bought this book so long ago its pages are yellowing and falling out. But when I’m busy and stressed, I still daydream of being able to sit in my garden and do nothing but watch the clouds roll by. When I am aboard a… show more.

Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher, but also an avid diver.

This is an engaging and readable philosophical examination of the mind of a very different kind of creature, an octopus. He grounds his thoughts both in his many diving interactions with octopuses and in what we know of the evolution of life—and mind—on Earth. 

Richard Dawkins is sadly now known mostly for his divisive polemics on religion and identity politics, but his early books on biology were unbelievably powerful.

The Blind Watchmaker helped flesh out, clarify, update, and expand Darwin’s theory of evolution for a massive audience, while also elegantly dismantling the common argument that life is so sophisticated that it must have been ‘designed’ by some kind of creator. 

As a young biologist, I read The Blind Watchmaker and was wowed by the way Dawkins explained how, under the right conditions, amazingly complex designs can arise from a simple system – without the need for anyone directing it or creating it.

Dawkins not only helps explain how life on Earth has advanced into the myriad forms we see on Earth today, but goes on to suggest that evolutionary systems might be at play in other aspects of our lives, like language and culture.… show more.

I’ve dipped into books about writing, storytelling, and scriptwriting before, and I’ve always found them to be utterly uninspiring, and in fact quite depressing – little more than a set of formulas to ensure your story’s structure is like other stories.

But Will Storr’s excellent book uses insights from evolutionary biology and psychology to help you get to understand why human minds love stories, and what it is about great stories that keeps readers turning the pages. His advice is powerful, simple – primal, even.

I’ve used this excellent book to help improve my writing and ensure my first book was a real page-turner. But The Science of Storytelling has also left a huge mark on me in terms of thinking about how and why we communicate. It’s for our own survival, after all. 

This is the most moving “academic” book I’ve ever read, and really that’s because it blends academic subjects like cultural studies with more personal, memoir-type writing about being a Black woman in the 21st century.

In the Wake is concerned with more than just death, of course, but death looms large throughout the book, as it has in all of Black life throughout American history. Indeed, the first sentence is “I wasn’t there when my sister died,” and over the course of the book we bear witness to many other deaths that have affected the author as well.

Over time, readers come to understand the various meanings of “wake” operating as overlapping metaphors through which the author understands her own experience. There is “wake” as coming into consciousness/waking up to a world full of injustice, there is “the wake” like the path behind a ship, in this case a slave… show more.

Ariès was a masterful medieval historian, and in this slim volume, based on a series of lectures he gave at Johns Hopkins University, he traced big cultural shifts in the way Western culture has thought about death and dying.

Medieval traditions lauded a so-called “tame death,” in which the dying person calmly accepted their fate, received visitors at home, and directed the rituals and ceremonies that would accompany their impending demise. Death was a normal part of domestic life, witnessed by young and old alike.

This is eventually contrasted with the modern way of dying, in which people die in hospitals, not at home, hidden away from most of a society that has come to believe people need to be shielded from sad and upsetting matters like illness and death. It is a fascinating work of history and a powerful critique of contemporary mores around mortality.     

I was blown away by this thought-provoking philosophical examination of the relationship between the living and the dead.

Burial, Hans Ruin points out, is the most ancient cultural-symbolic practice in all of human development. In burying the dead, and through the attendant rituals accompanying burial, we are caring for them and communicating about or with them. Ruin looks at a variety of ways that such care has been accomplished and debated over time, from prehistoric graves to ancient Egyptian pyramids to Sophoclean dramas from ancient Greece.

All of these examples are put to use as part of a larger meditation on what it means to live ethically; as he puts it “there is no social space entirely outside the shared space with the dead. To learn to live is to learn to inhabit this space in a responsible way. Life is a life after, as inheritance, ancestry, legacy and fate.”     

This book is not about death on its own but images of death, and the roles to which they are put by the press and politicians.

Focusing on iconic photographs of death from events such as the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, the Vietnam War, and the September 11th attacks, among many others, Zelizer charts a growing discomfort over time with images of death in the news. As technology improved, such photos became more graphic and intimate, and norms around the increasingly professionalized field of journalism came to render them mostly off limits.

Despite the general squeamishness of Western journalists and readers towards such images today, however, we do still see them during major world events and important breaking stories. It’s also true, Zelizer points out, that images of death in far away places are often shown in American newspapers with less concern.

There are important lessons here for all of… show more.

I fell in love with Stross’s book based on a single line: “The wreckage of an incredible meal is scattered across the tables around her.” I never forgot that evocative sentence and the vivid imagery it inspired. This book directly invokes the biggest concepts in cosmological futurism, like Matrioshka brains: star-powered computerized uber-brains.

This book has it all. I enjoyed the space-themed perspective on the singularity, which is less focused on the happenings on Earth and more on a space-faring civilization as the full scope of the singularity comes to pass. I particularly appreciated the utilization of a laser sail to transport an uploaded crew in a spaceship far too small for conventional humans, a concept that only works in the context of mind uploading.

 This book provides short summaries of the views of about one hundred philosophers of the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries.

Only one earlier philosopher is included, “the most prominent pessimist of the entire western philosophical tradition,” Arthur Schopenhauer.

One of the interesting features of the book – partly because it has rarely been attempted – is a taxonomy of the different answers that have been given to the question.