Here are 100 books that Turned on fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve been a journalist and writer my entire adult life. I’m a mid-30s mother of two who accidentally had my mind blown by ChatGPT a year ago. I felt this burning need to try and express what I was feeling and learning as I discovered this new thing. As I used it more and thought and thought about it, I started questioning my own humanity. I felt alone and alienated, consumed by my thoughts.
Writing Human Again didn’t feel like a choice. My hope is that other people will find some comfort, a renewed appreciation for critical thinking, and perhaps a dash of inspiration and self-improvement along the way.
Why is it that looking at the past, reading our history, studying ancient ruins, makes me feel better about facing today’s world?
I think about connection, a feeling that, despite having lived hundreds or thousands of years ago, there are still shared goals and commonalities between myself and them.
Harari is one of those rare authors who can distill enormous amounts of information into a single sentence and hold your attention at the same time. Early in the book, Harari explains that as humans evolved to walk upright, the narrowing of the pelvis and hips made childbirth more treacherous. His line for this: “Women paid extra.”As a mother myself, when I read that line, it felt so modern, so lived-in, like the same line could describe my own feelings today.
Books like Sapiens aren’t really about the biology of humans, but about finding our humanity within a scientific exploration.…
100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?
In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
As a UK registered lawyer, I have spent most of the past 35 years writing about my work. But what has always excited me, from my childhood, is the science fiction worlds which state a truth which is yet to happen, The worlds of H.G Wells; Huxley; Aldous; Orwell; Bradbury; and Atwell. An individual's struggle against overwhelming odds. Not always somewhere where you would want to go. But from which you will always take something away.
I'd heard about this famous book many years before I actually got around to reading it. What I loved about this book was its originality.
I am always reminded about Orwell's book whenever I hear phrases like ‘ thought police’ or ‘big brother’, which have become part of our everyday language. Probably one of the most influential books ever written. For me, the message of Orwell’s book is that the State will always win.
1984 is the year in which it happens. The world is divided into three superstates. In Oceania, the Party's power is absolute. Every action, word, gesture and thought is monitored under the watchful eye of Big Brother and the Thought Police. In the Ministry of Truth, the Party's department for propaganda, Winston Smith's job is to edit the past. Over time, the impulse to escape the machine and live independently takes hold of him and he embarks on a secret and forbidden love affair. As he writes the words 'DOWN WITH BIG…
As a UK registered lawyer, I have spent most of the past 35 years writing about my work. But what has always excited me, from my childhood, is the science fiction worlds which state a truth which is yet to happen, The worlds of H.G Wells; Huxley; Aldous; Orwell; Bradbury; and Atwell. An individual's struggle against overwhelming odds. Not always somewhere where you would want to go. But from which you will always take something away.
I used this book to relieve the boredom of a long daily commute.
Instead of looking out of a train window at the same old scenery I'd passed a thousand times before, I was now taken to a dystopian society in which everything which I had taken for granted about family life was turned upside down. Where humans are manufactured to a specification instead of being born. A new pseudo religion where everyone makes the sign of the ‘T’, to signify their devotion to the original Ford Model T, which was the first vehicle to be manufactured on an assembly line.
**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**
EVERYONE BELONGS TO EVERYONE ELSE. Read the dystopian classic that inspired the hit Sky TV series.
'A masterpiece of speculation... As vibrant, fresh, and somehow shocking as it was when I first read it' Margaret Atwood, bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale.
Welcome to New London. Everybody is happy here. Our perfect society achieved peace and stability through the prohibition of monogamy, privacy, money, family and history itself. Now everyone belongs.
You can be happy too. All you need to do is take your Soma pills.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
My name is Daniel Robert McClure, and I am an Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas. I teach U.S., African diaspora, and world history, and I specialize in cultural and economic history. I was originally drawn to “information” and “knowledge” because they form the ties between culture and economics, and I have been teaching history through “information” for about a decade. In 2024, I was finally able to teach a graduate course, “The Origins of the Knowledge Society,” out of which came the “5 books.”
This book tells the tech-business story of algorithms and data exhaust and the companies who have implemented the dystopian future prophesized by Boorstin, Toffler, Postman, and others. While the book is large, Zuboff’s writing draws you into a world you know and, paradoxically, don’t know.
The work is the final stop of our story about information and knowledge, its chaotic meandering through amusing images and the shock of the future.
'Everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital self-defense.' -- Naomi Klein, Author of No Logo, the Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything and No is Not Enough
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control us.
The heady optimism of the Internet's early days is gone. Technologies that were meant to liberate us have deepened inequality and stoked divisions. Tech companies gather our information online and sell…
I’ve always been passionate about social justice as a writer and as an international human rights lawyer. I had worked on human rights, surveillance, and privacy for decades around the world, but it was when I first read about Cambridge Analytica back in 2017 that it felt personal – privacy is the gateway to our right to freedom of thought and opinion and Big Tech is increasingly acting as the gatekeeper to all our human rights. These books have all helped me to understand what the risks are and how to tackle them.
Privacy Is Power gets to the heart of why we should all be worried about encroachments on our privacy.
Carissa Veliz is a philosopher and a talented writer who brings complex and profound ideas to life on the page. Some writing about technology can feel dry and detached, but Veliz makes you understand viscerally how the impact of technology is a human, not a technological issue.
As the data economy grows in power, Carissa Veliz exposes how our privacy is eroded by big tech and governments, why that matters and what we can do about it.
The moment you check your phone in the morning you are giving away your data. Before you've even switched off your alarm, a whole host of organisations have been alerted to when you woke up, where you slept, and with whom. As you check the weather, scroll through your 'suggested friends' on Facebook, you continually compromise your privacy.
I’m a scientist who studies the evolutionary tussle between cooperation and conflict that makes sex so infernally complicated. I started out by studying small animals, but the last decade or so have seen an increasing focus on humans. At the same time I’ve been intent on sharing what I learn with curious audiences on television, radio, and in print. I lead a program at my university that introduced me to some amazing technology researchers, from engineers in AI and robotics to lawyers who work on privacy. That’s when I realized the value of evolutionary knowledge in understating the fast-paced technological revolution we are currently living through.
Status is suddenly the hot topic in social psychology and the evolutionary study of human behaviour. Will Storr's new book both capitalizes on this trend and gives it new momentum. He places the drive for status at the centre of human social behaviour and shows how that drive has shaped all of human creativity, achievement, and violence.
As a researcher on evolution and behaviour, familiar with the excellent work on status, I found in this book a fresh and dynamic new package. Reading Storr’s book revealed to me where the evolutionary researchers have been constrained by their own ways of thinking. Likewise, other fields’ obsessions with race, sex, gender, power, and identity – while important – are really a case of staring at the trees without acknowledging the all-encompassing forest.
This is my new favourite popular book on human behaviour, and it is already reshaping my own research program.
'Will Storr is one of our best journalists of ideas ... The Status Game might be his best yet' James Marriott, Books of the Year, The Times
What drives our political and moral beliefs? What makes us like some things and dislike others? What shapes how we behave, and misbehave, in groups? What makes you, you?
For centuries, philosophers and scholars have described human behaviour in terms of sex, power and money. In The Status Game, bestselling author Will Storr radically turns this thinking on its head by arguing that it is our irrepressible craving for status that ultimately defines…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
Having grown up in a low-income neighborhood of housing projects as the son of bohemian artists, I always had a keen interest in understanding why some people got ahead while others floundered. Being a sociology professor at Princeton only got me so far. I had to get another Ph.D. in biology to understand that it was not nature or nurture that makes us who we are but the combination of our unique genetic inheritance and our particular social circumstances. The books I recommended all tackle the question of nature and nurture from one angle or another. Hope you enjoy them and learn as much as I did reading them.
Most people think concern about how genes influence outcomes like IQ and socioeconomic success is the province of the (far) right—of white supremacists and xenophobes. But Harden forcefully shows us that progressives should care just as much about inequality in genes as we are concerned about unequal environments.
Both have to do with luck and aren’t “fair.” She draws a convincing sketch of what a progressive policy around genetics might look like—an anti-eugenics policy that does not deny human nature.
A provocative and timely case for how the science of genetics can help create a more just and equal society
In recent years, scientists like Kathryn Paige Harden have shown that DNA makes us different, in our personalities and in our health-and in ways that matter for educational and economic success in our current society.
In The Genetic Lottery, Harden introduces readers to the latest genetic science, dismantling dangerous ideas about racial superiority and challenging us to grapple with what equality really means in a world where people are born different. Weaving together personal stories with scientific evidence, Harden shows…
I’m a scientist who studies the evolutionary tussle between cooperation and conflict that makes sex so infernally complicated. I started out by studying small animals, but the last decade or so have seen an increasing focus on humans. At the same time I’ve been intent on sharing what I learn with curious audiences on television, radio, and in print. I lead a program at my university that introduced me to some amazing technology researchers, from engineers in AI and robotics to lawyers who work on privacy. That’s when I realized the value of evolutionary knowledge in understating the fast-paced technological revolution we are currently living through.
This one is brand new! My publisher also published Elise Bohan’s debut, so I got to read it ahead of publication. I was blown away. Future Superhuman is an intelligent, funny, and engaging take on technology, and the likely transhuman future in which humans are enhanced by tech. This is an area full of speculation, and no small amount of made-up nonsense, but Future Superhuman is anchored in exceptional research from a dozen or more fields, setting it apart. Elise is an author to watch. Not only does she have an endless supply of smart things to say, but her writing is funny, her expression original, and her style appealing to a very wide audience. Reading this book reminded me how much fun good non-fiction can be.
In breathtakingly original prose, Elise Bohan argues that we're hurtling towards a superhuman future - or, if we blunder, extinction. The only way out of our existential crises, from global warming to the risks posed by nuclear weapons, novel and bioengineered pathogens and unaligned AI, is up. We'll need more technology to safeguard our future - and we're going to invent (and perhaps even merge with) some of that technology.
What does that mean for our 20th century life-scripts? Are the robots coming for our jobs? How will human relationships change when AI knows us inside out?…
I fell in love with the ancient Greeks a half-century ago. Ever since I have tried to learn from the past, by recognizing the ways in which the ancients were at once very like us and shockingly different. I only recently grasped that the Greeks were like us in their self-consciousness about human motivation: They recognized that many (perhaps most) people are driven by self-interest. But only a few of us are skilled at strategic choice-making. They knew that cooperation was necessary for human flourishing, but terribly hard to achieve. Today working together on common projects remains the greatest challenge for business, politics – and your everyday life.
Full disclosure: Adrienne Mayor is my wife. But that is not why I chose this book: It is a mind-blowing account of ancient dreams of technology and ancient scientific wonders. Mayor is a master storyteller. She recreates the ancient myths to reveal the timeless fascination with “artificial life” – with beings that are like us in some ways, except that they are “made, not born.” Long before humans could create real mechanical men and thinking machines, the Greeks dared to imagine what that would mean for humans and our relations with one another. And they imagined the inner lives and torments of the semi-machines themselves. Read this book and shiver to learn that our modernity was dreamed of 2500 years ago.
The fascinating untold story of how the ancients imagined robots and other forms of artificial life-and even invented real automated machines
The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not by MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. More than 2,500 years ago, long before medieval automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek mythology was exploring ideas about creating artificial life-and grappling with still-unresolved ethical concerns about biotechne, "life through craft." In this compelling, richly illustrated book, Adrienne Mayor tells the fascinating story…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I am a professional dabbler who has tried things from beekeeping, duck herding, race car driving, coding, and filmmaking. But I am famously known as the author and illustrator of imaginative and fun children’s books and comics. My latest book is the hilarious supervillain graphic novel Mischief and Mayhem. It’s a story about Missy who gets kicked out of superhero boot camp and ends up as a supervillain (a nice and friendly one). I’ve always enjoyed reading about unexpected heroes and characters who flip the script. We all have challenges in our lives and when we face them head-on is when we truly find the heroes in ourselves.
In this fast-paced action-adventure, super-secret agent Agent 9 has to stop King Crab and his diabolical plans to melt the polar ice caps and build a massive water park. If that doesn’t grab your attention, I have no doubt that James Burks’ wonderful and dynamic illustrations will. There are chase scenes, explosions, and humor on every page that’ll surely keep the reader hooked with every turn. I love how Agent 9 has to address her own personal struggles so she can level up and win the day. A very welcome addition to any children’s graphic novel bookshelf.
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"Funny, adorable, and action-packed!" —Kazu Kibuishi, #1 New York Times bestselling creator of the Amulet series
From the creator of the Bird & Squirrel graphic novel series, comes this hilarious and action-packed new series which follows a feline secret agent who will do whatever it takes to save the world—even if it means destroying a few things along the way.
The Super-Secret Spy Service’s mission is to keep the world safe from maniacal villains. And Agent 9 is one of its best operatives. Although Nine always manages to complete the mission, there is occasionally some collateral damage (like the priceless…
