Books September 2022

 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: 4/5

A beautiful society where everyone wears their heart on their sleeve and is quite loving 

The Innovation Stack by Jim McKelvey: 4/5 easy read, the language is simple, the humor is decent, the main insight about stacking innovations is useful, otherwise leans towards a motivational business book. You also learn that the founder of IKEA was a Nazi (literal Nazi). The book doesn’t waste stupid time repeating psychology studies. A pro-contrarian book a la Peter Thiel 

The Ministry for the Future: 4/5, personally it’s a 5 for me, and I read it cover to cover, but I realize not everyone will appreciate the subtle references which the book is trying to make, which is that it is parodying the neural routes that someone obsessed and particularly fixated on fixing climate change has gone through, including a sort of agnosticism for capitalism vs communism, growth vs. degrowth, technofix vs. political fix, etc. Because it surfaces a lot of these sort of arguments that are trite if you’ve thought long enough about how to practically solve climate change. This sort of reference-making is something that is likely to go over a lot of people’s heads. The book is also written from the perspective of “humanity” as a whole, which is why who the protagonist is keeps shifting until the later third of the book, but I heard that other readers found this style unsettling. I actually liked this of the book. As others say, I agree this book is by far the best imagery of what it’ll be like for humans and humanity to experience the consequences of climate change within this century. Read this in 2021 I think. 

The Uninhabitable Earth 4.5/5: A little bit dramatic, and the section on plastic I think is irrelevant, but surprisingly most of its views are justified because it’s simply a synthesis of all the bad things we know are going to happen because of climate change, and crammed into one book instead of shown to us one study at a time. Like I don’t actually think it exaggerated all that much. Each “doom” was something that can currently be backed by a scientific study somewhere. It’s that all the little dooms are real and do come together to make a big doom. Death by a thousand paper cuts. Warning: the book may increase your anxiousness or sadness, so you should only read this book if these tales of doom motivate you instead of demotivate you to work on climate change. Read this in January 2022.

The Rosie Project: 5/5, I already provided an earlier rating but I hadn’t finished the book by then. This book was an amazing page turner all the way through!!!