This is my second monthly reading list; a place where I share books I have recently read or listened to and some notes about them. If you want to start the month with some interesting topics, make sure to check out my recommendations below. Here are the books I recommended last month in the first entry to this series. I’m sharing only three books per month because it seems to be a manageable number of options to choose from.
Audible and Disclaimers
I will include affiliate links to Audible for all discussed books, and for ebook and physical formats when available. You will not be charged extra, and Audible is likely to have the majority of books you want since it is the biggest audiobook platform.
When you buy a book from Audible, be sure to download and keep a local copy. That way, you own it like a physical book. If you only access it through the app, you rely on Audible for delivery. If they lose distribution rights for the book, you lose access. So, always download anything you purchase.
Sign up for a free Audible Premium Plus membership trial and get one credit for a free audiobook. Even if you cancel the trial, you still get to keep the book you got from the promotion.
Another way to access the books I mention in this post is to check if they are available at your local library. This is certainly the cheapest option, but keep in mind that you may need to wait weeks to obtain them, and you will have a time limit to finish reading them (usually up to 14 days).
Book Recommendations
For this month, I decided to go for some books about human nature, history and progress. If you just want the titles, here are the links. Keep reading below if you would like to read through some of my notes:
- “Humankind – A Hopeful History” by Rutger Bregman
- “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari
- “The Dawn of Everything – A New History of Humanity” by David Graeber & David Wengrow
“Humankind – A Hopeful History” By Rutger Bregman
This book has quickly become one of my favorites and I can’t recommend it enough. The author challenges the idea that humans are inherently selfish, arguing that most people believe others are selfish and untrustworthy, and treat them accordingly. As a result, this belief becomes a nocebo (the opposite of a placebo), becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy; a vicious cycle.
The author presents a data-filled view of different psychological experiments conducted during the last century, casting doubts on their conclusions based on the researchers’ bias. These experiments include the infamous Stanford prison experiment and the electroshock experiment.
The author also covers a famous New York City case where a young woman was killed on the street of her neighborhood while allegedly 27 people just watched without calling the police. After studying the evidence, it becomes clear that the true story is nothing like what the newspapers and the media portrayed.
The book also addresses difficult topics that seem to go against its main premise, such as war and the holocaust, and provides possible explanations for this apparent discrepancy.
At the end of the book, the author includes a few tips on how to live, using this new view of humanity. One of my favorite parts is where the author encourages the reader to be more trusting. According to him, getting taken advantage of from time to time is a small price to pay to see the world in a more realistic way.
Some points:
- Cynics are usually regarded as “realistic”. This book argues that it is the opposite. Cynics and those who believe humans are always acting in self-interest have a warped and unrealistic understanding of human nature.
- It is best to avoid the news, especially stories that focus on sensational events. The news does not reflect real life, and the media tends to highlight the most unusual events, leading people to believe that the world is much darker than it actually is.
“Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari
In “Sapiens”, Yuval Noah Harari covers the history of humanity from around 70,000 years ago until the present. Among the most interesting points for me was the description of how inequality was born and spread with the advent of agriculture.
Another important point the book makes is that one of the main characteristics that makes us human is our ability to imagine. For instance, the book points out that most of us believe in countries, religions, corporations, money, etc. However, all those are just abstract entities created by our collective imagination. They don’t exist in the real sense of the word, and yet, we empower them through our joint beliefs.
The author maintains that this ability of humans is one of the qualities that allows us to build large societies. Other animals can’t do that. I think the book also gives a hopeful message regarding these imaginary entities. Since they are not a product of natural or physical laws, but of culture and human laws. That means we humans have the power to change them to fit our needs. For instance, if corporations are destroying the planet, we can change our laws to remedy this.
Finally, the book touches a bit on what is ahead for humanity with the advent of gene manipulation techniques and improvements in machine learning. However, these topics are better covered in Yuval Noah’s next book: “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow”. I will probably write a review/ recommendation about it in the near future.
“The Dawn of Everything – A New History of Humanity” by David Graeber & David Wengrow
The authors of this book try to dispel the preconceived notions about how societies evolve always from egalitarian to unequal. They maintain that most anthropologists and historians assume that a society of inequality like most modern ones (where some people have more than others) is inevitable, without really looking at the actual evidence.
In the book, the authors present evidence that humans have known about unequal arrangements of societies but that pre-historic civilizations categorically chose to move away from that type of organization.
The book paints a picture of early civilizations as having more agency than traditional western understanding grants them. The authors also emphasize several times throughout the chapters that they are using actual evidence to back up their claims, unlike the conventional and unquestioned notions that most archeologists and the general public hold.
Civilizations moved fluidly from centralized power to egalitarian arrangements when the need suited them. Many early civilizations of hunter-gatherers chose to remain so, instead of transitioning to agrarian societies. So, even though they knew about the existence of agriculture, they decided to remain hunter-gatherers because of their beliefs about how humans should behave towards others and the kinds of activities that are inherently human.
The authors also challenge traditional popular historians at some points. They specifically challenge Yuval Noah Harari’s book “Sapiens” for several reasons. One of the reasons is Harari’s portrayal of wheat as an entity with agency. They also challenge the notion that agricultural societies are unavoidable.
I’m doing a poor job of explaining it here, but the book is very interesting and I recommend it highly. It is a bit long (24 hours for the audiobook), but the story is engaging so it went by very quickly for me.
Yuval Noah Harari Responds To This Book’s Criticism
To complement this book, I suggest watching this interview of Yuval Noah by Adam Conover on YouTube. It is a bit long but at some points, the interviewer asks Yuval Noah directly about his opinion of this book (The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity).
The part of the interview that directly addresses this book is at around the 1:02:00 mark. I still recommend watching the whole thing,but if you are only interested in that part, then you can go to that point.
Discussion and Conclusion
Hopefully, you will enjoy these books as I have done. I would say they are must-read because the topics can have wide implications for how we see life. Let me know if you have read any of them and what you thought about it. Also, feel free to recommend other books so I can add them to my to-read list.
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