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Health & Fitness

Calling All Bookworms: A 2011 Reading List

Join me in my largely non-fiction reading list for 2011, including books like 'Caveman Logic' and 'The Grand Design.'

For my family, Mother's Day started off with my wife Elaine heading to work and the kids and I sitting around watching, "Look Who's Talking" on Netflix.  In the movie, the single mother played by Kirstie Alley sits down next to her mother and asks, "Mom, do you ever get bored of Dad?" Her mother, while looking at her husband as he laughs hysterically at an issue of  the Journal of Accounting, replies, "No.  How could I ever get bored with your dad?"

I couldn't help but think that's how my wife feels when I am cracking up at something that authors similar to Neil Shubin writes in books like, Your Inner Fish.

"What's so funny?" she asks.

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"Nothing.  Too much background is required for it to be funny."

"Just read it to me."

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So I do—and when I am finished she just stares at me for a second and goes back to Mafia Wars on Facebook.

But it's her fault really.  She bought me the Kindle after all.

Unfortunately I don't have as much time to read as I would like this year, but I'm trying to cram the following in before the end of the world comes next sometime next year:

  1. The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms - Finished
  2. The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values: - By Sam Harris - Finished
  3. Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World - I started this book by Hank Davis yesterday, and so far I've wanted to share just about every sentence via my Kindle to my Facebook wall.  For Example: 
    • The human mind is an illusion generator. Since you have a human mind, that statement probably either feels wrong or like an insult. It is neither. Patterns are everything to us. We hunger for them. We revel in them. They are the basis for art, literature, music, and much more in our lives. But a perceptual system that is so geared to wrestling patterns out of complex arrays of stimuli is bound to produce some false positives. From time to time we are going to see or hear what is not there, and those cases will seem no less compelling to us.
    • We have put many faulty beliefs behind us. Yet, because our minds are no more evolved than they were a thousand years ago, we are just as vulnerable to illusion, comfort, and social pressure as our ancestors were. Faced with incomplete sensory evidence, we are just as likely to come to wrong conclusions and then fight passionately to maintain those views because of the comfort or stability they provide. We may be less ignorant than our ancestors, but all the hard-won additional information does us no good if we don't let it inform our thinking. 
    • And one of natural selection's mottos has always been, "Better deluded than dead."
    • Consensual validity is a very powerful force. In many cases, if those around you believe it, it must be true. It is also a prime example of what are called heuristics, or shortcuts that save each member of the group (or species) from having to reevaluate the same.
    • There is comfort in the status quo even when it isn't right.
  4. The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.
  5. The Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity by David Christian
  6. God's Problem: How The Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question - Why We Suffer by Bart D. Ehrman.  His book, Jesus, Interrupted was fantastic.  I can't wait to get to this one.
  7. The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes.
  8. The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood.  Wood wrote the best history of Benjamin Franklin I have ever read.
  9. The Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authorative Edition - Volume 1
  10. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadevers by Mary Roach.  This is probably the strangest book on my list, but it comes highly recommended.
  11. Idiot America: How Stupidity Became A Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce
  12. The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War by James Bradley
  13. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben
  14. Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court by Jeff Shesol

Honorable Mentions That May Get Read In 2011

1.  Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny – Robert Wright – His book Evolution of God is one of my favorites.

2.  God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything: Christopher Hitchens – This book has been staring me in the face for a couple of years now.  I know I want to read, but it’s like that documentary I have been meaning to watch on Netflix but never do.  I know it would be a good read.

3.  Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality: – Christopher Ryan

4.  A History of the World in 6 Glasses – Tom Standage

5.  Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human – Richard Wrangham

Books I am still reading and hope to finish soon:

1.  Big History - By Cynthia Stokes Brown - Finished
2.  The Atheist Guide to Christmas - Ariane Sherine (proceeds to to charity)
3.  War and Peace (again) – by Leo Tolstoy 
4.  The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin - Gordon S. Wood
5.  Open Society - George Soros
6.  Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City – Greg Grandin
7.  American Gods – Neil Gaiman
8.  The Story of Edgar Sawtelle – David Wroblewski
9.  Anthill: A Novel – Edward O. Wilson
10. Physics for Future Presidents – Richard A. Muller
11. Endless Forms Most Beautiful - Sean B. Carroll
12. How to Teach Physics to Your Dog – Chad Orzel

—–

Other readings when I get the urge:

1.  Michel de Montaigne – The Complete Essays – Michel Montaigne
2.  Edgar Allan Poe’s Complete Poetical Works - Edgar Allen Poe
3.  The Entire Set of Works of Mark Twain – Mark Twain (Kindle Only)
4.  The Prince - Niccolo Maciavelli
5.  On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection – Charles Darwin
6.  Works of John Locke – John Locke – (Kindle Only)

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