A Clockwork Orange

Summary: As good as the movie. But has an extra chapter also. I think it also says something about memory. We can now, 2017, actually manipulate how someone feels about their memories. We construct the memory over and over again and this process can be influenced. So we can feel less emotions (PTSD) or even make something seem positive. This can be done with psychology but also medicines!

It’s 21 small chapters and can be listened in two-ish days. Definitively recommended.

Childhood’s End

Childhood’s End – Arthur Clarke

Summary: Good book about the novel idea that an alien race rules over humans and brings peace and prosperity. But they were actually only serving mankind to help their ‘children’ become a whole new (super) species.

Interesting ideas about world piece and how the universe is. But didn’t really bring many new ideas to my mind.

Tools of Titans

Tools of Titans – Tim Ferriss

Summary: good advice from many people. Organisation is not the best, but great to have at coffee table and read once very while. Can make larger summary later.

The Forever War

The Forever War – Joe Haldeman

Good sci-fi about a (too long) war in space with another race. It describes things like how the world changes (in waves) and how people in the war are different than civilians (also now the case). Fun idea about homo vs heterosexuality.

Not the best book ever for me, but I think it might be one of the first to use time-dilation in this way to let the characters move forward through time so elegantly.

Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut

Good book that plays with time, is anti-war, and used that time travel in a way to tell a story non-chronologically and still helps us see the perspective of the protagonist better.

Free Will

Free Will – Sam Harris

We don’t have free will. And if we learn more about the brain we have less agency. But knowing that you can know better what to do with the rest of the ‘freedom’ you have.

Brave New World

Good book about society highlighted by doing a contrast of orderly and the savages. Story not too grabbing / moving.

Read in 2017 and before during high school.

Artemis

I liked this second book by Andy Weir quite a lot. It’s a great vacation read where the pages just flow away. Like The Martian (his debut novel), it’s full of science and interesting twists. Here is my take on the storyline.

You: smuggler on the Moon, scraping by and doing your thing (being funny and all)

Need: Money (to repay dad)

Go: join in a plot to help a business man you’re smuggling for

Search: find out how to do this (evil) plan

Find: try and execute this dastardly plan, sabotage the rover

Take: it goes wrong, and many more things go wrong, you hurt the people around you

Return: a plan is made to return the city to normal and get everything right again (they stay in this phase for quite a while)

Change: everything works out in the end, although there is not much focus on the change. Of course she is able to pay her dad and life picks up again, her character stays quite the same (fun and not caring too much)

Solar

Hmm, this book, Solar by Ian McEwan, was recommended by a friend and I did like it. But it was not among the other fiction books that I liked better. That being said, there is some very fun dark humour in there.

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him, and whose fifth marriage is crumbling. However, an invitation to travel to New Mexico offers him a chance for him to extricate himself from his marital problems, reinvigorate his career, and save the world from environmental disaster. Can a man who has made a mess of his life clean up the messes of humanity?

Hmm interesting note from a reader:

“I’m writing a paper arguing that Beard is himself meant to represent humanity’s approach to the environmental disaster: he lacks the ability to take responsibility for his own actions, acts in his own self-interest, and relishes in excess (both in food and women) to achieve his own pleasures at the detriment to himself and others.

I think McEwan’s trying to tell us that by ignoring/failing to take large-scale concerted efforts against Global Warming simply because environmental issues don’t seem to cause immediate catastrophe in our own lives we are effectively acting like the despicable Michael Beard.”

Hyperion

It has been a while but I remember Hyperion by Dan Simmons as a great audiobook. There is a lot of thriller, myth, and good storytelling.

Here is some synopsis:

Hyperion: On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope—and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands. 

A stunning tour de force filled with transcendent awe and wonder, Hyperion is a masterwork of science fiction that resonates with excitement and invention, the first volume in a remarkable new science fiction epic by the multiple-award-winning author of The Hollow Man.

The Fall of Hyperion: In the stunning continuation of the epic adventure begun in Hyperion, Simmons returns us to a far future resplendent with drama and invention. On the world of Hyperion, the mysterious Time Tombs are opening. And the secrets they contain mean that nothing–nothing anywhere in the universe–will ever be the same.