I’m currently reading The Case for Space by Robert Zubrin and it’s really good. You can tell the guy dedicated his career and life to really thinking about how humans might live in Space, whether that be on the Moon, Mars or in the Asteroid Belt.
I recently read Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoğlu and that was also very good, it explained the shortcomings of other theories such as the geographic determinism espoused by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel although I think Why Nations Fail was a bit repetitive at times.
My favorites that I re-read often, actually re-listen on audiobook (shout out libro.fm) are A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster both by David Foster Wallace. I find his writing to be funny, erudite, and addictive. It’s like hearing someone else’s conversation with their brain.
Honorable mention goes to Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Taleb. One of those books that makes you look at the world differently when you finish.
Recently finished The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya, a biography of John von Neumann and it was fascinating to hear his impact on so many different fields, e.g. mathematics, the atom bomb, the first computers, game theory, and automata. And all the secondary characters could be subjects of equally fascinating books themselves, e.g. Teller, Oppenheimer, Turing, Gödel, Einstein, Nash, etc.
Yeah, von Neumann was a true genius. I’ll definitely check that book out.