Category: Reading List
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Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
This book was very interesting to read. Reading this book showed me how little the POC experience is represented in the curriculum. This is part of what inspired me to pursue Race and Resistance Studies at SFSU in my later educational career.This book is an autobiographical narrative. We go with the author through her own…
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Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
Giovanni’s Room is not a true story, but it parallels the author’s life. It’s somewhere between a fictionalized autobiography and historical fiction. It’s a very sad story which I really related to. The story follows a young man in Paris who falls in love with another man, much to his own surprise. Everything goes horribly…
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Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. This is a very strange and interesting story. Written almost 250 years ago, it takes place in two-dimensional space which makes it challenging to even consider at first. Once you get the idea, it explores many interesting sociological concepts from class mobility to gender. The two-dimensional nature of the…
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The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
I have waited a long time to read this book. I’ve also waited about a month since I finished reading it before writing this post. This book is a lot. It is considered the seminal work of the steampunk genre. In it, Gibson and Sterling present a world where Babbage found wide success with his…
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Woken Furies by Richard K Morgan
This book has a lot of content and a lot of moving parts. The story is very complex. I had to read it three times before I felt like I really understood the story. The production of the audio book is completely different from the first two books. I had to take a break before…
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Discussion of Conscious with Sam Harris and Annaka Harris
In this episode of his podcast, Sam Harris interviews his wife Annaka about her new book, Conscious. This book explores the current state of the art of our knowledge about the nature and purpose of consciousness. In this interview, they go over three main “interesting” questions she poses in the book, and the answers she…
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Lying by Sam Harris
Lying by Sam Harris makes the argument for radical honesty. This is an interested book which is very different from his previous books, but connects to them on the theme of reasonable and rational discussion of their topics. Religion, he seems to imply, can only exist in a world where people are comfortable lying to…
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Letter To A Christian Nation by Sam Harris
Letter To A Christian Nation is a very direct critique of Christianity from the perspective of rational Americans. He attacks head on the basis of Christianity and its many arguments, as well as the argument that it is a good thing for anyone. There are many very excellent arguments in this book which I am…
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The End of Faith by Sam Harris
The End of Faith was Sam Harris’ first book. He published it while he was still a graduate student. This book is an excellent indictment of Christianity in America and the many externalities it perpetrates on the world. I think if I had read this book twenty years ago, it would have had a dramatic…
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Understanding Humans In The Wild with Sam Harris
There are two huge takeaways for me from this podcast interview. The first is Slot Rattling. The guest is Adam Grant, a organizational psychologist and professor from Wharton. He talks about Slot Rattling as a psychological phenomena which explains a person’s behavior when they identify themselves at a certain undesirable point on a spectrum of…