In honour the end of June (and Canada Day!) I thought I’d offer some suggestions for reading for the summer.

Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma – Michael Pollan

Summer’s the perfect time to review your eating habits, and Michael Pollan is the perfect person to help.

The Better Angels of our Nature – Steven Pinker

A long book, but one that is worth taking the time to read. Pinker will tell you why you can still be optimistic about humanity: violence is falling, cruelty is diminishing, and overall we’ve actually been quite successful at reducing war, homicide, and other violent crimes.

The Righteous Mind – Jonathan Haidt

Summer’s also a good time for trying to reach across the aisle and understand the other side. Haidt is the ideal way to do that: fair and openminded, he analyzes morality, and instead of arguing the other side is immoral and the debate so often seems to descend to, he looks at the basis for morality that underlie the arguments on both sides.

Quiet – Susan Cain

A nice light read, but for all the introverts out there who sometimes feel overwhelmed by an extroverted society, a great read.

On my stack

Of course, I plan to do some serious reading myself, too. On my stack at the moment is

Capital in the 21st Century – Thomas Piketty

This 700 page economics treatise outsold fiction for weeks on Amazon: what that means for readership I have no idea, but at the very least there’s a lot of copies out there.

The Panic Virus – Seth Mnookin

An examination of the autism-vaccine controversy.

Risk-Savvy: How to make Good Decisions – Gerd Gigerenzer

Gigerenzer is an unusual psychologist who argues that the modern perception that we are biased actors who need to be fixed is flawed. Instead, he argues for biases as an ‘adaptive toolbox’: a series of adaptations that are by and large useful to us.

J’accuse – Emile Zola

The classic work of the Dreyfus Affair. In French, which is slowing me down but good for me.

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci

We’ll see how these read when I get there!