Hi Colin,

You are probably one of the most well-read influences of my life and to me it seems that a universal characteristic of great people is that they are tenacious readers.

Could share a handful of your favorite and/or most formative books?

Sincerely,

Zane

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Hey Zane-

You’re too kind!

I’m thrilled to receive this question/request, as I’m heavily influenced by other peoples’ work (both fictional and nonfictional), and I love having the opportunity to share some of those influences—though keeping it to a handful does make for quite the challenge.

For the record, I keep a running list of books (and other things) I’ve recommended on my podcast, here.

But here are some works that stand out in my mind as being particularly good or valuable in terms of living well in some way:

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life
by Ed Yong

Anything that can help us think about and contextualize the meta-narrative of life and living is valuable, to me. And this book does an excellent job of demonstrating how we, as human beings, are not individual organisms, but rather superorganisms, made up of countless other wee-beasties, that whole complex series of systems thinking of itself as ‘I’ but perhaps more accurately described as a diverse and remarkable ‘we.’

I’m also fond of saying that everything is connected, and I mean this in a scientific, provable sense, rather than a spiritual sense (though the path we take to that realization is perhaps less relevant than the fact that we got there). This book illustrates that fact beautifully, using contemporary understanding of microorganisms, biological systems, and genetics.

The Three-Body Problem
by Cixin Liu

This is a mind-bending work of fiction—the first of a three book series—that begins with humanity giving away its position in space to a technologically superior species of aliens that wants to conquer us, before following the path our species takes to prepare for their arrival 450 years in the future.

This book is philosophy-driven hard science fiction: meaning it’s predicated in part on the technology used and the legitimate potentiality of that technology, rather than using hand-wavy pseudo-magic to ensure things just work, and invoking “destiny” or “love” as catch-all problem-solvers.

The series it’s a part of, Remembrance of Earth’s Past, is also phenomenal. I don’t want to give too much away, but I had trouble putting all three of them down, and immediately sought out more speculative fiction originally written in Chinese (as these books were) afterward, to see what I’d been missing.

Autonomous
by Annalee Newitz

This novel serves as both parallel and counterpoint to the Three-Body Problem, in that it also demonstrates how new technologies might be used, and how they might influence the paths individual lives, society, government, economics, and everything else take—but it does so on a less epic scale. And as a consequence of that more-grounded, focused view, we get somewhat more compelling characters and a lot more relatable situations.

This is still hard sci-fi, which I find is useful for helping me imagine how things might turn out, what might happen next; but it’s also a more digestible read, and a lot more fun, in the entertaining sense, than chunkier tomes and more sprawling, epic storylines tend to be.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
by Yuval Noah Harari

This is a nonfiction work that speculates about where society might go next, based on certain evolving norms, understandings, and tools to which we currently have access, and those which are currently emerging around the world.

It’s a sequel of sorts to Harari’s previous work, Sapiens, which explored humanity’s past, up till today. This book goes in the opposite direction, exploring where we might go next.

Both chronological directions are vital to consider and work into our contextual understanding: the past to know what came before and how such things influence us in myriad, often invisible ways, and the future to understand how our actions can impact any number of things, both the vital and the seemingly mundane.

Teeth
by Mary Otto

This book knocked me flat, and I love it for that.

I try to seek out nonfiction work that pulls me into a deep-dive on topics I know nothing about, or never fully considered before, and this is a perfect example of that sort of sub-genre.

I’d never thought about how teeth, and oral health in general, reflect so many other things about a society. They say things about cultural norms, about beauty standards, about the relative scientific understanding of the culture in question, about that culture’s priorities, and about how they treat the lowest economic rungs of their civilization.

On that last point, this book cast a particularly stark light on how lower-income folks in the United States suffer as a consequence of the structure of our healthcare system, and it shows us how that system came to be, and came to set oral health aside as somehow something different from other types of healthcare—in large part because of perverse economic incentives, rather than because our mouths and teeth are any different than the other portions of our bodies that require time and attention to maintain.

This is a cringe-worthily short list, to me; there are just so many wonderful books out there, and so many types of book in which I find value.

That said, if you’re looking to grow, gain perspective, be inspired, achieve a more three-dimensional view of the world, have your expectations and biases challenged, and want to have a whole lot of fun, I highly recommend reading things—all kinds of things—as often as you dare.

And if you, like many people I know, want to read more but are frustrated by how slowly you seem to read in comparison to others—that’s okay. You’ll read faster as you read more, but reading more slowly in the meantime isn’t bad; it may be that you’re taking in more, and retaining more, than the folks who are borderline skimming.

Research shows that speed reading almost certainly doesn’t work, and in some cases is an outright fraud. Be wary of such snake oil, don’t be self-conscious about your reading speed, and focus on immersion, comprehension, and enjoyment over pace.

It’s also possible to gain a huge amount of insight and information from blog posts, poems, scripts, tweets, and fortune cookies. It’s all about who wrote it, what they wrote, and the focused attention you invest in what you’re reading. Really give yourself up to it, and take the time to think about what you read, afterward.

The format of a book isn’t inherently better than a podcast or ebook or cereal box or holographic sky-writing: what’s important is the content, and your ability and willingness to invest your time and energy in absorbing it.