We all have our happy places – the beach, pool, mountain, park, or whatever, and for many of us having something to read there makes it super-happy. This is my summer suggestions list for good reading to take to your happy place (OK, with apologies to the 12% – my friends in the southern hemisphere).
This note is a bit more than about books – reading includes listening to audiobooks and podcasts, consuming papers and posts, and even looking at AI book summaries. All of these give you the dopamine hit from learning. Your neuroplasticity fires up. You strengthen your neural pathways, improve focus, build empathy, and sharpen your critical thinking.
With reading you engage memory through the hippocampus that stores what you’ve read. And here’s the best bit: when you encounter new information, your brain matches it to your existing ‘schema’ – the mental models and organizing frameworks where new stuff is sorted and it’s added to your human intelligence (HI) stack. This is the place where you keep a working model of the outer world, the intricate sense of your inner self, and in my case my world worries and my (considerable) weltschmerz.
It is a scientific fact that reading accelerates the growth and scope of your HI – your human intelligence stack. No change there. But this stack is now becoming an HI x AI stack and that is a change.
So, what have I read to help with this AI mega-transition? One very practical primer: Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI | by Ethan Mollick. This is about how to collaborate with AI tools in daily work and life. Our HI x AI partnership needs to make sure that AI is at the table to be used in all aspects of your work—learning, ideation, writing, analysis, and decision-making. Treat AI Like a person (with relevant skills and limits). Giving AI clear roles in your prompts to get better results. You stay in control, AI assists, but human judgment is essential for quality and ethics. And unlearn and relearn how to learn, it’s that game changing.
Yes, AI is a disruptor – good and bad. In Unruly | by Sean West we have the concept of the unruly triangle—the intersection of: Politics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Law. These forces, once managed separately, now collide in unpredictable ways, creating compounded risks that traditional business strategies don’t handle at all well. West documents a global decline in the rule of law. Legal systems are weakening for 76% of the world’s population. AI technologies like deepfakes and misinformation tools erode trust in truth itself. When real videos can be dismissed as fake and fake ones accepted as real, the justice system and
public discourse become unstable. So not good news.
To bring in the new tech you need the new personalities. Elon Musk | by Walter Isaacson. I read this when Musk still had a good personal brand. Now that’s gone it helps me understand the good, the bad and the ugly with him and what part he will play in our future. A complex person.
Everything is complex, no surprise there, increasingly so. An Answer for Everything. Infographics to explain the World | by Rob Orchard. This is creative sensemaking brilliantly synthesised. Infographics are more than informative; they are dead cool. I have the sense that the infographic experience is going to be accelerated with AI being a key help. Watch that space.
May contain lies | by Alex Edmans. We live in a world full of misleading stories, flawed statistics, and biased studies and our own cognitive biases make us especially vulnerable to believing them. We are being hacked constantly, we tend to accept information that confirms what we already believe (confirmation bias). We often confuse correlation with causation. Our emotional reactions (System 1 thinking, per Kahneman) often override rational analysis (System 2). So, some suggestions. Do the critical thinking – the ability to think clearly, rationally, and independently using self-directed, self-disciplined, and self-monitored thinking. Question the assumptions, analyse the argument, consider the evidence. Of course, AI lures its users into reducing their critical thinking. But AI doesn’t do critical thinking, that should be clear on the tin, what it can do and what it can’t do. Humans are differentiated from AIs by their critical thinking.
Have you noticed books getting shorter? One example is 101 Essays that will change the way you think | by Brianna Wiest. One really beautiful excerpt here: the essay on ‘experiences we don’t have English words for yet’ (and surely should have). When sunlight shines through trees, the interplay between the light and the leaves. It’s an awesome, well, experience. In Japanese there is a word for it, it’s “komorebi” (木漏れ日). And then another excerpt on another wordless experience: the inability to grasp the fact that we can’t grasp what we don’t know yet. This is surely one of the more important ideas that deserves its own word. ‘101 Essays’ is great quirky writing by an American super-star author who is deeply reflective.
The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future | by Naomi Oreskes. This is a paper not a book. But it has shades of not knowing what we don’t know, as flagged in the Brianna Wiest essay. This paper is important not pleasant. This essay is a speculative, science-based narrative written from the perspective of a future historian in the year 2393, looking back at the period between 1988 and 2093—the “Period of the Penumbra”. It explains how Western civilization failed to act on increasingly alarming scientific warnings about climate change, leading to catastrophic consequences. The issue here is we seem to be sleepwalking towards a date with destiny on climate change, how can we build the shared understanding of the predicament, to catalyse a proper political response. Maybe with imaginative scenario-building like this we can do better.
And with that grim read, here is a more optimistic tone. What should people want to be? The Good Ancestor | by Roman Krznaric leads a discussion about the tyranny of the present but the opportunities in the future by laying better tracks now. We prioritize immediate rewards over long-term consequences. This short-termism is reinforced by technology, consumerism, and political systems. So, the big asks are to step up on intergenerational justice: ensuring fairness for future generations; apply cathedral thinking – starting projects that may take generations to complete (think Sagrada Familia and Gaudy); adopt transcendent goals – pursuing values that go beyond individual or national interests. My five-word tombstone. Thought deeply. Left fresh tracks.
And finally, One Day in December | by Josie Silver. This is a languid novel exploring fate, timing, friendship, loyalty, and honesty and how life rarely unfolds the way we expect. This is actually best read, or maybe listened to as I did, in the run-up to Christmas. Only 167 sleeps to go. I am not a great fiction reader, but this was a really top experience.
How do I make the time to read? In my work the answer to this battle is to impose some discipline on the mix of BAU (business-as-usual) and BBU (business-beyond-usual) time which for me is the 20% ‘bucket’ for BBU. My life answer is the same. My LAU (life-as-usual) bucket is overflowing, and I need a 20% LBU (life-beyond-usual) allocation to keep my sanity. That bucket has the good reading in it.
This year I have continued to seek out books that respect the world as a wider, deeper, and softer place than we give it credit. And one where we are confusing the difficult known unknowns with the unknown unknowns. This brings in systems thinking: that the world is far more complex than we can ever know; that we should try see it through dragon-fly eyes through diverse angles and lenses; we should look for longer-term shared responses to our shorter-term predicaments; and that may mean trying to adapt the rules of the game for a better outcome. Maybe we should schedule that glorious reading time this holiday time in the 20% LBU bucket. May you have a great Summer with a brilliant mix of rest and recreation, and social and solitude time, and life-as-usual and life-beyond-usual time.
And below is the full list of books that I’ve curated over the years with a bit of narrative to help with priorities. With a big credit to all those who have contributed their ideas; not least to Gail, my kids and grand-kids who figure in my 2-8-13 pin-code.
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