Started: February 28, 2025
Finished:
Pages: 239

Started: February 23, 2025
Finished: February 28, 2025
Pages: 326

Vonnegut writes the kind of science fiction that doesn't feel like science fiction. It deserves its own genre. The Sirens of Titan is about a man and his dog getting stuck in a chrono-synclastic infundibulum. It’s about Mars invading Earth, billionaires getting their brains wiped, and The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. It’s even about a message from aliens in the Small Magellanic Cloud. It's funny, it's thought provoking, and it's so goddamn imaginative. There are elements here common to other Vonnegut books, like religion in Cat's Cradle and free will in Slaughterhouse Five, but the major theme is the meaning of life. To this, Vonnegut ventures a guess... and a pretty good one, at that.

Started: February 19, 2023
Finished: February 28, 2023
Pages: 201

Part history, philosophy, psychology, and self-help, How to Survive the Modern World explores the unique aspects of modernity. Each chapter covers one aspect – capitalism, advertising, media, democracy, etc. – explaining how the modern world differs from the "old world," analyzing the benefits and deficits that we experience as a result, and proposing a way forward. It is profound, without being pretentious; trenchant, without being acerbic; unsparing, without losing hope. The chapter on Science and Religion, in particular, left me thinking "Finally, I've found the words I've been searching for to articulate the ideas that have been brewing in my subconscious." Essential reading.

Started: February 17, 2025
Finished: February 23, 2025
Pages: 303

An interesting account of one man's attempt to win the Most Human Human award at the 2009 Loebner Prize (Turing test). At times rambling, the book covers a swath of topics from philosophy to art to neuroscience to computer science in a quest to understand what separates human-human communication from human-computer communication.