10 Essential Books for Thought-Provoking Summer Reading

Everything from cutting-edge scientific ideas to a new philosophy of learning to art that honors living in the moment

Memorial Day weekend has come, which means summer has officially begun. And what's summer without a good summer reading list? So here it is--a cross-disciplinary selection of the 10 most essential cognitive fertilizers for a season of creative and intellectual growth. (Want more? Don't hesitate to revisit last year's list, full of timeless gems to catch up on.)

1. THE INFORMATION: A HISTORY, A THEORY, A FLOOD

The future of information is something I'm deeply interested in, but no such intellectual exploit is complete without a full understanding of its past. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, by iconic science writer James Gleick, is easily the most ambitious, compelling, insert-word-of-intellectual-awe-here book to read this year, illustrating the central dogma of information theory through a riveting journey across African drum languages, the story of the Morse code, the history of the French optical telegraph, and a number of other fascinating facets of humanity's infinite quest to transmit what matters with ever-greater efficiency.

"We know about streaming information, parsing it, sorting it, matching it, and filtering it. Our furniture includes iPods and plasma screens, our skills include texting and Googling, we are endowed, we are expert, so we see information in the foreground," he writes. "But it has always been there." ~ James Gleick

But what makes the book most compelling to me is that, unlike some of his more defeatist contemporaries, Gleick roots his core argument in a certain faith in humanity, in our moral and intellectual capacity for elevation, making the evolution and flood of information an occasion to celebrate new opportunities and expand our limits, rather than to despair and disengage.

Full review here.

2. AN OPTIMIST'S TOUR OF THE FUTURE

After life threw comedian Mark Stevenson a curveball that made him face his own mortality, he spent a year traveling 60,000 miles across four continents and talked to scientists, philosophers, inventors, politicians, and other thought leaders around the world, looking for an antidote to the dystopian visions for the technology-driven future of humanity so pervasive in today's culture. He synthesized these fascinating insights in An Optimist's Tour of the Future: One Curious Man Sets Out to Answer "What's Next?" -- an illuminating and refreshingly hopeful guide to our shared tomorrow.

From longevity science to robotics to cancer research, Stevenson explores the most cutting-edge ideas in science and technology from around the world, the important ethical and philosophical questions they raise, and, perhaps most importantly, the incredible potential for innovation through the cross-pollination of these different ideas and disciplines.

"This is a book that won't tell you how to think about [the future], but will give you the tools to make up your mind about it. Whether you're feeling optimistic or pessimistic about the future is up to you, but I do believe you should be fully informed about all the options we face. And one thing I became very concerned about is when we talk about the future, we often talk about it as damage and limitation exercise. That needn't be the case -- it could be a Renaissance." ~ Mark Stevenson

An Optimist's Tour of the Future comes as an auspicious yet grounded vision for what we've previously explored in discussing the future of the Internet and what the Web is doing to our brains.

Full review here.

3. LIVE NOW

Keeping with the theme of optimism -- because, really, who wants to dampen sunshine and the summer wind with another dystopian downer? -- here's a lovely project born, just like Stevenson's, out of a stark confrontation with mortality. When illustrator Eric Smith was diagnosed with three different types of cancer, he decided to start a collaborative art project inviting people to live in the moment through beautiful, poetic, earnest artwork that celebrates life. This season, the project was published as a book, the candidly titled Live Now: Artful Messages of Hope, Happiness & Healing -- an absolute treasure of Carpe Diem gold in the vein of Everything Is Going To Be OK, full of stunning illustration and design reminding us of what we all semi-secretly want to believe but the cynics in us all too often discount.

'Live Humbly' by Mikey Burton

'Break Your Routine' by Mikey Burton

'Overflowing Optimism' by Chad Kouri

"Cancer changed the way I ate, slept, and most importantly the way I live. Before cancer I was like most folks, just cruising along. It was during my treatment, when starting to discover what cancer could give to me -- the ability to absorb every moment as if each one were my whole life." ~ Eric Smith

Kirstin Butler's full review, with more images, here.

4. THE INTERNET OF ELSEWHERE

Barely halfway though, 2011 has already been one of the most tumultuous years for global politics and civic unrest in modern history. And the most dramatic changes have taken place in societies where emerging technology is disrupting how citizen relate to their government and one another. While countries like Libya and Egypt have been the eye of the media storm, some of the most fascinating effects of these shifts have been in countries still off the mainstream radar. In The Internet of Elsewhere: The Emergent Effects of a Wired World, California-born, Germany-based technology journalist Cyrus Farivar explores the role of the internet as a social, political and economic catalyst through compelling case studies from four unexpected countries: Iran, Estonia, South Korea, and Senegal.

From how Skype was invented in Estonia to why Senegal may be Sub-Saharan Africa's best chance for widespread public Internet access to what makes South Korea the most wired country in the world, the book offers profiles of local tech pioneers alongside insightful analyses of cultural context and what the "developed world" can learn from these countries, in some cases years ahead in harnessing the sociopolitical virtues of web technology. And, in a meta move true to the subject matter, Farivar successfully funded the book's European tour on Kickstarter.

"The Internet is not, in fact, a seed. It does not have the ability to bring about world peace and the elimination of the nation-state, any more than the telegraph did. It is but a tool that, when combined effectively with local political and economic realities, can have demonstrably positive and often surprising effects. However, this tool can be co-opted and/or fought against by regimes that are not ready for it to be used freely. Other developing societies, too, may not be completely ready to use the Internet effectively. This is why manifestations of the Internet remain so varied in different corners of the globe. This book is an attempt to tell the story of what happens when the Internet collides, head-on, with history unfamiliar to most Americans." ~ Cyrus Farivar

You can sample The Internet of Elsewhere by reading the fascinating 15-page introduction for free online.

5. A NEW CULTURE OF LEARNING

Reinventing the broken system of today's formal education is one of our era's most pressing cultural concerns. And while most conversations on the subject can be redundant, navel-gazy and ultimately ineffectual, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown bring a refreshing perspective on the subject with equal parts insight, imagination and optimism. Besides being one of our 7 must-read books on education, their A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change is the most popular book featured on Brain Pickings this year, and for good reason -- it makes a compelling case for a new kind of learning, one growing synchronously and fluidly with technology rather than resisting it with restless anxiety, a vision that falls somewhere between Sir Ken Robinson's call for creativity in education paradigms and Clay Shirky's notion of "cognitive surplus."

"We're stuck in a mode where we're using old systems of understanding learning to try to understand these new forms, and part of the disjoint means that we're missing some really important and valuable data." ~ Douglas Thomas

Full review, complete with video interviews with the authors, here.

6. THE FILTER BUBBLE

We live in a culture that puts a premium on customization, but this ultra-personalization has its price when it comes to the information we're being served. That's exactly what Eli Pariser, founder of public policy advocacy group MoveOn.org, explores in his fascinating and, depending on where you fall on the privacy spectrum, potentially unsettling new book, The Filter Bubble -- a compelling deep-dive into the invisible algorithmic editing on the web, a world where we're being shown more of what algorithms think we want to see and less of what we should see. (Did you know that Google takes into account 57 individual data points before serving you the results you searched for?) Implicitly, the book raises some pivotal questions about the future of the information economy and the balance between algorithm and curator -- something I feel particularly strongly about.

"In some ways, I think the primary purpose of an editor [is] to extend the horizon of what people are interested in and what people know. Giving people what they think they want is easy, but it's also not very satisfying: the same stuff, over and over again. Great editors are like great matchmakers: they introduce people to whole new ways of thinking, and they fall in love." ~ Eli Pariser

Full review, along with a revealing exclusive interview with Pariser, here.

The app itself is free, with various language pairs available for in-app purchase. The first pair released is Spanish-English, with more coming soon.

7. FLOURISH

Martin Seligman is best-known as the father of the positive psychology movement -- a potent antidote to the traditional "disease model" of psychology, which focuses on how to relieve suffering rather than how to amplify well-being. His seminal book, Authentic Happiness, was one of our 7 must-read books on the art and science of happiness. This season, he has finally released his much-anticipated, and somewhat controversial, follow-up: Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being -- a distinct departure from Seligman's prior conception of happiness, which he now frames as overly simplistic and inferior to the higher ideal of lasting well-being.

Without being a self-help book, Flourish manages to offer insightful techniques to optimize yourself, your relationships and your business for well-being, based on empirical evidence culled from years of Seligman's rigorous research.

"Relieving the states that make life miserable... has made building the states that make life worth living less of a priority. The time has finally arrived for a science that seeks to understand positive emotion, build strength and virtue, and provide guideposts for finding what Aristotle called the 'good life.'" ~ Martin Seligman

Full review, along with a primer by way of Seligman's 2004 TED talk, here.

8. THE LATE AMERICAN NOVEL

The future of publishing is something I ponder daily. And while mainstream media was busy announcing the death of the book, The Millions founders Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee did something better: They assembled an all-star team of literary visionaries and asked them what the future of the written word holds. The results -- funny, poignant, relentlessly thought-provoking -- are gathered in The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, spanning a remarkable array of perspectives and styles, from historical context to comic relief to the difficult questions that have to be asked.

"Are we going to have to find new ways to get noticed? Yes. Do we get to find news ways to get noticed? Yes. Is it trouble? Yes. But trouble is the stuff of writing and creation. Time to shut up and get to the making, get back to that sense of play where everything interesting, including the future, finally fast and soon to be here, starts." ~ Ander Monson

Kirstin Butler's full review, with ample quotes from the book, here.

9. RADIOACTIVE

Marie Curie is one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of science. A pioneer in researching radioactivity, a field the very name for which she coined, she was not only the first woman to win a Nobel Prize but also the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and in two different sciences at that, chemistry and physics. Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout is an endlessly beautiful cross-pollination of art and science, in which artist Lauren Redniss tells the story of Curie through the two invisible but powerful threads of her life: radioactivity and romance. It's a turbulent story -- her passionate love with Pierre Curie (honeymoon on bicycles!), the epic discovery of radium and polonium, Pierre's sudden death in a freak accident in 1906, Marie's affair with physicist Paul Langevin, her coveted second Noble Prize -- brimming with poignant reflections on the implications of Curie's work more than a century later as we face ethically polarized issues like nuclear energy, radiation therapy in medicine, nuclear weapons and more.

To honor Curie's spirit and legacy, Redniss rendered her poetic artwork in an obscure early-20th-century image printing process called cyanotype, critical to the discovery of both x-rays and radioactivity itself -- a cameraless photographic technique in which paper is coated with light-sensitive chemicals. Once exposed to the sun's UV rays, this chemically-treated paper turns a deep blue color. The text in the book is a unique typeface Redniss designed using the title pages of 18th- and 19th-century manuscripts from the New York Public Library archive. She named it Eusapia LR, for the croquet-playing, sexually ravenous Italian Spiritualist medium whose séances the Curies used to attend. The book's cover is printed in glow-in-the-dark ink.

Full review, with more images and a TEDx talk by Redniss, here.

10. GOD BLESS YOU, DR. KEVORKIAN

In 1997, iconic writer Kurt Vonnegut pitched an idea to New York public radio station WNYC: He would conduct fictional interviews with dead cultural luminaries and ordinary people through controlled near-death experiences courtesy of real-life physician-assisted suicide proponent Dr. Jack Kevorkian, allowing the author to access heaven, converse with his subjects, and leave before it's too late. The producers loved the idea and Vonnegut churned out a number of 90-second segments "interviewing" anyone from Jesus to Hitler to Isaac Asimov. The interviews -- funny, poignant, illuminating, timeless, profoundly human -- are collected in God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, a fantastic anthology playing on the title of Vonnegut's 1965 novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, some of the best cultural satire of the past century.

"During my most recently controlled near-death experience, I got to interview William Shakespeare. We did not hit it off. He said the dialect I spoke was the ugliest English he had ever heard, 'fit to split the ears of groundlings.' He asked if it had a name, and I said 'Indianapolis.'" ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Full review, with a rare transcript from Vonnegut's original pitch for the series to WNYC, here.

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This post also appears on Brain Pickings.
Images: Main image via Patrick Hoesly/flickr, others courtesy of Maria Popova