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The Satanic Verses,
Salman Rushdie
(1988)
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Heart of a Dog,
Mikhail Bulgakov
(1925)
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Kindred,
Octavia E. Butler
(1979)
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The Edible Woman,
Margaret Atwood
(1969)
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Behave,
Robert Sapolsky
(2017)
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Never Let Me Go,
Kazuo Ishiguro
(2005)
It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you’ve made, and there’s this panic because you don’t know yet the scale of disaster you’ve left yourself open to.
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Gweilo,
Martin Booth
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Tokyo Vice,
Jake Adelstein
I was learning a lot from Sekiguchi, most important that it’s the time you take when it seems unimportant that is the most important time of all.
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Weapons of Math Destruction,
Cathy O’Neil
Our own values and desires influence our choices, from the data we choose to collect to the questions we ask. Models are opinions embedded in mathematics.
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Drinking — A Love Story,
Caroline Knapp
For a long time, when it’s working, the drink feels like a path to a kind of self-enlightenment, something that turns us into the person we wish to be, or the person we think we are. In some ways the dynamic is simple: alcohol makes everything better, until it makes everything worse.
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Infidel,
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.
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To Kill a Mockingbird,
Harper Lee
I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.
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The Great Gatsby,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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How Bad Are Bananas?,
Mike Berners-Lee
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Endurance,
Alfred Lansing
They were for all practical purposes alone in the frozen Antarctic seas. It had been very nearly a year since they had last been in contact with civilization. Nobody in the outside world knew they were in trouble, much less where they were.
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Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine,
Gail Honeyman
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Anything You Want,
Derek Sivers
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Post Office,
Charles Bukowski
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The Tender Bar,
J.R. Moehringer
I hate when people ask what a book is about. People who read for plot, people who suck out the story like the cream filling in an Oreo, should stick to comic strips and soap operas. What’s it about? Every book worth a damn is about emotions and love and death and pain. It’s about words. It’s about a man dealing with life.
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The Importance of Being Earnest,
Oscar Wilde
Please don’t touch the cucumber sandwiches. They are ordered specially for Aunt Augusta.
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The Bell Jar,
Sylvia Plath
If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
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Oryx and Crake,
Margaret Atwood
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The Remains of the Day,
Kazuo Ishiguro
After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?
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Neuromancer,
William Gibson
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Flowers for Algernon,
Daniel Keyes
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,
Mark Haddon
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Sapiens,
Yuval Noah Harari
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
Douglas Adams
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An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth,
Chris Hadfield
Early success is a terrible teacher. You’re essentially being rewarded for a lack of preparation, so when you find yourself in a situation where you must prepare, you can’t do it. You don’t know how.
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Gateway,
Frederik Pohl