The best books stay with you. They become part of who you are. The following books all reside somewhere in my heart and mind and their insights and passions continue to evolve within me.

-- Michael Reed

“The man [sic] who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”

― Mark Twain

 Science and Social Science

• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. A history of humanity that begins with the premise that homo sapiens rules the world because it is the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in its own imagination, such as gods, states, money, and human rights. Fascinating and insightful.

• Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond - neo-environmental-deterministic investigation of why whites conquered most of the world. 

• The Diversity of Life by E.O. Wilson - remarkably fascinating and readable introduction to the science of ecology.

• On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin - fascinating even to skim and select from the essential sections. Available free on many digital reader platforms.

• The Eternal Frontier by Tim Flannery - an "Ecological History of America and It's Peoples." - why did it take an Australian to write a great natural history of North America?

• 1491 by Charles C. Mann - the latest science and history about what the New World was really like before Columbus. It was not an untouched wilderness, it turns out, at all. 

• The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann - a biographical sketch about two of the founding thinkers of environmentalism. One fears science and "progress." The other embraces it as a solution. Both threads still run through our debates about how to save the natural world.

• Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization - agriculture created "civilization," but it also gave us war, pandemics, peasants, and, eventually, a shocking dependence on fossil fuels to make artificial fertilizer. Manning skillfully traces that history and suggests some better ways forward.

• The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be by J.B. MacKinnon - Wow! Did we really do that much damage to the planet 500 and 1000 years ago? MacKinnon cites recent science and philosophy to lead us to novel solutions to environmental damage that don't rely on the false dichotomy of nature versus humanity.

• The Primary Source by Norman Meyers - dated but excellent primer on rainforests and their importance to ecology and to us.

• The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story by Richard Preston. Tells the story of the emergence of Ebola virus, which continues to plague parts of equatorial Africa to this day and threatens to spread or evolve into something truly frightening like that imagined by Stewart in Earth Abides (below).

Travel, Opinion, and General Non-fiction

• Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon - on old road maps the blue highways were the little roads that pass through towns, unlike the Interstates that bypass everything. A portrait of small town America in the 1980s. It's wonderfully written. It'll make you want to take a road trip.

• Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey - a paean, no, a polemic, of the desert and wilderness and of independent thinking and the American spirit. 

History

• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. This is a brilliant natural history of the human species. What makes us special? How did we get from a few thousand hunter-gatherers to 8 billion primates living in close quarters? How does our penchant for cooperation affect our future trajectory? It's a history of the whole damned human adventure told with an eye to the effects of technology on us and Earth.

• City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles by Mike Davis. From the New Yorker Magazine, "No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, “Los Angeles brings it all together.” To detractors, L.A. is a sunlit mortuary where “you can rot without feeling it.” To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide-ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias.

• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by  Dee Brown. An amazing and heart-wrenching history of the Native American experience told from an aboriginal perspective.

• Black Elk Speaks by Nierhardt - the last remaining Sioux medicine man relates to a European anthropologist what it was to be a free Sioux.

• A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. This is what American history looks like when it's written from the point of view of the worker, the middle class striver, the union activist, the oppressed, the women, the people of color. An essential counterpoint to the history tales, replete with great men, accomplishments, American exceptionalism, and technological Progress we're fed by high school, and some college, history textbooks.

Fiction

• The Overstory by Richard Powers. Multiple storylines intersect around the themes of trees, connectedness, and environmental change. Throughout this book, I kept thinking, "How does this author know everything?" More importantly, it was moving and beautiful. 

• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers - read it; it really is all that its tongue-in-cheek title claims.

• Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain - the greatest of American novels. I see something new in it each time I read it and I always laugh and smile as Twain forces me to again reflect on our crazy, beautiful country and its continuing struggles with racism and the effects of slavery.

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - second only to twain in its powerfully humanizing vision of what America can become, despite our bitter past. Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey is a recent Australian novel that works through some of the same issues as Huck and Scout in a Terra Australis context. Highly recommended as well.

• Catch 22 by Joseph Heller - the funniest novel to come out of any war, I think. Yossarian is a hoot.

• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut - the world has gone mad and the military-industrial-corporate complex threatens our souls. Funny, insightful, and touching. Vonnegut's books are easy to read, deeply humanistic, and laugh-out-loud funny. Read them all.

• All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy - sparse, powerful poetic prose about young men, the West, nature, violence, and love. The Road, also by McCarthy, is the saddest book I've ever read, but it is powerfully written and well worth the pain.

• Earth Abides by George Stewart - an emerging virus kills nearly everyone. Isherwood, a geography graduate student, survives. He has to start society from scratch in the San Francisco Bay area. You'll never forget the main character in this 70 year old post-apocalyptic novel.

• Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card - my favorite science fiction novel ever. Powerful, moving, and gasp out loud shocking in its resolution.

• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is not fashionable in literary circles today, but this book and it's spare, beautiful sentences is still one of the best writing teachers. Moreover, these characters are human beings and you can't help but love real human beings.

• The Dharma Bums and On the Road by Jack Kerouac. These two books are the essence of the Beat Generation to me. Before the Hippies, this guy was trying to dream up an alternative way of life to the consumer and atomic age that surrounded him.

The Boston Public Library has a list of the 100 Most Influential Books of the 20th Century:

http://www.bpl.org/research/adultbooklists/influential.htm

Finally, while it hardly qualifies as a favorite piece of literature, we all need to decide what to do with the next stage of our lives:

Major in Success: Make College Easier, Fire Up Your Dreams, and Get a Very Cool Job by Patrick Combs - the best simple book on career choices for college students and it only costs about $10. One of the best investments you'll ever make.