If you are bored, and want to do something else than doom scroll social media for a few hours, I have a few books to share that are really good!
The first book is a witty and interesting book about science and absurd circumstances. What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by the popular author of the webcomic xkcd Randall Monroe is a collection of questions asked via email. One such example is what would happen if someone pitched a baseball at 90% the speed of light. The short answer to this question is that it would explode like a nuke. Another question posed is what would happen if you tried to land a submarine from near-earth orbit. All of these mildly amusing questions are answered using a combination of science-speak, and his funnily drawn stick figures and sketches. For anyone who is into science, this is a must read.
Next is the 2012 book Argo, by former CIA operator Antonio Mendez. This follows the complicated world of espionage and intelligence during the Iranian revolution, and efforts to get members of the besieged US embassy out of Iran after everyone was taken at said embassy was taken hostage. In Argo, the author reveals the true story of the CIA’s attempt to exfiltrate a group of embassy officials that escaped the initial attack of the embassy, but were stuck in Iran with no way out. If you like thrills, and the world of spying, this book is for you.
Third is a better known work of fiction, and Pulitzer Prize winning work of literature. The book All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is a novel about WW2 era Europe, and the journeys of dual protagonists, the blind French teen Marie-Laurie LeBlanc and the German teen Werner Pfennig. It is a powerful work contemplating guilt, war and technology, and spins a masterful narrative of conflict and redemption. If you are into WW2 era settings, and heavy themes, this book is a pinnacle example of that.
Finally, the fourth book I read recently and thought was really good was Banana, by Dan Koeppel. This book (surprisingly) is about bananas, from the biology of it, to massive multinational banana corporations, how it dominated America markets
and devastated South American countries, how it instituted corrupt regimes and led to communist revolutions, to finally the diseases threatening it then and now. A surprisingly good book, and if you want to learn about something new, it is perfect.
Overall, this is a pretty wide group of books, and there should be something for everyone. Next time you reach for your phone, how about you use it to get one of these books from a library.
