I start tons of books using the Kindle preview but end up actually buying and finishing far fewer. I lean towards hard Sci-Fi. I like inscrutable alien artifacts and massive jumps through time. If I’m not reading about spaceships I’m reading history books for some reason. I think because the good ones at least are sort of like time travel books. I’ve managed to finish a bunch of great books recently from both these genres and I wanted to share my finds here for those of you with similar reading interests.
The Mesopotamian Riddle
This book details the honestly fascinating story of the bizarre collection of characters who managed to decipher the oldest writen language, cuneiform.
Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art
It is hard for me to comprehend 300 thousand years. When I think about the last 2000 years it seems like an overwhelming amount of time. Neanderthals were fucking around on earth for 300 thousand years. Just like, eating berries and making stone tools for 300 thousand years. It’s hard to imagine but this book does an incredible job of explaining what their lives were like and how it’s much different from what a lot of us think of when we hear the word Neanderthal.
Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt
If you like Warhammer 40k books you might enjoy this one. Napoleon essentially took “Remberancers” with him to record his mission to conquer Egypt. This is the absolutely wild story of the artists, poets, scientists and various other weirdos he drug into the desert and then left to die when conquering Egypt turned out to be much harder than he expected.
Sleeping Gods
The other books go back in time but this last one takes us forward. This is an excellent Hard Sci-Fi read about deep space exploration, time travel far into the future of human evolution and ancient aliens. What more could you want!?
-Gabe Out
