Thinking about my summer reading list
My summer holiday is in June this year, as I have a conference in mid-July and then I am scheduled to return back to university 1 August. I think Beth and I are going to spend a week in a North Norfolk, one of our favourite places, which has also sort of become a home for both of us. In anticipation of my break, I’ve started putting together my summer reading list, as I do every year. To be honest, there are so many good books right now, it is difficult to choose.
Although my list isn’t complete, one book that I’m already looking forward to is Jennifer Ackerman’s ‘The Genius of Birds‘. I had this book on my Christmas break reading list but, unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to get to it.
I recently purchased ‘Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us About Life, Love and Relationships’ by Camilla Pang, and I think I will add this to my list. Camilla has a PhD in biochemistry and, as she also has ASD, my interest in this book is more so about her personal journey coming to grips with the complex world social around her through the lens of science. It sounds, on quick glance, that we’ve come to cope with the world in similar ways and share an interest in understanding human behaviour and development. Having said that, I think there is a bit of a risk that people might read this book and conflate it with some sort of autistic worldview, which is completely incorrect, or, equally incorrect, as a scientific view of human behaviour. Contrary to some reviews, I wouldn’t read Pang’s book looking for a strictly scientific view (else one will be disappointed). I could be wrong, but I think ‘Explaining Humans’ may have potentially been mispromoted, hence some of the confused feedback. I approach this book as I would when reading someone’s memoirs, like ‘Diary of a Young Naturalist‘ by Dara McAnulty, ‘Lab girl‘ by Hope Jahren, or ‘Letters to a Young Scientist‘ by Edward O. Wilson. With topics including the challenges of relationships, learning from mistakes, and navigating the human social world by finding tools in things like game theory and machine learning, my interest is in the fact that this is another author with autism and, for myself, I similarly use textbooks and my studies to understand and manage my experience the world. Even on a purely phenomenological level, it will be interesting.
Another book that I may add is of a completely different tone: namely, Saul David’s ‘Crucible of Hell’. I’ve been enjoying reading about WWII again, and, as noted in this post on Dan Carlin’s podcast series on the events in the Asiatic-Pacific theatre, the battle of Okinawa (and others) I haven’t read much about. A few more books I have been thinking about: Douglas R. Hofstadter’s ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid‘, ‘The Deeper Genome‘ by John Parrington, ‘King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry‘ by Siobhan Roberts, ‘Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics’ by Bernardo Kastrup, ‘Quantum Computing Since Democritus‘ by Scott Aaronson, Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Society‘, and Daniel Kahneman’s latest ‘Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement‘. Tough decisions.
Mental health awareness week
Finally, it’s mental health awareness week in the UK. Often these sort of campaigns can be incredibly superficial, failing to look at root causes or ask fundamental questions about well-being and support, but they don’t have to be. Mental health awareness is something that I’ve always taken seriously, not least because I have experienced many challenges with my own mental health throughout my life. The last time I did research and wrote on the subject, suicide statistics in many leading Western countries were significant. I know, too, that for people with autism, like myself, mental health can present a significant challenge in addition to the other challenges one may face. People with autism are much more likely to die by suicide than the general population, as many cause-specific analyses of mortality for people with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) indicate. Sometimes these facts are overlooked when we talk about mental health as a society, and often I find it important to highlight. But mental health doesn’t discriminate, it affects all people from all backgrounds, and weeks like this one are a good time to help foster discussion, combat stigma, and to think about mental health in all of its facets.
*Image: ‘Streams of Paint‘ by markchadwickart (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
