Book Club Recommendations

Ed: The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout, Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World, Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by David Sweetman

Chris: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Lillian: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, This Is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan

Robert: The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe, 1918–1933 by Sally Marks

Suhaib: Her First Palestinian and Other Stories by Saeed Teebi

[Book summaries by ChatGPT]

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Harari traces the arc of Homo sapiens from small bands of foragers to dominant global species. He organizes the narrative around four great revolutions:

Cognitive Revolution (~70,000 years ago): the emergence of language, myth, and the ability to imagine “shared fictions.”
Agricultural Revolution (~10,000 years ago): transition to farming, sedentism, property, inequality, and social hierarchies.
Unification of Humankind: through empires, trade, religion, and money as shared myths that connect vast numbers of people.
Scientific Revolution (starting ~500 years ago): the rise of empiricism, technology, capitalism, and growing mastery over nature and ourselves.

Harari questions whether “progress” always improves human happiness, and warns about future challenges from biotechnology, AI, and the possibility of “post-human” species.

Main themes:

Humans succeed by co-operating flexibly in large groups via shared myths (religion, money, nations).
Many “advances” (e.g. agriculture) come with trade-offs (e.g. social stratification, disease, labor).
Our stories (about ourselves, our power) often outpace our ability to recognize their fragility.
The future demands grappling with meaning, happiness, and control over life itself.

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson

This book is a curated compendium of Naval Ravikant’s insights, interviews, aphorisms, and commentary around wealth, happiness, and decision making.

Some of its key ideas:

Wealth vs. money vs. status: Wealth is having assets that generate while you sleep; money is the medium of exchange; status is your social ranking.
Leverage and scale: Use non-linear tools (code, media, capital) rather than trading your time directly for money.
Specific knowledge: Focus on what you are uniquely good at — skills that cannot easily be automated or taught en masse.
Compound judgement & reading: Good decision making compounds over time; reading widely and thoughtfully is central.
Happiness is a skill: Naval argues we often bind ourselves to desires; by disentangling ourselves from dependencies, we can cultivate inner peace.

The book is not organized as a narrative, but more as a tactical + philosophical reference.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

A genre-blending novel combining time travel, romance, espionage, and reflections on identity and power.

Premise & Setting
In near-future Britain, the government establishes the “Ministry of Time,” a secret agency that rescues individuals from the past—specifically ones whose deaths would not paradoxically alter history (“expats”)—and brings them to present day for experiments.

Each “expat” is assigned a “bridge” — a modern civil servant who helps the time traveler assimilate. The narrator (unnamed) is British-Cambodian, and is assigned as the bridge to Commander Graham Gore, a naval officer extracted from the Franklin expedition (1847).

Plot & Conflict

The narrator helps Gore navigate 21st-century life (language, social mores, technology) and over time develops a deep emotional bond with him.
But the Ministry harbors secret agendas; not everything is as benevolent as it seems. There’s a mole, spies (the Brigadier, Salese), and internal power struggles.
In a twist, the vice-secretary Adela is revealed to be the narrator’s future self, with machinations to protect a timeline she favors.
The narrator and Gore eventually defy the Ministry, damage the “time door,” and flee. The narrator is dismissed; Gore escapes with other expats.

Themes & Reflections

Displacement, identity, and assimilation: The time travelers are analogous to immigrants or refugees adjusting to a world not their own.
Power, history, and agency: Who controls narrative and which futures are permitted?
Love, loyalty, and betrayal: Romantic and interpersonal entanglements complicate moral choices.

Critical reception notes its ambitious blending of romance, thriller, and speculative elements — sometimes successfully, sometimes unevenly.

This Is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan

Pollan explores humanity’s relationship with three psychoactive substances: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.

In the opium section, he recounts growing poppies in his garden and reflects on the blurred line between medicine, addiction, and prohibition, linking it to the modern opioid crisis.
The caffeine section traces how coffee and tea reshaped societies, fueling Enlightenment thought, capitalism, and productivity, while Pollan experiments with quitting caffeine to feel its grip.
With mescaline, he examines Indigenous ceremonial use, psychedelic experience, and debates over legality, conservation, and cultural appropriation.
Central theme: plants are not just passive resources but active agents shaping human consciousness, culture, and history; what society deems a “drug” is as much about politics and culture as chemistry.

The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe, 1918–1933 by Sally Marks

Marks revisits the interwar European period, questioning the prevailing view that the post-World War I peace treaties reliably secured stability.

Synopsis & Argument

The “peace” after WWI was fragile, premised more on ideals (disarmament, moral diplomacy) than enforceable power.
European leaders misread ethnic tensions, economic burdens, war debts, and reparations in underestimating instability.
The League of Nations was structurally limited in enforcing peace; its weaknesses undermined confidence.
The failure to make Germany truly accept defeat, and to integrate it into a stable international order, fueled resentment exploited by Hitler.
Marks reinterprets leaders’ decisions, showing that devotion to peace and demilitarization paradoxically constrained democratic states’ ability to respond decisively to threats.

Structure & Updates
This is a revised second edition, updated with newer scholarship, adding maps, noting archives, and refining arguments in light of later historical analysis.

Significance
A widely used text in interwar diplomacy studies; it emphasizes that ideals alone are insufficient to maintain order when systemic and structural constraints are ignored.

Her First Palestinian and Other Stories by Saeed Teebi

This is a short story collection (nine stories) that explores the lives, identities, and tensions of Palestinian immigrants and descendants in Canada.

Key elements & themes

The title story “Her First Palestinian” examines identity, diaspora, and the sometimes awkward intersections between personal and political belonging.
Through multiple voices (newcomers, second generation, refugees), Teebi shows how Palestinian identity is not monolithic but layered, diasporic, split between memory, land, and belonging.
Themes include displacement, guilt, assimilation, the weight of inherited trauma, intergenerational memory, and the invisibility of Palestinian lives in Canadian spaces.

This is a poignant and intimate set of stories that foregrounds the humanity of people often reduced to headlines.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

A dreamlike, multi-layered novel exploring love, memory, unreality, and longing.

Plot outline

As teenagers, a boy and girl fall in love over an interschool essay contest. The girl tells the boy that her “real self” lives in a city beyond a wall. She disappears, and the boy becomes obsessed.
In adulthood, the narrator journeys to that imagined city (beyond the wall). In that realm, he works in a library reading dreams; the girl appears as his assistant, frozen in time.
The city is surreal: walls shift, shadows play strange games, and characters inhabit dual layers between real and symbolic worlds.
Eventually, he must confront whether to stay or return, whether to reintegrate his shadow, and how to live with the loss and haunting.

Themes & Style

The blurred boundary between reality and dream / subconscious
Loss, obsession, and the impossibility of reclaiming the past
Identity split (self inside vs outside the walls)
The narrative is meditative, alternates between seemingly normal life and magical, metaphorical realms.

Critics note that while it invokes classic Murakami tropes, it also leans heavily into metaphor and sometimes meanders.

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout

Tell Me Everything (2023) is a novel set in a small town in Maine, exploring hidden lives, memory, trauma, and the interconnectedness of people.

Plot & Structure

The story revolves around a disappearance: a woman vanishes, and various characters—friends, neighbors, even casual acquaintances—react, remember, and reflect.
Narration shifts through multiple perspectives: what one person hides, another recalls, what others imagine.
Overlapping narratives reveal secrets, misunderstandings, guilt, forgiveness, and what people choose not to say.

Themes

The opacity of interior life: how much of someone’s story is invisible or suppressed
Memory and narrative: how recollections shift over time and intersect
Small-town intimacy: how lives interlock, and reputations and expectations matter
The power of confession, empathy, and the burden of silence

Strout’s style is quiet, character-driven, and deeply psychological.

Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World

This is an art-history / biography work focused on Pablo Picasso and the creation of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) — the painting that upended traditional representation.

Core content

The book locates Les Demoiselles within its historical, artistic, cultural, and biographical contexts: what art movements preceded it (e.g. Cézanne, African masks, Iberian sculpture) and how Picasso reacted to them.
It recounts how that painting broke from conventions of perspective, form, and the human figure, precipitating Cubism and modernism more broadly.
The work also examines how the painting was received at the time (shock, rejection), and how over time it became canonical.
Biographical elements: Picasso’s personality, his relationships, his influences, rivalries, and artistic ambitions are interwoven into the narrative.

The book argues that the painting’s radical break was not just aesthetic but conceptual: it forced art to ask what it means to represent reality.

Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by David Sweetman

A biography tracing Gauguin’s life: his journeys, art, and contradictions.

Life trajectory & highlights

Born in Paris (1848) with time in Peru; he first worked as a stockbroker before turning to art.
Dissatisfied with European conventions, Gauguin traveled (notably to Tahiti and Polynesia) to escape and reinvent his art.
In Tahiti, he sought “primitive” inspiration, rejected Western norms, and painted vivid, symbolic works.
His personal life was fraught: relationships with women, colonial dynamics, racial attitudes, financial instability, health decline.
Gauguin died in 1903, largely forgotten, but posthumously became a major figure in modern art.