Below are the 20 books I read in May and June of 2019. Since I started my 49 day trip at the very end of May, my June books read really fell off, but there’s still a fair share here.

1. The Last Full Measure (4) – 5/1/19       
   • “Lee nodded, said, ‘It is a ghastly thing…that we do here, that we do to each other. We are not supposed to think on that…it is part of the duty, of the tragedy. And there are so many…’”          
   • “‘So what happens now?’ Tom shrugged, said, ‘We go on till it ends, I reckon.’ Chamberlain shook his head. ‘No, there’s something more,’ he said. ‘The men who survived this have learned something new, that slaughter is acceptable, that mass killing is now routine. What does that do to us?’”         
   • “Now he closed his eyes, tried to think of some prayer, some question, some plea for divine intervention. His mind worked, words tumbling in a mass of nonsense. He opened his eyes, stared up, thought, Maybe that is how it must be. There can be no prayers, not now, not while this goes on. We have not earned the right.”         
   • “There is only one way to make war, Colonel. You have to hurt somebody. Maybe you have to hurt everybody. Make them feel it, understand what it is we are doing out here.”
   • “Look what we have done, what man has done to God’s land. There has to be a price for that.”
   • “It doesn’t seem to matter anymore, he realized. There is no thought to the fighting, the destruction has become so commonplace, we don’t even see it now.”          
   • “Grant laughed now, pulled out a cigar, winked at Julia, said, ‘You know, Sherman, I’ve always said that women should be entitled to vote, in fact, they should have two votes, and the men should stay home. That way, there would never be an argument, and no one would ever vote the wrong way.’”
   • “He is at rest now, and we who are left are the ones to suffer.”
2. Rise to Rebellion (4) – 5/4/19             
   • “There is an awful danger when the people become accustomed to tyranny. If the people learn to accept small abused, then larger abuses will follow. It is like a disease, crippling slowly, until the body is beyond repair.”
3. Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics (3) – 5/4/19          
   • “[H]appiness is not just something that happens to you; it is a skill.”          
   • “[W]hen it comes to the management of worry…maybe ask yourself one simple question: ‘Is this useful?’” – on ruminating 
4. The Compound Effect (3) – 5/6/19           
   • “[R]emember that you get in life what you tolerate.”
5. All the Light We Cannot See (4) – 5/6/19           
   • “You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest.”          
   • “Doing nothing is as good as collaborating.”
   • “Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”
   • “You must never stop believing. That’s the most important thing.”
6. The Way of the Strangers (3) – 5/8/19          
   • “The notion that religious belief is a minor factor in the rise of the Islamic State is belied by a crushing weight of evidence that religion matters deeply to the vast majority of those who have traveled to fight.”            
   • “Since 2012, tens of thousands of men, women, and children have migrated to a theocratic state, under the belief that migration is a sacred obligation and that the state’s leader is the worldly successor of the last and greatest of prophets. If religious scholars see no role for religion in a mass movement like this, then they see no role for religion in the world.”           
   • “To a rationalistic and materialistic generation, it was inconceivable that such great debates and mighty conflicts could have involved no more than ‘merely’ religious issues.”
   • “The Islamic State’s scholars do not cite Marx, the philosophies, the laws of Manu, or Paul the Apostle. They cite Koran, hadith, and carefully selected thinkers within the Islamic tradition. Their fanaticism is a Muslim fanaticism. It takes astonishing levels of denial to claim, as uncountable Muslims and non-Muslims have, that the Islamic State has ‘nothing to do with Islam,’ merely because the group’s heinous behavior clashes with mainstream or liberal Muslim interpretation.”
7. Essentialism (5) – 5/10/19           
   • “Less but better.”          
   • “If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.”                
   • “What if schools eliminated busywork and replaced it with important projects that made a difference to the whole community? What if all students had time to think about their highest contribution to their future so that when they left high school they were not just starting on the race to nowhere?”          
   • “What if we stopped celebrating being busy as a measurement of importance? What if instead we celebrated how much time we had spent listening, pondering, meditating, and enjoying time with the most important people in our lives?”
   • “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” – Mary Oliver          
   • “Protect the asset.”
   • “If it isn’t a clear yes, then it’s a clear no.”
   • “How will we know when we have succeeded.”
   • “Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” – Socrates
8. A Long Way Gone (3) – 5/11/19
9. Born to Run (5) – 5/12/19           
   • “Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction.” – William James             
   • “When you run on the earth and run with the earth, you can run forever.”
   • “In a 2008 research paper for the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Dr. Craig Richards, a researcher at the University of Newcastle in Australia, revealed that there are no evidence-based studies – not one – that demonstrated that running shoes make you less prone to injury.”           
   • “But recent research has shown stability shoes are unlikely to relieve plantar fasciitis and may even exacerbate the symptoms.” – Runner’s World 2008
10. Misquoting Jesus (2) – 5/16/19
11. All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Watching Star Trek (3) – 5/16/19           
    • “Each person or each species, no matter how alien, has the right to live their lives as they wish. (As long as they’re not trying to take over the galaxy or eat you or something.)”       
    • “Whatever you are doing, answer a distress call. The most important time to help someone is when they need it.”
    • “[T]he unknown is not to be feared, it is to be examined, understood and accepted.”
12. Homo Deus (3) – 5/17/19          
    • “In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.”           
    • “Thus the Old Testament God never promises any rewards or punishments after death.”
    • “This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.”          
    • “The idea of nurturing a lawn at the entrance to private residences and public buildings was born in the castles of French and English aristocrats in the late Middle Ages. In the early modern age this habit struck deep roots, and became the trademark of nobility. Well-kept lawns demanded land a lot of work…In exchange, they produce nothing of value.”
    • “Grass is nowadays the most widespread crop in the USA after maize and wheat, and the lawn industry (plants, manure, mowers, sprinklers, gardeners) accounts for billions of dollars every year.”          
    • “In my view, you cannot have a serious discussion about the nature and future of humankind without beginning with our fellow animals.”
    • “What makes the fate of domesticated farm animals particularly harsh is not just the way they die, but above all the way they live.”
    • “Unfortunately, humans can cause tremendous suffering to farm animals in various ways, even while ensuring their survival and reproduction. The root of the problem is that domesticated animals have inherited from their wild ancestors many physical, emotional and social needs that are redundant on human farms. Farmers routinely ignore these needs, without paying any economic penalty. They lock animals in tiny cages, mutilate their horns and tails, separate mothers from offspring and selectively breed monstrosities. The animals suffer greatly, yet they live on and multiply.”            
    • “The Agricultural Revolution was thus both an economic and a religious revolution. New kinds of economic relations emerged together with new kinds of religious beliefs that justified the brutal exploitation of animals.”
    • “Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”
    • “That’s how history unfolds. People weave a web of meaning, believe in it with all their heart, but sooner or later the web unravels, and when we look back we cannot understand how anybody could have taken it seriously.”
    • “Similarly in many countries around the world, including the USA and the UK, witnesses in courts put their hand on a Bible when swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It’s ironic that they swear to tell the truth on a book brimming with so many fictions, myths and errors.”     
    • “Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function…But the stories are just tools. They should not become our goals or our yardsticks. When we forget that they are mere fiction, we lose touch with reality. Then we begin entire wars ‘to make a lot of money for the corporation’ or ‘to protect the national interest’. Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; why do we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their service?”
    • “However, religion is created by humans rather than by gods, and it is defined by its social function rather than by the existence of deities. Religion is any all-encompassing story that confers superhuman legitimacy on human laws, norms and values. It legitimizes human social structures by arguing that they reflect superhuman laws.”
    • “Religion is interested above all in order. It aims to create and maintain the social structure. Science is interested above all in power. Through research, it aims to acquire the power to cure diseases, fight wars and produce food. As individuals, scientists and priests may give immense importance to the truth; but as collective institutions, science and religion prefer order and power over truth.”         
    • “The uncompromising quest for truth is a spiritual journey, which can seldom remain within the confines of either religious or scientific establishments.”
    • “Yet in fact modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.”
    • “Modernity, in contrast, is based on the firm belief that economic growth is not only possible, but absolutely essential. Prayers, good deeds and meditation might be comforting and inspiring, but problems such as famine, plague and war can only be solved through growth. This fundamental dogma can be summarised in one simple idea: ‘If you have a problem, you probably need more stuff, and in order to have more stuff, you must produce more of it.’”
    • “Too many politicians and voters believe that as long as the economy grows, scientists and engineers could always save us from doomsday. When it comes to climate change, many growth true-believers don’t just hope for miracles – they take it for granted that the miracles will happen.”
    • “How rational is it to risk the future of humankind on the assumption that future scientists will make some unknown planet-saving discoveries? Most of the presidents, ministers and CEOs who run the world are very rational people. Why are they willing to make such a gamble? Maybe because they don’t think they are gambling on their own personal future. Even if bad comes to worse and science cannot hold off the deluge, engineers could still build a hi-tech Noah’s Ark for the upper caste, while leaving billions of others to drown. The belief in this hi-tech Ark is currently one of the biggest threats to the future of humankind and of the entire ecosystem. People who believe in the hi-tech Ark should not be put in charge of the global ecology, for the same reason that people who believe in a heavenly afterlife should not be given nuclear weapons.”             
    • “If you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable. The more painful, the sacrifice, the more convinced they will be of the existence of the imaginary recipient. A poor peasant sacrificing a valuable bull to Jupiter will become convinced that Jupiter really exists, otherwise how can he excuse his stupidity? The peasant will sacrifice another bull, and another, and another, just so he won’t have to admit that all the previous bulls were wasted.”
    • “As of early 2016, the sixty-two richest people in the world were worth as much as the poorest 3.6 billion people! Since the world’s population is about 7.2 billion, it means that these sixty-two billionaires together hold as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humankind.”
    • “Consequently, in the early twenty-first century politics is bereft of grand visions. Government has become mere administration. Government ensures that teachers are paid on time and sewage systems don’t overflow, but it has no idea where the country will be in twenty years.”
13. The Gift of Fear (3) – 5/19/19
    • “You may not know, however, that women visit emergency rooms for injuries caused by their husbands or boyfriends more often than for injuries from car accidents, robberies, and rapes combined.”          
    • “At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.”
    • “I’ve successfully lobbied and testified for stalking laws in several states, but I would trade them all for a high school class that would teach young men how to hear ‘no,’ and teach young women that it’s all right to explicitly reject.”       
    • “80 percent of the young men in juvenile detention facilities were raised without fully participating fathers.”
    • “If only more abused children could know that they are the residents of their homes, not the architects, then they might believe that where they are will not limit where they might go. Until America focuses shame on perpetrators instead of victims, these children will have children, and the war they thought was over won’t be over, for them or for us.”          
    • “[In 1911, criminologist Arthur MacDonald] suggested that ‘newspapers, magazines and authors of books cease to publish the names of criminals. If this not be done voluntarily, let it be made a misdemeanor to do so. This would lessen the hope for glory, renown or notoriety, which is a great incentive to such crimes.’”
    • “Worry, wariness, anxiety, and concern all have a purpose, but they are not fear. So any time your dreaded outcome cannot be reasonably linked to pain or death and it isn’t a signal in the presence of danger, then it really shouldn’t be confused with fear. It may well be something worth trying to understand and manage, but worry will not bring solutions. It will more likely distract you from finding solutions.”          
    • “When you feel fear, listen.”
14. Sapiens (3) – 5/24/19          
    • “Even today, with all our advanced technologies, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC – wheat, rice, maize (called ‘corn’ in the US), potatoes, millet and barley. No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years.”       
    • “Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.”                
    • “We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.”
    • “Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.”
    • “In fact, even today coins and banknotes are a rare form of money. The sum total of money in the world is about $60 trillion, yet the sum total of coins and banknotes is less than $6 trillion.”
    • “When the Christians vehemently refused to [respect the empire’s protector gods and the emperor’s divinity], and went on to reject all attempts at compromise, the Romans reacted by persecuting what they understood to be a politically subversive faction. And even this was done half-heartedly. In the 300 years from the crucifixion of Christ to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, polytheistic Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians. Local administrators and governors incited some anti-Christian violence of their own. Still, if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that in these three centuries, the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians. In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.”        
    • “Monotheists have to practice intellectual gymnastics to explain how an all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good God allows so much suffering in the world.”
    • “If God knew in advance that a particular person would use her free will to choose evil, and that as a result she would be punished for this by eternal tortures in hell, why did God create her?”
    • “So monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such belief.”
    • “How can a monotheist adhere to such a dualistic belief (which, by the way, is nowhere to be found in the Old Testament)? Logically, it is impossible. Either you believe in a single omnipotent God or you believe in two opposing powers, neither of which is omnipotent. Still, humans have a wonderful capacity to believe in contradictions.”
    • “Columbus believed he had reached a small island off the East Asian coast. He called the people he found there ‘Indians’ because he thought he had landed in the Indies – what we now call the East Indies or Indonesian archipelago. Columbus stuck to this error for the rest of his life. The idea that he had discovered a completely unknown continent was inconceivable for him and for many of his generation.”
    • “The Aztecs did not know how to react. They had trouble deciding what these strangers were. Unlike all known humans, the aliens had white skins. They also had lots of facial hair. Some had hair the colour of the sun. They stank horribly. (Native hygiene was far better than Spanish hygiene. When the Spaniards first arrived in Mexico, natives bearing incense burners were assigned to accompany them wherever they went. The Spaniards thought it was a mark of divine honour. We know from native sources that they found the newcomers’ smell unbearable.)”            
    • “When growth becomes a supreme good, unrestricted by any other ethical considerations, it can easily lead to catastrophe.”
    • “According to the most moderate estimates, between 1885 and 1908 the pursuit of growth and profits cost the lives of 6 million individuals (at least 20 per cent of the Congo’s population). Some estimates reach up to 10 million deaths.”
    • “Just as the Atlantic slave trade did not stem from hatred towards Africans, so the modern animal industry is not motivated by animosity. Again, it is fuelled by indifference. Most people who produce and consume eggs, milk and meat rarely stop to think about the fate of the chickens, cows or pigs whose flesh and emissions they are eating. Those who do think often argue that such animals are really little different from machines, devoid of sensations and emotions, incapable of suffering.”
    • “Today, the earth’s continents are home to billions of Sapiens. If you took all these people and put them on a large set of scales, their combined mass would be about 300 million tons. If you then took all our domesticated farmyard animals – cows, pigs, sheep and chickens – and placed them on an even larger set of scales, their mass would amount to about 700 million tons. In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals – from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales – is less than 100 million tons. Our children’s books, our iconography and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left.”
    • “Much of the vaunted material wealth that shields us from disease and famine was accumulated at the expense of laboratory monkeys, dairy cows and conveyor-belt chickens. Over the last two centuries tens of billions of them have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation ehose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth. If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When evaluating global happiness, it is wrong to count the happiness only of the upper classes, of Europeans or of men. Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans.”
15. The Corrosion of Conservatism (3) – 5/24/19           
    • “I swilled a Scotch and took some sleeping pills – something I don’t normally do – and tried to sleep. And yes, I know you’re not supposed to combine sedatives with alcohol, but you’re also not supposed to elect a bigoted bully as president of the United States.”          
    • “How was it possible that 90 percent of Republicans had supported a charlatan who had only recently been a Democrat and who had few fixed convictions outside of narcissism and nativism, racism and sexism?”
    • “Often these conservatives would preface their remarks with ‘I’m no fan of Trump, but…’ – the ‘but’ being key – and then proceed to make clear that they were indeed fans but were ashamed to admit it because they knew how vile Trump was considered to be by polite society. This was almost identical to the way certain people would say ‘I’m no racist, but…’ before proceeding to prove that they were indeed racists by opining that people of color were ‘stupid,’ ‘ criminal,’ or ‘lazy.’”                    
    • “The Anti-Defamation League found that from August 2015 to July 2016 there were 2.6 million anti-Semitic tweets, reaching 10 billion total impressions. Admittedly about 70 percent of them came from just 1,600 accounts, suggesting a small but fanatical movement. The ADL also determined that the number of anti-Semitic acts in the United States increased from 942 in 2015 to 1,267 in 2016 and 1,986 in 2017.”
16. Breaking the Spell (3) – 5/25/19           
    • “Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.”           
    • “The spell that I say must be broken is the taboo against a forthright, scientific, no-holds-barred investigation of religion as one natural phenomenon among many.”            
    • “Yes, I want to put religion on the examination table. If it is fundamentally benign, as many of its devotees insist, it should emerge just fine; suspicions will be put to rest and we can then concentrate on the few peripheral pathologies that religion, like every other natural phenomenon, falls prey to. If it is not, the sooner we identify the problems clearly the better.”           
    • “Anybody can quote the Bible to prove anything, which is why you ought to worry about being overconfident.”
    • “Religion is not out-of-bounds to science, in spite of propaganda to the contrary from a variety of sources. Moreover, scientific inquiry is needed to inform our most momentous political decisions. There is risk and even pain involved, but it would be irresponsible to use that as an excuse for ignorance.”           
    • “You don’t get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.”
    • “Those to whom his word was revealed were always alone in some remote place, like Moses. There wasn’t anyone else around when Mohammed got the word, either. Mormon Joseph Smith and Christian Scientist, Mary Baker Eddy, had exclusive audiences with God. We have to trust them as reporters – and you know how reporters are. They’ll do anything for a story.” – Andy Rooney               
    • “If I were designing a phony religion, I’d surely include a version of this little gem – but I’d have a hard time saying it with a straight face: ‘If anybody ever raises questions or objections about our religion that you cannot answer, that person is almost certainly Satan. In fact, the more reasonable the person is, the more eager to engage you in open-minded and congenial discussion, the more sure you can be that you’re talking to Satan in disguise! Turn away! Do not listen! It’s a trap!’”
    • “Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things – that takes religion.” – Steven Weinberg             
    • “This familiar phrase was born, by the way, in the Oxford Union, a debating society at Oxford University, in a speech by Benjamin Disraeli in 1864, in response to the challenge of Darwinism: ‘What is the question now placed before society with a glib assurance the most astounding? The question is this – Is man an ape or an angel. My Lord, I am on the side of the angels.’”
17. Infidel (3) – 5/26/19            
    • “If God was merciful, why did He demand that His creatures be hanged in public? If He was compassionate, why did unbelievers have to go to Hell? If Allah was almighty and powerful, why didn’t He just make believers out of the unbelievers and have them all go to Paradise?”            
    • “Surely, no Muslim could continue to ignore the clash between reason and our religion? For centuries we had been behaving as though all knowledge was in the Quran, refusing to question anything, refusing to progress. We had been hiding from reason for so long because we were incapable of facing up to the need to integrate it into our beliefs. And this was not working; it was leading to hideous pain and monstrous behavior.”
18. A Million Steps (4) – 6/6/19       
    • “I asked him where he was going and he responded, ‘Wherever I can make the most difference.’”       
    • “People will always walk into our lives to show us something or say something, to love us or take care of us, to put us on our path, and then when it’s complete, they leave. We are left behind with more than we can imagine, which we then share with others…on their paths.”        
    • “For every problem under the sun / There is a solution or there is none / If there’s a solution go and find it / If there isn’t never mind it”
19. 10 1/2 Things No Commencement Speaker Has Ever Said (4) – 6/13/19          
    • “[T]he only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”          
    • “Yet we know that success is not about simply running faster than everyone else in some predetermined direction. It is about finding a passion, taking risks, running in new directions, and dealing with failure.”         
    • “If you want to explore the world, you can make it happen. I didn’t say it was easy; I just said it was easier than you think.”
    • “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.” – Theodore Roosevelt
20. The History of Cuba (3) – 6/29/19
    • “Other initiatives included granting women the right to vote, establishing twelve-week maternity leave to working mothers, mandating employer-provided child care for infants and prohibiting the practice of firing women from their jobs simply because they were married. These ‘leftist’ actions were not supported by the United States of American businesses in Cuba.”