1. Mike Jay, Wireheads: An Unnatural History of Technology in the Brain.  Much of this story is told through the lens of the accompanying science fiction and non-neuro trends in other parts of science.  An excellent book, substantive on every page, and it will make you want to read some of the works he cites.

2. Vasily Grossman, From the Front Line, Stalingrad-Treblinka-Berlin 1941-1945.  Self-recommending, the best third of this volume is just stunningly good.  You do not have to read the whole thing, as there is some degree of repetition.

3. Forough Farrokhzad, Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season.  She died in a car crash in 1967 at the age of thirty-three, but it turns out she was an amazing poet.  I usually do not enjoy poetry in translation, but this is so fiery and full of passion that I am happy to recommend it.  Surely in the original Farsi it is better (and quite different?) yet.

4. André Breton, Nadja.  It is short, and fun enough to read.  But one learns most books from the past are not masterpieces, and that surrealism as a movement — most of all in painting — was more important than the literary outputs of surrealism.  Nadja, to me, sounds like a drag.  Which is fine.  But.  What does Breton really think he is immortalizing here?  At the end he writes “Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or not at all.”  I do appreciate Breton for his understanding of Mexico, and for his cultivation of Haitian art.

5. Emma Southon, Servus: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire.  A very good and aggressively readable book about how terrible slavery was in the Roman Empire.  A useful corrective to other sources as well.  While my general view is that interpretative disputes over antiquity are difficult to resolve, I find her interpretations more intuitive and more convincing than the other side of the debate.