Here are a few you might want to read this summer.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Anything about Lincoln is interesting,

I admire him and the tough things he faced, including having his son die being among the worst.

And it is striking this balance between the tragedy of life and the joy of life.

It's about grief and purpose and it's very touching.

Everything Happens for a Reason by Kate Bowler

You've got this one person who's sick and is trying to figure out how they should deal

with their bad news.

You don't want to think of outcomes as just being random, you want to be able to connect

them to something you control.

She's not asking you to cry for her.

She's just telling you what happened.

Origin Story by David Christian

The whole theory of Big History is to have a structure that makes it easy to understand

and explain things.

I think it helps people to have that understanding that now we have big blocks of knowledge,

but the big blocks of knowledge relate to each other in a strong way.

for me this broad knowledge of how all the pieces fit together.

You know, to me that's interesting.

Factfulness by Hans Rosling

It's pretty fantastic because he really talks through how you should think about the world.

For the first time in this book, he teaches you a categorization of four tiers that is

super helpful.

Like tier 1: no bike, tier 2: bike, tier 3: some cars in the picture,

tier 4: a lot of cars, too many cars.

I never got to tell Hans how much I liked his book, but the world would be better if

millions of people read it.

Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

What Isaacson does is say what made da Vinci special.

He's most known for his art.

He thought of himself as a military engineer and a scientist, an expert on music.

And so he really defines the term Renaissance man.

These are books that I'd recommend this summer.

I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.