Misc. Non-fiction

In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris’ The End of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos.

A CLASSIC FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF ONE SUMMER Every time Bill Bryson walks out the door, memorable travel literature threatens to break out. His previous excursion along the Appalachian Trail resulted in the sublime national bestseller A Walk in the Woods. In A Sunburned Country is his report on what he found in an entirely different place: Australia, the country that doubles as a continent, and a place with the friendliest inhabitants, the hottest, driest weather, and the m

This is an inAudible lossless TrueDecrypt, ripped directly from the Audible AAX to create one .m4b file. No transcoding or re-encoding (and therefore a loss of quality) was done in this process. The .m4b audiobook is chapterised by hand. I have used my copy of the book for the exact chapter titles. It looks fantastic when using a playback device that supports .m4b chapters.

Developing video games - hero’s journey or fool’s errand? The creative and technical logistics that go into building today’s hottest games can be more harrowing and complex than the games themselves, often seeming like an endless maze or a bottomless abyss. In Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, Jason Schreier takes listeners on a fascinating odyssey behind the scenes of video game development, where the creator may be a team of 600 overworked underdogs or a solitary geek genius. Exploring the artistic ch

From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values “I can’t think of a more important piece of writing to read right now. I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn’t anymore. Please read this. I promise you won’t regret it.”—Tommy Orange, bestselling author of Wandering Stars and There There

“If your relationship is so bad, why don’t you just leave them?” “If you were in such an abusive relationship, why did you stay with them for so long?” “If you knew you were in a relationship with such a toxic person, why didn’t you ask people for help?” If you’ve ever been asked these questions, aside from being ignorant and hurtful, you’ll know it’s beyond frustrating. The answer to the above questions, whilst it’s complex and often confusing, can be given with two words: trauma bonded. If you

Writing advice tends to be full of “rules” and “tips” which are either too broad to be helpful or outright wrong. In On Writing and Worldbuilding, we will discuss specific and applicable ideas to consider, from effective methods of delivering exposition and foreshadowing, to how communication, commerce, and control play into the fall of an empire.

Continuing where Thus Spoke Zarathustra left off, Nietzsche’s controversial work Beyond Good and Evil is one of the most influential philosophical texts of the 19th century and one of the most controversial works of ideology ever written. Attacking the notion of morality as nothing more than institutionalised weakness, Nietzsche criticises past philosophers for their unquestioning acceptance of moral precepts. Nietzsche tried to formulate what he called “the philosophy of the future”.

From the best-selling author of How to Change Your Mind, a pioneering search for consciousness in the brain and beyond A World Appears is the story of the quest to solve the greatest mystery in nature: consciousness. How does it feel to be you with your own personal feelings, thoughts and experiences? Every one of us is intimately familiar with consciousness, but no one knows how – or why – it came to be that three pounds of grey matter can generate a subjective point of view.