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<div class="goodreads-card" data-title="Hemlock Cup, The" data-author="hughes-bettany">
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<h3 class="goodreads-title">
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10187742" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Hemlock Cup, The</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">hughes-bettany</p>
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<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: 30/11/2025</span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">We think the way we do because Socrates thought the way he did. His aphorism 'The unexamined life is not worth living' may have originated twenty-five centuries ago, but it is a founding principle of modern life. For seventy years Socrates was a vigorous citizen of Golden Age Athens, philosophising in the squares and public arenas rather than in the courts of kings, before his beloved city turned on him, condemning him to death by poison.
Socrates lived in and contributed to a city that nurtured key ingredients of contemporary civilisation - democracy, liberty, science, drama, rational thought - yet, as he wrote almost nothing down, he himself is an enigmatic figure. In The Hemlock Cup, acclaimed historian Bettany Hughes gives Socrates the biography he deserves, painstakingly piecing together Socrates' life and using fresh evidence to get closer to the man who asked 'how should we live?' - a question as relevant now as it has ever been.</div>
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<div class="goodreads-card" data-title="Orientalism" data-author="Edward W. Said">
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/355190" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Orientalism</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">Edward W. Said</p>
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<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: 16/11/2025</span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">More than three decades after its first publication, Edward Said's groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East has become a modern classic.
In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding. Essential, and still eye-opening, Orientalism remains one of the most important books written about our divided world.</div>
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<div class="goodreads-card" data-title="Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century" data-author="Tony Judt">
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<h3 class="goodreads-title">
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6613495" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">Tony Judt</p>
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<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: 07/11/2025</span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">We have entered an age of forgetting. Our world, we insist, is unprecedented, wholly new. The past has nothing to teach us. Drawing provocative connections between a dazzling range of subjects, from Jewish intellectuals and the challenge of evil in the recent European past to the interpretation of the Cold War and the displacement of history by heritage, the late historian Tony Judt takes us beyond what we think we know of the past to explain how we came to know it, showing how much of our history has been sacrificed in the triumph of myth — making over understanding and denial over memory. Reappraisals offers a much-needed road map back to the historical sense we urgently need.
Judt's book, Ill Fares the Land , republished in 2021 featuring a new preface by bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer , Ta-Nehisi Coates.</div>
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<div class="goodreads-card" data-title="The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance" data-author="Anthony Gottlieb">
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<h3 class="goodreads-title">
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29776963" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">Anthony Gottlieb</p>
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<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: 03/11/2025</span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">Already a classic, this landmark account of early Western thought now appears in a new edition with expanded coverage of the Middle Ages. The Dream of Reason takes a fresh look at the writings of the great thinkers of classic philosophy and questions many pieces of conventional wisdom. The book invites comparison with Bertrand Russell's monumental History of Western Philosophy, "but Gottlieb's book is less idiosyncratic and based on more recent scholarship" (Colin McGinn, Los Angeles Times). A New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Best Book, and a Times Literary Supplement Best Book of 2001.</div>
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<div class="goodreads-card" data-title="Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood" data-author="DaMaris B. Hill">
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57693270" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">DaMaris B. Hill</p>
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<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: 02/11/2025</span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">From the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing comes a new book of narrative in verse that takes a personal and historical look at the experience of Black girlhood.
In Breath Better Spent , DaMaris B. Hill hoists her childhood self onto her shoulders, together taking in the landscape of Black girlhood in America. At a time when Black girls across the country are increasingly vulnerable to unjust violence, unwarranted incarceration, and unnoticed disappearance, Hill chooses to celebrate and protect the girl she carries, using the narrative-in-verse style of her acclaimed book A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing to revisit her youth. There, jelly sandals, Double Dutch beats, and chipped nail polish bring the breath of laughter; in adolescence, pomegranate lips, turntables, and love letters to other girls’ boyfriends bring the breath of longing. Yet these breaths cannot be taken alone, and as she carries her childhood self through the broader historical space of Black girls in America, Hill is forced to grapple with expression in a space of stereotype, desire in a space of hyper-sexuality, joy in a space of heartache.
Paying homage to prominent Black female figures from Zora Neale Hurston to Whitney Houston and Toni Morrison, Breath Better Spent invites you to walk through this landscape, too, exploring the spaces―both visible and invisible―that Black girls occupy in the national imagination, taking in the communal breath of girlhood, and asking In a country like America, what does active love and protection of Black girls look like?</div>
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<div class="goodreads-card" data-title="For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf" data-author="Ntozake Shange">
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9307770" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">Ntozake Shange</p>
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<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: 01/11/2025</span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">This revolutionary, award-winning play by a lauded playwright and poet is a fearless portrayal of the experiences of women of color—“extraordinary and wonderful…that anyone can relate to” ( The New York Times ) and continues to move and resonate with readers today more than ever.
From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp's Public Theater and on Broadway, the Obie Award-winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country. Passionate and fearless, Shange's words reveal what it is to be of color and female in the twentieth century. First published in 1975 when it was praised by The New Yorker for "encompassing...every feeling and experience a woman has ever had," for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come. Here is the complete text, with stage directions, of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.</div>
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<div class="goodreads-card" data-title="Loitering with Intent" data-author="Muriel Spark">
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18470099" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Loitering with Intent</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">Muriel Spark</p>
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<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: 28/10/2025</span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">Where does art start or reality end? Happily loitering about London, c. 1949, with the intent of gathering material for her writing, Fleur Talbot finds a job “on the grubby edge of the literary world” at the very peculiar Autobiographical Association. Mad egomaniacs writing their memoirs in advance ― or poor fools ensnared by a blackmailer? When the association’s pompous director steals Fleur’s manuscript, fiction begins to appropriate life.</div>
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<div class="goodreads-card" data-title="A Darker Electricity: The Origins of Spiral Tribe Sound System" data-author="Mark Angelo Harrison">
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<h3 class="goodreads-title">
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/126127940" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">A Darker Electricity: The Origins of Spiral Tribe Sound System</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">Mark Angelo Harrison</p>
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<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: 25/10/2025</span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">At the time, it was unclear why the UK government targeted the Spiral Tribe travelling sound system. Even after arresting many key members and launching one of Britain's biggest court cases against them. Was it really because they were a marauding horde of anarcho-techno-pirates, their outlandish music calling a generation to rebel against conservatism, convention, and even consensus reality?
Or was it because, as pioneers of the 1990s free party movement, championing the new British breakbeat and European techno sound, they were reclaiming social space in warehouses and out under the stars? Each weekend they pulled ever bigger crowds away from consumer culture. No superstar DJs, no door policy and everyone dancing together as equals. An inspiring, unifying force of creativity.
As Spiral Tribe's co-founder and visual artist (or as the Crown prosecutor described him, 'the criminal ringleader' who'd helped 'mastermind' Britain's 'biggest ever illegal rave' at Castlemorton), Mark Angelo Harrison has a unique perspective to tell their inside story.
He vividly charts their nomadic journey and the rapid escalation of their popularity - and notoriety. From small squat-scene parties in London to enormous warehouse raves and free festivals. From one little overloaded van to the mighty convoy of matt-black military vehicles that instigated the teknivals of Europe.</div>
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<div class="goodreads-card" data-title="Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI" data-author="Karen Hao">
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222725817" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">Karen Hao</p>
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<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: 16/10/2025</span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">From a brilliant longtime AI insider granted intimate access to the world of Sam Altman and OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy
When longtime AI expert Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI, five years ago, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, it was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile forces. What could go wrong?
Over time, first for the MIT Technology Review, then the Wall Street Journal, and now for the Atlantic, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that breakthrough success requires an almost unprecedented amount of proprietary the “compute” power of scarce high-end chips and the processing capacity to compile and drive these massive large language model data sets, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans on the ground “cleaning up” the data for sweatshop wages throughout the global South, and a truly alarming spike in the need for energy and water underlying everything. Somewhere near you, a server farm is being built. he truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play of this great game. How would Sam Altman and OpenAI resist such Faustian temptations?
Spoiler they didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within Open AI and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact last year with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing by the Open AI board just as he seemed at the top of the world, and then the board’s ignominious retreat and Altman’s triumphant return. The true story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is one of the great tales of corporate hubris and dysfunction for the highest of stakes. But this isn’t just a tale of a single company and its team, however fascinating they are. The g forces pressing down on this crew are deforming the judgement of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao also shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction at scale grind on. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down on the darkling plain where the real suffering happens at impact, Empire of AI is the book we need to pierce the veil and bring the stakes into sharp focus.</div>
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<div class="goodreads-card" data-title="Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself" data-author="Harriet Ann Jacobs">
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/597671" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">Harriet Ann Jacobs</p>
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<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: 14/10/2025</span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">One of the central firsthand accounts of slavery in America
A haunting, evocative recounting of her life as a slave in North Carolina and of her final escape and emancipation, Harriet Jacobs's classic narrative, written between 1853 and 1858 and published pseduonymously in 1861, tells firsthand of the horrors inflicted on slaves. In writing this extraordinary memoir, which culminates in the seven years she spent hiding in a crawl space in her grandmother's attic, Jacobs skillfully used the literary genres of her time, presenting a thoroughly feminist narrative that portrays the evils and traumas of slavery, particularly for women and children.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.</div>
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Scrapbook Note •