Time for the RudeVC summer reading list again. Here are my picks for the summer of ’17.

The Gene: An Intimate History, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Mukherjee has a talent for crafting an engaging, page-turning narrative out of complex scientific topics. His first book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. In some ways, The Gene serves as the prequel, recounting the stories of the ancestors of modern hereditary biology like Gregor Mendel, and leading up to the contemporary day of genome mapping and gene editing technologies. The haunting question is: should humans ever go beyond reading our own genomes to actually writing them?

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Shibumi by Trevanian. This book was recommended to me by my lawyer, of all people, and I always heed his advice. Shibumi is a spy novel in the classical sense, though it is written like a beautiful piece of literature in the methodical way of Rousseau. The word shibumi in Japanese is so rich in context that it elicited a wide variety of reactions from native speakers whom I queried. If you have any affinity for the Japanese design aesthetic, for France’s Basque country, for the strategic game of Go, or simply for spy thrillers in the most refined sense, you’ll love this book.

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The Three Body Problem, by Liu Cixin. I’ve only read books 1 and 2 of this captivating trilogy translated from one of China’s most prolific science fiction writers, and I’m chomping at the bit for the delivery of book 3. There’s a strange contradiction revealed by the naïveté and kindness demonstrated by humanity when faced with the universe: On Earth, humankind can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when humans gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligence exists, it must be from civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct. Mind-blowing !

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Finally, for any VCs who are still not familiar with the lean startup concept, Eric Ries should be on top of your beach blanket this summer.

Happy reading !

[previous RudeVC reading list editions: 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016]