36 books to read this summer - curated by LEVITY’s expert guests

Ending Aging — Aubrey de Grey & Michael Rae

A roadmap for repairing the seven categories of age-related damage.

Still stands up 17 years on; the tech is now catching up.

Methuselah’s Zoo — Steven Austad

What exceptionally long-lived animals teach us about human longevity.

Offers the evolutionary perspective most gerontologists miss.

Replacing Aging — Jean Hebert

Tissue-replacement strategies for rejuvenation.

Highlights under-appreciated routes to age reversal.

Star Maker — Olaf Stapledon

Sweeping 1937 SF “history” of future intelligences and cosmic evolution.

Shaped his taste for truly long-term thinking.

The Anthropic Cosmological Principle — John D. Barrow & Frank Tipler

Cosmic fine-tuning, omega-point speculation, and humanity’s role.

Showed him physics can tackle ultimate-scale questions.

The Quantum Thief — Hannu Rajaniemi

Post-singularity heist romp in a transformed Solar System.

Brimming with provocative tech ideas (and fun).

The Beginning of Infinity — David Deutsch

An argument that knowledge-creation is potentially unbounded.

A call for epistemic rigour and optimism.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Fan-fic that teaches Bayesian thinking through wizardry.

One of few novels that treats aging as a solvable problem.

The Great CEO Within — Matt Mochary & Alex MacCaw

Tactical handbook for scaling a company.

“Short chapters, zero fluff - perfect for founders.”

What’s Our Problem? — Tim Urban

Big-picture look at civic discourse and progress traps.

His go-to if you’re not an entrepreneur.

The General and the Genius — James Kunetka

How Oppenheimer and Gen. Groves ran the Manhattan Project.

A case study in mega-project execution and CEO–CTO dynamics.

Any solid biography of Christopher Columbus

Venture financing & milestone negotiations, 15th-century style.

“Startup life, four centuries early.”

The Beginning of Infinity — David Deutsch

See above.

His touchstone for distinguishing description from explanation.

Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson

1992 cyber-punk novel that coined “metaverse.”

Predicted much of today’s tech landscape.

The Fabric of Reality — David Deutsch

Four “threads” (quantum theory, computation, evolution, epistemology) that weave reality.

A genuine paradigm-shifter.

The Singularity Is Near — Ray Kurzweil

Exponential tech forecasts and AI-enabled transcendence.

Grounded his early tech optimism.

The Case Against Death — Patrick Linden

Philosophical arguments for radical life extension.

Aligns with his own death-abolition agenda.

Ageless — Andrew Steele

Intro to aging biology and the coming interventions.

“Almost as good as The Death of Death.”

The Singularity Is Nearer — Ray Kurzweil

Follow-up pushing the timing of the intelligence explosion closer.

Kurzweil remains the exponential thinker, in his view.

State of the Future — The Millennium Project (annual)

Data-rich scenarios out to 2050.

Helps stretch the strategic horizon.

Physics of the Impossible / Physics of the Future — Michio Kaku

What science now deems feasible—or soon will.

Endorses his techno-optimism.

One, No One and One Hundred Thousand — Luigi Pirandello

A man realises everyone has a different version of him.

Explores identity - central to how we age and eat.

The China Study — T. Colin Campbell & Thomas M. Campbell II

Landmark epidemiology linking diet, protein and disease.

Early evidence that too much protein hinders longevity.

Morning and Evening — Jon Fosse

Spare Norwegian novella on memory, aging and mortality.

Captures the fog between reality and recollection.

Well-Being and Death — Ben Bradley

How death affects welfare, and why it matters ethically.

The book that sent him to grad school.

The Methods of Ethics — Henry Sidgwick

19th-century masterwork systematising moral theory.

A model of clarity he still leans on.

Elon Musk — Walter Isaacson

Inside the mindset powering rockets, EVs and everything else.

Template for “going all-in on hard problems.”

The Case Against Death — Patrick Linden

See José’s section.

A concise moral case for curing aging.

Terra Ignota series — Ada Palmer

Political SF set in a pluralistic 25th-century Earth.

A plausible, messy, better-than-today far future.

The Right Price — Peter J. Neumann & Joshua T. Cohen

How value-based drug pricing should work.

Essential for anyone puzzling over longevity-drug economics.

Ibis trilogy — Amitav Ghosh

Opium-war era saga spanning India and China.

Proof that living longer means more time for great fiction.

Zoobiquity — Barbara Natterson-Horowitz & Kathryn Bowers

How human and veterinary medicine inform each other; animals as unexpected models of disease.

Reframed her thinking about cross-species research projects.

Methuselah’s Zoo — Steven Austad

What exceptionally long-lived animals teach us about human longevity.

A comparative-biology perspective she finds “a very interesting read.”

Eternity Soup — Greg Critser

A journalistic tour of the modern anti-aging movement and its hormone-therapy roots.

Useful historical context for today’s longevity hype.

The Death of Death — José Cordeiro & David Wood

Case for aging as a reversible condition, pitched to general readers.

Adds another angle to the current debate on radical life extension.