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- 36 books to read this summer - curated by LEVITY’s expert guests
36 books to read this summer - curated by LEVITY’s expert guests
Nobel laureates, sci-fi epics, and - yes - plenty of longevity

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Expert-approved books for a smarter summer
📚 Summer offers you a rare chance to swap the doom-scrolling feed for finite pages. Below is a book-bag-ready roundup of every title our LEVITY guests have recommended on-air in the past year. Pick one (or three), drop them in your tote, and let the mind expand.

Jamie Justice
EVP, Health Domain at XPRIZE; gerontologist at Wake Forest School of Medicine
→ Watch the episode.
Title & Author | What it’s about | Why Jamie likes it |
---|---|---|
Why We Age — Steven Austad | A zoologist’s accessible tour of the biology and evolution of aging. | “Foundational, pivotal” - the book that pulled her into geroscience. |
Metaphors We Live By — George Lakoff & Mark Johnson | How everyday metaphors quietly steer thought and behaviour. | She uses it when framing debates like “Is aging a disease?” |
The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman | Classic guide to human-centred design. | Helps her design research systems and incentive prizes around real human use. |
Aubrey de Grey
Biogerontologist; co-founder, SENS & LEV Foundation
→ Watch the episode.
Title & Author | What it’s about | Why Aubrey likes it |
---|---|---|
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. |

Recommended by Anders Sandberg.
Anders Sandberg
Futurist philosopher, Institute for Future Studies, Stockholm; ex-FHI Oxford
→ Watch the episode.
Title & Author | What it’s about | Why Anders likes it |
---|---|---|
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). |
Laurence Ion
Co-founder VitaDAO & City of Viva; longevity community builder
→ Watch the episode.
Title & Author | What it’s about | Why Laurence likes it |
---|---|---|
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. |
Peter Fedichev
Physicist & CEO, Gero; AI-driven longevity drug hunter
→ Watch the episode.
Title & Author | What it’s about | Why Peter likes it |
---|---|---|
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. |

Two popular books among our guests.
Derya Unutmaz
Immunologist, Jackson Laboratory; AI-longevity grant awardee
→ Watch the episode.
Title & Author | What it’s about | Why Derya likes it |
---|---|---|
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. |
José Cordeiro
Futurist & author, The Death of Death
→ Watch the episode.
Title & Author | What it’s about | Why José likes it |
---|---|---|
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. |

Recommended by Valter Longo.
Valter Longo
Director, USC Longevity Institute; fasting-mimicking diet pioneer
→ Watch the episode.
Title & Author | What it’s about | Why Valter likes it |
---|---|---|
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. |
Travis Timmerman
Philosopher of death & ethics, Seton Hall University
→ Watch the episode.
Title & Author | What it’s about | Why Travis likes it |
---|---|---|
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. |
Daniel Ives
CEO, Shift Bioscience; cell-simulation trailblazer
→ Watch the episode.
Title & Author | What it’s about | Why Daniel likes it |
---|---|---|
Elon Musk — Walter Isaacson | Inside the mindset powering rockets, EVs and everything else. | Template for “going all-in on hard problems.” |
Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston
Cognitive neuroscientist, Monash University; author, The Future Loves You
→ Watch the episode.
Title & Author | What it’s about | Why Ariel likes it |
---|---|---|
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. |
Opium-war era saga spanning India and China. | Proof that living longer means more time for great fiction. |

Some of Rochelle Buffenstein’s favorites.
Rochelle Buffenstein
Comparative biologist & Research Professor, University of Illinois Chicago; world authority on naked mole-rats
→ Watch the episode.
Title & Author | What it’s about | Why Rochelle flagged it |
---|---|---|
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. |