100 books like There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness

I believe that the best haunted house books are ones in which it’s the characters who are haunted. In this book by Daphne du Maurier, I’m not sure if the house is haunted by the specter of Rebecca, but I know the narrator certainly is.

I love how the author creates an atmosphere filled with dread as the new wife imagines her predecessor, tries to live up to her reputation, and finally learns who she really was. 

An elegant mystery set in a near-to-partly-cloudy future. In the wake of some sort of apocalypse, communities have rebuilt.

In the Coast Road region, a sustainable civilization based on careful attention to quotas and mutual regard would seem an idyll of peaceful coexistence.

And yet. Enid is an investigator, called upon at times of uncomfortable questions.

She and her partner are called to look into a suspicious death. The buried realities encountered reveal a less-than-ideal picture of communities coping with things that do not fit with their presumptions.

A quiet mystery built atop a fascinating portrait of What Comes Next. I was drawn to the characters, the situation, but most especially the questions hovering just outside the confines of the story.

My mother has a service dog, and I’ve inherited a disability or two. The heroine in The Spare Man didn’t let her dog or her physical limitations stop her. She even used them to her advantage when she could.

I also loved how the book was an old-school Nick and Nora style murder mystery told in the far future on a space cruise ship. The author mixed those genres like she was mixing a tasty cocktail.

It was glorious fun from first page to last. And like all the stories on my list, it showed how much a hero can shine, no matter what gender or lack of gender she is, no matter how big or how small, what sort of personality or capability she has. It might be more of a mark of courage for a hero to find a friend than storm a castle, but that’s okay because… show more.

Not a mystery, but one of the finest science fiction novels about a subject not often encountered in SF:  kindness.

A group of travelers arrive at a way station, each on their way elsewhere, when a catastrophe strands them. None of them are human, they are all aliens, and they default to helping each other, and by the end friendships are forged.

Chambers is amazing at exploring the heart of cooperation and recognition. Their are tensions born of mutual ignorance, but the default here is to figure the problems out and build. Refreshing. 

The most controversial aspect of nearly a century of research in quantum mechanics is how the perspective of an observer, either sentient or mechanical, determines reality on the subatomic scale. What does this say—if anything—about life in our above-ground, macro world? With zero sensationalism and great rigor, not to mention witty and accessible writing, physicists Rosenblum and Kuttner sort out questions of particle mechanics, quantum theory, and consciousness in a manner that is understandable to the layperson yet faithful to the findings of this most confounding of the hard sciences. 

I savored this book sip by sip, wishing that each chapter would have lasted a little longer, a little longer. I felt a “healthy envy” for anyone lucky enough to have had a teacher like Klein in high school.

It’s impossible not to fall in love with the cosmos while reading his work. His ability to explain complex scientific concepts in an accessible and poetic manner is admirable.

Each chapter has given me an unforgettable early morning coffee, revealing at a pace the magic that science holds in every corner.

Most academics have played the game David Lodge calls “Humiliations” in his novel Changing Places: you have to list books that you should have read but didn’t, the more scandalous the better. For a while, Reichenbach’s book was my go-to. I was writing my PhD on the direction of time but hadn’t read Reichenbach. Because it was old I figured I indirectly knew everything in it. Holy moly was I wrong! Not only is The Direction of Time the first serious blend of good philosophy and physics tackling the direction of time — plus a great example of the type of philosophy I deeply value — but it is still packed with insights. No question, I should have read it earlier in my life.  

This best explains why the dominant ideas in the popular version of science are wrong and why the right ideas make sense. Prigogine, a Nobel Laureate, and his colleague philosopher Isabelle Stengers show that the popular notions of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, time, and determinism don’t correspond to scientific observations.

These wrong notions lead to paradoxes that make it impossible for scientists to understand such basic phenomena as human consciousness, which makes all science possible. Instead, the authors lay out an evolutionary approach, validated by much research, that shows how time, evolution, and reality can be understood without mysticism.

This is a collection of essays by Kuhn, written later in his life, as he tried to clarify and develop the view he initially presented in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Kuhn reflects on developments in the sociology of science that were influenced by his work, as the Strong Programme sociologists of science identified as Kuhnians and relativists.  Kuhn tries to clarify what he meant by “paradigm change”, motivated by a concern to address his critics and to distance his own view from certain types of relativist views.

The autobiographical interview is very engaging, as Kuhn takes this opportunity to reflect on the impact of his book, as well as on the effects the book has had on his life and career. I think much of what Kuhn had to say in these later papers provides important insight into understanding science, especially his remarks on scientific specialization.

This is a collection of twenty-four essays by thirty-six prominent researchers, demonstrating how important this topic has become for both scientific and philosophical research. In 2016 (after I had published ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE: Toward a Metaphysics of Emergence [2012], where I discuss Paul Humphreys’ view on pp. 231-2), he published EMERGENCE: A Philosophical Account, Oxford University Press, New York.

What I find especially significant in this more recent (and more challenging) work is that, in effect, emergence theory has developed into both a metascience and a metaphilosophy–as is evident in Humphreys’ Chapters 2, “Ontological Emergence” and 5, “Conceptual Emergence,” as well as Chapters 6, “Philosophical Topics Related to Emergence,” and 7, “Scientific Topics Related to Emergence.” This parallels very closely my own perspective on both scientific and philosophical conceptions of emergence.