How the Mind Works is a 1997 non-fiction book by Steven Pinker, who presents his ideas on how the human mind developed and how it produces the feats we take for granted every day, such as talking, walking, and making friends. Pinker is a cognitive neuroscientist who studies language acquisition in children. He approaches the study of the mind from a psychological and cognitive perspective, but he did extensive research for the book and brings... Read How The Mind Works Summary

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How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (2018) was written by Michael Pollan after curiosity and a personal desire to experience psychedelics for himself prompted exploration into psychedelic research. Pollan uses multiple forms of narrative to weave a story that’s part history, part memoir, part biomedical nonfiction, and part travelogue. The book follows the history of LSD and psilocybin as well as... Read How to Change Your Mind Summary

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How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery (2015) is a nonfiction book by Kevin Ashton about creativity. Ashton has led three start-ups and was a pioneer in the use of radio-frequency identification (RFID) in inventory systems, underscoring his business credibility in this area. His thesis extends into the creative process involved in any field, including art and medicine. Ashton’s main point strikes an open and democratic tone: Being creative is... Read How to Fly a Horse Summary

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I Am Legend by Richard Matheson was published in 1954. The novel depicts a dystopian/post-apocalyptic world in which people infected with a contagious disease behave like vampires. The last human man, Robert Neville, must protect himself as he studies the scientific basis for the disease. I Am Legend discusses moral relativism, the evolution of the horror genre, and loneliness. It has been adapted several times, most recently as the 2007 film I Am Legend starring... Read I Am Legend Summary

I Am Number Four (2010) is the first book in the modern young adult science fiction series Lorien Legacies by Pittacus Lore, the pseudonym of authors James Frey and Jobie Hughes. Despite the novel’s mixed reviews, I Am Number Four spent seven successive weeks at the top of the New York Times children’s bestseller list. The novel was adapted into a film of the same name in 2011 by DreamWorks Pictures.Other works by this author... Read I Am Number Four Summary

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life is an in-depth introduction to the microbiome and how it interacts with humans and other species. Author Ed Yong is a science writer for The Atlantic. His writing has also appeared in many other publications, such as The New Yorker, Wired, The New York Times, and Nature. The book’s original hardcover edition was published in 2016; this guide is based on the... Read I Contain Multitudes Summary

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If on a winter’s night a traveler is a 1979 postmodernist novel by Italo Calvino. The dual narrative is composed of two parallel strands: numbered chapters in which the narrator directly describes to the audience the process of reading the book, and titled chapters constructed from hypothetical first chapters of various books that the audience is reading. The innovative novel has been praised by critics and hailed as highly influential.This guide uses the 1998 Vintage... Read If on a Winter's Night a Traveler Summary

American journalist and short-story writer Margaret Craven released her debut novel, I Heard the Owl Call My Name, in the U.S. in 1973, where it became a New York Times best-seller. Originally published in Canada in 1967, the novel, like her later works, centers around the native population of British Columbia.  Mark Brian is a 27-year-old Anglican vicar sent by his bishop to the coastal village of Kingcome to live among the Kwakiutl Indians and... Read I Heard The Owl Call My Name Summary

Susan Sontag’s 1978 book Illness as Metaphor is an 87-page work of critical theory exploring the language we use to describe disease and its victims. The work was originally published in the New York Review of Books as three long-form essays. Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor while undergoing treatment for breast cancer, though not mentioned in the text. This genre—critical theoretical examinations of social and cultural events or phenomena—was where Sontag established her reputation. Illness... Read Illness As Metaphor Summary

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Inferno by Dan Brown is the fourth installment in Brown’s Robert Langdon series of mystery/thriller novels, following (in order) Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, and The Lost Symbol, and preceding Origin. Each edition covers a self-contained story, so readers need not follow the series in order, and often includes themes centered on European and Christian history and cultural traditions. The title character, Robert Langdon, is the only recurring character. Inferno won the Goodreads... Read Inferno Summary

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Inherit the Wind is a 1955 play by American playwrights Jerome Lawrence (1915-2004) and Robert E. Lee (1918-1994). It is based on the 1925 Scopes trial, where schoolteacher John T. Scopes was put on trial for teaching the theory of evolution at a time when doing so was illegal. Although Inherit the Wind draws from the events of the Scopes trial, it deviates significantly from the details of the case, as Lawrence and Lee were... Read Inherit the Wind Summary

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