I have always read fiction up until now because I enjoy them very much. Every year I’d set a target of about 50 fiction work to be read within that year and will mostly reach my goals by the end of it. However, this year, I’ve decided to broaden my horizon and read non-fiction too.
After much mulling over and a discussion with my dear cousin, I began my journey on the road to non-fiction books with not one but two books simultaneously.
Book 1) Opening Pandora’ Box by Ferdie Addis
Book 2) Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
Book 1 feels like an extension of my favourite genre (mythological fiction). The author discusses several phrases that the English language has picked up from Greek/Roman/Egyptian and other mythologies. Addis gives a brief background about the origin story of each these phrases and how it has metamorphosed its existence in the English language today.
Book 2 has opened up a whole new world of information for me. Harari provides a panoramic view of human evolution, sometimes quite contrary to the things we’ve learnt through our academic years. Scaling briskly through various levels of evolution, much like the theme song of Big Bang theory, Harari pauses at a few significant milestones of history like The Cognitive Revolution (approximately 70,000 years ago), The Agricultural Revolution (approximately 10,000 years ago) and then gradually moving on to the Scientific Revolution, The Industrial Revolution and the Information Revolution.
I have yet reached only till the Agricultural Revolution and am awed by the probabilities of what may have led to us humans be who we are now. And although we consider ourselves the mighty masters of the universe now, countless generations before, we were no more important than the myriad other organisms that populated the planet back then. It all started when animals much like the modern humans first appearing about 2.5 million years ago.