Sapiens

This is the book that made me a reader. Before it I had read maybe three or four books in my whole life, and most of those were for school. I am not a reader. Or I wasn't.

I did not even mean to read it. I had bought a few books in French, started one of them, Zero to One, and kept struggling, not with the language exactly, more that reading in French burns extra energy for me, so I gave up on it and went looking for something in English instead. I could not find the same one, so I grabbed this. And then I could not put it down.

I am not a history person. If you ask me what I am into it is business, not the human story going back tens of thousands of years. And it grabbed me anyway. I read a hundred and fifty pages in under three days, and I am not exaggerating, I cannot fake that. Then three hundred. About four hundred pages in three weeks, from a guy who does not read. It is complex, it covers so many things, our history, our nature, why we are the way we are, and it actually helped me understand a lot.

Here is how far into me it got. One night I had been reading it heavily right before bed, and I woke up at four thirty in the morning, fully awake, with this thought that humanity is going to end, that something is going to take over us, that I actually needed to do something about it. Four thirty in the morning. That is what a book about where our species came from and where it might be going does to you when it is the last thing you read at night. I just lay there thinking.

I remember telling myself, if I read fifty of these in a year I would be a different person, I would basically be Einstein. And the thing cost twelve euros. Twelve. What you get back from that is not normal.

But the real thing here is not the facts in it. It is that it turned reading into something I actually do. Reading is the gym for the brain, and I had never once set foot in that gym. This was the rep that made it click, and the part people miss is that it is not even hard, not like the real gym where you have to drag yourself there. I read it between meals, on the train, before bed, because I wanted to. After it I kept going and I have not really stopped, and a lot of what changed for me after came partly from that, from becoming someone who reads.

So I do not have a clean verdict on it as a book. What I have is this. It is the one that opened the door.