Since it's been some time, my discussions of the books won't be perfect.
Zen and the Martial Arts - Joe Hyams; I liked it. It's a short of book of life lessons related to martial arts, tied in with discussions of the authors time spent with Bruce Lee. I took Taekwondo for a year in college, and I recall resonating with a lot of what he discussed.
Der Steppenwolf - Herman Hesse; I personally really like books like this. Kind of twisted, very thought provoking. Kind of like 1984 in the sense that it is split into parts, where part of the book is like reading a book within the book. It's about an old hermit in the end of his life, and his thoughts and experiences, grappling with age and loneliness.
Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain - Lisa Feldman Barrett; I have a psych minor, so the topic is up my alley. I enjoy books where someone with a degree shares random thought-provoking discussions they've studied over time. The content we ingest on the internet too often comes from the unqualified and over-sensationalized pandering for views.
On Juneteenth - Annette Gordon-Reed; informative for a topic I knew little about. The book gives a backstory on the history and culture of Texas, and the local strife during abolition times. Many were happy, some opposed the change, which is why slaves in some areas didn't find out they were free until a certain bill was passed.
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, and Christobel - Samuel Taylor Coleridge; one must keep in mind these ballads, or lyrical stories, were written around the start of the 1800s, but they're interesting. Ancient Mariner gives a sense of life on the seas before modern times and contains the famous Albatross reference. Kubla Khan was an interesting piece. Christobel was about like a medieval princess sneaking out and encountering a figure in the woods at night, and talks of betrayal.
Diaspora - Greg Egan; this book just stuck out to me while I was walking around my local bookstore when I lived in SF, and I'm really glad I bought it. I don't read science fiction that often, but my physics and philosophy backgrounds really helped me appreciate what this book attempted to imagine. For a book written in 1997 too, you have to respect it. This book follows a noncorporeal mind in futuristic Earth who must flee Earth when a burst from a collapsing star is detected and threatens the world. The fleeing entities search for inhabited planets during their escape, who they must also warn of the impending doom, while searching for a way avoid the cataclysm by accessing the multiverse.
Schild's Ladder - Greg Egan; I enjoyed Diaspora so much I immediately read another book by the author, and it did not disappoint. Written in 2002, about intergalactic civilization in the far future, a ship of noncorporeal entities is studying Physics (Calabi-Yau manifolds, etc.) when they create an area of space with different physics from our own. This area turns out to be nonconvergent, and threatens to spread and engulf the universe itself, so the ship must flee while trying to figure out how to either stop the space from spreading or learn to migrate into the strange new reality.
Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut; it was okay. I'm not saying it was bad, but reading Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse 5 first set high expectations. The book is about some guy discussing a made-up religion and going to an island before the end of the world. It was a good satirical commentary on both the habitual and the often-ignored aspects of life.