Papyrus, the invention of books in the ancient world - Irene Vallejo

This gem is a book about…books. The history of books, from a physical and literary point of view. From when the ancient oral stories were first fixed on tablets to the invention of papyrus (hence the title) and parchment, the advent of paper and the current day digital era. From manually copied texts to the printing press revolution.

The praise of folly - Erasmus of Rotterdam

I’ve been having this book on my reading list since I was a student. I finally checked it off. It’s a very ironic, yet extremely disruptive text written by this Dutch renaissance intellectual at the beginning of the 16th century. It targets superstitions, common ideas and attitudes of a wide share of society, and it’s particularly sharp against theologians in genearal and the Catholic Church more specifically.