List of Books I've Read

Beautiful prose. Dying Roman emperor reflects on the meaning of life. Food, love. Written in 1950s, good reminder that survival bias means that older books are better. Thought it was fiction, turned out to be less fiction. Could have been 66% shorter.

Written in 1980; feels like the tech industry hasn’t changed much. Incredible ethnography by a journalist.

Main character attempts to escape groundhog day by analysis, rather than action, frustratingly. Nice and short, but with sequels.

Nagasaki in 1890. Written from Dutch and Japanese, male and female perspectives. Colonialism is bad but so was local imperialism. Main characters are good. Bad guys are interestingly bad.

Second favorite, so far, from the Culture series. Sociological writing with interesting characters. Problems of post-abundance, AI in charge. Limits of relativism, benevolent colonialism. There’s an “outside context problem” — which is a challenge/opportunity the society lacks the tools to resist.

Crawlin’!

Translated by Daniel Hahn. Interwoven stories of the Angolan revolution. Complex characters. Magical realism.

Favorite Sanderson in a while

Graphic memoir. Complicity in poisoning the land, people, self. Hard reflections on the rape culture of the Alberta oil sands man-camps.

Electro-magnetism. Discovery of waves. Creation of the modern world of electricity, radio, computers.

Nice little play. You can go back in time but you have to sit in this one chair and you can only do it once while the coffee is hot. It can’t change the present, but it can change the future. Some teary moments. Took me back to Japan with the cute coffee shop setting.

Honest and funny. Quick read. He does 30.4% of the childcare. Struggles with what it means to be a modern dad.

Groundhog Day. Part II. Stops attempting escape. Starts trying to find meaning in the world as it is. Finds seasonality by traveling. Finds joy by biking, physical presence.

Set in Syracuse (Sicily) in 400 BC. Gruesome, funny. Local potters / holy idiots convince Athenian prisoners of war to put on two plays.

Concise, leaves much to the imagination in a nice way. Whodunit from the lawyer’s perspective. Against sensational news.

Hunger games + Hot or Not reality TV

Another nice Sanderson standalone

Another nice Sanderson standalone

Got slow 1/3rd of the way in. Then starting enjoying the slow.

Interesting fantasy. Powers come from plants and fungus from sea monsters that pose existential threat. Turns out to be anti-NIMBY and pro-Government-as-collective-action

Cultural criticism. Claims that measuring art’s success in terms of views and dollars has led to 25 years of stagnation. Successfully art appeals to the average. Pharrell has wide appeal because he mashes everything up. Hipsters like Terry Richardson are creepy at best. Few interesting points, but overall not compelling.

Tedious, often seemed pointless. Vaguely anxiety producing. But also an interesting puzzle. Was fun to talk about with the Pretentious Book Club.

Verbose. Musical descriptions fail to move me or help me understand the music. Interesting take on the intersection of Bach and technology.

Marred by unnecessary contrarian political stances, like mentioning how competent the Nazis were. Is a big fan of Elon Musk, Israel army. Makes broad statements about Egyptian/Arab culture that seem suspect. Doesn’t like Rousseau/romanticism because it was anti-rational, anti-worker. Prefers Diderot’s encyclopedia that showed how to. Likes repairable rather than “perfect” guns. Long second chapter is disorganized. First chapter on the first sail around the world race is excellent and concise. Like that it was written collaboratively online, with input from reviewers.

Murderbot series

Murderbot series

Crawlin’

Quickie. Sanderson’s short stories are better. Bit heavy handed on the disability rights / dignity stuff.

A touch too preachy and violent for my tastes; “complicated” characters don’t end up being complicated

Page turns. Main character is overly competent old wife guy. Too much emphasis on the guy, turns what might have been interesting aliens into 2D bad guys / victims.

When you’re 20% into a book, it’s all been throat-clearing, it’s time to stop reading.

Don’t always agree. Some misses. But the highs are high. Inspired wedding vows.

1880s, Eadweard Muybridge, Leland Stanford, photography, railroads, industrialization as speed, Indian wars, San Francisco, a murder invention of cinema

Cozy but not cutesy. Inclusive but not heavy handed. Sociological storytelling about a powerful woman, shaping her wyrd, in post-Roman England.

Beautiful sentences. Another gem. I enjoy prose by poets.

Beautiful sentences. Kind to kind characters.

Clear thinking, great sentences, still interesting ideas.

Much better than the first. Very good sociological storytelling.

Russia’s poorly managed first exploration of Alaska, genocide of the Apache, invention of the vacuum tube, can digital (binary) computers become analog (continuous) computers. Great beginning, loses speed in the middle, recovers at the end.

Used a high school science teacher as an excuse to constantly over-explain. But great twists and nice morals.

Fun, fast moving, witty.

‘I Remember’ is very quotable

Helped vows

Candy book, more sex than expected

Confirmed things I already believed. Not clear how we actually fix government so it can do things.

Incorrect views on therapy and mental health. Great world building, nicely wraps up first half of long series.

Sometimes very good, sometimes very egotistical and banal

Keynes biography

Empathetic. Critical of bad criticism in defense of good criticism. Jazz is unrepeatable, After a great solo, Mingus told his band: ‘Don’t do that again.’

Mistborn series but steampunk with characters who believe in the (incorrect) broken windows theory of crime fighting

Helps explain why NIMBYs are so committed to Plans. They think it’s higher, constitutional law-making by the People, which shouldn’t be changed without popular referendum.

About nightmares. Not wise to read before bed

Graphic novel. Trauma. Chinese history. California and Alaska. Won a Pulitzer.

Part of the ‘Culture’ series

History of talking heads, mostly their New York and musical context. Seems skeptical of the band.

Tedious, sometimes interesting philosophy

Kinda unpleasant. Plot didn’t move.

Stories aren’t adding up to any insights about music or the brain

Feels a bit dated

Romantasy with awful romance

Results aren’t always good information. Good decisions can lead to bad results, and vice versa. But I didn’t like all the game theory.

Trying to mock how boring pride and prejudice is, but it is still boring to read about boredom

For consultants, but some useful advice

Equality isn’t one thing. Egalitarianism isn’t a coherent program, rather it is a system of mutually antagonistic claims upon society.Review: Too much word-math-games and Rawls-like ‘imagine a perfect society.’ Yet also resists both academic trends. For Rae challenge isn’t to imagine a perfectly equal society or develop a perfectly consistent theory of equality, but to struggle with rough, inconsistent reality.

Connection between his life and philosophy is more than hypocrisy. Interesting as contemporary of Jesus who taught a not dissimilar philosophy. Only a few generations away (learned from people who learned) from the Greeks, like Socrates and Diogenes.

Wrong but interesting.

Unreadable. Disliked the characters relationships (especially the friendships) too much.

Too COVID-y

Awful. Too many adjectives.

Was not captured by first 20 pages

Nostalgic, moving, insightful, elegantly summarizes philosophical theory and applies it to life, deeply sad. Memoir of second-generation Taiwanese kid in the SF Bay and at Berkeley in the 90s.Tries to be cool by selectively not liking things. From the acknowledgments: ‘This is a book about being a good friend, a term that only occasionally applies to me.’

Mind-blowing. Well written. Babies experience consciousness fundamentally differently than adults. Babies are deeply curious about causes (hence: ‘Why?’) in part because they’re dependent on others and thus need to be able to identify social causes. Causal thinking supports counterfactual thinking (aka imagination) which allows us to reflect and iteratively improve more quickly than trial and error. Babies aren’t good at not-doing. They can’t not try on every pair of socks. Being able to execute a task or run through a to-do list or pay attention to just one thing requires a lot of not-doing, aka inhibition, which comes from our front brain, which develops as we age. A lack of inhibition helps babies see the-world-as-it-is (rather than the-world-as-we-categorized-it or the-world-as-we’ve-gotten-used-to-it).

Review: Embarassed at how much I like YouTube Doctor Peter Attia. The book is too wordy and the evangelism makes him seem untrustworthy, but broadly seems correct. Key takeaway: Just as we build up a financial reserve for retirement, we should also build up our physical and mental reserve. Zone 2 training is key because metabolic health drives everything, including dementia. Time-based food restrictions (e.g. intermittent fasting) are more effective for some people (me) rather than calorie-based or food-based. Core stability / balance is key because it prevents injuries while we exercise to build our physical reserve and falls are a major cause of death for the elderly. Your cholesterol can’t be too low.

Literary, nostalgic. Written in a ‘shadowy style’: ‘too obvious a structure is contrivance… too orderly an exposition falsifies the ruminations of the heart…’

Rich characters, complex family dynamics

Mindbending. Truly creative premise.. The cities are geographically overlapping, and one can easily see and hear and touch between them. But the boundary is policed by an alien force. But they still have to see each other, in order not to have car accidents all the time. So citizens of each city learn to unsee citizens of the other.

Insightful explorations of technology. Shows instead of tells.

Grumpy robot earns empathy

Beautiful fragments

Greek philosophy + kinda scifi. What might Plato’s “Republic” actually look like? Would Socrates be annoying and fun?

I like a prose-poem

Useful for teaching and learning. Interesting brain science.

Captures the moment precisely and beautiful. Decribes things I’ve felt but never put words to. Feels a bit like an alternative universe version of my life where I committed to being a writer and got really into EDM. A bit too fixated/whiney on COVID and Trump, but those parts are easily skipped.

Guilty pleasure. Too much torture and no female characters. Too many angry / whiney dudes. Somehow, still good.

Bad guys win!

Good presentations alternate between fact and story. They create tension between the world as it is, and the world as it could be. They make the audience the hero.

The dialectic is between change and acceptance. Mental health is a skill. The four key skills are: 1. distress tolerance 2. mindfulness 3. emotional regulation 4. interpersonal effectiveness. Mastering these skills allows us to shift from a reactive, emotion-drive live towards a values-driven life.

Less inspiring than the first time I read it. Still a must-read for everyone who wants to host dinner parties, improve meetings at work, or organize community.

Thesis: Freedom is not the absence of constraint, but a creative reworking of constraint, particularly the constraint of care-taking. The first half of on Freedom transmutes theory into art, like Nelson did in the Argonauts. The second half is a disorganized book report that commits the worst errors of academic writing. It’s a lot of: ‘Look I did the reading’ and ‘complicating’ everything. Andrea Long Chu harshly reviewed the book in Vulture https://www.vulture.com/article/maggie-nelson-on-freedom-review.html. I was not compelled by the bulk of Andrea Long Chu’s review, which is a too clever argument that criticism letters about removing art from museums is itself art that deserves protection from criticism. But I do agree that Nelson has set a high standard with earlier books, and failed to meet that standard in the second half of the book. I wouldn’t call the arguments boring (which Andrea Long Chu does), but I think the style was.

significance = high trust + high stakes. Significance is scary. It means caring, dancing with fear, taking responsibility, working collaboratively, inspiring others, and doing more than we’re asked.

I thought Wittgenstein’s Mistress would be unreadably post-modern. But it’s actually an interesting story about a woman who has survived an apocalypse. It’s contradictory, unreliable, and time-shifty in a way that feels true of actual memory

Excellent intro to excellent SciFi series

hard boiled detective novel in an interesting alternative universe where indigenous americans didn’t get completely genocided

Exceptionalists think America was a fresh start, free of European corruptions. Rana rejects the idea of originial purity. To establish a viable freedom we must contend with the complexities of our history. 1700s America suggests that genocide is positively correlated with democracy. The New Deal shifted American institutions and values towards security, and away from independence.

Because it’s hard to measure the quality of knowledge work, it is tempting to put our effort into discrete and quantifable tasks, like emails and meetings.

Every day has a natural dip. Morning people are better at not doing (aka only doing the to-do list) before the dip, and better at creative thinking after.

Artful, tense.

Don’t read too many Pratchett books in a row. They’re funny, but quickly become predictable.

Dissapointing ending

Actually 3 books for those of you counting. Interesting magic system.

Interesting and scary alien.

Meta-Moby-Dick

v funny

The first few essays made some interesting points, but the author was overly invested in the trauma of others, and, ironically, failed to escape the trap of self-absorption.

Interesting (and wrong) claim: perfectionism is good because it creates passion, drive, energy. But this requires a counter-inutitive definition of ‘healthy perfectionists’ as perfectionists who aren’t attached to perfection. (Any bad thing can become good if you add the negation to the definition.) It is useful, however, to recognize that ambition, high-standards, and hard work are good things. Interesting idea: “prescriptive balance.” Life shouldn’t be balanced. Too often, we struggle to stay on the narrow beam of other people’s expectations. Instead, we strive for live large, self-directed lives. Interesting contrast: chillers vs. perfectionists. The chiller tells the perfectionist to ‘take it easy.’ The perfectionist tells the chiller to ‘get off the couch.’

Space intrigue in semi-Aztec epic-poetry-obsessed empire. Repeats the West Wing problem: making a few heroes do all the work that would actually take many people. Annoying amount of lying, talking about lying, claiming to be clever, and then blurting.

Deep basics of computing. Hated in 2023, but enjoyed in 2024.

1-2 interesting stories. Most are thin plots with too obvious (telling vs. showing) social justice commentary.

Hawaii was colonized by a mix of whalers/pirates and puritans.

The authors are behavioral economists. They study how people consume information, with particular emphasis on how to communicate with voters / the public. Failing to clarify your own thinking before putting it in writing is disrespectful to your audience. To clarify your writing, clarify your purpose: why are you writing this? who is it for?

Preachy. Repetitive. Worst of Bakewell’s otherwise excellent books. Argues that utilitarianism is humanism because it forces us to regard the desires of others. But I think utilitarians are actually seeking to avoid the difficulty of diffence. Utilitarians want to homogenize the diversity of human experience into a uniform metric (happiness units). And this leads them (like Singer) to consider humans that are different–like children and disabled folks– as lesser.

depression is an action our thoughts are harder to control than our behavior

the beauty of things imperfect. to explain it is to diminish it. objects that exemplify wabi sabi are not symbols or representations. It is beauty not as perfection, but as acceptance; including the bittersweet acceptance of our own mortality.

Self-aware remix of Greek myths. Contrasts frenzy v. piety. Piety is duty to the gods. Frenzy is duty to one’s family.

Defining the relationship doesn’t guarantee relationship security.

Coaches listen. They don’t provide solutionsy help others find the solution.

Poverty porn

Somewhat tedious.

Interesting main character consultant-immigrant. But second half is preachy and trite. Somehow made me less interested in cooperative living.

Too drunk.

Useful in showing that pyschoanalysis is trying to get the patient to acknowledge that their behaviors and beliefs must have some value (otherwise we wouldn’t do/hold them), but dated and poorly written.

Upsetting, too woke

Too slow

Idea that we have many, potentially conflicting internal voices didn’t resonate.

Unhelpful

Incomprehensible

Wrong

Unhelpful

Boring

Boring because when Jung is right he’s just made an obvious thing too complex. And he’s often wrong.