The Book List

I have to be honest: I was a little bit disappointed when I started reading this book, but over time I grew to enjoy it and learn from his writing.

My favorite part of the book was the parable of the donkey: I always want to do many things, and there's always a tiny undercurrent of dissatisfaction of being unable to do all of them right now.

Reminding myself that I will (probably) have a chance to do so in the future helps me focus.

I find reading about – or watching movies set in – New York to be strangely soothing and familiar. E. B. White's lucid description of the city is timeless and satisfying.

It's a short essay and available online

A strangely prophetic book set in a post-pandemic world.

A few years ago I bought this book after seeing it around the Strand one time too many. I shortly ended up discarding it because it made me incredibly uncomfortable.

I ran across David Sedaris again on Masterclass: and found his classes fascinating; not so much because of what they say but because of who he is as a person. He spoke about the fact that he could always write about anything he experienced, and that would always made it bearable.

That was enough motivation for me to pay much more attention to writing, and to give his book a second attempt.

The attention he pays to the world around him comes through in the journal: in his matter-of-fact – but also subtle – style where he describes casual oppression, racism, sexism, and living a fairly rough life.

That is what made me uncomfortable when I partially read and abandoned this book the first time around: my defence mechanism in life is to simply overlook anything painful that doesn't directly involve me. David, on the other hand looks at it carefully, thinks about it – and then proceeds to elegantly write about it.

I found out about this book from Bill Gates' summer reading list. I ended up reading through it remarkably quickly, and then looking up the author to find out if there was more (spoiler: not yet).

I recognized the drawing style and the characters from rip-offs and reshares across Instagram and 9-gag, but this was the first time I read directly from the source and it was worth it.

There is humor, and a lot of honesty around the struggle to be a somewhat-functioning adult that I appreciated. The comics take the edge off a clear description of the effects of depression.

This is a hard book to read, precisely because that confronts the elephant in my brain. At the same time, it's a very valuable book to read.

Jerry Weinberg was an amazing, prolific author: I've only started getting into his books recently, but this book was a fascinating read as something written in 1975 – and then only edited with additional notes after 25 years worth of observations by the author.

"Writing a program is a process of learning" "Whenever a supervisor is responsible for work he does not understand, he begins to reward workers not for work, but for the appearance of work." "It will always be difficult to appreciate how much trouble we are not having." "Once the problem solution has been shown, it is easy to forget the puzzement that existed before it was solved." "Whatever the future of programming may bring, I firmly believe it will still reward thinking over mindlessness." "But it is naive, I now realize, to expect that bad systems cannot be built by people with good hearts."

I was very happy to read this book, and suspect that I'll go back to it again at some point. Some of my highlights:

Pragmatic Programming has been one of my favourite programming books, and one that I recommend wholeheartedly to everyone. Pragmatic Thinking is also remarkable: and I'm trying to apply what I've learnt from it.

I got this one for free from Tor, and ended up reading out of morbid fascination. I strongly prefer my Vampire fiction closer to Dracula and very, very, very far away from Twilight.

I've always greatly enjoyed his books, and when I received a notification about a new book I jumped at it, and ended up reading it overnight. This is a remarkably fun fantasy book, with a magic system that reminds me of programming and AI.

A history describing the beginning of the internet: I found this fascinating, and it ended up describing several terms I hadn't been familiar with.

I stumbled across this book in the Strand, and ended up ripping through the series in a few days.

A fascinating description of the Magnum Photography agency.

“But if nothing we do here has any guarantee of lasting, if even the best gestures have only a slim chance of outliving us—is there any reason not to just give up?”

“Every reason in the world.” “We’re here, and we’re alive. It’s a beautiful evening, on the last perfect day of summer.” “Now let’s go down there and make the most of it, while it lasts.”

I'm always surprised by how relevant and useful I find his books, even though they were written decades ago.

Definitely an interesting read: getting a better sense of how Doom was developed and Carmack’s work ethic written as an incredibly readable novel.

The book was delightfully well written but I didn’t enjoy reading it much: perhaps I’m too far removed from the beat generation to appreciate books depicting them.

A delightfully sinister short story that lasted just long enough to get me through dinner and coffee.

A grand finale for the series, and possibly the longest novel I've read till date. (Though now that I think about it, there is a story by Isaac Asimov that spans a similar length of time).

There are so many concepts packed in, it's a great read — it starts off somewhat slowly but quickly catches steam, and I ended up spending the rest of my night reading through. There isn’t much I can write here without giving away too much, but it’s easily worth a read.

This was trending on Hacker News, so I ended up picking up the book: the author speaks about relaxed concentration, something my Aikido Sensei kept trying to emphasize but I never really achieved.

For physical activities, I’ve since found that I can cheat my conscious self by just explicitly thinking about a secondary activity and letting the rest of my muscles go about normally.

He emphasizes seeing ourselves/the world as it is, without judgement; focusing on only the required outcome.

An interesting read, and one I’m hoping to apply to Flamenco at the very least; and work if I can manage it.

I’ve been reading The View slowly over months, for reading this collection of essays is very similar to doing a depth first traversal of a tree; most essays are introductions to other books or music, and if I found the introductions compelling enough (which was often) I would go and read the books mentioned.

Shatterday was one of the books I ended up reading this way.

Reading through this book emphasized Gaiman’s deep love of books, reading and comics — capped with his admonition to Make Good Art, it’s definitely something I’d recommend.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. And discontent is a good thing: people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different, if they’re discontented.

A Moveable Feast was a delight to read: I’m enjoying my life in New York City, sitting in several favourite cafes reading, writing — or programming, and occasionally getting distracted by beautiful women as they sit across the cafe. Displaced by several years and continents, Hemingway’s life was more similar and resonated much more than I had expected.

I was reading another book by Neil Gaiman at the same time — and the contrast in styles was refreshing; Hemingway’s style is precise, minimalistic and direct. Reading the several iterations of introductions to a moveable feast gave a hint at the amount of effort behind every page.

Finally, as someone who tends to avoid social appointments like the plague — allow me to justify myself in Hemingway’s words:

The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits.

Another book recommendation by Howard Schulz; and one which covers D&D gaming. I kept reading mostly because I've never actually played these games, though I have similar enough interests it's surprising that I've never been interested.

Even though the title gives it away, the book itself was enough of a cliché that I didn’t enjoy it.

This is probably the hardest book I've read this year: and I'm already planning to re-read and attempt more problems in a few months; after trying to apply the techniques mentioned in the book to better understand other hard books I've been meaning to read.

Working through this book would often make my jaw drop: my first thought would generally be We can do that? quickly followed by I would have never applied this there.

For example, using dimensional analysis to approximate integrals, or his approach to lumping to determine values; evaluating e^D as a left-shift was completely insane.

I picked up the Sin du Jour series after reading a positive review on Howard Taylor's blog — they’re really good urban fantasy and fairly different from most books I’ve read.

To describe the books in terms I understand — a cross between China Mieville and Terry Pratchett; I just wish the books were a bit longer.

A somewhat strange choice for me, but I've been trying to get better at setting personal goals and assumed — from the title — that this might help.

Instead, the book ended up introducing me to the theory of constraints and basically that managers should look at determining what needs to change, what to change it to, and how to achieve the change.

The fact that it was written as a fictional account made it much easier to read and I ended up reading the book surprisingly quickly.

A slim, extremely readable memoir by Murakami about his life as a runner and a professional writer.

Even more so than running, I read the book as a novel about persistence, and a lifetime of creating. Pursuing something across a lifetime is something to build up to, and something you build up to in a rhythm.

There were several passages and instances that stood out to me;

— on persisting

To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed—and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.

— on focus

If I’m asked what the next most important quality is for a novelist, that’s easy too: focus—the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever’s critical at the moment. Without that you can’t accomplish anything of value, while, if you can focus effectively, you’ll be able to compensate for an erratic talent or even a shortage of it.

— on speaking

I have to choose words that area easy to pronounce so people can understand me, and remember to get the audience to laugh to put them at ease. I have to convey to those listening a sense of who I am. Even if it’s just for a short time, I have to get the audience on my side if I want them to listen to me. And in order to do that, I have to practice the speech over and over, which takes a lot of effort. But there’s also the payoff that comes with a new challenge.

Overall, I greatly admire the humility and grit that appear here: and the standards he sets for himself.

On a more general note, I’ve always enjoyed the prose in Murakami’s novels, even if the contents occasionally (or often) whiz over my head at a distance. I’m never quite sure if that’s because of the translator or the author; given that I’ve enjoyed reading several books by him by various translators, presumably it’s because of the author.

Finally, I never realized that he also works at translating several English novels to Japanese — or that he’s translated several of Raymond Carver’s novels, which possibly explains his fascination with American detective novels.

Twenty Minutes was a valuable — if somewhat long — book to read. The author takes the reader on a walk from his walk-up apartment in the Greenwich Village to his Studio, describing everything he sees with the context of a practicing architect and teacher.

As someone who loves to walk through the city, I was fascinated by the the several different aspects of the city he speaks about — the decision to lay out New York City as a grid and the ramifications; the fact that ‘Tribeca’ stands for ‘TRIangle BElow CAnal’; why my old apartment building has a shaft through it - and the relationship between landlords and tenants.

He also speaks at length about gentrification, and the effects of neighbourhoods losing their character. The fact that the world becomes smaller as it becomes more connected is something I think about frequently.

I did find the book hard to read and extremely dense at times — with references that were beyond me. The fact that it was written over several years also tends to come through, I think I could discern a change in the author’s voice — and occasionally the book tends to ramble a bit.

I wish more experts would write similar books: I particularly enjoy John Carmack’s VR game reviews, which are written in a similar vein.

As surprising as China Mieville always is — nazis, surreal art, and demons in a single book.

A surreal but very readable book that has made me much more interested in surreal art.

The conclusion to the trilogy: again, there was too much of a sense of far too many events and villains and heroes being compressed into a book, but this was an easier and more interesting read.

This entry was written and published from an aeroplane.

One unexpected side-effect of listing out past books was that I ended up finding a series I'd never completed; Bone and Gaunt by Chris Willrich.

The second book in the series is decent, with a lot happening — a fairly good sword and sorcery series that kept me turning pages to find out what’s next.

I hadn't originally planned to pick this up, but decided I might as well, given I've read books one through four several times, and five through seven occasionally.

A fun, short read, with some unexpected twists and turns — and one plot decision that will probably birth several fan fics on tweaking.

The final book in this trilogy, and a fine ending.

Reading these books was definitely an astonishing experience, because the point of view narration made it very easy to sympathize with the characters and get completely immersed in the book.

As expected, there weren’t that many answers, though some questions were cleared up; others were hinted at — like the series itself, the main question in the story is something that’s more to be experienced than dissected or explained.

The Southern Reach Trilogy has been riveting so far: I wasn’t able to put down the second book till I reached the end and I’m already eagerly anticipating reading the third one tomorrow. Having read The City of Saints and Madmen I don’t quite expect to get all the answers after reading Acceptance tomorrow, but still enough to satiate part of my curiousity, I hope.

Set in the same world, with overlapping characters Authority manages to be similar to yet completely distinct from Annhilation with another fascinating new narrator. The mundane world encountered here is also fascinating.

For those who read fantasy as a quick escape into another world as an observer free of death and taxes — which I do, as mini-vacations to regain perspective — these are amazing books.

A surprisingly short read that I just could not put down: I enjoyed everything from the remarkable story, the narration and the amazing structure.

Now I need to make another quick pilgrimage to The Strand to pick up the sequels in this trilogy.

Another unplanned for detour from wandering around The Strand bookstore.

Having watched The Omen, and at the very least having read a review of the film I had some idea of what was coming at the end of the book — but that only improved the experience because it just showed how carefully everything in the story was arranged.

Mr. Levin clearly follows Chekhov’s gun.

A page-turner with good pacing: the book kept me interested till the very end. I enjoyed how the author toyed with expectations around characters readers end up being sympathetic to.

I was wondering around The Strand fulfilling my prophecy and ran across this one on one of the shelves.

A fun read with good ideas; but the science fiction feels a bit dated — which it is, The Illustrated Man was published in 1951! The technology reminds me of The Jetsons for the most part.

There are some really good short stories here: particularly The Veld and The City.

I had read Labyrinths half way through several months ago: today I ended up picking it up and reading through most of the remaining book.

I’ve read another collection by Borges before: a few stories overlapped between the two collections. It just became that much more obvious that I can keep reading Borges again and again and find more in the set of words.

Reading Borges always tends to be an experience: his writing tends to transcend time. There are some themes that stood out to me, particularly when I re-read some of the stories.

People blend into each other when considered across time; there are only so many human behaviours and experiences — looking forward or backward everything is simply repeated.

The field guide I always wanted. Apparently the trick is to just talk to them. And under general circumstances, they tend to be from the same planet.

A collection of brilliant short stories, further coloured in with introductions by the author.

I've been waiting for this book for several years at this point, and I ended up speed reading through it in a single day.

Hopefully the last book in the series releases on time.

I enjoyed reading this book because it provides a perspective into most of my career options: working at a big company (Facebook, even!), startups — including a stint at Y-Combinator, Finance and includes actual numbers. And I recognize a large number of names and places in the book.

Pretty much the scariest book I've read.

I'd always assumed that I'd be self-aware enough to observe double-think in the real world, that wasn't exactly an Orwellian dystopia.

Reading this book makes me question that assumption very strongly, as well as other aspects of the world around us.

I'd love to be able to model bias in behaviour and try estimate effects of subtle biases compounding compared to a central agency reinforcing bias and wilfully harming people.

Pinker asserts something extremely counter-intuitive: violence around the world is decreasing, and goes on to provide comprehensive facts, statistics and possible narratives tying them together as proof.

Contents aside, I enjoyed reading this book as a blueprint for providing a compelling argument: very well structured, argued, and backed up by several references. I also found it amusing that Pinker's rebuttal of criticisms was mostly pointed to pages already in the book — there's just so much content that I can't help but sympathize with critics who missed some of the facts he addressed.

Perhaps the only thing that I would have liked to observe argued even more clearly is the distortion caused by media and the recency effect to further reduce the impression that with ISIS, Syria, et al violence has indeed been decreasing.

There's not much point in summarizing the book here; it's worth reading by itself and the Wikipedia article would be much better than anything I could come up with.

Additional background provided for each of the concepts: ranging from probability to Hobbes to the Prisoner's Dilemma were amazing and really interesting to read.

It's interesting to contrast this book with the Decline of Power; one of the factors behind decreasing violence is the increase of Leviathans who reduce the benefit from violence; the Decline of Power argued precisely the opposite with the author being worried about anarchy resulting caused by a breakdown of standard government.

One aspect that I'm curious about is what physical violence is mutating into — what aspects of our behaviour today will be considered barbaric by humans a few centuries in the future?

Economic sanctions and doxxing are some possible examples.

Update: I actually met the author when he came to do a Q&A at Facebook and asked him the same question; he spoke about male rape in prisons, nuclear weapons, etc.

To be completely honest, I'm no longer completely convinced by this book; probably because I don't quite understand all the assumptions involved — I'll need to read more around this subject to feel comfortable.

I really like the post-apocalyptic universe with reality set adrift; a reasonably fascinating diversion with a cliff hanger ending.

I'll read book 3 when it comes out, but I found the Prince of Thorns series much more engrossing.

A fun, near-future Sci-Fi read with some good ideas. The emphasis on IRC-like messaging threw me off a bit.

What I found more interesting was a note in the preface, which comes along while he explains why he makes his books available under a CC license for anyone to read and download:

I just think that the complex social practice of "book" — of which a bunch of paper pages between two covers is the mere expression — is transforming and will transform further.

A fun, fairly irreverent read on an Oxford Poet's stay in Japan and a year of Aikido training. I read a recommendation for this book while following a long thread of action movies, actors who actually know martial arts, and so on.

I generally don't read travelogues, but this was fascinating enough that I ended up reading the book within a day of getting it by mail (it's old enough to not have a kindle version).

One of the few hard science fiction books I've ever read: post-humans, vampires, and officially the best aliens I've encountered so far.

On the way, the author also manages to introduce several concepts, particularly around Darwinian processes.

An interesting biography around one of the most fascinating people alive today.

I always try to be careful about reading too much into behaviours while reading these: how many of a person's achievements are because of their eccentricities, and how many are in spite of their eccentricities.

An interesting book exploring the effects of limited bandwidth and tunneling: I constantly have trouble with time management and often find myself over committing.

I was hoping for more explorations of avoiding or managing tunnelling and side effects, but apart from the recommendation to push more things into your tunnel vision I didn't quite get much more from this read apart from validation around experiences I'd already had.

Short and cute — a nice dinner time read.

This (relatively short) book could really have done with some more aggressive editing. Far too many literary references, whether they actually contributed to the theme or not; the sheer number of dracula/vampire references were also hard to read through.

Yes, I agree that vaccination is really important; I did that before reading this, and still do after. I vaguely suspect that if I (for some strange reason) didn't agree, this book is nowhere near enough evidence to convince me otherwise.

The perspective of american healthcare transitioning from "paternal" care to "shopping" was interesting.

For a change, a technical paper instead of a book.

My biggest take aways were that

An interesting, if somewhat dated read that speaks about how rituals are useful in propagating information in societies by providing feedback that others know what you know and they know that you know that they know and so on and so forth.

He introduces some game theoretic principles, underlines the fact that this has several simplifying assumptions built in and goes into depth with examples around advertisements during the super bowl, etc.

To be perfectly frank the book felt more like a literature survey at times that highlighted important aspects around understanding social systems; but this was a part of a conversation I haven't heard or understood.

The appendix felt like something that would be very well modelled by a program along the lines of something Bret Victor would build that showed how values change with understanding.

One of the stranger fiction books I've ever read: the author wrote a sequel to 1984 which investigates the function of the telescreens as communication devices; and how access to unfettered communication effectively breaks any totalitarian control.

Some aspects from both Better Angels as well as the Panopticon from Rational ritual are reflected here.

I also enjoyed the book as a statement by itself — the author rearranged words by Orwell to come up with a coherent piece using a computer: though I might have enjoyed the book slightly more if the background and story weren't alternating chapters.

Finally, this book takes critical reading to a whole new level: Peter Huber explains a lot of the book in terms of what was going in Orwell's life and could possibly explain his approach to life and books, which was amazing.

A lovely collection of short stories by Sir PTerry — one of my favourite authors ever. After spending enough time immersed in any author's books I become very curious about how they came up with the world — and books like this with notes on each story and the why behind it are like catnip for me.

I found out that "Death and What Comes Next" was written as puzzle — see Timehunt — and honestly that is something that had never crossed my mind given how smoothly the story flows. It happens to be one of my favourite Death stories.

I am glad to report that there are still some Discworld books I haven't read, and I plan to savor each one slowly because there aren't going to be any more.

Cute, and I really liked the concept of letters written to the ether.

A fun dinner companion: both dystopian and not, I almost expect the world to end up somewhere like this.

An interesting book to read in light of Decline of Power and Better Angels: clearly pointing out how violence can increase without an effective Leviathan and the standard Hobbesian trap the gangs fall into.

I was constantly uncomfortable this one, though — perhaps it felt too voyeuristic for my taste. I'm still trying to figure out why; I just finished reading this today so it'll take a bit of time before I can express my thoughts better.

Another observation was that time feels distorted in the book: the author spends several years working on his dissertation, while the book moves reasonably fast.

I suspect I'll update this sometime soon.

I really enjoyed reading this book, even though I'm missing a lot of context about the time he's writing this book around and the country Czechoslovakia.

The chapter on litost was a really good read; the stories about Tamina were interesting, though it took me a long time to understand the references in the second story, perhaps because it was a bit graphic.

The constant references to the fact that this was a book, and the characters were all from the Author's imagination — including choosing names for them were refreshing.

I'm afraid these words don't do enough justice to the book: this is much better.

Technically, a YA fantasy story - but I enjoyed it far too much and will be recommending this one to anyone above the age of 8.

Merrily stomps on existing YA tropes around chosen ones and their inevitable victories.

PS. Un Lun Dun == UnLondon

A fun story surrounding Sherlock Holmes, Henry James and other prominent Americans where Sherlock starts realizing that he might a fictional character¹.

A fairly pleasant read, not as fast moving as I would have liked but still gripping enough that I finished it fairly quickly after starting.

Sadly, I suspect I missed a lot of references because I'm not very familiar with the non-Sherlock characters referenced, particularly Henry James. I need to add some more entries to my queue of unread books.

1: Including taking his first heroin injection to be able to see the type of the book — and the reader.

Short and cute — a nice dinner time read.

Masterful vignettes from one of my favourite authors — capped at the end by a story about Shadow, from American Gods.

I particularly enjoyed the even-shorter stories based off the months of the year, the cinderella/sleeping-beauty reference and the Amanda-Palmer-inspired story.

Surprisingly enough, perhaps what I enjoyed most was the introduction: he discusses on how un safe fiction can be; and that is what inspires the title of the book.

There are also short pieces on how each story was written, which I saved till I'd read the book completely to savor all the better.

One of the themes I've been becoming increasingly fascinated with over the past several years has been understanding and handling information.

Reading about recommendations around indexing and accessing information for a thesis several years before computers were commonly used for other academic research or the internet was easily accessible promised to be rewarding; the fact that the author was Eco with his dry wit and understated humour promised that this book would be entertaining.

It was both.

The thesis that is referred to in this book is an undergraduate thesis for the final years of a degree. Eco focuses on both why writing a thesis can be a very rewarding experience, and why it would make sense to do it honestly.

There were two topics that I found very relevant and useful from the book:

Another short story — a tad predictable even though it's written from a completely alien standpoint.

Completely predictable, well written and extremely funny.

A reasonable continuation of the series; a page turner even if it was a bit too cliched and mostly predictable.

A surreal, relaxing tale representing what it feels like to be awake after midnight.

Somehow perfectly captures my mood on nights I stay awake because I can.

Introduced me to music which sounds like liquid gold - Duke Ellington.

A good ending to the series — with a lot happening in a very few pages. Perhaps a bit too much, even.

A pleasant diversion for a lazy weekend. For a slightly more unkind take, check out a digested read by John Crace.

This is an amazing fan fiction series that I've been reading for several years: what if Harry Potter went about magic scientifically, with experiments and controls and careful¹ observation.

The reason the series finds itself mentioned here is that Elizier finally finished the series — appropriately enough — on Pi² day.

Now that it's complete, I can finally unreservedly recommend the series: go and explore a completely different magical universe!

1: Determining the limits of transfiguration without blowing up and destroying everything in a radius of several miles, for example.

2: As someone who abhors the mm/dd/yy format, Pi day is very bittersweet.

One of the most fascinating books I've read in the past few years. Of course, I could only read a translation but the quality of the translation was amazing enough to make this a more than worthwhile read. I am somewhat disappointed that I didn't come across Borges earlier in my lifetime.

There were some stories that I didn't enjoy as much as the others because they required more context than I had about Latin American history — there were very useful notes provided, but nevertheless I lost a lot of the colour I would have otherwise observed here.

Stories that particularly stood out to me are: The Immortal, The Writing of God, of course the eponymous The Aleph, The Zahir, On Exactitude in Science, The Plot — and finally, Ragnarok.

Ragnarok foreshadows Neil Gaiman's American Gods a lot for me.

There is something very fascinating on how a very few words from Borges — just a page or two, and a complete story — could be so significant. I digested this particular set of short stories with a lot of discipline, at least initially: restricting myself to just one every night before I fell asleep. By the end I couldn't resist and devoured the rest of the book over an eventful weekend.

I am always a different man; a reinterpretation of the man I was yesterday, and the day before, and all the days I have lived. The past is gone, was always gone; it does not exist, except in memory, and what memory is but thought, a copy of perception, no less but no more replete with truth than any passing whim, fancy, or other agitation of the mind. And if it’s actions, words, thoughts that define an individual, those definitions alter like the weather — if continuity and pattern are often discernable, so are chaos and sudden change.

There are two things about a man that matter: what he wants and what he’ll do to get it.

dovie’andi se tovya sagain