Reading
Books I’ve Read More Than Once (And Will Read Again)
Island - Aldous Huxley
Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig
Dharma Books
The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajñaparamita - Thich Nhat Hanh
Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment - Robert Wright
Breath by Breath: The Liberating Practice of Insight Meditation - Larry Rosenberg
Everything Else
Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking - Jordan Ellenberg
The Power of Myth - Joseph Campbell
How to Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia - Mohsin Hamid
Island - Aldous Huxley
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World - Cal Newport
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari
Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions - Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking - Jordan Ellenberg
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products - Nir Eyal
Most of the Books I’ve Read since May 2016
1 - What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars - Brendan Moynihan
2 - The Talent Code: Greatness isn’t born. It’s grown - Daniel Coyle
3 - As a Man Thinketh - James Allen
4 - Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character as Told to Ralph Leighton - Richard P Feynman
5 - The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History - Elizabeth Kolbert
Argues that the Earth is in the midst of a modern, man-made, sixth extinction.
6 - Euthyphro - Plato
Socrates and Euthyphro attempt to establish a definitive meaning for the word piety (virtue).
7 - The Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind - Richard Wiseman
Peter Bernstein argues that the notion of bringing risk under control is one of the central ideas that distinguishes modern times from the distant past.
9 - Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street - John Brooks
10 - Apology - Plato
The Socratic dialogue that presents the speech of legal self-defence, which Socrates presented at his trial for impiety and corruption.
11 - Distress - Greg Egan
12 - Meno - Plato
Socrates introduces positive ideas: the immortality of the soul and the theory of knowledge as recollection.
14 - Seven Years in Tibet: My Life Before, During and After - Heinrich Harrer
Experiences in Tibet before the Communist Chinese People’s Liberation Army invaded Tibet in 1950.
15 - How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking - Jordan Ellenberg
Connects various economic and societal philosophies with basic mathematics and statistical principles.
16 - The Art of R Programming: A Tour of Statistical Software Design - Norman Matloff
17 - Dragon In The Land Of Snows: The History of Modern Tibet since 1947
18 - Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate - Vaclav Smil
19 - Dhammapada
A collection of sayings of the Buddha in verse form.
20 - The Power of Myth - Joseph Campbell
Reveals how the themes and symbols of ancient narratives continue to bring meaning to birth, death, love, and war.
21 - How to Get Rich - Felix Dennis
22 - The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers - Ben Horowitz
23 - Python: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide! - Andrew Johansen
24 - Zero Zero Zero - Roberto Saviano
25 - Journey to the East - Hermann Hesse
26 - Python Machine Learning - Sebastian Raschka
27 - The Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steve Blank
Launched the Lean Startup approach to new ventures.
28 - Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application - Jason Fried
29 - Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
The personal writings by the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius recording his private notes to himself and ideas on Stoic philosophy.
30 - Mahābhārata
One of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India - within it is the Bhagavad Gita.
31 - Buddhist Meditation - Kamalashila
32 - A Still Forest Pool: The Insight Meditation of Achaan Chah - Jack Kornfield
The quiet, intensive, and joyous practice of the forest monks of Thailand.
33 - Breath by Breath: The Liberating Practice of Insight Meditation - Larry Rosenberg
The Ānāpānasati Sutta is a discourse that details the Buddha’s instruction on using awareness of the breath as an initial focus for meditation.
34 - Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application - Jason Fried
35 - The Obstacle is the Way: The Ancient Art of Turning Adversity to Advantage - Ryan Holiday
What blocks our path actually opens one that is new and better.
36 - How to Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia - Mohsin Hamid
37 - The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book) - Don Miguel Ruiz
38 - Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion - Gary Vaynerchuk
39 - Content Machine: Use Content Marketing to Build a 7-figure Business With Zero Advertising - Dan Norris
40 - Maori Myth and Legend - A. W. Reed
41 - Phaedrus - Plato
Although ostensibly about the topic of love, the discussion in the dialogue revolves around the art of rhetoric and how it should be practiced.
42 - On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction - William Zinsser
43 - Island - Aldous Huxley
Huxley’s utopian counterpart to Brave New World.
44 - The Limits to Growth
A 1972 report on the computer simulation of exponential economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources.
45 - The Authority Mindset: Proven Principles For Establishing Yourself as an Expert in Any Industry - David Bame Jr.
46 - Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction - Philip Tetlock
47 - The Last Lecture - Randy Pausch
48 - The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right - Atul GawandeA
A compelling argument for the checklist, which he believes to be the most promising method available in surmounting failure.
49 - The 7 Day Startup: You Don’t Learn Until You Launch - Dan Norriss
50 - The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success - William N. Thorndike
52 - Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World - Cal Newport
53 - Blue Ocean Strategy - W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
54 - Tibet: A History - Sam Van Schaik
55 - The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation - Thich Nhat Hanh
56 - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen R. Covey
57 - Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 - Seth Godin
58 - Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck - Chip and Dan Heath
59 - Yoga for the Stiffer Body: Inspirational Yoga Sequences Made Accessible for Real People - Lin Craddock
60 - Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It - Chris Voss
A former international hostage negotiator for the FBI offers a new, field-tested approach to high-stakes negotiations.
61 - Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future - Blake Masters and Peter Thiel
62 - Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity - David Allen
63 - Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action - Simon Sinek
64 - Ideas into Words: Mastering the Craft of Science Writing - Elise Hancock
65 - 59 Seconds: Think a little, change a lot - Richard Wiseman
66 - The Art of Work: A Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do - Jeff Goins
67 - How Will You Measure Your Life? - James Allworth
69 - The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth’s Future - Paul Sabin
70 - This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate - Naomi Klein
71 - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari
72 - A Path With Heart: The Classic Guide Through The Perils And Promises Of Spiritual Life - Jack Kornfield
74 - The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement - Eliyahu M. Goldratt
75 - Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur - Derek Sivers
77 - Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work - Chip and Dan Heath
78 - Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises - Timothy Geithner
79 - Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days - Jessica Livingston
80 - Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy - Cathy O’Neil
81 - The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement - David Brooks
The building blocks of human flourishing in a multilayered, profoundly illuminating work grounded in everyday life. This is the story of how success happens, told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica.
83 - Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
The spiritual journey of self-discovery of a man named Siddhartha during the time of the Gautama Buddha.
84 - A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living - Joseph Campbell
85 - The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World - Pedro Domingos
86 - The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember - Nicholas Carr
87 - The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us about the Good Life - Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh
88 - Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age - Paul Graham
The bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara describes how to train in the perfection of wisdom by seeing through the illusory nature of all things.
90 - Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow - Yuval Noah Harari
91 - Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions - Dan Ariely
92 - What They Don’t Teach You At Harvard Business School - Mark H. McCormack
93 - Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies - Nick Bostrom
94 - In My Own Way: Autobiography of Alan Watts
95 - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life - Mark Manson
96 - The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science - Jonathan Haidt
97 - Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism (Our Sustainable Future) - Ozzie Zehner
98 - Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup - Rob Walling
100 - Ego is the Enemy: The Fight to Master Our Greatest Opponent - Ryan Holiday
101 - Do the Work - Steven Pressfield
101 - Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment - Robert Wright
An evolutionary & psychological perspective on Buddhism.
102 - Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions - Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
How the simple, precise algorithms used by computers can also untangle very human questions.
104 - Leonardo Da Vinci - Walter Isaacson
105 - The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures - Frans Johansson
106 - Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Don’t pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and how much of their neck they are putting on the line.
107 - Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium - Seneca
108 - Benjamin Franklin: An American Life - Walter Isaacson
109 - Fluent Python - Luciano Ramalho
110 - Effective Python: 59 Specific Ways to Write Better Python - Brett Slatkin
111 - So Good They Can’t Ignore You - Cal Newport
112 - Walden - Henry David Thoreau
Part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and—to some degree—a manual for self-reliance.
113 - Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality - Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jethá
In opposition to what the authors see as the “standard narrative” of human sexual evolution, they contend that having multiple sexual partners was common and accepted in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness.
114 - The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life - Kevin Simler & Robin Hanson
Our brains are designed not just to hunt and gather, but also to help us get ahead socially, often via deception and self-deception. But while we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise.
115 - From Bacteria to Bach and Back - Daniel Dennett
A book that covers the evolutionary origin of human consciousness. I especially enjoyed the Darwin’s and Turing’s strange inversions of reasoning - that competence is more common without competence than with it.
116 - Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard - Chip & Dan Heath
117 - Island - Aldous Huxley
118 - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig
119 - Agile Data Science 2.0 - Russell Jurney
120 - The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
121 - Iconic Advantage - Soon Yu
123 - Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ - Daniel Goleman
124 - Clean Architecture: A Craftsman’s Guide to Software Structure and Design - Robert C. Martin
125 - Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems - Martin Kleppmann
126 - Competing Against Luck - Clayton M. Christensen
127 - Dune - Frank Herbet
128 - Foundation - Issac Asimov
129 - Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living - Krista Tippett
130 - Still the Mind - Alan Watts
131 - Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life - Paul Dolan
132 - The Mythical Man-Month - Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
133 - Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age - Paul Graham
135 - Interactive Data Visualization for the Web: An Introduction to Designing with D3 - Scott Murray
136 - Python Testing with pytest: Simple, Rapid, Effective, and Scalable - Brian Okken
137 - Buddhism - Brain Conze
138 - Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered - E. F. Schumacher
First published in 1973, Small Is Beautiful brought Schumacher’s critiques of Western economics to a wider audience during the 1973 energy crisis and emergence of globalization. I especially enjoyed the chapter ‘Buddhist Economics’.
140 - Statistics Done Wrong - Alex Reinhart
141 - Man’s Search For Meaning - Viktor Frankl
141 - Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process - John McPhee
142 - Clean Architecture - Robert Martin
143 - Lovingkindness - Sharon Salzberg
144 - Fire Under The Snow - Palden Gyatso
The story of a brave Tibetan monk who spent 33 years imprisoned by the Chinese. Hard to read at times due to the brutality of his treatment, but an important story about one of the major tragedies of the 20th century.
145 - The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human - Jonathan Gottschall
146 - The Stranger - Albert Camus
147 - The Dip - Seth Godin
148 - Fooled By Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
150 - The River of Consciousness - Oliver Sacks
Sacks, an Oxford-educated polymath, had a deep familiarity not only with literature and medicine but with botany, animal anatomy, chemistry, the history of science, philosophy, and psychology. The River of Consciousness is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death.
151 - Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell - Dennis Bray
The internal chemistry of living cells is a form of computation. Cells are built out of molecular circuits that perform logical operations.
152 - The Four - Scott Galloway
153 - The Laws of Human Nature - Robert Greene
154 - Map and Territory - Eliezer Yudkowsky
First book contained in the ebook Rationality: From AI to Zombies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky. It is the edited and expanded version of a series of blog posts in “the Sequences”, and discusses the nature of rationality, belief, and explanation.
155 - How To Actually Change Your Mind - Eliezer Yudkowsky
The second book contained in the ebook Rationality: From AI to Zombies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky. It is the edited version of a series of blog posts in “the Sequences”, and covers the ultra-high-level penultimate technique of rationality: triumphing over confirmation bias and motivated cognition.
156 - Atomic Habits - James Clear
157 - Finite and Infinite Games - James P. Carse
There are at least two kinds of games: finite and infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. Finite games are those instrumental activities - from sports to politics to wars - in which the participants obey rules, recognize boundaries and announce winners and losers. The infinite game - there is only one - includes any authentic interaction, from touching to culture, that changes rules, plays with boundaries and exists solely for the purpose of continuing the game.
158 - How To Fail at Almost Everything And Still Win Big - Scott Adams
159 - The Flaw of Averages - Sam L. Savage
160 - Location is (Still) Everything - David R. Bell
Wharton professor and marketing expert David R. Bell argues that the way we use the Internet is still largely shaped by the physical world we inhabit.
161 - In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives - Steven Levy
163 - Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them - John Yorke
Here he takes us on a journey to the heart of storytelling, revealing that there truly is a unifying shape to narrative forms - one that echoes the fairytale journey into the woods and, like any great art, comes from deep within.
164 - Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions - Dan Ariely
Challenges readers’ assumptions about making decisions based on rational thought.
165 - In Search of Excellence - Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.
In 1982, at the time of publication of In Search of Excellence, America was looking to Japan as the rising economic force. American businesses were studying Japanese management techniques and looking to learn from their successes.
In Search of Excellence went against this trend, by focusing on American companies and studying what made the most successful American companies successful.
166 - The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus
Camus introduces his philosophy of the absurd, that life is inherently devoid of meaning and consequently absurd, but humans will nevertheless forever search for meaning.
167 - The Fall - Albert Camus
His crisis, and his ultimate “fall” from grace, was meant to invoke, in secular terms, the fall of man from the Garden of Eden. The Fall explores themes of innocence, imprisonment, non-existence, and truth. In a eulogy to Albert Camus, existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described the novel as “perhaps the most beautiful and the least understood” of Camus’ books.
168 - On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft - Stephen King
On Writing is organized into five sections: “C.V.”, in which King highlights events in his life that influenced his writing career; “What Writing Is”, in which King urges the reader to take writing seriously; “Toolbox”, which discusses English mechanics; “On Writing”, in which King details his advice to aspiring writers; and “On Living: A Postscript”, in which King describes his van accident and how it affected his life.
169 - The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder
It chronicles the experiences of a computer engineering team racing to design a next-generation computer at a blistering pace under tremendous pressure.
170 - The 33 Strategies of War - Robert Greene
A guide to the subtle social game of everyday life informed by the military principles in war.
171 - Making Learning Whole - David Perkins
Teaching any subject can be made more effective if students are introduced to the “whole game,” rather than isolated pieces of a discipline.
172 - The Man Who Solved the Market - Gregory Zuckerman
After a legendary career as a mathematician and a stint breaking Soviet codes, Simons set out to conquer financial markets with a radical approach. Simons hired physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists - most of whom knew little about finance - to amass piles of data and build algorithms hunting for the deeply hidden patterns in global markets.
173 - At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails - Sarah Bakewell
174 - The Pragmatic Programmer - David Thomas
175 - Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott
176 - Python Data Science Handbook - Jake VanderPlas
177 - Burn Your Portfolio - Michael Janda
178 - The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn - Richard W. Hamming
179 - Practical Natural Language Processing - Sowmya Vajjala
180 - Sid Meier’s Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games - Sid Meier
181 - Masters of Doom - David Kushner
182 - Tea War - Andrew B. Liu
183 - Data Scientists at Work - Sebastian Gutierrez
184 - Data Science at the Command Line - Jeroen Janssens
185 - How Emotions Are Made - Lisa Feldman Barrett
… emotion is constructed in the moment by core systems interacting across the whole brain, aided by a lifetime of learning.
186 - Ho Chi Minh: A Life - William J. Duiker
187 - The Case Against Reality - Donald D. Hoffman
A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses
188 - I Am A Strange Loop - Douglas Hofstadter
Examines in depth the concept of a strange loop to explain the sense of “I”.
189 - Blood, Sweat and Pixels - Jason Schreier
190 - Calling Bullshit - Jevin West
191 - Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering - Robert Glass
192 - Gödel’s Proof - Ernest Nagel & James Newman
193 - The Innovators - Walter Isaacson
… begins with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s.
194 - Radical Acceptance - Tara Branch
Feelings of self-doubt and insecurity are what hold us back in life and cause true suffering.
195 - Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker
196 - The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith - Dennis C. Rasmussen
197 - Infrastructure as Code, 2nd Edition - Kief Morris
198 - When Einstein Walked with Gödel - Jim Holt
199 - Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind - Andy Clark
200 - Tibet: The Road Ahead - Dawa Norbu
201 - From a Mountain In Tibet - Llama Yeshe Losal Rinpoche
202 - A Thousand Brains - Jeff Hawkins
203 - Wind, Sand and Stars - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
204 - Memories, Dreams, Reflections - Carl Jung
205 - The Silmarillion - J. R. R. Tolkien
206 - The Rāmāyana
A Sanskrit epic composed in India over a period of nearly a millennium.
207 - Blindsight - Peter Watts
A crew of astronauts sent out as the third wave, following two series of probes, to investigate a trans-Neptunian Kuiper belt comet dubbed “Burns-Caulfield” that has been found to be transmitting an unidentified radio signal to an as-yet unknown destination elsewhere in the Solar System, followed by their subsequent first contact.
208 - The Vietnam War: An Intimate History - Geoffrey C. Ward
209 - Stalingrad - Antony Beevor
210 - The Fabric of Reality - David Deutsch
211 - Anarchist Communism - Peter Kropotkin
212 - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles - Haruki Murakami
Toru Okada, a low-key and unemployed lawyer’s assistant, is tasked by his wife, to find their missing cat.
213 - Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
Toru Watanabe looks back on his days as a college student living in Tokyo.
214 - Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants - Robin Wall Kimmerer
215 - Consciousness Explained - Daniel Dennett
216 - Building SimCity - Chaim Gingold
217 - 1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
218 - Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami
219 - Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
220 - I’ve Been Thinking - Daniel Dennett
221 - Karl Marx - Rolf Hosfeld
222 - Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
223 - What the Buddha Taught - Walpola Rahula
224 - Why Marx Was Right - Terry Eagleton
225 - Blood Red Sunset: A Memoir of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
A first hand account of China’s Cultural Revolution.
226 - The End is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses - Dan Carlin
227 - The Khmer Empire - Charles River Editors
228 - 1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
229 - The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation - Jon Gertner
230 - Invisible Women - Caroline Criado Perez
231 - The Business Forecasting Deal - Michael Gilliland
232 - The Illiad - Homer
233 - Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami
A strange and dreamlike novel, its chapters alternate between two narratives—”Hard-Boiled Wonderland” (the cyberpunk, science fiction part) and “The End of the World” (the surreal, virtual fantasy part).