Now Reading

This is a partial view of my reading pipeline. The left column is based on the last few years. The right column is a lifetime state. Links are affiliate links. FR = Frequently reread.

This page was last updated on: 6/14/2023.

Now Reading (Fast)

  1. Brad DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia
  2. J. E. Gordon, The New Science of Strong Materials

Now Reading (Slow)

  1. Sanjoy Mahajan, The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering
  2. Christina Dunbar-Hester, Oil Beach

Recently Finished

  1. Greg Egan, Permutation City
  2. J. G. Ballard, Complete Short Stories
  3. Benjamin Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World
  4. Octavia Butler, Lillith’s Brood
  5. Ted Chiang, Exhalation
  6. Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path

Recent Rereads

  1. Sherlock Holmes canon (free on Gutenberg)
  2. Isaac Asimov, Robot Dreams
  3. Isaac Asmiov, Robot Visions

Queued/Maybe

  1. H. P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection
  2. Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
  3. James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy

Recently Abandoned

Respectable Dent

  1. James Scott, Against the Grain
  2. James Carse, The Religious Case Against Belief
  3. Robert Sapolsky, Behave
  4. Alfred T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History
  5. Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years War
  6. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method

Antilibrary

  1. Morris Bishop, Petrarch and His World
  2. Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude 
  3. David Lewis, We the Navigators
  4. Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand
  5. Burton G. Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street
  6. Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan
  7. Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild
  8. Roger Schank, Tell me a Story
  9. Alfred Chandler, Scale and Scope
  10. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
  11. David F. Noble, Forces of Production
  12. Rose George, The Big Necessity
  13. Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form
  14. Marcus du Sautoy, Symmetry
  15. Ian Stewart, Why Beauty is Truth
  16. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses
  17. José Ortega y Gasset, Towards a Philosophy of History

Personal Favorites

  1. Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic
  2. Alec Nevala-Lee, Astounding
  3. Tom Gauld, Mooncop
  4. Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror
  5. Kenneth Brower, The Starship and the Canoe
  6. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
  7. Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix Plus
  8. Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order
  9. Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay
  10. James Gleick, Time Travel: A History
  11. George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral

Frequent Recommendations

  1. Bruno de Mesquita, The Dictator’s Handbook
  2. John Kay, Obliquity
  3. Marc Levinson, The Box
  4. Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft
  5. Pankaj Ghemawat, World 3.0
  6. Gareth Morgan, Images of Organization
  7. Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches
  8. Carlotta Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
  9. Chet Richards, Certain to Win
  10. Robert Coram, Boyd
  11. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail
  12. Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies
  13. Edmund S. Phelps, Mass Flourishing
  14. James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

Honorable Mentions

Personal Lighthouses

  1. James Scott, Seeing Like a State
  2. Keith Johnstone, Impro
  3. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
  4. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man
  5. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
  6. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens
  7. Edna Kramer, The Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics

Favorite Canons

  1. Agatha Christie (FR)
  2. Asimov (FR)
  3. Culture
  4. Discworld
  5. Douglas Adams (FR in the past)
  6. Sherlock Holmes

Fading/Forgotten

  1. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
  2. Ron Chernow, Titan
  3. Charles Morris, The Tycoons
  4. T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon
  5. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
  6. Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read 

Papers/Articles

Video

(I only post/cite video content when the ideas are not available in book form)