Reading list

 2025 June 03

To read (no particular order, eventually...)

  1. Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Neil Postman
  2. Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Jared Diamond
  3. Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Daniel Kahnemann
  4. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), Julian Jaynes
  5. Silent Spring (1962), Rachel Carson
  6. Brave New World (1931), Aldous Huxley
  7. Notes from the Underground (1864), Fyodor Dostoevsky
  8. Divine Comedy (1321), Dante Alighieri (TL Longfellow)
  9. How To Read a Book (1972), Charles Van Doren
  10. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
  11. Walden (1854), Thoreau
  12. House of Leaves (2000), Mark Z. Danielewski
  13. Last and First Men (1930), Olaf Stapledon
  14. Star Maker (1937), Olaf Stapledon
  15. Infinite Jest (1997), David Foster Wallace
  16. Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories (2007), John Klima
  17. Moby Dick (1851), Herman Melville
Maybe this is impractical.

Read

  1. Mathematics and the Imagination (1940), Edward Kasner, James Newman
  2. A Brief History of Time (1988), Stephen Hawking
  3. A History of Pi (1970), Petr Beckmann
  4. Interworld (2007), Neil Gaiman, Michael Reeves
  5. The Three-Body Problem (2008), Liu Cixin (TL Joel Martinsen, Ken Liu)
  6. The Wandering Earth (collection) (2017), Liu Cixin
  7. Flatland (1884), Edwin Abbott
  8. 1984 (1949), George Orwell
  9. Rationality: From AI to Zombies (2008), Elizer Yudkowsky
  10. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (2015), Eliezer Yudkowsky
  11. Godel, Escher, Bach -- An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), Douglass Hofstadter
  12. The Crab 110 pp. private communication
  13. Holes (1998), Louis Sachar
  14. Significant Digits, Alexander D
  15. Animal Farm (1945), George Orwell
  16. The Philosophy Gym: 25 Short Adventures in Thinking (2003), Stephen Law
  17. The Man Who Knew Infinity (1991), Robert Kanigel
  18. Algorithms to Live By (2016), Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths
  19. Dreyer's English (2019), Benjamin Dreyer
  20. Slapstick (1976), Kurt Vonnegut
  21. The Elements of Typographical Style (1992), Robert Bringhurst
  22. Social Intelligence (2006), Daniel Goleman
  23. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985), Richard Feynman
  24. Unsong (2017), Scott Alexander
  25. Metamagical Themas (1996), Douglass Hofstadter
  26. Mother of Learning (2020), nobody103/Domagoj Kurmaić
  27. Namesake (2003), Jhumpa Lahiri
  28. On Writing the College Application Essay, 25th Anniversary (2012), Harry Bauld
  29. Intimate Behavior: A Zoologist's Classic Study of Human Intimacy (1997), Desmond Morris its a good book im not freaky like that
  30. The New Cosmic Onion (2007), Frank Close
  31. Why Do People Sing? (2011), Joseph Jordania
  32. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1981), Keith Johnstone
  33. Sadly, porn (2021), Edward Teach (pseudonym) ok ts one is lowk freaky my bad gng
  34. A Farewell to Arms (1929), Ernest Hemingway
  35. Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories (2022), qntm/Sam Hughes
  36. Gone Girl (2012), Gillian Flynn
  37. The Black Swan (2010), Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  38. Con$umed (2006), Benjamin R. Barber
  39. Stories of Your Life and Others (2002), Ted Chiang
  40. New Guide to Science (1920), Isaac Asimov
  41. Machine of Death (2010), collection
  42. Klara and the Sun (2021), Kazuo Ishiguro
  43. An Introduction to Language 9e (2011), Fromkin, Rodman, Hyams
  44. Freakonomics (2005), Steven Levitt, Stephen Dubner
  45. Ra (2014), qntm/Sam Hughes 2025.06.01
  46. Superfreakonomics (2009), Steven Levitt, Stephen Dubner 2025.06.04
  47. The World Behind the World (2023), Erik Hoel 2025.06.08
  48. If Nietzsche were a narwhal (2022), Justin Gregg 2025.06.09
  49. Permutation City (1994), Greg Egan 2025.06.10
  50. Flatterland (2008), Ian Stewart 2025.06.13

Books are a triviality. Life alone is great. —Thomas Carlyl, Journal, 1989