Library

Updat­ed June 17, 2021

Read­ing

  • ノルウェイの森 (村上)
    • 気にしなくてにいい、ノルウェイの森は走れメロスより近代的な小説ですから、言葉も簡単はずだと私を思いましたけれど、十一章で二章を読むのに二週間かかりました。これでも、頑張ります💪
  • Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eter­nal Golden Braid (Hof­s­tadter)
  • High Growth Hand­book (Gil)
  • Debt: The First 5000 Years (Grae­ber)
  • The Lessons of His­to­ry (Durant, Durant)

Queue

  • Neu­ro­mancer (Gibson)
  • The Sea­soned Schemer (Fried­man, Felleisen)
  • Types and Pro­gram­ming Lan­guages (Pierce)
  • Man­ag­ing Giga­bytes: Com­press­ing and Index­ing Doc­u­ments and Images (Witten)
  • The Design and Imple­men­ta­tion of the FreeB­SD Oper­at­ing System (Neville-Neil, McKu­sick)
  • Com­put­er Sys­tems: A Pro­gram­mer’s Per­spec­tive (Bryant, O’Hal­laron)
  • The Master and Mar­gari­ta (Bul­gakov, trans. by Burgin, O’Con­nor)
  • Com­put­er Net­work­ing: A Top-Down Approach (Kurose, Ross)
  • Finan­cial State­ments: A Step-by-Step Guide to Under­stand­ing and Cre­at­ing Finan­cial Reports (Ittel­son)
  • Intro­duc­tion to Finance: Mar­kets, Invest­ments, and Finan­cial Man­age­ment (Norton, Melich­er)
  • Against the Gods: The Remark­able Story of Risk (Bern­stein)
  • Common Japan­ese Col­lo­ca­tions: A Learn­er’s Guide to Fre­quent Word Pair­ings (Shoji)
  • Pro­gram­ming Lan­guage Prag­mat­ics (Scott)
  • Struc­ture and Inter­pre­ta­tion of Com­put­er Pro­grams (Suss­man, Abel­son)
  • Think­ing in Sys­tems: A Primer (Mead­ows)
  • Work­ing Effec­tive­ly with Legacy Code (Feath­ers)
  • The Emper­or’s Soul (Sander­son)
  • Fic­ciones (Borges)
  • The Begin­ning of Infin­i­ty: Expla­na­tions That Trans­form the World (Deutsch)
  • Snow Crash (Stephen­son)
  • The Black Com­pa­ny (Cook)
  • Essen­tials of Eco­nom­ics (Ballvè)
  • The Theory of Money and Credit (Mises)
  • The Mys­tery of Bank­ing (Roth­bard)
  • Under­stand­ing the Dollar Crisis (Greaves)
  • Game Theory: An Intro­duc­tion (Tadelis)
  • Naked Money: What It Is and Why It Mat­ters (Whee­lan)
  • Super­in­tel­li­gence: Paths, Dan­gers, Strate­gies (Bostrom)
  • The Hitch­hik­er’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)
  • The Stand (King)
  • Leviathan (Hobbes)
  • A Brief His­to­ry of Time (Hawk­ing)
  • On Lib­er­ty (Mill)
  • The Gen­er­al Theory of Employ­ment, Inter­est and Money (Keynes)
  • The Wealth of Nations (Smith)
  • Cap­i­tal­ism and Free­dom (Fried­man)
  • Sapi­ens (Harari)
  • Homo Deus (Harari)
  • The Ascent of Money: A Finan­cial His­to­ry of the World (Fer­gu­son)
  • Trac­tion (Wein­berg, Mares)
  • 雪国（川端）

Fin­ished

  • Domain-Driven Design Dis­tilled (Vernon)
    • A good dis­til­la­tion of the much denser orig­i­nal.
  • Sid­dhartha (Hesse)
    • “Wisdom cannot be impart­ed. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like fool­ish­ness to some­one else… Knowl­edge can be com­mu­ni­cat­ed, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do won­ders through it, but one cannot com­mu­ni­cate and teach it.”
  • The Psy­chol­o­gy of Money (Housel)
  • Zen and the Art of Motor­cy­cle Main­te­nance (Pirsig)
    • To do some­thing well, first be a good person. Then you will nat­u­ral­ly do it well.
  • The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Atten­tion, Master Myself, and Win (Kon­niko­va)
    • It reads more like a por­trait of Erik Seidel than about the author’s own jour­ney. This book would have turned out quite dif­fer­ent­ly if Kon­niko­va’s mentor was any­body else. Still enter­tain­ing though, and a pleas­ant break from some of the denser mate­r­i­al I’m work­ing on right now.
  • The Five Dys­func­tions of a Team (Lencioni)
    • I wish more books were writ­ten this con­cise­ly. The story car­ries the mes­sage well with­out boring, and strate­gies and tech­niques for deal­ing with the var­i­ous dys­func­tions are simply writ­ten and easily action­able. The title of the book is unfor­tu­nate — this book is better read before one actu­al­ly needs it.
  • Cat­e­go­ry Theory for Pro­gram­mers (Milews­ki)
    • Despite prob­a­bly being the most acces­si­ble book to cat­e­go­ry theory, it’s still some of the hard­est mate­r­i­al I’ve ever cov­ered (it’s not saying much, since I’m not much of a math guy). Some of the chap­ters took me mul­ti­ple days of con­cen­trat­ed mental effort to under­stand, and I had to take a month-long break in the middle to let my brain’s dif­fuse mode do its thing. Def­i­nite­ly revis­it­ing this book again in the near future.
  • The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov (Dos­to­evsky, trans. by Pevear, Volokhon­sky)
    • BK has brought me closer to the face of God than any other osten­si­bly reli­gious work. Dos­to­evsky’s master stroke was in real­iz­ing that it was likely that the reader would be more an Ivan and less an Alyosha, and tai­lord his mes­sage accord­ing­ly. The novel is just as rel­e­vant today (if not more so) as it was in the Russia of 1879.
  • The Four Pil­lars of Invest­ing (Bern­stein)
  • Archi­tec­ture of a Data­base System (Heller­stein, Stone­brak­er, Hamil­ton)
  • Alice in Bor­der­land (Haro)
    • The first manga I com­plet­ed since the con­cep­tion of this read­ing list. Alice in Bor­der­land first came to my atten­tion as a Net­flix show. Having enjoyed other sto­ries involv­ing sur­vival games (see Liar Game, No Game No Life), I was inclined to read the source mate­r­i­al, and I’m glad I did. A dis­parate group of people is torn from placid exis­tences and forced to par­tic­i­pate in games in order to extend their visas, which dic­tate how long they can live before being exe­cut­ed by sky lasers with pin­point accu­ra­cy. Some of these games involve care­ful prob­a­bilis­tic analy­ses, others only pos­si­ble by sac­ri­fic­ing others. All said, a gen­uine­ly deliv­ered study on what life means for each of the char­ac­ters in the group, and dare I say, the reader him­self.
  • The Ele­ments of Style (Strunk, White)
    • Indis­pens­able for writ­ing well.
  • Med­i­ta­tions (Aure­lius, trans. by Hays)
    • Deeply trans­for­ma­tive. I’ve nat­u­ral­ly grav­i­tat­ed toward some of the tenets described within, but seeing them, and more, in writ­ing only strength­ens my con­vic­tion.
  • Games People Play (Berne)
    • Would have dropped it if it were any longer. Many of the games pre­sent­ed in this book seem con­trived and out of touch with modern social inter­ac­tions. I also expect­ed a bit more rigour in the for­mal­iza­tion of trans­ac­tion­al analy­sis. If such a thing exists I didn’t find it here.
  • A Promised Land (Obama)
    • First biog­ra­phy I read in its entire­ty. The book can be divid­ed into two parts — pre-pres­i­den­cy (Chap­ter 1-10), and pres­i­den­cy (Chap­ter 11-27). The book covers the first term of his pres­i­den­cy, making it all the way to the bin Laden raid. Highly rec­om­mend­ed. Despite its length, one can’t help but imag­ine that Obama had to make many tor­tu­ous deci­sions on which events to make it to the print­ing press. The chap­ters on US rela­tions with the Middle East and the Israeli–Pales­tin­ian con­flict were par­tic­u­lar­ly enlight­en­ing.
  • The Great Mental Models Volume 1: Gen­er­al Think­ing Con­cepts (Par­rish, Beaubi­en)
    • Didn’t learn much from this book. Not sure who the target audi­ence for this book is; anyone inclined enough to pick up this book prob­a­bly already knows most of what this book is going to say.
  • Breath: The New Sci­ence of a Lost Art (Nestor)
    • Not a long book, but too long for the mate­r­i­al it covers. TLDR: don’t breathe through your mouth. There are a few inter­est­ing breath­ing tech­niques men­tioned in the book that I’ll try and report back.
  • Good Strat­e­gy Bad Strat­e­gy: The Dif­fer­ence and Why It Mat­ters (Rumelt)
    • I can’t quite remem­ber where I saw this rec­om­mend­ed. I’m struck by how much sense this book makes, being as it is a book about the most airy-fairy term in busi­ness. Even if you’re not a busi­ness-type, give it a quick browse.
  • The Type Astro­naut’s Guide to Shape­less (Gur­nell)
    • Wanted to figure out what all the fuss was with about gener­ic pro­gram­ming. I think my take­home from this book is, if you don’t know if you should be using Shape­less, you prob­a­bly should­n’t be. I don’t like how com­pli­cat­ed things are, and how much mas­sag­ing and plead­ing with the com­pil­er you need to do to get afore­men­tioned Very Com­pli­cat­ed Things to work.
  • Death’s End (Liu, trans. by Liu)
    • I haven’t read any sci­ence fic­tion in a long time, so I’m not sure if it’s normal to be so blown away by a work of fic­tion. I also miss the com­pul­sive feel­ing of not being able to put down a story. On a relat­ed note, I had been har­bour­ing a per­son­al belief that beyond a cer­tain stage, it gets pro­gres­sive­ly more dif­fi­cult to be impressed by fic­tion. Depend­ing on how you look at it, this series has either strength­ened that belief or blown it out of the water. I’m look­ing for­ward to read­ing some of Bran­don Sander­son­’s work, as rec­om­mend­ed to me by a good friend.
  • The Vin­tage Guide to Clas­si­cal Music (Swaf­ford)
    • Might ini­tial­ly be mis­tak­en as Wikipedi­an, but the true value of this book is in the author’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tions of some of the enig­mat­ic fig­ures in music. The sec­tion on music rec­om­men­da­tions that book­end each chap­ter is a god­send also.
  • Eco­nom­ics in One Lesson: The Short­est and Surest Way to Under­stand Basic Eco­nom­ics (Hazlitt)
    • One of the most digestible books I’ve ever read on how eco­nom­ic poli­cies work. It taught me how to make sense of things like min­i­mum wages and rent con­trol. This book and more like it can be found on the Mises web­site, for free.
  • 走れメロス (太宰)
    • Went through this short story on friend­ship as part of my ongo­ing Japan­ese lessons.
  • Dis­cov­er­ing Sta­tis­tics Using R (Field, Miles)
  • The Dark Forest (Liu, trans. by Mar­tin­sen)
  • Scala Cook­book (Alexan­der)
  • Japan­ese Core Words and Phras­es (Shoji)
  • The Little Schemer (Fried­man, Felleisen)
  • A Short His­to­ry of Nearly Every­thing (Bryson)
  • Pro­gram­ming in Scala (Oder­sky, Spoon, Ven­ners)
  • Trad­ing and Exchanges: Market Microstruc­ture for Prac­ti­tion­ers (Harris)
  • Func­tion­al Pro­gram­ming in Scala (Chiu­sano, Bjar­na­son)
  • The Three-Body Prob­lem (Liu, trans. by Liu)
  • Learn­ing How To Learn (McConville, Oakley, Sejnows­ki)
  • Code: The Hidden Lan­guage of Com­put­er Hard­ware and Soft­ware (Pet­zold)
  • Design­ing Data-Inten­sive Appli­ca­tions (Klepp­mann)
  • HTTP: The Defin­i­tive Guide (Totty, Gour­ley)
  • Oper­at­ing Sys­tems: Three Easy Pieces (Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau)
  • Dis­crete Math­e­mat­ics (Lovász, Veszter­gom­bi)
  • Crack­ing The Coding Inter­view (McDow­ell)
  • You Don’t Know JS (Simp­son)
  • JavaScript - The Good Parts (Crock­ford)
  • Data Struc­tures and Algo­rithms in Java (Goodrich, Tamas­sia)
  • Data Struc­tures and Algo­rithms in Python (Gold­wass­er, Goodrich, Tamas­sia)
  • Time, Clocks, and the Order­ing of Events in a Dis­trib­uted System (Lam­port)
  • TCP/​IP Illus­trat­ed: Volume 1 - The Pro­to­cols (Fall)
  • The Right­eous Mind (Haidt)
  • The Unbear­able Light­ness of Being (Kun­dera)
  • High Per­for­mance Web Sites (Soud­ers)
  • Even Faster Web Sites (Soud­ers)
  • The Alchemist (Coelho)
  • Head First Java (Bates, Sierra)
  • The Hunger Games Tril­o­gy (Collins)
  • Genki I: An Inte­grat­ed Course in Ele­men­tary Japan­ese (Banno, Ikeda, Ohno)
  • Genki II: An Inte­grat­ed Course in Ele­men­tary Japan­ese (Banno, Ikeda, Ohno)
  • Freako­nom­ics: A Rogue Econ­o­mist Explores the Hidden Side of Every­thing (Dubner, Levitt)
  • The God Delu­sion (Dawkins)
  • …

Half-fin­ished/​paused

  • Domain-Driven Design (Evans)
  • Func­tion­al and Reac­tive Domain Mod­el­ing (Ghosh)
  • The Com­pleat Strat­e­gyst: Being a Primer on the Theory of Games of Strat­e­gy (Williams)
    • The anti­quat­ed tone makes it hard to read. I dropped this in favour of a more aca­d­e­m­ic approach in Tadelis’s Game Theory: An Intro­duc­tion.
  • Craft­ing Inter­preters (Nys­trom)
    • Fin­ished the first half of the book (which covers a com­plete imple­men­ta­tion in Java). May even­tu­al­ly come back to cover the second half, which rewrites the whole thing in C with a focus on per­for­mance
  • All of Sta­tis­tics: A Con­cise Course in Sta­tis­ti­cal Infer­ence (Wasser­man)
  • Why We Sleep: The New Sci­ence of Sleep and Dreams (Walker)
  • The Crea­ture from Jekyll Island (Grif­fin)
  • Clean Code (Martin)
  • The Ele­ments of Com­put­ing Sys­tems: Build­ing a Modern Com­put­er from First Prin­ci­ples (Nisan, Schock­en)
  • Func­tion­al Pro­gram­ming, Sim­pli­fied (Alexan­der)
  • How to Solve It (Pólya)
  • Intro­duc­tion to Algo­rithms (Cormen, Leis­er­son, Rivest, Stein)
  • Reli­able and Secure Dis­trib­uted Pro­gram­ming (Cachin, Rodrigues, Guer­raoui)
  • Data and Real­i­ty (Kent)
  • Exha­la­tion (Chiang)
  • Ruby Under a Micro­scope: An Illus­trat­ed Guide to Ruby Inter­nals (Shaugh­nessy)
  • Pro­gram­ming Pearls (Bent­ley)
  • Rebuild­ing Rails (Gibbs)
  • Elo­quent Ruby (Olsen)
  • Nginx HTTP Server (Nedel­cu)
  • …