Library

Updat­ed May 11, 2022

8/​24 books for 2022.

Read­ing

• 人間失格（太宰）
• Common Japan­ese Col­lo­ca­tions: A Learn­er’s Guide to Fre­quent Word Pair­ings (Shoji)

Queue

• 7 Powers: The Foun­da­tions of Busi­ness Strat­e­gy (Helmer)
• A Brief His­to­ry of Time (Hawk­ing)
• Alche­my: The Sur­pris­ing Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense (Suther­land)
• Cap­i­tal­ism and Free­dom (Fried­man)
• Com­put­er Net­work­ing: A Top-Down Approach (Kurose, Ross)
• Design­ing Event-Driven Sys­tems (Stop­ford)
• Dis­ci­plined Entre­pre­neur­ship (Aulet)
• Essen­tial­ism: The Dis­ci­plined Pur­suit of Less (McK­e­own)
• Essen­tials of Eco­nom­ics (Ballvè)
• Fic­ciones (Borges)
• Gov­ern­ing the Com­mons: The Evo­lu­tion of Insti­tu­tions for Col­lec­tive Action (Ostrom)
• Homo Deus (Harari)
• Intro­duc­tion to Finance: Mar­kets, Invest­ments, and Finan­cial Man­age­ment (Norton, Melich­er)
• My Life in Adver­tis­ing and Sci­en­tif­ic Adver­tis­ing (Hop­kins)
• Neu­ro­mancer (Gibson)
• On Lib­er­ty (Mill)
• Po: Beyond Yes and No (de Bono)
• Prin­ci­ples for Deal­ing with the Chang­ing World Order: Why Nations Suc­ceed and Fail (Dalio)
• Seven Sketch­es in Com­po­si­tion­al­i­ty: An Invi­ta­tion to Applied Cat­e­go­ry Theory (Fong, Spivak)
• Snow Crash (Stephen­son)
• Struc­ture and Inter­pre­ta­tion of Com­put­er Pro­grams (Suss­man, Abel­son)
• The Begin­ning of Infin­i­ty: Expla­na­tions That Trans­form the World (Deutsch)
• The Black Com­pa­ny (Cook)
• The Design and Imple­men­ta­tion of the FreeB­SD Oper­at­ing System (Neville-Neil, McKu­sick)
• The Emper­or’s Soul (Sander­son)
• The Gen­er­al Theory of Employ­ment, Inter­est and Money (Keynes)
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Build­ing a Busi­ness When There Are No Easy Answers (Horowitz)
• The Hitch­hik­er’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)
• The Master and His Emis­sary: The Divid­ed Brain and the Making of the West­ern World (McGilchrist)
• The Master and Mar­gari­ta (Bul­gakov, trans. by Burgin, O’Con­nor)
• The Sea­soned Schemer (Fried­man, Felleisen)
• The Stand (King)
• The Theory of Money and Credit (Mises)
• The Wealth of Nations (Smith)
• Theory of Com­pu­ta­tion (Sipser)
• Trac­tion (Wein­berg, Mares)
• Types and Pro­gram­ming Lan­guages (Pierce)
• Under­stand­ing Michael Porter: The Essen­tial Guide to Com­pe­ti­tion and Strat­e­gy (Magret­ta)
• Work­ing Effec­tive­ly with Legacy Code (Feath­ers)

Fin­ished

• A Field Guide to Men’s Health (Mills)
• The Mom Test (Fitz­patrick)
• The Cold Start Prob­lem: How to Start and Scale Net­work Effects (Chen)
  • One of the best books I’ve ever read on how to under­stand soft­ware tech busi­ness­es. Highly rec­om­mend­ed.
• With­out Their Per­mis­sion: How the 21st Cen­tu­ry Will Be Made, Not Man­aged (Ohan­ian)
• 雪国（川端）
• Pro­gram­ming Type­Script (Cherny)
• The Art of Learn­ing (Wait­zkin)
  • Would not rec­om­mend unless you’re look­ing for an auto­bi­og­ra­phy.
• Think­ing in Sys­tems: A Primer (Mead­ows)
  • Great book. Lots of coun­ter­in­tu­itive results. For exam­ple, when work­ing with sys­tems, it’s cru­cial to iden­ti­fy how long the delay of the response will be. The longer the delay, the more care­ful­ly, and less fre­quent­ly adjust­ments should be imple­ment­ed. It’s a useful mental model that explains many things, such as gov­ern­men­tal respons­es to Covid, and why they seem to be unusu­al­ly inde­ci­sive (answer: it’s because the response delay, in this case the number of Covid cases, is rel­a­tive­ly short, com­pared to the response delay of most other kinds of gov­ern­men­tal poli­cies.)
• Dif­fi­cult Con­ver­sa­tions: How to Dis­cuss What Mat­ters Most (Stone, Patton, Heen)
• Good to Great: Why Some Com­pa­nies Make the Leap… And Others Don’t (Collins)
• The 48 Laws of Power (Greene)
  • Anoth­er one of those Freudi­an books (see also: Games People Play). If you buy into it, you’ll sud­den­ly see every­thing in its terms, which can be quite dan­ger­ous. Still worth read­ing though, if you find your­self nav­i­gat­ing a highly-politi­cized envi­ron­ment (are you in one now?). I did not read this book cover to cover; it reads more like a ref­er­ence book and should be treat­ed as one.
• The Cul­ture Code: The Secrets of Highly Suc­cess­ful Groups (Coyle)
  • The most impor­tant factor in doing any­thing suc­cess­ful­ly as a group is to make sure that every­one in the group is tight­ly knit. Other fac­tors like select­ing for the smartest people don’t move the needle as much. There­fore, go out of your way to make sure that group mem­bers can form bonds with each other, includ­ing insti­tut­ing reg­u­lar team activ­i­ties and rit­u­als, influ­enc­ing the layout of the office to pro­mote inter­ac­tions, com­mu­ni­cat­ing a common vision, etc.
• Sapi­ens (Harari)
  • Anoth­er world­view-chang­ing book. A great com­ple­ment to Debt.
• Pat­terns of Enter­prise Appli­ca­tion Archi­tec­ture (Fowler)
  • Pick­ing out the stuff that’s still rel­e­vant in modern web devel­op­ment can be a bit of a chore, but those bits that do remain just as useful as ever, and a great way to suss out unknown unknowns when think­ing about archi­tec­ture.
• Never Split the Dif­fer­ence: Nego­ti­at­ing as if Your Life Depend­ed on It (Voss, Raz)
  • Much of the book can be dis­tilled into the appen­dix, where the author describes how to con­struct a nego­ti­a­tion one sheet.
• Debt: The First 5000 Years (Grae­ber)
  • World­view-chang­ing. When I set out to try to under­stand the nature of money, I com­piled a read­ing list. This book might just be what I was look­ing for.
• The Lessons of His­to­ry (Durant, Durant)
• The One Minute Man­ag­er (Blan­chard, John­son)
• ノルウェイの森 (村上)
  • 長い旅、やっと終わりました。
• Game Theory: An Intro­duc­tion (Tadelis)
  • Here I posit a new kind of meta equi­lib­ri­um — one in which the assump­tion of all par­tic­i­pants having read this book holds. Prove that this meta equi­lib­ri­um is equiv­a­lent to the Nash equi­lib­ri­um.
• The Every­thing Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Stone)
• The Great CEO Within: The Tac­ti­cal Guide to Com­pa­ny Build­ing (Mochary, MacCaw, Talav­era)
  • More tac­ti­cal than High Growth Hand­book, with step-by-step instruc­tions that can be imple­ment­ed easily. Rec­om­mend­ed for anyone, not just people start­ing or build­ing com­pa­nies. There’s a lot of value in run­ning your life like a CEO, even if you’re not one.
• Mind Hack­ing: How to Change Your Mind for Good in 21 Days (Har­grave)
  • Silly self-help book that I found in an Airbnb. It’s worth a read for anyone who look­ing for ideas on fig­ur­ing out their own brains and how to influ­ence their own behav­iour. There is one hack men­tioned in the book that is par­tic­u­lar­ly promis­ing: that of imag­in­ing your­self being men­tored by some­one else (anyone you look up to or would like to emu­late, even famous his­tor­i­cal fig­ures like Abra­ham Lin­coln), and imag­ine how a con­ver­sa­tion with that person would go. You’ll find that most of the time, with some effort, you’ll usu­al­ly already know what to do, but lack con­vic­tion. I know, it sounds like straight out of an anime, but give it a try; you might be sur­prised.
• High Growth Hand­book (Gil)
• 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)
• Into Thin Air (Krakauer)
• A Farewell to Arms (Hem­ing­way)
• The Lord of the Rings Tril­o­gy (Tolkien)
• The Harry Potter series (Rowl­ing)
• The Great Gatsby (Fitzger­ald)
• Phan­tom (Good­kind)
• (and more when I was younger, mostly fic­tion)

Half-fin­ished/​paused

• Soft­ware Design for Flex­i­bil­i­ty: How to Avoid Pro­gram­ming Your­self into a Corner (Hanson, Suss­man)
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eter­nal Golden Braid (Hof­s­tadter)
  • Won’t have much mental band­width to do this book jus­tice in the near future.
• 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)
• …