Reading Log

Past Reads

• Only the Paranoid Survive by Andrew Grove: Written by a former CEO of Intel, the book talks about “critical inflection points,” times when a business encounters crisis and must radically pivot its product or go bust. His point isn’t that critical inflection points are bad. In fact, if handled properly, Grove argues inflection points can take a business to new heights. The idea of a “critical inflection point” is reminiscent of Taleb’s theory of black swans.
• Striking Thoughts by Bruce Lee: Bruce Lee is known for his martial arts movies, but he was also a philosopher. The book talks about all kinds of philosophy, including the Western / analytical tradition: for example, he talks about the difference between a priori and a posteriori knowledge.
• Essays by Michel de Montaigne: French nobleman Montaigne (1533-1592) invented the essay, but not as we know it today. In contrast to school essays, which are typically focused in nature, academic, and boring, Montaigne writes in a highly idiosyncratic and unstructured fashion. He jumps from topic to topic liberally; he cites personal experiences, rumors, and anecdotes whose historical accuracy is at times questionable; he quotes from his favorite Greek and Latin authors, in their original language (!) and seemingly from memory. He is introspective, witty, and (despite the centuries-long gap) often very relatable. This unusual style of composition makes sense in light of the fact that “essay” meant something more like “attempt” in the French of his time, i.e. the word had no academic connotation.
• How to Live, Or, A life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell: This book is a biography of the aforementioned Michel de Montaigne, written in a kind of question/answer form. Another appreciated feature of this book is that Bakewell supplies relevant historical context for modern readers to follow along. This is especially useful when, for example, he is discussing the civil wars in France. More than just a biographer, she is an interpreter who makes Montaigne’s ideas and writing accessible to modern-day readers.
• The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb: Philosophy, epistemology, funny anecdotes from the author’s career as a Wall Street trader: Taleb’s writing style is highly idiosyncratic and polarizing. Some people strongly dislike his books while others swear by his ideas.
• The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk: Hopkirk mixes expert historical research with entertaining (and factually accurate) storytelling. This makes the book very fun and rewarding to read.
• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card: While disguising itself as a sci-fi book for children, this work tackles some important philosophical questions. Note that Ender’s Shadow is a great example of a successful sci-fi sequel. It doesn’t overshadow the original book; instead, it complements it. Orson Scott Card sheds new light onto the characters’ motivations and fleshes out subtle details that went unexplained in Ender’s Game.
• The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu: The “Dark Forest Theory” that forms the basis of this work (and many other sci-fi books about aliens) has been disproven: Aliens would visit for knowledge, not resources.
• The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Taleb: This is a short, fun, and witty read. You could finish it in one afternoon, because it consists entirely of concise, one to two sentence philosophical statements (aphorisms). You could also read the aphorisms one at a time, following the author’s recommendation finishing the book in a few months.
• Surviving the College Admissions Madness by Kevin Robert Martin: The book presents itself as a college admissions advice book, but it’s really a set of memoirs combined with investigative journalism. A thoughtful, convincing book on how college admissions in America should be reformed and what has gone wrong.
• The Discovery of France by Graham Robb: One interesting takeaway I got from this (very well-written) book is that as late as the 1800s, most of France’s population didn’t know French. What we think of as “French” today was actually the dialect of Paris, which was only exported to the rest of the country in recent times.
• Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell: Orwell wrote a lot of stuff besides 1984 and Animal Farm. Did you know that he was fluent in Burmese?
• The Story of English by Robert McCrum
• The Great Seige by Ernle Bradford: This book is a very thoroughly-researched history of the Ottoman Empire’s seige of the island of Malta in 1565, complete with detailed breakdowns of the motivations and strategies of both sides.
• The Wisdom of Adam Smith: A neat condensed form of Adam Smith’s economics and philosophy writings.
• The Story of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang: My favorite story in this collection is “Story of Your Life: it’s linguistics, sci-fi, and physics all rolled into one novella. The story was written in the late 90s, but it still feels relevant today, which is a testament to Ted Chiang’s skill as a thinker and sci-fi writer.
• Cultural Amnesia by Clive James
• Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes by Daniel Everett: While Everett’s more recent findings are at odds with the mainstream linguistic research community - sometimes not without reason - I believe this book is still worth reading for historiography: I read it to better understand the history of linguistics in the 20th century.
• De Brevitate Vitae by Seneca
• Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
• Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes
• On Writing by Stephen King
• How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack
• Exhalation by Ted Chiang
• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari: No.

Non-books, dense blog posts, websites

• Nassim Taleb’s Philosophical Notebook: My favorite entries: #66, “Real Books vs Digital Words” and #71, “Low Carb Philology”
• Reflections on Hyderabad - 2022
• Text is the Universal Interface: Reflections on ChatGPT, the Unix philosophy, and the history of software development.

The design of my reading log was inspired by this page.