What is the best thing you read in 2022?

I read "Crucial Conversations" this year. It feel like it has the potential to be life changing. Need more time to tell what impact it really has.

It introduced me to a new topic, which is analyzing social situations and apply problem solving skills to them. Something that never occurred to me for some reason. I now realize there are smart people working and having interesting thoughts and conclusions in this topic. So much more to explore. (Open to recomindations too!)

The book also seems to give more useful information about how to handle difficult social situations. I was pretty down on work and becoming cynical (still am though hah!) The advice I often get is stuff like be agreeable, don't rock the boat, dont say anything with passion ("corp speak"), to get ahead and get what you want. This feels bad to me. Often it appears in corporations the only people that are getting ahead are those types of yes people. I feel like this book gave me the tools to have differing opinions and express them successfully.

I also liked the book shows that a lot of these difficult conversations are actually in your control. Most people seem to have terrible communication skills I'm learning. Often I would write off a bad conversation as the other person just being an asshole or difficult or something. after reading this it seems like it is possible to handle a lot of these a lot better.

Disjointed thoughts off the top of my head, but I found the book pretty enlightening. Id recommend it if you struggle with expressing your opinions in emotional conversations.

Reading it right now, but I already think it's the test thing: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

I was (and still am) obsessed with productivity. But I more and more my tasks had felt like something I needed to get done, to afterwards finally be able to relax and profit from them. But this time never came and I just got busier.

The book does a great job at explaining how much of our daily grind is based on a refusal to accept our finitude. And once we accept our finitude, we can get a lot more done in a happier way.

I realize this isn't really the intent of the question, but I read "The Count of Monte Cristo" this year for the first time and it's now my favorite book. It's a classic that I just had never bothered with and the story sucked me in. The redemption, revenge, scheming, secrecy. It was phenomenal.

Best paper I read was "Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (2011)".

https://pages.lip6.fr/Marek.Zawirski/papers/RR-7687.pdf

CRDTs get a lot of hype on HN, 95% of the time it's for collaborative editing. But they're much more than some JS library to build an app around - they're a formalism of distributed systems that are strongly eventually consistent. What this means is if the mathematical properties [0] of CRDTs hold, there's no conflicts, no rollbacks, no user intervention - provided the same data is received by every node (in any order, mind you), they will all be in an identical state without a consensus.

For me this is massive, and I'm convinced this has big industrial applications, ie distributed systems in domains where the source of truth is most naturally modelled as append only events. In this scenario, the whole database is a single CRDT.

Also - and I hope I'm not outing myself as a pleb here - but each time I re-read it I discover new things, stuff I might have glossed over, didn't fully understand, or didn't appreciate before.

So yeah, have to hand it to this paper. It's really broadened my horizons.

[0] way less scary than you think. If you're comfortable with first year abstract algebra, operations, sets, relations etc you'll be fine.

Fiction

I discovered and read Blake Crouch this year

- Dark Matter

- Recursion

- Upgrade

- Pines

I also discovered and read

- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

- Gravity by Tess Gerritsen

- A Man by, At the End of the Matinee Keiichiro Hirano

It's between Recursion and Project Hail Mary for me. I am leaning more towards Recursion.

Non-fiction

I discovered and read the following this year

- Deep Work by Cal Newport

- The Millionaire Fastlane by M.J. DeMarco

- Zero to One by Peter Thiel

- How to Start a Business Without any Money by Rachel Bridge

- Creative Gene by Hideo Kojima

- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

- The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

- Show Your Work, Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon

- Press Reset by Jason Schreier

I would say Deep Work and Steve Jobs had the biggest impact on me.

Programming

I am learning Elixir using Elixir In Action by Sasa Juric.

Favorite Technical: The Pragmatic Programmer. This is something that I should have read much earlier.

Favorite Fiction: Pale Fire. Just pure astonishment. Left me speechless with how he made the language sing.

Also great (in no particular order):

- The Sewing Girl's Tale (non-fiction)

- The Odyssey (poem)

- Tropic of Cancer (novel)

- Tenth of December (short story collection).

- Endurance (non-fiction)

- The Billion Dollar Spy (non-fiction)

- Agent Sonya (non-fiction)

- Agent Running in the Field (novel)

- Little Dorrit (novel)

To be honest, I love most of the stuff I read this year. Only a handful of books I didn't like enough to read through.

Book: You Are Not Expected to Understand This: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World by Torie Bosch [1]

Came across this book randomly on Twitter and picked it up. The book is broken into 26 essays about significant pieces of code (defined vaguely), ranging from the Morris Worm to Pagerank to the popup window and the 1x1 invisible gif and how these shaped the modern tech landscape. Lovely read overall, and really shows how pieces of code you work on today can end up having long lasting impact on how society perceives technology as a whole. Best of all, it's not a heavy read, but offers a lot of concise info that can send you down wormholes of wikipedia.

Paper: Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service [2]

Database systems have always been a passion of mine, and the paper from AWS about how DynamoDB works internally is an incredible look into what makes a NoSQL DB platform capable of serving 89 million requests per second _(this is in the intro)_ which is incredible scale. Always good to see how engineering decisions shape products, and it's been interesting to see Dynamo take shape over the last decade _(though I recommend most folks to stay away from it because of it's mad pricing)_

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60254955-you-are-not-exp...

[2]: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/atc22-elhemali.pdf

Easily The City & The City by China Miéville.

The premise is great, the characters are fun, the plot will keep you engaged.

A noir detective story about a murder that happens in the space between two cities which are in superposition. That is, they share the same geographic space, but citizens are forced to live in only one of the cities by a seemingly omnipotent power called Breach that maintains the borders of the two cities.

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius. This year and every year.

It is kind of a stereotype though of tech dudes to be into stoicism, but whatever, this book really just puts me in such a good frame of mind any time I open it.

I re-read The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson; it represents what I love about Sci-Fi: Interesting ideas on the edge of plausibility; a speculative society based on their consequences; a clever story and setting. Leaves me with a "Could be build that?" feeling.

It's inspiring one my current side-projects; a molecular and protein modeler/simulation.

I was late by a year to it, but Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun was both fascinating and, typical for Ishiguro, almost lethally concentrated melancholy. A literary take on AGI and religion from the cleverly written perspective of an AI assistant device, mixed with a coming-of-age story and a meditation on the disposability of modern technology.

I subscribe to Asimov's bi-monthly (6/year) sci-fi short story magazine and there's always one or two stories that really stand out every issue. It's always a treat when a new one turns up in the mailbox. https://www.asimovs.com/

Rabbit Test by Samantha Mills [0] is the heavily researched, hard sci-fi that retains its close intimacy on the impact on regular people that I think science fiction should be going towards. It's realistic, heavy-hitting, and doesn't bullshit on the politics involved.

https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/rabbit-test/

I've been reading the Foundation series, and it's quite good.

Aside from that:

"The New Right" by Michael Malice

"The Storm Before the Storm" by Mike Duncan

"The Anglo-American Establishment" by Carroll Quigley

"Numbers Don't Lie" by Vaclav Smil

Books that weren't good:

"A Short History of Man" by Hans-Herman Hopper

"The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil

"After Evangelicalism" by David P. Gushee

Gene Wolfe.

The whole Solar Cycle (The Book of the New Sun, Urth of The New Sun, The Book of The Long Sun, The Book of The Short Sun), Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, There Are Doors, The Sorcerer's House ... .

Wolfe is a genius.

Before that I also finished Malazan.

There is No Antimemetics Division by qntm [1]:

An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it. Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you wouldn't share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams...

But anomalous antimemes are another matter entirely. How do you contain something you can't record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you're at war? Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day

[1] https://a.co/d/hqdu0We

The Rustonomicon (WIP) made Rust things click in a way that really benefitted me: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/

Definitely in the running!

I'd also recommend "The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work": https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral-en.pdf

Three Body Problem trilogy. Most unique sci-fi I have ever read.

Related, from a few weeks ago: Ask HN: Best books read in 2022? – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33849267

The Once and Future King, by T.H. White.

The Sword in the Stone is probably my favorite Disney movie so I was delighted to discover the movie was based on a book which was even better.

The best works of fiction I read:

- Count Belisarius by Robert Graves

- The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

- The Expanse (all of them)

- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

And the best books on software development were:

- Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach by Mark Richards and Neal Ford

- Multithreaded JavaScript by Thomas Hunter II and Bryan English

- The Programmer's Brain by Felienne Hermans

Here's a few:

* Matthew Klein & Michael Pettis - Trade Wars Are Class Wars

* Bruno Latour - We Have Never Been Modern

* Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (had never read it before, probably book of the year for me)

and of course, Matt Levine's Money Stuff, which is good every year!

Been getting into sci-fi novels recently. Favorite has been stuff by Adrian Taichovsky [1]. A lot of it is premised on "what if animals were (engineered) smarter". His novels usually explore how cognition / language / culture would evolve over millenia for different species.

(minor spoilers) For example, one story describes bees that form a hivemind. Another describes how language would work with only colors. Another describes how society would evolve if knowledge was genetically inherited.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Tchaikovsky

The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman So simple and clear. I listen to it once or twice a year.

How to Fight a Hydra by Josh Kaufman A heroes story about doing hard things.

Courage is Calling by Ryan Holiday I didn't actually finish this one. I just go back to it for about 20-30 minutes every time I need a boost. I save it for when I feel overwhelmed and it snaps me right out of it.

Clean Code, the Clean Coder, and Clean Architecture by Robert C Martin Amazing. I am better for reading these.

Venture Deals by Brad Feld Saved me a lot of time and heartache

The Metaverse by Matthew Ball The first real definition of the Metaverse I've ever heard. Loved it.

The Stormlight Archives by Brandon z Sanderson. I'm on book 4 now eagerly awaiting the release of 5. Easily one of if not the best series of his.

Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination.

As a perfectionist in recovery, this book was extremely illuminating: https://www.newharbinger.com/9781684038459/the-anxious-perfe...

I often felt like they were describing me to myself as I was reading... Highly recommend if you deal with perpetual dissatisfaction with your performance or achievements and would like to learn how to accept yourself for who you are and live a "lighter" existence.

quick shout-out to https://literal.club/ as a hopeful successor of GoodReads, which has been in a state of disrepair if not abandonware for several years now. Literal is a terrific product and I hope it gains traction.

as for my own entries…

- Lapvonia by Moshfegh and Hollow by Catling are both sort of magical-realism set in medieval European villages, which would normally be considered "fantasy" but I assure you are very much not fantasy novels as any normal reader would consider. They are rather stories about the medieval setting set from the perspective of how people a thousand years ago understood and perceived their real world.

- and also on that medieval-tales motif, The Mere Wife by Headley is a contemporary retelling of Beowulf (the hero is a cop named Ben Wolff), great fun and well-styled.

- Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Beaton is winning tons of awards and deservedly so.

- Termination Shock and Ministry for the Future are stabs at possible approaches for solving climate change by very prominent SF writers, which miss the mark for various reasons, but worth a look as they're the dominant themes for the next few years of science fiction.

Starting FORTH by Leo Brodie - Written in a casual, funny, beginner friendly way, and even though I'm not a beginner I still enjoyed it immensely. Now if only Forth were more popular!

Edit: realised OP said `thing' not `things' so I deleted some books.

The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe.

Absolutely astounding, the best book I've read in my life. Gene Wolfe has become my favorite author ever. Each time I reread the book I discover a million things I didn't notice before.

"Einstein's Fridge" was great to learn about the history and development of thermodynamics at a fairly high level.

"Good Inside" on becoming a better parent was also great and taught me a lot.

"Every Tool's a Hammer" on becoming a better maker.

"Crafting Interpreters" on learning about and building compilers.

All were really great reads.

Mme. Bovary. First it just was an exercise to show to my wife how _descriptions_ are _action_. I was trying to improved her everyday writing, you know, memos from work, informal/formal letters. I'm reading French just a little as English. So we are doing this... _exercises_ based upon an Spanish translate. And there it was. Just like I used to be remember it: fabrics that suddenly becomes a living creature embracing Emma B. nee Rouault, feelings that forms heavy lakes falling upon her, light that is light and sound and it taste like aluminum. Sorry to inform: is not a novel about couples, not even about a couple, not even about Emma. It's all about how you can tell a thing, whatever thing, not thinking about it as static dead thing but a living, fiery, not a few times menacing, whatever.

John Green's "The Anthropocene Reviewed" was surprisingly a great joy to read. It was a light in the dark for me. He makes me feel thankful and appreciative of being a part of the human race without coming off as cheesy or contrived. And it's funny, too.

« Axiomatic » sci-fi short stories by Greg Egan. I think it’s the first time fiction has clicked for me. It’s hard sci-fi so the science is accurate and that helps a lot. And the fact that they’re short stories helps because of my modern day short term attention span…

I finally read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down[1], which has been on my list for years.

Cultural/anthropological journalism tends to fall into a handful of traps (fawning over "exotic" cultures, or dismissing them as backwards), and this is one of a small handful of books that avoid those errors. I highly recommend it to anybody who's interested in medical anthropology, or more generally to anyone looking to understand (a tiny fragment of) the immigrant experience in the US.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12609.The_Spirit_Catches...

Fiction: The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier. Very fun novel somewhere between sci-fi and literary fiction, best read without having spoiled anything about it.

Non-Fiction: The Bright Ages - Matthew Gabriele. Very nuanced well written popular history of the medieval period

Journalism: Not from this year but I read it this year the first time: Largely photographic piece about the drug war in the Phillipines: (warning, very disturbing/gory) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/07/world/asia/ro...

"The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

If anyone can recommended some other "beginner" books for learning genetics I would really appreciate it.

The road to serfdom and the constitution of liberty by fa hayek. Really nails home why the individual is the moat important organizational block of society and how to protect that. Why nations fail and the narrow corridor by daron acemoglu were also excellent and gave more practical ideas on how to make institutions that work well (and also protect individuals). Wanting by luke burgis was also a really good jntro to rene girards ideas that like drive social interraction.

Haruki Murakami's "Novelist as a Vocation" has been inspiring for me. It's a memoir about his path as an author. I find that his discussions of topics such as writers block relevant to my technology work.

The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie. Grim and gritty, with phenomenal character development that hones in on the fallibility of people. The narration by Steven Pacey is incredible, if you'd like to go that route.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel.

The end of the world is just the beginning by Peter Zeihan. It is an amazing walkthrough of the modern global economy and how it is changing based on changing demographics and politics. Highly recommended.

"When We Cease to Understand the World" was fascinating historical fiction, which felt more like fiction because the stories were so out there and well-written. Many times I looked up the wikipedia entry on some character or event, only to discover that some of the more bizarre and out-there parts of the story that I had assumed were fiction were actually fact.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4462913650

The two recent books by Madeline Miller, "Circe" and "The Song of Achilles"

"Crossroads" Jonathan Franzen

"Agassi" Andre Agassi - I don't normally read sports memoirs, but this one came highly recommended by a woman author that I have read recently so I gave it a try. As a tennis fan who pretty much alway routed for the other player when he played (except when he played Pete Sampras), I found the book totally engaging. Highly recommended.

I finally got around to reading Neuromancer, and it was pretty stellar. Not the best story, but man, Gibson's prose is phenomenal in my opinion.

Fiction: Gideon the Ninth - which was both funnier than expected, given it's about necromancers, and also a great view of how very technical discussions appear from the outside

Non fiction: Probably "Becoming Trader Joe" really shows how business decisions are path very situational and path dependent. i.e. the whole store brand schtick of Trader Joe's started because of alcohol regulations

A few suggestions on the heavier side since I had an interesting year.

Attached, The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find--and Keep-- Love: Why do people ghost, lovebomb or keep long term relationships. There are a few reddit groups that are incomprehensible if you have not read this, afterwards you see things differently. Not a happy book regardless of the title. Thais Gibson therapist on youtube that also suffered personally has good content.

The body keeps the score: Read this second, it describes the physical effects of various mental health related events. People swear by this again and again.

Complex PTSD, from surviving to thriving: If you need to read this you are at the point that you have figured out that something has gone very wrong with you or someone close tou you. Thr chapter on cptsd emergency is very chacteristic. Also read the respective reddit threads.

The topics above are very to the point and the situations they describe affect in a subtle way a lot of people. The first also assist in understanding parent children relationships.

Life After Lifestyle by Toby Shorin: https://subpixel.space/entries/life-after-lifestyle/

Enjoy this piece and some of the themes in it, weird DTC brands, authenticity, manufacturing culture. It seems to make sense of the current moment we live in.

Napoleon by Andrew Roberts. It's one of those rare works of history that is both highly informative and a real pleasure to read.

It helps that Napoleon lived one of the most extraordinary lives in human history.

Key takeaway, in the saucy words of the great man himself: "Fortune is a woman. The more she does for me, the more I will require of her."

I just posted a list of articles earlier today.[0] Choosing one article and one book, I would go with

- Stylized Facts in the Social Sciences by Daniel Hirschman

- 1177 B.C. by Eric Cline

[0] https://bcmullins.github.io/interesting-articles-2022/

Fiction

--------

Termination Shock - Neal Stephenson

Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

Shards of Earth - Adrian Tchaikovsky

Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir

Gnomon - Nick Harkaway

The Gone Away World - Nick Harkaway

The Apollo Murders - Chris Hadfield

Nonfiction

----------

Mindf*ck - Chris Wylie

1776 - David McCullough

Apollo 8 - Jeffrey Kluger

I really enjoyed this Dan Luu article https://danluu.com/nothing-works/

It's something I had been thinking about for a while but didn't have the knowledge required to put it into words. I end up linking it a bit.

Someone on Hacker News recommended The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan. The audiobook is just fantastic, read by the author and you can tell how passionate and concerned he is about the subjects he’s talking about. It’s a long book but worth the read.

I finally got around to reading The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, which was pretty great. Also the Richard Burton movie (read the book first).

Best paper, easily:

https://nebuchadnezzar-megolm.github.io/

I read "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist" this year, and the authors make great points. The ones that stuck with me the most are those regarding Kant's scepticism.

Isaacson's biography of Da Vinci. Beautiful man.

The biography went really deep into his art and pointed out what made it so special. As someone who knows nothing about art, this gave me a wonderful new perspective both on Da Vinci and on art in general.

The Precipice by Toby Ord

https://theprecipice.com/

An amazing nonfiction book that at times reads like science-fiction. A grand overview of various existential risks humanity faces and what we can do to decrease the chances. As it stands, the author estimates humanity's survival chances to be 5/6 per 100 years, given today's state of things. This is equivalent to playing a Russian roulette - not something we can maintain for the long term. So now is one of the most important times in history of humanity: preventing our not-unlikely total destruction.

The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. It definitely lives up to its reputation.

"The Ministry For the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson and "Termination Shock" by Neal Stephenson provide compelling approaches to dealing with climate change, in the form of thriller novels.

"So good they can't ignore you" - the book has a contrarian viewpoint on how you don't look seek out the field that you are most passionate about, but rather you work at getting good at something and the passion finds you. Makes so much sense!

"Do hard things" - title is self- explanatory, real growth happens under pressure.

"The Snowball" - this is such an important book - not just great financial advice, but also filled with life advice from the sage of Omaha. It's over 1000 pages long, but it's so honest.

I discovered Patrick Radden Keefe's writing this past year, and loved his writing style enough to immediately pick up a second of his books.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

I've also been listening to a lot of audiobooks and was really impressed by Rosamund Pike's reading of The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan (Book 2 of the Wheel of Time series) for Audible; enough that I'm waiting to listen to Book 3 to when her reading of it is released next summer.

After Terry Pratchett's death in 2015 I started rereading all of Discworld in publishing order, I had read about half of them before.

This year's batch included _The Fifth Elephant_ and later _Night Watch_, and they're really fantastic. The pinnacle of the series? I have about ten books left to find out.

Also _The Loom Of Life_ (in Dutch, its Dutch title translates to "Why are there so many species") and it was a nice dense introduction to biodiversity and ecology.

And others less worth mentioning.

The same two books I read every year.

7 Habits of highly successful people How to win friends and influence people.

Both books seem to be used in thousands of newer books, borrowing the same themes.

Bill Browser's Red Notice and then Freezing Order.

They read like fiction and gave me a whole new appreciation for how Russia works, plus international politics and investing.

The Guns of John Moses Browning. One of those where you didn't realize how someone you likely don't know much about has impacted every human on the planet.

Sadly, Porn by Edwars Teach (better known as The Last Psychiatrist).

He has a very opinionated style, so if it doesn't work for, you'll hate it. At the same time, I've found it extremely insightful about human nature and it forced my to face some parts of myself that I wasn't aware of and didn't like.

Very much love-or-hate read, but worth trying. Just maybe check out his old blog first to see if his style is bearable for you.

Strugatsky - Roadside picnic

A small sci-fi novel where a fantastic premise is explored. The most interesting part is the description of the role of the different characters in relation to the mystery (which is not explained in the book). See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic

I finally got around to reading Moby Dick this year. I found it to be about 100x better and more approachable than I expected, and there’s so much to meditate on while reading it that I am excited to read thru it a second time.

Also, 2 new Cormac McCarthy novels just came out and I re-read the boarderlands trilogy and blood meridian this year to prep myself. I can’t recommend these enough, even tho it was my second time reading

Jack Four by Neal Asher. sci fi first person mega action. impossible to put down. Close second would be Hail Mary by the guy who wrote the Martian.

Best is hard! But "Owls of the Eastern Ice," about fieldwork in Siberia studying owls, is definitely up there.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/22/owls-of-the-ea...

Re-read „It’s Not Luck” by Elijahu Goldratt; maybe it’s not „epiphany”, but very good instruction on tackling seemingly „impossible” projects.

For some reason "Who We Are and How We Got Here" (David Reich on early human history via DNA) was just a delight, to have so many open questions be slammed shut.

"The Need to be Whole", from Wendell Berry, is deeply thought-provoking in a sort of spiritual-political way, though far too long for how much it has to say, and questionable at times.

Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective by Ken Stanley and Joel Lehman. This book was a fascinating read for anyone with ambitious objectives (or an interest in optimization algorithms). Ken is such a deep thinker, I love when he's on podcasts or gets interviewed, and reading his book was a real treat.

River of the Gods by Candice Millard https://www.npr.org/2022/06/15/1105189330/river-of-the-gods-...

Cryptonomicon. A classic but deservedly so.

Neville Shute's novel 'On the Beach', from 1957.

I won't spoil it -- Wikipedia has a synopsis if you want -- other than to say it's end-of-times dystopia. But from 1957. It's delightful.

My friend Tim:

> Just finished On the Beach. Simple and profound. Just need some Zoloft and I will be great. Thanks for the recommendation.

Always with Honor (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55807906)

Memoir from the leader of the White Army during the Bolshevik revolution. Sparked an interest in Russian history for me.

"The Idea of the World", by Bernardo Kastrup. A complete departure from my materialistic view of the world, and - in spite of certain arguments made in the book, with which I disagree - offered me the chance to learn something that now requires more reading on the topic.

https://www.amazon.in/Art-War-Sun-Tzu/dp/8184950888

I think this is one of the most underrated book and one should read it at least once.

Four novels stood out:

- Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

The novel explores aging, careers, and relationships. As I plod further into middle age, I felt like it was written for me.

Amor Towles is a brilliant writer. I enjoyed all three of his novels:

- A Gentleman in Moscow - Rules of Civility - The Lincoln Highway

If you're into historical biographies, I highly recommend The Last Lion by McMasters on Churchill. Really puts things into perspective about how close Germany came to owning Europe.

It's really 3 books, 5000+ pages, not a quick read but worth the effort.

This book: https://www.amazon.in/Heavyhands-Ultimate-Exercise-Leonard-S...

"Stories of Your Life and Others" by Ted Chiang (from 2002). Contains the short story that the movie Arrival was based on, and a bunch of other cool stories as well. Definitely the best SciFi I've read in a long time.

An Elegant Puzzle- Systems Engineering Management. The content is great, and the design and typsetting are fantastic too. It helped formalize a lot of half thoughts I had floating around my head in regards to engineering management.

Paradais by Fernanda Melchor was the only book I literally could not put down till I finished. It’s a short book, but extremely visual. I read it maybe six months ago and the whole story has played through my head since then.

Children of the Arbat(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Arbat)

Pretty scary book about Russia circa 1930-1940

2 books: The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism & The New Traditional Woodworker. Both of these I read separately and in the end became convinced that they are indeed unintentionally related.

"The Beautiful Tree: a personal journey into how the world's poorest people are educating themselves" by James Tooley. It's a very interesting book about low-cost private education.

- a collection of lydia davis short stories - 'on earth we're briefly gorgeous' by ocean vuong - latest noon magazine - lorca poems - 'dirty work' by larry brown

"Slight Edge" by Jeff Olson was pretty good. Lessons from the book helped me make progress towards my bigger goals every day. You don't need to read the entire book to get value.

The Inner Game of Tennis

The meta-crises framework co-developed by Daniel Schmachtenberger

https://consilienceproject.org/

Injustice by Brad Nelsen

Fascinating execution on a fun sci fi idea: intergalactic prison from the inside. Delightful and creative character development and a cathartic conclusion!

I reread Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, which despite having been published ~50 years ago, still seems prescient and with relevant commentary on modern life

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*** by Mark Manson?

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society - by Eric A. Posner and Eric Glen Weyl

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177502/ra...

The book recommends radical changes to how we deal with private property, voting, immigration, large stock investors, AI stuff, and more. It felt like an honest overview of various economic policies across the past (pointing out how radical many changes were) and a set of reasonable proposals for how to improve our currently-broken system.

Sex Versus Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein by John Launer.

What Is a Minor Literature? by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari.

By far the best thing I’ve read in years is the blog about obesity and its mysteries, slimemoldtimemold.com. Can’t recommend it enough.

“Man’s Search For Meaning” made me think a lot.

The erogamer. For all its flaws, it has many amazing moments. It made me think about life and how people change as they age.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.

It was Matt Crump’s saga about his cheating students at crump lab.com. It was taken down, but it was a great read.

Everything’s on Andrej Karpathy‘s blog.

Reincarnation Blues, by Michael Poore. Takes on some serious stuff but never takes itself too seriously.

"The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann" by Ananyo Bhattacharya

I read the first two fiction books I'd read in a long time this year:

- Children of Time

- Children of Ruin (the sequel)

Finally finished the "Gervais Principle" essay, was real high quality.

Business: Team Topologies Non-Fiction: Be Love Now Fiction: The Lost Metal

Thinking fast and slow, and Principles. Both live up to their reputation.

let's talk about owls with diabetes by David Sedaris. Never has a book made me laugh out loud more than this one. It's completely ridiculous and crazy, but I loved every minute of it.

Anna Karenina by Tolstoy The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

The Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley

The sixth principle Farnham Street blogs

The Bobiverse

Build by Tony Fadell (iPod, Nest).

"Mathematics for the Non-Mathematician" - Morris Kline. An oldie but a goodie. Don't expect a gripping writing style. Actually, don't expect to read more than a few sections at a time. But if you get through it you will come away with a much better mathematical intuition.

"The Body Keeps the Score" - Bessel Van Der Kok. tl;dr on this one is: the DSM V is woefully inadequate.

Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari

That Hideous Strength

1492 by Charles Mann

The Bible (ESV)

The news that lockdown ends.