What are you looking forward to reading in 2023?

This year I have set my goal high: completing 100 books from start to finish. For this, I need to consistently read about 2 books per week(2 * 52 = 104). I plan to read the classics and the most recommended books from the West and India. This will dovetail two objectives: a) Cutting down the time I spend mindlessly on reddit, youtube and so on. b) Assimilating more thoughtful material to ruminate over and write down my thoughts on.

I created a blog just today to record my notes and thoughts on some of what I read, at https://chitramdasgupta.bearblog.dev/

Curious question, how do you folks find energy to read more text after spending hours a day reading code on a screen? I find my ability to concentrate on it totally shot.

I can't concentrate on a book by the time I'm done working. It's probably been a decade now since I read a book.

Learning / Curiosity:

Fantastic Fungi, Paul Stamets - Because I watched the Netflix documentary

The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli - Because someone here mentioned it and it peaked my interest

Cloud Hidden, Alan Watts - Because I hord Alan Watts quotes and need to finally read one of his works completely

The Molecule of More, Lieberman & Long - Came across it at a book store and looked interesting

Pleasure

The Go-Giver, Burg & Mann - Been on my list for a while but can't remember why.

- Self-Determination Theory (SDT) by Deci and Ryan - finish (and probably re-read). It's a major theory in psychology on human motivation, and it's one of the worldview-shifting reads for me. It's as nerdy and scientific as you can get to the motivation research, and it applies virtually every sphere of human interaction - work, parenting, sports, relationships, education etc.

- The Constraints-Led Approach (CLA) Principles for Sports Coaching and Practice Design - CLA is the the best sports coaching (and also quite nerdy) philosophy I've found so far. Unlike SDT it's mostly concerned about motor skill acquisition science.

- Collection of books on figure skating starting from 1880 - aside from purely historical value, they have incredible knowledge on how to perform figures (that's where name "figure skating" came from) - the art almost extinct nowadays. It's a foundation of this sport, but as international federation removed them from competitions, nobody learns or teaches it anymore, so we literally loosing the roots of the most important skill in figure skating (US and Canada are doing better than everyone else, you can still learn and pass tests in figures, but that's quite unique cases).

History of financial fraud, from 13th century to 21th century. (french)

The early signs of a company difficulties and financial fraud. (french)

Financial fraud handbook. (Joseph T. Wells)

You see the pattern.

Why ? I don't know. I'm kind of fascinated by that. The first time I had any interest of stock market related things was for "The smartest guys in the room" (Enron scandal) long before I read anything about stock markets itself.

I just recently said to someone : "I don't understand why someone would engage in a Ponzi scheme when it's mathematicaly a sure thing, in a finite world with a finite money supply, the scheme will collapse and he will get caught". He responded : "Because he hopes he will get away with it"...

His response of course adds up to my curiosity, because my question states first he can't mathematicaly get away with it. There is definitively a logic of thinking I don't get. But I'm kind of dumb when it's about people.

That being said both my parents had a kind of personnal take about reality and truthfulness... Differences betweens what people say or write about financial matters and financial reality tend to disappear within a relatively short period of time, as reality always catches up in that case.

This explains maybe that.

A book store near us has an amazing January sale, so:

Entertainment: Babel - An Arcane History by RF Kuang, Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick, and my usual re-read of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Non-fiction: Code (second edition), The Myth of Normal by Gabor & Daniel Mate

Milan Curcic's Modern Fortran book is in the mail on its way to me right now. I'm pretty excited about taking some time with that after reading a chapter from the ebook version.

At the same time I'm looking forward to complimenting it with another go at Silvanus P. Thompson's Calculus Made Easy so I can hopefully get a better understanding of the models described in the fortran book. (Been working through Khan Academy material in the meantime as a prelude...)

I've also got the latest installments in Sammy Harkham's Crickets series and Sam Sharpe & Peach S Goodrich's Viewotron series on deck which I've been saving as a treat. They're both published so infrequently I wanted to save them for some time can sprawl into my reading.

I'm continuing to read a PhD thesis that happens to spend a lot of time talking about the migration of my great grandmother's family (and ancestors) through western Virginia and eastern Kentucky (and then on to Oklahoma and Arkansas) starting in the late 18th century.

"Who's your people?": Cumulative identity among the Salyersville Indian population of Kentucky's Appalachia and the midwest muckfields, 1677--2000" by Carlson, Richard Allen, Jr., Ph.D., Michigan State University, 2003, 711 pages; AAT 3115947

https://d.lib.msu.edu/etd/47376

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. It's about an AI, which is becoming an important future possibility, and it's newer than what I usually read. I wonder if it's more shallow-entertaining like Her, or more serious like Asimov's robot stories. Or maybe an entirely new take?

Unsong by Scott Alexander. Yes, the famous blogger with original takes on society, politics, and philosophy. Will his solid reasoning and surprising conclusions carry over into a long writing form?

Glasshouse by Charles Stross. No other reason than it's been recommended as a series here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33146896 , and I'm done with the previous entries.

The Kalevala by the Finns. One of the four ancient epics. Even if a bit of a slog, it's a refreshing change from modern reads. https://sacred-texts.com/neu/kveng/kvrune15.htm

Type-Driven Development with Idris by Edwin Brady - Idris seems different enough from the mainstream that learning it might prove eye-opening. Or spoil me for coding in normal languages forever. A bit of a gamble, this one.

Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP), volume 4B. This was published in December 2022 [1], 11 years after volume 4A.

I bought 4A and 4B yesterday. I'll first dip into them at random, purely for pleasure. Then pick a couple of sections to work through more seriously.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33082128

This is not about reading but I am looking forward to digging (mostly audiobooks) the Indian Epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata this year.

I never paid attention to these things before but after I lost my father a couple of years ago I have made it my personal avenue to walk in his footsteps in everything I do. He loved these books, the literature and often took out references from them for many lessons in life. Not just that, he remembers every character, every line, every verse and every poem from those things. He was a true genius.

I wanted to experience these epics as he did while he read them, and to make everything he loved a part of my life. I miss you daddy.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn.

All of Lee Kwan Yew’s books.

The Ancient City

Some Spanish literary classics, in Spanish. (I’m at newspaper reading level, not great, and still trying to improve.)

Always with Honor, by Pyotr Wrangel

Lots of great tech books I have on preorder from No Starch Press.

Re-reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It's a yearly ritual.

- finishing Atomic Habits(worth the hype, imo)

- Pale Fire, Nabokov

- Speaker for the Dead - I thought the first book was just ok, but praise for the sequel made me interested

- House Of Leaves

- Godel Escher Bach

Kindred by Octavia Butler.

I've been making my way through all of her other works for the past few years. I've read the Xenogenesis trilogy two or three times. Her works speak to me about the human condition in ways very few authors have been able to.

Kindred is her last remaining work I know of that that I have not read. I've been purposefully saving it for last and it feels like now is the time.

For pleasure: getting into the rabbit hole of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series (41 fantastic sci-fi / comedy novels)!

Getting back into sci-fi. Just finished the first book in the third body problem series. Also have earth unaware (Enders game prequel) and We are legion (we are bob) ready to go.

From a work perspective I just finished creative selection which was excellent.

This three-part biography on Teddy Roosevelt:

https://www.amazon.com/Edmund-Morriss-Theodore-Roosevelt-Tri...

Entertainment: - Blindsight - Children of Dune - War and Peace

Curiosity/Knowledge: - Peter Zeihan (author) - Atomic Habits - Turn the Ship Around

Work: - Domain Modeling Made Functional by Scott Wlaschin - Designing Data Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppman

Thanks everyone, love reading these responses!

Fiction:

Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez, because I enjoyed Delta-V, Daemon & Freedom. Which reminds of Kill Decision, which I haven't read so far.

Others: TBD

TCP/IP Illustrated and Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, both by W. Richard Stevens.

The Haskell Wikibook.

More Ursula K. Le Guin.

The Doors of Stone by Patrick Rothfuss (please!)

A really good book produced with the help of GPT / ChatGPT ?

I always have too many books started, but one on my to-do pile is Shoshana Zuboff's, "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism." I ordered the paperback, so it's here, glaring at me.

My obituary, probably.