What are you reading these days?
Just wondering
I'm reading the Millennium series by Stieg Larsson
The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard [1].
Ballard is science fiction in the sense he explores inner space instead of outer space.
Some are kind of eh, and ones that have really stuck out for me,
"Concentration City" - a giant infinitely expanding city ala Dark City or Blame!.
"Studio Five, The Stars" - poetry is written by machines and only eccentrics write their own. Think AI generation of art but in 1961.
"The Subliminal Man" - government uses subliminal messages to promote mindless consumerism - They Live but 1963.
"Billennium" - Earth is vastly overpopulated and any semblance of personal space or privacy is non-existent.
"The Garden of Time" - allegory of never ceasing approach of time no matter what you do to defend yourself from it.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Short_Stories_o...
My non-fiction pile is very peculiar to me (maths, probability, gambling, Rust and Elixir books, a backlog of a load of recent Humble Bundle deals), but I have some solid fiction recommendations:
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is the sort of novel where you start to get sad as the weight of unread pages in your right starts to lighten. A novel about some friends who build some games (set in the 1990s and 2000s, with references to games of that era), it's really about friendship, social awkwardness and creativity.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke can't really take a review. When I first of it in Literary Review, the reviewer refused to disclose any plot for fear of providing spoilers, and I'm the same. I can just tell you, it's lovely. Her writing has got even better since she wrote Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and it's a really, really solid novel.
Yesterday, my Dad messaged me about a current read I'll share here as a warning, and because his style is just hilarious:
I treated myself to a copy of "A Stroke of the Pen" by Terry Pratchett: short stories unearthed after his death. Very disappointing. If I were you, I would wait until it is available at your local library and then you could scrawl cuss words inside it without damaging your personal copy.
Solid advice that, I hope you'll agree.
Bluey: Camping
When Bluey is on a family camping trip, she meets a new friend, Jean Luc. Join them as they plant a tree, hunt a 'wild pig' and learn about the magic of friendship.
_Regenesis_, by George Monbiot.
About how we can realistically feed everyone on the planet long term, in a way that doesn't destroy nature, keeps soil healthy and more able to deal with climate change, and is also affordable.
Very good. Very well sourced, sceptical of romantic ideas that just don't scale.
Given that we currently use 60% of our agricultural land to feed livestock, that we then use to produce 12% of our calories (and 40% of the land for the other 88%), and that methods of agriculture that leave the ecology healthier have lower yields than current industrial methods, he takes as a given that we'll have to do without most of the livestock.
I'm reading Against Method by Paul Feyerabend. It makes the case for more anarchy in science, that observations are shaped by the paradigm and that therefore new theories sometimes require respite from a lack of support in current evidence. It's a refreshing critique of Popper coming from within the analytic school. Like a Foucault light.
"Journey to the Edge of Reason, The Life of Kurt Gödel", by Stephen Budiansky.
Even though it contains an introduction to his proof of the Incompleteness Theorems, you won't learn all too much about logic or mathematics, but it sure paints an interesting picture of the people involved at the start of the 20th century.
"Silas Marner" by George Eliot. Has redefined humor for me.
"Reinforcement Learning and Stochastic Optimization" by Warren B. Powell. I'm still not entirely sure what to think of his claims about unifying many scientific disciplines, but it sure is packed with a lot of information and theory.
I bought a copy of Ben Hur in a second hand store for 3 dollars. The book was printed in 1887 and you can se it has been read by a lot of people and has been repaired at least once. I am hoping I can stick with it and finish it. Wish me luck.
For tooling, I am currently reading Practical Vim by Drew Neil. Vim has been my primary editing tool for a couple of years now but I know that I am not close to maxing its capacity. I would like to supercharge my vim skill with more advanced macros and less keystrokes.
Fiction: I am currently reading the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. I love the way the book plays with logic in a fictional style. The dialogues with the little demon, Wormwood, are super interesting. More like psycho analysis in fictional form. It reminds me about reading Brothers Karamazov where you find a lot about you in characters in the book.
I just finished reading Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I'm currently reading Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences by Tynan Sylvester.
A good friend of mine gifted me Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin and I'm planning on getting into that one soon.
Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky. There's a series of games based on the books but I'm enjoying the storytelling in the book far more. Basic premise is after nuclear war survivors have built a new society inside of the tunnels and stations of the Moscow metro system. There's mutants and other threats, but I don't want to spoil too much.
Last week I finished "The Midnight Library" by Matt Haig, it's about having regrets for the things you did or didn't do in your life and how those things could have turned out if you made different choices, pretty good book.
Currently I read "Healing back pain" by John E. Sarno I'm halfway through and think it's interesting so far, yesterday I also started "Eversion" by Alastair Reynolds, can't say much about it because I only read 10 pages, but Reynolds' books are mostly pretty good.
Last three things I read (slightly all over the place):
- Aleister Crowley by Steven Ashe: A biography of the British occultist.
- Going Infinite by Michael Lewis: A (very well meaning) story of Sam Bankman-Fried
- The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt: A book about "safety culture" on campus and it's implications at large.
A deepness in the sky - Vernor Vinge
It's actually too good. I have a habit of reading before going to sleep, and this book is so hard to put down that I am becoming sleep deprived
Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh.
I really like it. There are lots of popular science books out there, but very few popular math ones. I am grateful that this exists.
Read the author's Code Book before. Liked that one, too. I was also taking Cryptography and Cybersecurity as one of my Master's electives.
This book does not cover the journey of solving the Fermat's Last Theorem narrowly, but broadly covers a lot of history of mathematics in a very nice way. The writing is superb.
I struggle to stay interested in one book until the end because many books that are designed to teach you something have made their point in the first chapter and then spend the rest of the book hammering it in.
Currently been reading Make It Stick for a year and I'm probably going to drop it because it's not that interesting.
Also have these opened:
- The Hobbit
- A Philosophy of Software Design
- Bhagavad Gita
I’m reading two very interesting books right now.
- Designing Data Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann; comprehensive study on data models.
- 9 Pints by Rose George; it’s 9 stories/anecdotes about blood. Supremely enjoyable non-fiction writing.
The Culture series by Iain M. Banks. I actually randomly read Look to Windward years ago after being lent a copy. It stuck with me and recently started the series from the start. I'm up to Excession now. It's possibly the most "colourful" thing I've ever read. Often amazing, sometimes disturbing. The writing is second to none.
I’ve been getting into Italo Calvino after reading Invisible Cities, which was great.
Right now I’m reading The Baron in the Trees.
I’ve been reading “Deschooling Society” by Ivan Illich while slowly working my way through Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene”.
I have just finished “World of yesterday” by Stefan Zweig, probably one of the best books I have ever read, it gives you a picture how the world was at the beginning of 20th century and how despite of cultural and technological advances of the world, Europe turned to madness.
Now i am starting “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace.
Just got finished reading "What the Dormouse Said", not a phenomenal read due to the density of characters but definitely worth it for the exploration of early thought on computers. I had never read extensively about the work of Englebart and the Augment project and it was fascinating to see things we take for granted about human computer interaction slowly form amongst a community. I feel like I had lost touch with the idea of computers as extensions of human brains. It's a small shift in thinking, but not thinking of a computer as a separate thing opens up completely novel thought patterns.
On a lighter note I was expecting a lot more drugs than politics in this book. Oh well, we should appreciate things for what they are and what we want them to be.
Several books - but I really want to shout out
Roger Zelazny’s ”Lord of light”(1967)
I don’t think this book is as half as well known in the Sci-fi genre as it should be. When you start reading it, it becomes an obvious precursor to themes in so many modern books. Matrix and the Culture series of Iain Banks, as well as Rajaniemi’s ’Quantum thief’ come to mind. The central theme is semi-immortality - peoples minds are uploaded to a new body one after another. In a colony planet, far removed from Earth, an elite has taken control of this and lord it over everybody else. At some point superpowers emerge etc to make it ’more entertaining’ and some of that is a bit clunky - but get past that! This is a jewel waiting to be read (and not very long).
HMS Surprise by Patrick O'Brian, it's the 3rd novel in the Aubrey/Maturin series. It's the series that the movie Master and Commander is based on. It's about a ship captain and his doctor friend and their naval adventures in the early 1800s.
The bible - am not a religious person, don't want to become one, and I mean no shade to religious people. However, as I now read it, I'm surprised by how much western culture references it. People use examples, names and scenes from the bible much more often than I realised and it helps to recognize that.
American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Oppenheimer was an ok movie, the book it's based on is better paced.
A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit. This is the first book I encountered on disaster sociology. That field of study sounds amazing! It's about how people become altruistic and how communities form right after a natural disaster.
I usually have a couple of books on the go at the same time. So, right now I’m reading “A Month By The Sea” by Dervla Murphy. It’s a fascinating account of a month she spent in Gaza. I’m also reading “The Plague” by Camus.
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. Also got a few print issues of Lapham's Quarterly, so checking those out.
Steve M. Easterbrook Computing the Climate - How We Know What We Know About Climate Change
Tom Deakin and Timothy G. Mattson Programming Your GPU with OpenMP: Performance Portability for GPUs
"No time to lose" a book by Pema Chodron. Its a translation and commentary of a Buddhist manuscript on basically how to become enlightened. I found the sections on how humans all suffer from past emotional memories (kleshnas) really interesting. As was the discussion on rage and forgiving people cruel to oneself. I followed it up with another of her books "when things fall apart". Again very good.
I'm now reading a Witcher fantasy novel. Blood of elves.
Ball Lightning by Cixin Liu - A year ago I read The Three Body Problem by the same author and extremely loved his approach to storytelling and sci-fi. Since then I have bought his other famous books (Ball Lightning, The Dark Forest and Deaths End) and I am really loving Ball Lightning so far.
The Creative Act by Rick Rubin - I'd like to call myself a creative (I produce music, paint and love cinema but all as a hobby). I recently read The Artists Way and found it really fulfilling in how to thing about creativity and nurturing your creative self. A friend lent me her copy of The Creative Act and after the first few pages I bought my own copy as I wanted to highlight and write notes in the book. Really recommend it for anyone who wants to think about how to think about creativity.
Multiple papers on ANNs - I am working with ANN libraries such as FAISS, Annoy and HSNWLib as part of my job as an ML Engineer in recommendation systems and I want to properly understand how the internals of these approximate vector search indexes work. I stared reading `Efficient and robust approximate nearest neighbor search using Hierarchical Navigable Small World graphs` and it lead to a rabbit hole of different papers I have on my stack.
Been sitting in the garden all afternoon reading Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire.
So far: terrific. About a quarter the way in. Space opera with political intrigue.
A seemingly endless list of descriptions of open positions, just to be disappointed by "remote within US" buried somewhere within each and every one.
Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook. Over, and over, and over again.
I just started Daemon from Daniel Suarez.
Very cool techno thriller.
The Thursday murders club by Richard Osman - a fun British murder mystery, lots of tea and biscuits. It's the first of a series.
A Brazilian book called Ministério do Prazer (Ministry of Pleasure).
It's an erotic fanfic featuring one of our Supreme Court ministers and the daughter of an alt-right senator.
It's absolute trash, but it's hilarious. I suggest that anyone who can read Portuguese and has been following Brazilian politics should read this book. It costs something like BRL 1,99 on Amazon.
The Design of Everyday Things
by Don Norman
Mrs. Gandhi's last battle by Satish Jacob & Mark Tully.
BBC journalists who reported the blue star operation after which lead to India's former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination.
If you wanna know about the history behind the current Canada vs India row, this is a good place to start.
Been reading a lot of Romance books lately. They are like a cozy blanket. For a to be considered Romance, are required to have a "happily ever after" eg no sudden character death. It ensures the author isn't going to mess your day up.
Also, a lot of them have sex, which is nice.
The Seeds of Earth by Michael Cobley, which feels very much like he mashed together a couple of Alan Dean Foster books with an Iain M Banks Culture novel.
A key part of the story takes place on a planet-wide forest with giant trees and a Gaia-like sentience (Midworld), its maguffin is a galaxy-threatening superweapon (The Tar-Aiym Krang), and a significant character is a wise old floating robot/AI that uses fields to manipulate things (Culture drones).
This reminds me of Interstellar, where I recognised the books that the authors had taken their influences from, such as Rocheworld by Robert L. Forward, which also features helpful robots that fold up with arms that have smaller-and-smaller subunits.
Just finished “Heavy weather sailing” by Martin Thomas and Peter Bruce. Grim but good stuff. Now following up with Fatty Goodlander’s “Creative anchoring”.
On the fiction side, read Arkady Martine’s “A memory called empire” recently, and about to start with the sequel.
I just finished reading "The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick and immediately bought 2 other books by him. If you have ever had a customer conversation and left with a slightly empty feeling this is the pill you are looking for
Surely You Can't Be Serious - an oral history of how the Airplane movie got made. Got it on Audible and no idea how it might work as a regular book as the audiobook has so many different cameos and narrators. Great stuff.
Determined A science of life without free will by Robert Sapolsky.
Actively reading:
- The Fountainhead
- Project Hail Mary
- Learning TypeScript
Passively reading:
- The Design of Everyday Things
- Dive into Design Patterns
Considering to read - This is mostly for anyone who has read them and would like to give their opinion about it.
- Algorithms to Live By
- Name of the Wind
- Malazan Book of the Fallen
- Good Girl's guide to murder
- The Paradox of Choice
- Moonwalking with Einstein
- The Boron Letters
- Storyworthy
-
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.
Reading:
Craig, The Fall of Japan
Price, Battle of Britain Day: 15 September 1940
Pratchett, Discworld series (finished four volumes)
Recently finished:
Craig, Enemy at the Gates
MacGregor, Checkpoint Charlie
Jones, Colossus (Incredibly prescient 1966 novel predicting ASI; the 1970 film adaptation is better, but the novel has more insights into the AI's similarity with LLMs)
Suarez, Daemon
Moss, Nineteen Weeks: America, Britain, and the Fateful Summer of 1940
Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947
Pascal, Showstopper: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT
I’m on a bit of a “Big American Corruption” spree after finishing Succession so i’ve started “The Dark Side of Camelot” about the dirty dealings of the Kennedy family.
Xi Jinpings four book set "The Governance of China."
Fulfillment winning and losing in one click America. - investigative journalism, Uses stories of the lives of those within Amazon's ever increasing orbit to illustrate the reality of the increasing financial divides. Impressive stats reminds me of the more compelling British alternative 'hired' six months in low wage Britain- i'd recommend that.
The dispossessed - sci-fi, surprisingly nuanced conversation of roles and society.
Odyssey by Homer (just finished)
Master and Margarita by Bulgakov (just finished)
In the Shadow of the Sword by Tom Holland
Started by quit:
Aeneid by Virgil (too much of Roman propaganda)
Catch 22 by Heller (had it on the list because of recognition but, disliked it 5-10% in)
The long good-bye by Ramond Chandler. I enjoy every sentence. He was a master at his craft and capture me with the language and the story telling.
Just finished The Song of the Cell, currently reading Gravity’s Rainbow (lol) and starting The Horse, the Wheel, and Language.
Fiction: Book 8 of The Expanse
Non-Fiction: Radical Candor, and After Steve
Next up: One of my Bill Bryson backlog, and Nothing But The Truth.
"Elixir in Action" by Saša Jurić. The first and second chapters are excellent. However the third chapter (on Control Flow and Pattern Matching) isn't as well written, apparently it is important to know that Elixir doesn't assign values to variables but rather 'binds' the values to the variable. It feels a bit like having 11 on a volume knob.
The grapes of wrath, John Steinbeck. Still feels surprisingly relevant with regards to workers organizing and how we view migrants today.
Finishing listening to the Hyperion cantos by Dan Simmons (read it the first time) and reading Olympos by Dan Simmons. I think I'm all Dan Simmons'd out though I want to read Carrion Comfort. I think I'm going to return to three body problem and dune for my next books. Not sure for audiobooks yet but the sequel to fire upon the deep is on my queue
I'm learning about US history as a non-American, for no particular reason other than I found some books in a second hand store.
- "1776", by David McCullough - a combination of American Revolution history with telling of leadership in times when defeat seems inevitable.
- "Team of Rivals", by Doris Kearns Goodwin - just started, reading about the pre-Civil War politics.
Blindsight by Peter Watts and I’ve just finished the sea of rust by C. Robert Cargil.
Both are good, sea of rust was a quick read, informative on the world building with a fast enough plot that kicked in early enough to keep me read more.
Blindsight, is a bit unique so far. Definitely interesting but it’s the two parter firefall im reading which combines the second book too.
Re-reading "A song of ice and fire" saga with the hope that "Winds of winter" arrives just when I finish
Comics! I recently finished Wanted (which made for a shitty movie, but a decent comic) and Watchmen (I despair I hadn't gotten around to it sooner).
Now I'm planning to read V for Vendetta, The Killing Joke, Batman: Year One, and some more. I've finally come around to comics as an art form, and I couldn't be happier!
"Escape from earth: A secret history of the space rocket" by F Macdonald. Well written but focussed mostly on the people and politics of American rocketry after WWII (including the mad occult antics of Jack Parsons). I would have prefered something that focussed more on the tech.
Malot - En Famille.
I decided it's time to revisit some classics. I finished the "Sans Famille" a few days back. Those are quick/fast reads but with immense value/wisdom/philosophy.
Next one is to re-read the "Hold on to your kids" by Neufeld & Maté.
Right now I’m reading Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson and Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare.
Ways of being. It's about different kinds of intelligences out in the wild. It starts a bit slow but it's very interesting and has a lot of interesting anecdotes and stories.
Before that I couldn't put down Stasiland, a book with stories about Stasi employees and the people they persecuted.
Jon Fosse (this year's Nobel Prize winner in literature) - "Septology" I-II, a dreamlike maze of thoughts written in a way I haven't seen before. A hypnotic, meandering stream of consciousness slowly unfolding into an intriguing story.
Caravan of the Damned by Chuck Dixon. Conan the Barbarian as envisioned by the writer who created Bane.
What I wish I was reading is book 9 of Joel Shepherd's "Spiral Wars" series. Unfortunately it's not out yet. But he's one of my new favorite authors, both the Scifi Spiral Wars and the more fantasy-like "Sasha" series are excellent.
“The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes”, by Zachary D. Carter.
Counterweight; Djuna. Good sci Fi.
The Thin Man, The Maltese Falcon; Hammett. Good books behind excellent movies.
The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, by Gary Keller
Randomly heard about it on a podcast. Just started reading, not sure if I'll like it or not
Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. Read few books of that, then switch to something other and then back. "Small Favor" at the moment. "Dead beat" has been favourite so far.
IPv6 Fundamentals: A Straightforward Approach to Understanding IPv6
It is the first "book" I bought to learn something, but after tinkering a while with ipV6 in my homelab, I saw no other way.
The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu. I loved The Three-Body Problem which I read last month, can't say I'm loving this one, just enjoying it, but I'm only at around 25%.
I've just started a book by a brilliant Cuban author: Leonardo Padura. I would recommend his "The Man Who Loved Dogs", it's about the man who killed Trotsky.
"Fourth Wing", by Yarros. Soon to be an Amazon Prime video.
Re-reading McMaster's "Battlegrounds" (2020). His predictions are pretty much on track.
Just finished Being You by Anil Seth and The experience machine by Andy Clark. Both great popular science book on current neuroscience and consciousness research.
The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England. Not sure what I'll read after. I was at a bit off a loss after reading race after technology.
"A City on Mars" by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith.
SICP, apparently so far. It's just map, and reduce.
The Software Engineer's Guidebook by Gergely Orosz
Do not read any of the books that came out after
Stieg Larsson died.
If you must read the first one, partially, allegedly
based on notes left my Stieg Larsson
Attention is all you need, still on page one.
Physics as Metaphor by Roger S Jones. I've never seen a better explanation of how time and space are constructed out of perceptions.
"Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul" by Giulio Tononi
Having just finished "On the move", Oliver Sacks' autobiography.
The Only Way Is West by Bradley Chermside
Book about Camino de Santiago.
I like walking (and Camino is lot of walking), so this is interesting.
The Programmer's Brain by Felienne Hermans
- "Going Infinite", by Michael Lewis
- "Speed & Scale", John Doerr
- "Superintelligence", by Nick Bostrom
All great reads, strongly recommended.
James Clear, Atomic habits. I really enjoy it.
Papert: Mindstorms
Lem: Summa Technologiae
Barber: Strong Democracy
The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg
Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
An introduction on marketing and how to set prices for goods and services.
Also not a book but highly recommended: Maus by art spiegelmann
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers.
Three Felonies a Day by Silverglate
Make Something Wonderful by Steve Jobs
A Guide to the Good Life by William Irvine
I read “The Bitcoin Standard” which I really enjoyed. However i’m not finding “The fiat standard” as interesting.
I read The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde. It’s only a 10 minute read, meant for kids, but it’s beautiful.
“The Lost Cause” by Cory Doctorow
I got an early copy at a conference he keynoted at. I’m enjoying it quite lot.
The series Darkover from Marion Zimmer Bradley.
It's more science fiction than my normal pick of fantasy, but nice reads.
Started with The Mote in God's Eye last month. Now I'm almost done with The Gripping Hand.
Perfume 'The Alchemy of Scent' by Jean-Claude Ellena - the art and business of creating perfume.
I am reading The Laws Of Human Nature by Robert Greene. I love everything that I have read from him.
The End and the Death Volume II
but that's a guilty pleasure of mine.
The second book I am reading is Behave written by Sapolsky
Whatever the Humble Bundle is selling DRM-free. Currently the _Rick and Morty_ comic book series.
The DevOps Handbook, second edition
The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology - Nick Cook.
Jim Butcher's latest Cinder Spires book.
Recently finished the last Brandon Sanderson secret project.
Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. - Brian Merchant
Nonfiction:
- Is Math Real? by Eugene Cheng
- Here to There: Radio Wave Propagation by AARL
Fiction:
- Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
- Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor
Phantastes by George MacDonald
The Recruiter by Douglas London (Rtd Senior CIA Operations Officer)
Random Walk Down Wall Street
“The investigation” by Stanisław Lem
“Neuromancer” by William Gibson
“A fire on the moon” by Norman Mailer
American Nations, by Colin Woodword. A different take on the US.
In Praise of Shadows by Tanizaki, about Japanese aesthetics
Various auto generated content from large language models
Stories of the Prophets, Ibn Kethir.
A masterpiece
Just started Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo.
I’m currently reading:
The art of explanation by Ros Atkins.
Lovely book.
The Great Mental Models - Shane Parrish
Stories of the Prophets, Ibn Kethir.
Chinese Thought by Roel Sterckx
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Dungeon Crawler Carl audio.
White Holes - Carlo Rovelli
Dune series
A philosophy of software design
I have multiple books in my reading stack, picking up depending on the mood:
- Fentanyl, Inc by Ben Westhoff
- Arabs in Medieval Sindh by Rafi Samad
- Rework by Jason Fried (re-reading it)
- An Indispensable Truth: How Fusion Power Can Save the Planet - Chen, Francis F.
- Elon Musk - Isaacson, Walter
Magicians of The Gods by Graham Hancock. But I will not finish it. It is boring and long-winded and he's more a travel journalist than researcher or scholar, so no real breakthroughs and a sprinkle of Daniken-like sensationalism while stretching the facts quite a bit. But what killed the book for me eventually was his unfounded attack on Sitchin. The previous book I read from him was Fingerprints of The Gods, that one was better but still had similar issues.
I would like to finish reading Hitler's Mein Kampf. I had it for years, started it twice but never finished it. I have no other books to read so I think this will be my next.
Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson
Adam Grant - Hidden Potential
“Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson.
It’s a balanced account of the most important industrialist of our generation.
Refutes some of the “Elon Bad” groupthink myths too.
Elon Musk's biography written by Walter Isaacson.
"A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East".
Started reading it before the current crisis, but it's only more relevant now. Kinda dense with too many "characters" and events.