Reading

A good book gets better on the second reading. A great book on the third. Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procustes

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

—Bertrand Russell

Not everything ends up recorded here. Only what I’d read again, or perhaps recommend.

I’ve developed a disdain for works of the popular science genre, especially the ones that are health/psychology/self-help type. After I read some number of them, it started to feel as if I’m reading the same book over and over. I try to avoid them now, skim if I can’t.

2024

• The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (2021) - John Koenig
• Le Petit Prince (1943) - Antoine de Saint-Exupèry
• The Elements of Computing Systems (2021) - Noam Nisan, Shimon Schocken
• The Overstory (2018) - Richard Powers
• Learning by Heart (2008) - Corita Kent, Jan Steward
• How to Read a Book (1972) - Mortimer J. Adler
• The Soul of a New Machine (1981) - Tracy Kidder
• How to Do Nothing (2019) - Jenny Odell
• Of Mice and Men (1937) - John Steinbeck
• The Big Sleep (1939) - Raymond Chandler

2023

• On the Shortness of Life (c.49 CE) - Seneca
• The Shape of Design (2012) - Frank Chimero
• The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975) - Thich Nhat Hanh
• Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (2017) - Samin Nosrat
• The War of Art (2002) - Steven Pressfield
• Art & Fear (1994) - David Bayles, Ted Orland
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) - Raymond Carver
• The Burnout Society (2010) - Byung-Chul Han
• Wherever You Go, There You Are (1994) - Jon Kabat-Zinn
• Impro (1979) - Keith Johnstone
• Uncle Vanya (1897) - Anton Chekhov
• Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979) - Douglas R. Hofstadter
• The Artist’s Way (2002) - Julia Cameron
• The Pragmatic Programmer (1999) - David Thomas, Andrew Hunt
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994) - Haruki Murakami
• Free Play (1990) - Stephen Nachmanovitch
• This Is How You Lose the Time War (2019) - Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone
• The Book of Tea (1906) - Kakuzō Okakura
• Wabi-Sabi (1994) - Leonard Koren
• In Praise of Shadows (1933) - Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
• The Courage to Be Disliked (2013) - Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga
• The Beauty of Everyday Things (2017) - Soetsu Yanagi
• The Zen of Seeing (1973) - Frederick Franck

2022

• A Brief History of Time (1988) - Stephen Hawking
• Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) - Viktor Frankl
• Digital Minimalism (2019) - Cal Newport
• Fooled by Randomness (2001) - Nassim Taleb
• Antifragile (2012) - Nassim Taleb
• The Bed of Procrustes (2010) - Nassim Taleb
• Meditations (180 CE) - Marcus Aurelius
• Black swan (2007) - Nassim Taleb
• The Alchemist (1988) - Paulo Coelho
• Algorithms to Live by (2016) - Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths
• The Art of Rhetoric (4th century BCE) - Aristotle
• Lila (1991) - Robert M. Pirsig
• Ways of Seeing (1972) - John Berger
• Pragmatic Thinking and Learning (2008) - Andy Hunt
• The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2010) - Marie Kondō
• Abc of Reading (1934) - Ezra Pound
• Kafka on the Shore (2002) - Haruki Murakami
• Klara and the Sun (2021) - Kazuo Ishiguro
• Design for the Real World (1984) - Victor Papanek
• Skin in the Game (2018) - Nassim Taleb
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) - Joan Didion
• Letters from a Stoic (c 65 CE) - Seneca
• Tao Te Ching (4th century BCE) - Lao Tzu
• Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! (1985) - Richard Feynman
• How to Make Sense of Any Mess (2014) - Abby Covert

Some Time Before

• Zen in The Art of Archery (1948) - Eugen Herrigel
• The Inner Game of Tennis (1974) - W. Timothy Gallwey
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) - Robert M. Pirsig
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983) - Edward Tufte
• Night (1956) - Elie Wiesel
• Farewell to Manzanar (1973) - Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
• All the works by Kurt Vonnegut
• Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964) - Christopher Alexander
• A Pattern Language (1977) - Christopher Alexander
• The Stranger (1942) - Albert Camus