Reading

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

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 Procrustes” (2016), p. 52

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

I’ve developed somewhat of a disdain for works of the popular science genre, especially the ones that are health/psychology/self-help type. It seems they all cite the same papers over and over. After reading some number of them, it starts to feel as if you’re reading the same book over and over. I try to avoid them now, skim if I can’t.

The items highlighted are what I may have enjoyed more than the rest.

2025 ¶

• The Listening Book (1991) - William Allaudin Mathieu
• As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams (c. 1060) - 菅原孝標女 / Lady Sarashina

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
• White Heat (1990) - Marco Pierre White
• The Mythical Man-Month (1975) - Fred Brooks
• Notes on Camp (1964) - Susan Sontag
• Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) - Neil Postman
• The Creative Act (2023) - Rick Rubin

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 (c. 4th century BCE) - Lao Tzu
• Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! (1985) - Richard Feynman
• How to Make Sense of Any Mess (2014) - Abby Covert

Articles, Essays, Papers, Short Stories, Talks, Theses ¶

• Flowers for Algernon (1959) - Daniel Keyes
• Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change (1998) - Neil Postman
• A Mathematician’s Lament (2002) - Paul Lockhart
• The Revolution Finished Twenty Years Ago (1956) - Christopher Alexander
• A City Is Not a Tree (1965) - Christopher Alexander
• The Origins of Pattern Theory: The Future of the Theory, and the Generation of a Living World (1999) - Christopher Alexander

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

Elsewhere: Best of 2024, Notebook, Raigo Jerva