Alexandria

Books, essays, and readings worth keeping (not exhaustive).

Fiction & Literature

  • 1984 — George OrwellProphetic in ways Orwell didn't intend.
  • A Fire Upon the Deep — Vernor VingeHard sci-fi with genuinely alien civilizations and one of the better treatments of superintelligence in fiction.
  • Animal Farm — George OrwellThe revolution always eats itself.
  • Anna Karenina — Leo TolstoyTolstoy sneaks his real obsessions in through the side door.
  • Catch-22 — Joseph HellerThe circular logic of the title concept is the whole book in miniature.
  • Crime and Punishment — Fyodor DostoevskyRaskolnikov's logic is airtight until it isn't.
  • Demons — Fyodor DostoevskyStavrogin is one of literature's most haunting characters.
  • Dune — Frank HerbertThe ecology, the religion, the politics — Herbert built a complete world. One of my all time favorites.
  • Frankenstein — Mary ShelleyThe real horror is Victor's abandonment of his creation, not the creation itself.
  • Harry Potter — J.K. RowlingRead the whole series as a kid. Formed how I think about narrative. I'm not going to pretend it didn't :).
  • I, Robot — Isaac AsimovThe three laws seem solid until Asimov systematically breaks each one. More relevant now than when it was written.
  • Metamorphosis — Franz KafkaAbsurdist fiction, also a story about feeling fundamentally alien to your own family?
  • No Longer Human — Osamu DazaiPerforming being human while feeling completely alien to everyone around you. Bleak and painfully recognizable.
  • Notes from Underground — Fyodor DostoevskyThe underground man is insufferable and completely recognizable. The first modern anti-hero.
  • Project Hail Mary — Andy WeirI love Rocky!
  • The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor DostoevskyLot of attempts to read this one. The Grand Inquisitor chapter alone justifies the whole thing.
  • The Death of Ivan Ilyich — Leo TolstoyA hundred pages that will restructure your relationship with mortality.
  • The Epic of Gilgamesh — AnonymousThe oldest story we have and it's about grief.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas AdamsFunny in a way that doesn't age. I love this book.
  • The Iliad — HomerWar as it actually is: brutal, absurd, full of petty gods.
  • The Martian — Andy WeirProblem solving as plot.
  • The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect — Roger WilliamsOne of the more serious treatments of post-scarcity and what humans do when there's nothing left to want. Not for everyone.
  • The Odyssey — HomerThe original adventure novel.
  • The Stranger — Albert CamusMeursault's indifference reads differently before and after you've thought about absurdism.
  • White Nights — Fyodor DostoevskyA classic. Short and heartbreaking.

Philosophy & Spirituality

  • Autobiography of a Yogi — Paramahansa YoganandaOne of those books that hits differently depending on where you are in life. A lot of it I can't verify but couldn't dismiss either.
  • Bible, Quran, Bhagavad Gita, Ramayana, Guru Granth Sahib — God?Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you (Matthew 7:7)
  • Meditations — Marcus AureliusDear Diary, a Roman emperor is trying to talk himself into being a better person.
  • Siddhartha — Hermann HesseSimple surface, dense underneath. One of my favorite books even today.
  • Tao Te Ching — LaoziMove with the grain of the world instead of against it.
  • The Beginning of Infinity — David DeutschOne of the most important books I've read. Explanatory knowledge as the thing that distinguishes humans.
  • The Denial of Death — Ernest BeckerEverything humans do is motivated by the terror of death.
  • The Fabric of Reality — David DeutschFour deep theories — quantum mechanics, evolution, epistemology, computation, and the argument that they're actually one theory. Amazing book.
  • The Myth of SisyphusThe one serious philosophical question is whether life is worth living. Camus says yes.
  • The Problems of Philosophy — Bertrand RussellA hundred pages that introduce epistemology cleanly. Russell writes with a clarity most philosophers don't bother with.
  • The Upanishads — VariousAtman, Brahman, the nature of self and reality.
  • Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World — René GirardMimetic desire, scapegoating, the origins of violence.
  • Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Friedrich NietzscheStop living by borrowed values and build your own. The Übermensch is mostly misread — IMO it's not about superiority, it's about self-authorship. Become who you are.

Mind & Consciousness

  • Computing Machinery and IntelligenceTuring asking 'can machines think?' in 1950.
  • Gödel, Escher, Bach — Douglas HofstadterAbout consciousness, recursion, and self-reference. One of those books that rewires how you think. Hard read, but worth it.
  • Healing Back Pain — John E. SarnoThe mind-body connection is real and medicine has been slow to acknowledge it. Hope you never have to read it lol.
  • Keep Your Identity SmallThe more labels you attach to yourself, the harder it is to think clearly.
  • The Elephant and the Blind — Thomas MetzingerNice to see you're not the only crazy one. Great book for fellow meditators.
  • The Emperor's New Mind — Roger PenrosePenrose arguing that human consciousness can't be computational.
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel KahnemanSystem 1 / System 2 is now almost a cliché, but useful for understanding your own reasoning failures.
  • When the Body Says No — Gabor MatéThe connection between suppressed emotion and serious illness.

Science & Nature

  • Black Holes — Brian CoxCox is one of the best Science educators. And Black holes are fucking crazy.
  • Calculus Made Easy — Silvanus P. ThompsonWritten in 1910 and still the best calculus introduction. The preface alone is worth it.
  • Chaos: Making a New Science — James GleickStrange attractors and the butterfly effect reframed how I think about complex systems.
  • Concepts of Physics — H.C. VermaProbably the best introductory physics sequence I've encountered.
  • Lifespan: Why We Age — and Why We Don't Have To — David SinclairSinclair's case for aging as a disease.
  • Six Degrees — Duncan WattsWhy everything is more connected than it looks and what that means for how things spread.
  • Six Easy Pieces — Richard FeynmanFell in love with Physics reading this book. Feynman's the GOAT.
  • Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down — J.E. GordonEngineering explained through history, biology, and intuition.
  • The Feynman Lectures on Physics — Richard FeynmanFeynman explains things the way they actually are, not the way they're convenient to teach.
  • The Road to Reality — Roger PenroseThe most ambitious popular science (debatable if you can call it that) book I've encountered. Penrose expects you to learn the math.
  • The Selfish Gene — Richard DawkinsThe gene's POV of evolution permanently changed how I think about biology and behavior.
  • The Vital Question — Nick LaneWhy life is the way it is — energy, mitochondria, the origin of complexity. Biology from first principles.

History & Society

  • An Era of Darkness — Shashi TharoorWhat British colonialism actually did to India economically.
  • Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World — Jack WeatherfordThis + Dan Carlin's Wrath of the Khans, provides a truly gripping and comprehensive look into the fascinating world of the Mongols.
  • History of the Peloponnesian War — ThucydidesWritten 2,400 years ago and still the best account of what happens when an established power meets a rising one.
  • Meditations on MolochScott Alexander on coordination failures and why good outcomes require active effort to achieve.
  • Stephen Hawking: His Life and Work — Kitty FergusonMore biography than physics, but well done. Gifted to me by a friend.
  • Steve Jobs — Walter IsaacsonThe genius and the cruelty aren't separate.
  • The Art of War — Sun TzuStratergy, planning, that kind of thing.
  • The Innovators — Walter IsaacsonHistory of computing from Ada Lovelace to the internet. Useful for understanding that breakthroughs are almost always collaborative and almost never how they're remembered.
  • The Man Who Knew Infinity — Robert KanigelRamanujan's biography. Mathematics as pure intuition. One of the strangest minds in history.
  • The Prize — Daniel YerginEight hundred pages on the history of oil — the geopolitics, the wildcatters, the wars.
  • The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich — William L. ShirerThe eyewitness passages are chilling. Hard to read but important for understanding how fast and completely a society can collapse.
  • What Went Wrong with Capitalism — Ruchir SharmaGood historical framing but the conclusions feel rushed.

Building & Creating

  • High Output Management — Andrew S. GroveGrove writes about running Intel like an engineer thinks about systems.
  • Poor Charlie's Almanack — Charlie MungerMental models as a way of life.
  • The Art of Doing Science and Engineering — Richard HammingHamming's lectures on how to think about engineering and science as a craft. Less about what to build, more about how to develop judgment.
  • The Creative Act: A Way of Being — Rick RubinIts all vibes bro.
  • The Design of Everyday Things — Don NormanI now look at every door handle differently.
  • The Mom Test — Rob FitzpatrickThe most practical book on customer discovery.
  • You and Your ResearchHamming's 1986 talk at Bell Labs. On why some brilliant people do important work and most don't.
  • Zero to One — Peter Thiel & Blake MastersThe core point about competition versus monopoly is interesting.

Computing & AI

  • An Introduction to Statistical Learning — James, Witten, Hastie & TibshiraniThe accessible version of Elements of Statistical Learning.
  • Designing Data-Intensive Applications — Martin KleppmannA book on distributed systems that isn't about distributed systems.
  • Little Book of Deep Learning — François FleuretDense and short in the best way.
  • Rust Atomics and Locks — Mara BosThe definitive guide to low-level concurrency in Rust.
  • Rust for Rustaceans — Jon GjengsetPinned types, variance, unsafe internals — the parts the beginner books skip over. Jon's one of the best Rust people.
  • Superintelligence — Nick BostromDense and slow, but it defined the field. Some scenarios feel dated now, the core arguments haven't been refuted.
  • The Bitter LessonSutton's essay on why scale beats hand-crafted knowledge every time.
  • The Pragmatic Programmer — Hunt & ThomasDRY, orthogonality, tracer bullets. Still relevant today.
  • Writing An Interpreter In Go — Thorsten BallThe right way to learn compilers.