Library

Updated July 10, 2023

#Reading

• ニムロッド（上田）
• Practical Process Automation (Ruecker)
• From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000 (Lee)

#Queue

• A Brief History of Time (Hawking)
• Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach (Kurose, Ross)
• Disciplined Entrepreneurship (Aulet)
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (McKeown)
• Ficciones (Borges)
• Homo Deus (Harari)
• Introduction to Finance: Markets, Investments, and Financial Management (Norton, Melicher)
• My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising (Hopkins)
• Neuromancer (Gibson)
• Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail (Dalio)
• Snow Crash (Stephenson)
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Sussman, Abelson)
• The Anthropocene Reviewed (Green)
• The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (Deutsch)
• The Black Company (Cook)
• The Emperor’s Soul (Sanderson)
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (Horowitz)
• The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov, trans. by Burgin, O’Connor)
• The Stand (King)
• The Theory of Money and Credit (Mises)
• Theory of Computation (Sipser)
• Traction (Weinberg, Mares)
• Types and Programming Languages (Pierce)
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Feathers)

#Finished

• The Wandering Inn
  • Not sure if this falls under the “finished” section, but I did read the first 8 and a half books (as of current writing the author is halfway through the 9th book). That’s easily over 7 million words. To put things in perspective, the entire Harry Potter series is only 1 million words.
• 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy (Helmer)
• The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest (Chancellor)
• 人間失格（太宰）
• Common Japanese Collocations: A Learner’s Guide to Frequent Word Pairings (Shoji)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)
• Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman)
• Harrison Bergeson (Vonnegut)
  • A dystopian short story on what societal equality might entail.
• A Field Guide to Men’s Health (Mills)
• The Mom Test (Fitzpatrick)
• The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects (Chen)
  • One of the best books I’ve ever read on how to understand software tech businesses. Highly recommended.
• Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed (Ohanian)
• 雪国（川端）
• Programming TypeScript (Cherny)
• The Art of Learning (Waitzkin)
  • Would not recommend unless you’re looking for an autobiography.
• Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Meadows)
  • Great book. Lots of counterintuitive results. For example, when working with systems, it’s crucial to identify how long the delay of the response will be. The longer the delay, the more carefully, and less frequently adjustments should be implemented. It’s a useful mental model that explains many things, such as governmental responses to Covid, and why they seem to be unusually indecisive (answer: it’s because the response delay, in this case the number of Covid cases, is relatively short, compared to the response delay of most other kinds of governmental policies.)
• Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (Stone, Patton, Heen)
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… And Others Don’t (Collins)
• The 48 Laws of Power (Greene)
  • Another one of those Freudian books (see also: Games People Play). If you buy into it, you’ll suddenly see everything in its terms, which can be quite dangerous. Still worth reading though, if you find yourself navigating a highly-politicized environment (are you in one now?). I did not read this book cover to cover; it reads more like a reference book and should be treated as one.
• The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups (Coyle)
  • The most important factor in doing anything successfully as a group is to make sure that everyone in the group is tightly knit. Other factors like selecting for the smartest people don’t move the needle as much. Therefore, go out of your way to make sure that group members can form bonds with each other, including instituting regular team activities and rituals, influencing the layout of the office to promote interactions, communicating a common vision, etc.
• Sapiens (Harari)
  • Another worldview-changing book. A great complement to Debt.
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (Fowler)
  • Picking out the stuff that’s still relevant in modern web development can be a bit of a chore, but those bits that do remain just as useful as ever, and a great way to suss out unknown unknowns when thinking about architecture.
• Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It (Voss, Raz)
  • Much of the book can be distilled into the appendix, where the author describes how to construct a negotiation one sheet.
• Debt: The First 5000 Years (Graeber)
  • Worldview-changing. When I set out to try to understand the nature of money, I compiled a reading list. This book might just be what I was looking for.
• The Lessons of History (Durant, Durant)
• The One Minute Manager (Blanchard, Johnson)
• ノルウェイの森 (村上)
  • 長い旅、やっと終わりました。
• Game Theory: An Introduction (Tadelis)
  • Here I posit a new kind of meta equilibrium — one in which the assumption of all participants having read this book holds. Prove that this meta equilibrium is equivalent to the Nash equilibrium.
• The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Stone)
• The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building (Mochary, MacCaw, Talavera)
  • More tactical than High Growth Handbook, with step-by-step instructions that can be implemented easily. Recommended for anyone, not just people starting or building companies. There’s a lot of value in running your life like a CEO, even if you’re not one.
• Mind Hacking: How to Change Your Mind for Good in 21 Days (Hargrave)
  • Silly self-help book that I found in an Airbnb. It’s worth a read for anyone who looking for ideas on figuring out their own brains and how to influence their own behaviour. There is one hack mentioned in the book that is particularly promising: that of imagining yourself being mentored by someone else (anyone you look up to or would like to emulate, even famous historical figures like Abraham Lincoln), and imagine how a conversation with that person would go. You’ll find that most of the time, with some effort, you’ll usually already know what to do, but lack conviction. I know, it sounds like straight out of an anime, but give it a try; you might be surprised.
• High Growth Handbook (Gil)
• Domain-Driven Design Distilled (Vernon)
  • A good distillation of the much denser original.
• Siddhartha (Hesse)
  • “Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else… Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
• The Psychology of Money (Housel)
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig)
  • To do something well, first be a good person. Then you will naturally do it well.
• The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win (Konnikova)
  • It reads more like a portrait of Erik Seidel than about the author’s own journey. This book would have turned out quite differently if Konnikova’s mentor was anybody else. Still entertaining though, and a pleasant break from some of the denser material I’m working on right now.
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Lencioni)
  • I wish more books were written this concisely. The story carries the message well without boring, and strategies and techniques for dealing with the various dysfunctions are simply written and easily actionable. The title of the book is unfortunate — this book is better read before one actually needs it.
• Category Theory for Programmers (Milewski)
  • Despite probably being the most accessible book to category theory, it’s still some of the hardest material I’ve ever covered (it’s not saying much, since I’m not much of a math guy). Some of the chapters took me multiple days of concentrated mental effort to understand, and I had to take a month-long break in the middle to let my brain’s diffuse mode do its thing. Definitely revisiting this book again in the near future.
• The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky, trans. by Pevear, Volokhonsky)
  • BK has brought me closer to the face of God than any other ostensibly religious work. Dostoevsky’s master stroke was in realizing that it was likely that the reader would be more an Ivan and less an Alyosha, and tailord his message accordingly. The novel is just as relevant today (if not more so) as it was in the Russia of 1879.
• The Four Pillars of Investing (Bernstein)
• Architecture of a Database System (Hellerstein, Stonebraker, Hamilton)
• Alice in Borderland (Haro)
  • The first manga I completed since the conception of this reading list. Alice in Borderland first came to my attention as a Netflix show. Having enjoyed other stories involving survival games (see Liar Game, No Game No Life), I was inclined to read the source material, and I’m glad I did. A disparate group of people is torn from placid existences and forced to participate in games in order to extend their visas, which dictate how long they can live before being executed by sky lasers with pinpoint accuracy. Some of these games involve careful probabilistic analyses, others only possible by sacrificing others. All said, a genuinely delivered study on what life means for each of the characters in the group, and dare I say, the reader himself.
• The Elements of Style (Strunk, White)
  • Indispensable for writing well.
• Meditations (Aurelius, trans. by Hays)
  • Deeply transformative. I’ve naturally gravitated toward some of the tenets described within, but seeing them, and more, in writing only strengthens my conviction.
• Games People Play (Berne)
  • Would have dropped it if it were any longer. Many of the games presented in this book seem contrived and out of touch with modern social interactions. I also expected a bit more rigour in the formalization of transactional analysis. If such a thing exists I didn’t find it here.
• A Promised Land (Obama)
  • First biography I read in its entirety. The book can be divided into two parts — pre-presidency (Chapter 1-10), and presidency (Chapter 11-27). The book covers the first term of his presidency, making it all the way to the bin Laden raid. Highly recommended. Despite its length, one can’t help but imagine that Obama had to make many tortuous decisions on which events to make it to the printing press. The chapters on US relations with the Middle East and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict were particularly enlightening.
• The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts (Parrish, Beaubien)
  • Didn’t learn much from this book. Not sure who the target audience for this book is; anyone inclined enough to pick up this book probably already knows most of what this book is going to say.
• Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (Nestor)
  • Not a long book, but too long for the material it covers. TLDR: don’t breathe through your mouth. There are a few interesting breathing techniques mentioned in the book that I’ll try and report back.
• Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters (Rumelt)
  • I can’t quite remember where I saw this recommended. I’m struck by how much sense this book makes, being as it is a book about the most airy-fairy term in business. Even if you’re not a business-type, give it a quick browse.
• The Type Astronaut’s Guide to Shapeless (Gurnell)
  • Wanted to figure out what all the fuss was with about generic programming. I think my takehome from this book is, if you don’t know if you should be using Shapeless, you probably shouldn’t be. I don’t like how complicated things are, and how much massaging and pleading with the compiler you need to do to get aforementioned Very Complicated Things to work.
• Death’s End (Liu, trans. by Liu)
  • I haven’t read any science fiction in a long time, so I’m not sure if it’s normal to be so blown away by a work of fiction. I also miss the compulsive feeling of not being able to put down a story. On a related note, I had been harbouring a personal belief that beyond a certain stage, it gets progressively more difficult to be impressed by fiction. Depending on how you look at it, this series has either strengthened that belief or blown it out of the water. I’m looking forward to reading some of Brandon Sanderson’s work, as recommended to me by a good friend.
• The Vintage Guide to Classical Music (Swafford)
  • Might initially be mistaken as Wikipedian, but the true value of this book is in the author’s characterizations of some of the enigmatic figures in music. The section on music recommendations that bookend each chapter is a godsend also.
• Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics (Hazlitt)
  • One of the most digestible books I’ve ever read on how economic policies work. It taught me how to make sense of things like minimum wages and rent control. This book and more like it can be found on the Mises website, for free.
• 走れメロス (太宰)
  • Went through this short story on friendship as part of my ongoing Japanese lessons.
• Discovering Statistics Using R (Field, Miles)
• The Dark Forest (Liu, trans. by Martinsen)
• Scala Cookbook (Alexander)
• Japanese Core Words and Phrases (Shoji)
• The Little Schemer (Friedman, Felleisen)
• A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bryson)
• Programming in Scala (Odersky, Spoon, Venners)
• Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners (Harris)
• Functional Programming in Scala (Chiusano, Bjarnason)
• The Three-Body Problem (Liu, trans. by Liu)
• Learning How To Learn (McConville, Oakley, Sejnowski)
• Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (Petzold)
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Kleppmann)
• HTTP: The Definitive Guide (Totty, Gourley)
• Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces (Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau)
• Discrete Mathematics (Lovász, Vesztergombi)
• Cracking The Coding Interview (McDowell)
• You Don’t Know JS (Simpson)
• JavaScript - The Good Parts (Crockford)
• Data Structures and Algorithms in Java (Goodrich, Tamassia)
• Data Structures and Algorithms in Python (Goldwasser, Goodrich, Tamassia)
• Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System (Lamport)
• TCP/IP Illustrated: Volume 1 - The Protocols (Fall)
• The Righteous Mind (Haidt)
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera)
• High Performance Web Sites (Souders)
• Even Faster Web Sites (Souders)
• The Alchemist (Coelho)
• Head First Java (Bates, Sierra)
• The Hunger Games Trilogy (Collins)
• Genki I: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese (Banno, Ikeda, Ohno)
• Genki II: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese (Banno, Ikeda, Ohno)
• Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Dubner, Levitt)
• The God Delusion (Dawkins)
• Into Thin Air (Krakauer)
• A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway)
• The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Tolkien)
• The Harry Potter series (Rowling)
• The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
• Phantom (Goodkind)
• (and more when I was younger, mostly fiction)

#Half-finished/paused

• Software Design for Flexibility: How to Avoid Programming Yourself into a Corner (Hanson, Sussman)
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (Hofstadter)
  • Won’t have much mental bandwidth to do this book justice in the near future.
• Domain-Driven Design (Evans)
• Functional and Reactive Domain Modeling (Ghosh)
• The Compleat Strategyst: Being a Primer on the Theory of Games of Strategy (Williams)
  • The antiquated tone makes it hard to read. I dropped this in favour of a more academic approach in Tadelis’s Game Theory: An Introduction.
• Crafting Interpreters (Nystrom)
  • Finished the first half of the book (which covers a complete implementation in Java). May eventually come back to cover the second half, which rewrites the whole thing in C with a focus on performance
• All of Statistics: A Concise Course in Statistical Inference (Wasserman)
• Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams (Walker)
• The Creature from Jekyll Island (Griffin)
• Clean Code (Martin)
• The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles (Nisan, Schocken)
• Functional Programming, Simplified (Alexander)
• How to Solve It (Pólya)
• Introduction to Algorithms (Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein)
• Reliable and Secure Distributed Programming (Cachin, Rodrigues, Guerraoui)
• Data and Reality (Kent)
• Exhalation (Chiang)
• Ruby Under a Microscope: An Illustrated Guide to Ruby Internals (Shaughnessy)
• Programming Pearls (Bentley)
• Rebuilding Rails (Gibbs)
• Eloquent Ruby (Olsen)
• Nginx HTTP Server (Nedelcu)
• …