Bookshelf

Inspired by Patrick Collison’s bookshelf, these are books that I have read or are currently/soon on my shelf. These capture most of what I am interested in.

I think that a good measure of “usefulness of a book” is how surprising you find the ideas and facts the book contains. An interesting parallel is in information theory where the measure of the quantity of information content is called surprisal.

Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan
The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, Jacques Hadamard
The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination, Jacob Bronowski
Zero to One, Peter Thiel
The Elephant in the Brain, Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler
Poor Charlie’s Almanack
Hackers and Painters, Paul Graham
The Elephant in the Brain, Kevin Simmler and Robin Hanson
Prelude to Mathematics, WW Sawyer
The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte
How to Fail at Everything and Still Win Big, Scott Adams
Letters from a Stoic, Seneca
12 Rules for Life, Jordan B Peterson
Mastery, Robert Greene
How Innovation Works, Matt Ridley
The Art of Doing Science and Research, Richard Hamming
The Book of Why, Judea Pearl
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Rene Girard
The System’s Bible
The Red Queen, Matt Ridley
Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer
The Sciences of the Artificial, Herbert Simon
Spent, Geoffery Miller
Probably Approximately Correct, Leslie Valiant
The Elements of Eloquence, Mark Forsyth
Atomic Habits, James Clear
The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin
Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb
Skin In The Game, Nassim Taleb
Antifragile, Nassim Taleb
Thinking Like Sherlock Homes, Peter Bevelin
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini
Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
The Art of Seduction, Robert Greene
Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goldman
How To Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
Blink, Malcom Gladwell
Social Intelligence, Daniel Goleman
Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan
The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch
The Art of the Soluble, Peter Medawar
Advice to a Young Scientist, Peter Medawar
Relentless, Tim Grover
Idea Makers: Personal Perspectives on the Lives & Ideas of Some Notable People
Ben Franklin, Walter Isaacson
Classic Feynman, R.P. Leighton
Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell
Autobiography of Ben Franklin
Einstein, Walter Isaacson
Da Vinci, Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson
Master Thinkers, Andre Glushman
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
The Foundation Series, Asimov
The Odyssey
Principles, Ray Dalio
The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
The Old Man and the Sea, Hemmingway
The Illiad
Founders at Work, Jessica Livingston
High Output Management
Only the Paranoid Survive
The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker
The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz
Blitzscaling, Chris Yeh and Reid Hoffman
Innovater’s Dilemma, Clay Christensen
Innovators Solution, Clay Christensen
Outliers, Malcom Gladwell
The Joy of X, Steven Strogatz
Essays, Francis Bacon
Born Standing Up, Steve Martin
Win Bigly, Scott Adams
Man’s Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl
A Man For All Markets, Edward O. Thorp
My Inventions, Nikola Tesla
The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time, Will Durant
The Selfish Gene, Dawkins
Lifespan, David Sinclair
Man and His Symbols, Jung
The Prophet, Kahlil Gibrain
Managing Oneself, Peter Drucker
Deep Work, Cal Newport
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody, Nietzsche
Biopunk: Solving Biotech’s Biggest Problems in Kitchens and Garages,Marcus Wohlsen
The Wisdom of Life, Arthur Schopenhauer
The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, Geoffrey Miller
The Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation, Stephen Mitchell
Basic Machines and How They Work, Naval Education
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Edward O. Wilson
How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler
The Lessons of History, Will Durant
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford
Notes to Literature, Adorno
Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories Volume I, II, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation, Matt Ridley
The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge, Matt Ridley
How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, Matt Ridley
The Laws of Human Nature, Robert Greene
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Richard P. Feynman
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
The Code Breaker (Jennifer Doudna’s Biography), Walter Isaacson
The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve, Steve Stewart Williams
Becoming Steve Jobs, Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli
Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke
Robot Visions, Isaac Asimov
Very Important People, Ashley Mears
Dune, Frank Herbert
Hacking Darwin, Jamie Metzl
Aesthetic Computing, Edited by Paul A. Fishwick
Visual Intelligence, Donald Hoffman
Talent, Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross
An Equal Music, Vikram Seth
The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi
Mindset, Carol Dweck
Shoe Dog, Phil Knight
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Elementary Statistics, Jerald G. Schutte
Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It, Kamal Ravikant
Kafka on the Shore, Murakami
The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman
How to Solve It, G. Polya
Principles of Mathematics, Bertrand Russell
Concrete Mathematics, Donald E. Knuth
Desiging Data-Intensive Applications, Martin Kleppmann
Structure and Interpretation of Programs, Sussman and Abelson
Feynman’s Lectures in Physics
Fundamentals of Physics, Resnick, Halliday and Walker
Machine Learning Design Patterns: Solutions to Common Challenges in Data Preparation, Model Building, and MLOps, Michael Munn, Sara Robinson, and Valliappa Lakshmanan
Deep Learning, Ian Goodfellow
Introduction to Algorithms, CLRS
Cracking the PM Interview, Gayle Laakmann McDowell
Cracking the Coding Interview, Gayle Laakmann McDowell
Schaum’s Outline of Vector Analysis, 2ed, Murray Spiegel
Artificial Intelligence Engines, James V Stone
The Theoretical Minimum Series, Leonard Susskind
The Golden Gate, Vikram Seth
The White Tiger, Arvind Adiga
The Castle, Franz Kafka
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
My Side, David Beckham
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Open, Andre Agassi
Haroun and the Sea of Stores, Salman Rushdie
The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton
System Design Interview 1 and 2, Alex Xu
Designing Distributed Systems: Patterns and Paradigms for Scalable, Reliable Services, Brendan Burns
Design Patterns for Cloud Native Applications, Kasun Indrasiri
Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes, Justin Domingus
Google Cloud Cookbook, 2nd Edition, Rui Costa
Designing Machine Learning Systems, Chip Huyen
Data Pipelines Pocket Reference, James Densmore
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Elementary Statistics, Jerald G. Schutte
The Man from the Future — The Visionary Life of John von Neumann
The Power Law, Sebastian Mallaby
7 Powers, Hamilton Hemler
Outlive, Dr. Peter Attia
Excellent Advice for Living, Kevin Kelly -
Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, Eric Berne
Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson
Reframe Your Brain, Scott Adams
The Anthology of Balaji: A Guide to Technology, Truth, and Building the Future, Eric Jorgenson
Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era Hardcover, Eiji Yoshikawa
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford
Testaments Betrayed, Milan Kundera
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Murakami
All the Math You Missed: (But Need to Know for Graduate School), Thomas A. Garrity
Proofs: A Long-Form Mathematics Textbook, Jay Cummings
Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results, Shane Parrish
The Elements of Computing Systems, 2nd edition: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles, Nisan and Schocken
Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See, Donald Hoffman
The Joy of Abstraction: An Exploration of Math, Category Theory, and Life, Eugenia Cheng
Logic, A Very Short Intro, Graham Priest
High Performance Python: Practical Performant Programming for Humans, Ian Ozsvald and Micha Gorelick
Mastering Uncertanity, Matt Watkinson and Csaba Konkoly
How the World Really Works, Vaclav Smil
Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life, Rory Sutherland
The Computer and the Brain, John von Neumann

“I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time.” – Charlie Munger