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 do you find the ideas/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 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
  • 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
  • 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
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      "I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time." - Charlie Munger