Reading List

This is a list of some good books I’ve recently read (or recently decided that I want to read) and brief summaries on what I’ve learned from them or what I think they’re about. A few books may get longer treatments in their own posts, which are sometimes linked. If it’s on here, consider it a recommendation. Crossed out titles are finished. Otherwise, I’m in the middle of reading them or planning on starting soon.

Fiction

  • Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
  • Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan
    Be cautious about setting expectations for children that you wouldn’t anyone else. Winning isn’t everything; some games are played to confide with the other players.
  • Eleanor and Park – Rainbow Rowell
    I feel like this one is best summed up with a quote:
    “Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”
  • 1984 – George Orwell
    No good comes from the absence of critical thinking. Absolute power will corrupt absolutely. Language and expression are things worth fighting for.
  • Looking for Alaska – John Green
    Mortality is brutal, but it’s a good motivator for living an interesting life. Genuine emotional connection is more fulfilling than physical intimacy, but the need for intimacy often rears emotional connection.
  • Welcome to Night Vale – Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor
  • Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
    Absolutely hilarious. My takeaway: Don’t take a necessarily absurd life so seriously.
  • The Course of Love: A Novel – Alain de Bottone
    It takes work to achieve true connection, which should be seen as an achievement of love, not a prerequisite.
  • Crazy Rich Asians – Kevin Kwan
  • Artemis – Andy Weir
    Doing thorough research before writing science fiction never hurts.
  • The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
  • The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Nonfiction

  • Republic – Plato
  • The Mathematics of Love – Hannah Fry
    Love, like most things in life, is full of patterns. Mathematics is ultimately the study of patterns, and can describe a surprisingly large part of human activity.
  • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – Yuval Noah Harari
    Humans likely killed off our closest ancestors in early history. The idea of some similar but verifiably different human species coexisting with us in the modern world is an interesting thought experiment. Also, humans aren’t particularly special as a species, and we have a clearly defined and storied evolutionary history.
  • Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life – Anne Lamott
    Writing is a collaborative process, so get feedback from friends you trust. Keep active writing groups. Read often. Ensure you are not the best writer you know.
  • On Writing – Stephen King
    Write simply. Write often. Maintain a strong vocabulary, but only use it when appropriate. Language is already an abstraction from the purest form of the idea in your head, so don’t make the task harder by using words further from your original purpose.
  • Guns, Germs, and Steel – Jared Diamond
  • What Happened – Hillary Clinton
  • How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use – Randy Paterson
    When depressed patients are asked, rather counterintuitively, to list what strategies they would use to maximize misery, they discover that many of their answers are things they already do regularly. To summarize some common answers: Remain indoors, sleep poorly, look at screens all day, feel bad for yourself, and don’t exercise.
    Basically, to understand what makes you happy, it may help to first understand what makes you sad.
  • Algorithms to live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions – Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths
    Thinking and strategizing about how to best spend your time itself costs time. Most decisions don’t benefit from extra computation. Usually, you can and should go with instinct, which is a tool optimized by millions of years of evolution on human decision making. Otherwise, simply keep in mind how long any one decision takes up and question if this time investment makes sense.
  • The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck – Mark Manson
    Most of an immature life’s problems exist only in one’s head. To name the important ones: others’ opinions of you and delusions of grandeur. Just get rid of them.
  • The Dictator’s Hanbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics – Bruce Bueno de Mesquita & Alastair Smith
    Dictators only appear to be ineffective and cruel leaders because their tools to remain in power lie with the fewest amound of people. A democracy is generally nicer to live in because the leadership is more interchangeable and the keys to power lie under more people.
  • A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson

Short Stories

  • The Library of Babel – Jorge Luis Borges
    My favorite short story of all time. I love it so much, I wrote about it here.
  • The Last Question – Isaac Asimov
    You’re just going to have to read this one. It’s impossible to put the experience into words.

Poetry

    • Paradise Lost – John Milton
    • No Matter the Wreckage– Sarah Kay
      (Anthology) Pretty awesome collection. Sarah Kay’s slam poetry is also worth taking a look at.
    • The Odyssey – Homer