Books that earned a proper write-up: not summaries, not star ratings, but an account of what changed when I finished the last page, what the author was actually doing beneath the surface argument, and what it might mean for someone building things in the real world.
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James Gleick's The Information is the clearest history we have of how the world learned to measure the signal. It is also the book that showed me, by drawing the boundary so cleanly, the one thing the science of information set aside on purpose: meaning. This review is the origin story of the work I have been doing since I closed it.
Watts's short 1966 book argues that the skin-encapsulated ego is a useful fiction, that you came out of the universe rather than into it, and that a culture forbids us to notice.
I'm mid-listen on Isaacson's Elon Musk, read by Jeremy Bobb, and I keep hearing Musk's five-step engineering algorithm in my own work. I admire the deletion discipline; the mania has a human cost.
I'm mid-listen on the Born a Crime audiobook, narrated by Trevor Noah himself, and it is one of the best-told things I have ever put in my ears. A story of apartheid, a fierce mother, language as survival, and lightness pulled out of hardship.
Out of Your Mind is Alan Watts' archival lectures in his own voice, laugh included. I keep them on a loop, transcribed the program for a film series, and found the bedrock under how I think about the stars.
I finished the Masters of Doom audiobook narrated by Wil Wheaton and it was marvelous. The two-founders, build-from-nothing, ship-relentlessly story of id Software stuck with me. I miss it already, the same way I miss Shoe Dog.
McDougall went to Mexico's Copper Canyons asking why his feet hurt and came back with the Tarahumara, the endurance running hypothesis, and a case against cushioned shoes that fed the barefoot movement.
Murakami's memoir treats running and writing as one daily discipline. I read it as a runner on Nevada's open BLM land who also keeps a daily freewriting journal, and it named things I had felt.
Pre ran every race from the front, lost the Munich 5,000 that way, and refused to change. Tom Jordan's biography of Steve Prefontaine, read by someone who runs but does not race.
I listened to Shoe Dog while working on my own projects. Knight's Nike story is one long cash crunch, a bank that kept pulling credit, and a team of obsessive runners, told without the mythology.
I listen to Admiral McRaven's commencement speech every week, usually Sunday night or Monday morning. The book expands that University of Texas address into ten lessons from SEAL training.
I read Zuckerman's book on Jim Simons while running my own iron condors. Medallion's edge was thin and executed at scale. My system has so far shown it survives, not that it pays.
Hoff explains Taoism through Pooh and Piglet: wu wei and the uncarved block in the first book, inner virtue and the power of the small in the second. I keep catching myself being Rabbit.
An in-progress read of Cade Metz's Genius Makers (2021): Hinton through the AI winter, the talent war at Google and Facebook, DeepMind's AGI goal. It ends before ChatGPT, and I read it in doses.
Petzold starts with two kids signaling with flashlights and climbs, relay by relay and gate by gate, to a working processor. It changed how I think about the machines I use every day.
Taleb's Antifragile rearranged how I think about risk: the fragile, robust and antifragile triad, the barbell, via negativa, and skin in the game. Arrogant, repetitive, and worth the argument.
I bought Pale Blue Dot as a student for its cover, then wore out Sagan's own audiobook reading on long drives. Its point still holds: we are not on Earth so much as in space, moving.
The DevOps Handbook is the clearest account I have read of why some teams ship small changes often without breaking things. A walk through the Three Ways, the technical practices, and what has dated.
A short Wiley options book I read on planes. It builds from calls and puts to spreads and iron condors, and it treats risk and time decay as seriously as returns. Dry, but a useful reference.
Mireya Mayor went from Miami Dolphins cheerleader to primatologist tracking lemurs in Madagascar. What stayed with me is that she never chose between the two and does not apologize for either.