28 books this year, listed roughly in chronological order of when I read them. I was on track to read one book a week for the first few months of the year. But I got sidetracked over the summer, and didn’t read at all. But I picked up the pace again towards the end of 2017 to sort of average it out.

Arkwright by Allen Steele

I start 2017 off properly with a new hard sci-fi. Arkwright follows a sci-fi author who uses the proceeds from his wildly successful books on interstellar travel to make his stories a reality. In a lot of ways, it is a Musk/SpaceX story except funded by a book series rather than PayPal’s sale to Ebay. The book begins in the early 20th century describing the science fiction author and what led him to form the Arkwright Foundation–a nonprofit dedicated to human interstellar travel. At first it didn’t seem like the technical science fiction I expected. But the author allays my fears when, fast-forward a few generations, we witness a rocket launch in a tropical Carribean island. This scene reminded me heavily of SpaceX’s first Pacific island launch(described in Musk’s biography) which was a sort of wistful tropical dream where the world’s top aerospace engineers poured their lives into achieving a purpose greater than themselves.

Arkwright’s story then advances past where SpaceX is now, to the point where they’re building an interstellar ship powered by a Light Sail and carrying human embryonic material with artificial incubators. The book ends with a thankfully brief exploration–unlike Seveneves–of the life and world of the newly colonized humans at the light sail’s destination. There’s nothing particularly groundbraking about Steele’s story, but it’s an enjoyable and worthwhile read if you tend to like hard science fictions.

The Everything Store by Brad Stone

A book chronicling the origin story of and rise of Amazon. It feels much like reading Steven Levy’s In The Plex, in a good way. The narrative is very objective, taking pains to be both critical and full of praise for the various unique aspects of Amazon.

I enjoyed the opening chapters, which describe the juvenile early days of a scrappy startup struggling to handle an exponentially increasing number of book orders. Yeah, it’s just books, but remember, this was basically the first online-only retailer. Amazon’s book explosion is their analogy for Google’s exploding search traffic, or the leadup to SpaceX’s first booster success. I similarly admire–although with more hesistation–the Machiavellian strategies Amazon employs, like undercutting competitors and selling at a loss until the competitor has no choice but to sell itself to Amazon at a huge discount.

I read this book before the scathing NYT article about the horrid work culture at Amazon. Given the sensationalism of modern media, I can’t determine how truthful the article is, or whether Bezos’ response is true, but I certainly believe Amazon’s negative workplace reputation must have some source of truth. At the end of the day, I wouldn’t work there, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t hold their stock.

Deep Work by Cal Newport

Ever since discovering the internet in my adolescence, I’ve found my attention and time being occupied in varying proportions by distractions. More recently, it is skewing towards “unhealthily distracted.” The reasons are subtle: greater closeness to friends and a desire to check their messages more often, more interest in the financial markets due to investments, the discovery of new high quality internet content, etc. None of these are necessarily bad, but they have made it harder to concentrate at work, read deeply, or pursue self-improvement. I notice these symptoms creeping up on me, but don’t quite qualify them as negative effects, thus deciding to simply let them be. Deep Work clearly illustrates to me how less efficient and productive I am when allowing these distractions to dominate my consciousness.

It uses a series of studies, conjectures, and biographical examples to explain the value of getting “in the flow.” That sounds like common sense, but the way Cal Newport explains it has surprisingly caused me to change many lifestyle habits:

  • It explains how damaging context-switches are to creative work. I used to haphazardly slice up my day with meetings, thinking that I’ll simply find time to write code in between meetings. I am now aware that I am an order of magnitude less effective with split up time compared to focused uninterrupted time. My work style is now to block off at least 2-3 hours of uninterrupted time for coding–with noise-cancelling headphones and classical music–with my phone’s notifications (even work emails) totally off. I find that I can write more and better code with less actual time spent by simply organizing my day better.

  • For my “rest time”, at home during the weekends or after work, I realize that mindless consumption (TV, internet, social media) is actually more tiring than doing something productive (uninterrupted reading, writing, coding side projects, exercise). It’s counterintuitive, but you’ll sleep better and your mind will be more at ease after it’s been actively used compared to passively dragged along.

The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner

I thought this book would be a sort of origin story of AT&T, which was the Google of its day in terms of scientific corporate innovation. In some ways it is, but even more so, and even more interestingly, it is the origin story of modern computers. It closely follows the innovators and innovations (like the transistor) that led to the modern computer revolution. I’m a computer scientist, and I understand decently well how computers work down to the processor and pipeline level with logic gates and switches. But there’s a step below that always remained totally opaque to me, where one understands the actual substances (silicon) and their electrochemical or quantum properties that allow such a simple electrical switch to form the primitive of all processors.

It’s riveting history to learn about how switches originally worked, from mechanical motor-driven switches, to delicate glass vacuum tubes. When the book finally arrives at the invention of the semiconductor electrical switch, I finally and fully understand the mind-blowing revolution that is the semiconductor.

My main critique of this book is that it spends a bit too much time chronicling the lives of the scientists and researchers involved–of which there are many–which is largely orthogonal to the scientific developments.

Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis

An incredibly interesting memoir of sorts that covers Lewis’ years of experience in the heart of Wall Street as a bond salesman working for Salomon Brothers. The book lifts the veil around an utterly unique and at times unbelievable subculture fed by greed and gluttony. Lewis is a very fluid and succinct writer; every chapter goes into just enough depth to command your interest. He rarely strays off into uninteresting financial details or boring descriptions of people’s personal lives–unless their personal lives are scandalously related to the story. You finish the book feeling a unique mix of emotions.

  • Included, you feel perversely curious as if listening to a fraternity brother spilling the secrets of their hazing rituals.
  • Outrage, at the sheer amount of money that goes into the pockets of bad people doing bad things.
  • Self-righteous–unless you happen to be someone in finance–you feel better about yourself, maybe you don’t make this ludicrous amount of money, but you tell yourself that you’re a good person.

It’s honestly one of the most satisfying books I’ve read all year, and combined with Flash Boys, makes Michael Lewis one of my all time favorite authors.

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis

A hilarious and well-written examination of the various national bankruptcies, their origins, and what they reveal about people in those cultures. Michael Lewis brings you through his travels to Iceland, Ireland, and Greece to seek out the origins and aftermaths of the financial disasters that wrecked their countries. A similar story prevails follows throughout: runaway speculative greed led bankers and by proxy, their governments to gamble their country’s financial future, and every day taxpayers were left holding the lump of coal at the end. Although the focal victims of his novel are every day citizens in foreign nations, the book still almost makes your blood boil in outrage, because those who cashed out on their financial misery are largely the same ones responsible for our 2008 financial meltdown, American bankers.

The Wandering Earth: Classic Science Fiction Collection by Liu Cixin

A collection of translated short stories from my favorite author. Each story is easily among the best sci-fi shorts I’ve ever read. The overall theme throughout is the effects on society when faced with new, surprising, and disruptive technologies or unexpected environmental developments. Liu Cixin is a master at building up to a completely unexpected and mind-blowing twist that leaves you pondering the story for days afterwards. You won’t be disappointed with any of them.

The Wandering Earth

A riveting story about the evolution of society and technology if our beloved sun became a time-bomb, and we needed to somehow escape the solar system.

Mountain

An exploration of the technological and scientific development of an alternate form of life that begins in a much harsher environment.

The Wages of Humanity

Set in a similar (or identical) world to his other short, Taking Care of God, it explores a very interesting conclusion to the continually growing wealth gap between the rich and the poor.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Watch one of Professor Ariely’s YouTube videos to get a taste for what he has to offer. He examines human behavior, and the predictable absurdity of it, in a new field he’s frontrunning called Behavioral Economics. The book is basically a description of a bunch of interesting experiments. An example: participants are asked to build bionical puzzles repeatedly for less and less monetary reward until they decide it’s not worth it anymore. The participants can be made to stop much earlier if the test administrator disassembles the just build puzzle in front of them as they build the next one. The results of these experiments is always very surprising and just plain fun, and I’ve found some of them applicable to understanding myself, my own motivations, and those of others.

A Power Governments Cannot Suppress by Howard Zinn

Zinn argues that modern America is blind. We look embarassingly back on our history of slavery, racism, and colonialism, and claim it was a part of our ugly past that we’ve evolved out of. Yet we willfully ignore the continued injustices continually wrought upon Iraqi and Afghanistani citizens in our War on Terror. It’s a decent read, but not nearly as satisfying as his earlier magnum opus, A People’s History.

Kissinger by Walter Isaacson

I confess I could not finish Isaacson’s first biography. I like his others, but the Kissinger one is far too long and rambling. There isn’t much of an overarching structure to the 800 word work, it seems just an endless reporting of Kissinger’s dealings with hundreds of quickly forgotten names throughout his long career as a U.S. statesman. Looking back at all the Isaacson biographies, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein, Steve Jobs, I realize that he becomes successively more succinct and focused with each more recent biography, and consequently my enjoyment increases as well. The Franklin biography is sort of rambling as well, the Einstein one is the first one I actually like–but there are some sections I’d choose to cut out as well, and the Steve Jobs one is really a masterpiece with a flowing structured narrative that delivers a beautiful story very efficiently.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

A recently super-popular book. I don’t quite think it lives up to the hype. It’s written similarly to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, and in fact often covers the same topic. Whereas Diamond’s book focused on big questions like why did some cultures come to dominate others by the 20th century, Harari’s book made many conjectures about what unique facts about humans led them to dominate the planet. It was relatively interesting to have a history lesson over a wide breadth of human history, but I didn’t leave the book with any profound conclusions.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

A brief story on the life of the monk Siddhartha who went through various phases of life including asceticism and eventually reached a certain level of enlightenment. I didn’t read it religiously or factually, but more of as an abstract story to try to glean some lessons from. It’s sort of like hearing a really long parable, and pondering over it’s potential meaning.

Maus by Art Spiegelman

An illustrated novel retelling the story of the Holocaust. The twist is that each type of person is illustrated as some sort of animal:

  • Jews are mice
  • Germans are cats
  • The Polish are pigs
  • Americans are dogs

The reverse anthropomorphizism has a startling way of making you reconsider many of the absurdities of the Holocaust. There are many levels of symbolism caused by the animal caricatures. One feeling created is that the Holocaust really divided humans into “species,” which was the only way that humans could act in such a way to one another without losign all sanity. You as the reader really identify with the Jews, the mice, because that’s the perspective of the narration. And so it almost makes sense when you witness the utter inhumanity of German cats, since why would cats care about mice? Maus is a page turner with beautiful illustrations, worth reading regardless of your preferences.

Underground Airlines by Ben Winters

An alternative history fiction, where society is pretty much exactly where it is now, except slavery was never ended in the American South. I love alternate history novels, and the scenario here is definitely captivating and unique. My critique is that the novel focuses almost entirely on the story of a few select characters, only incidentally describing the unique alternate universe. I would have enjoyed a larger focus on the geopolitical aspects of having a world where slavery still exists in the most powerful nation.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

A hard science fiction that explores humanity’s exodus from a destroyed Earth, and the development of civilization by intelligent spiders! This is not a book for anyone even mildly arachnophobic. This sci-fi has two hard sci-fi concepts that I really enjoyed. The first is the deep exploration into how a different type of species might evolve intelligence and begin to form complex technological societies. There’s plenty of stories around intelligent primates, or intelligent cephalopods, but this I’ve come across for arachnids. Apparently the author consulted numerous Arachnologists to get a firm foundation of spider biology from which he based his imagination. The second concept is the societal development on board the generation ship that left Earth towards the arachnid planet. It’s interesting to follow the people of a spaceship that will be in transit for hundreds of years. Most will live their entire lives in transit, and the equation gets even more complicated because there are stasis pods so select individuals can transpose their lifetimes across sections of the journey. Definitely worth a read if any of the above concepts sound interesting to you.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor E. Frankl

Frankl was a neurologist and psychiatrist who survived through the Holocaust. He uses his horrendous situation as an opportunity to analyze the nature and meaning of suffering. Although the title suggests Frankl found the meaning behind life and suffering, he largely avoids such conclusions. He mostly makes prescient remarks and allows the reader to synthesize their own conclusions based on their experiences combined with Frankl’s. My passage in the book is probably one of the only times Frankl tries to impart a conclusion, and it’s a very well written passage:

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth–that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in a positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way–an honorable way–insuch a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory”. – Frankl

Revolution for Dummies by Bassem Youssef

Bassem Youssef is a badass. He was an Egyptian surgeon on who decided to recreate the satirical Daily Show in Egypt at the height of the Arab Spring. This was unheard of in such a religious and conservative society. His memoir mixes his journey with a satirically biting analysis of Middle Eastern politics and society. You’ll laugh out loud reading this book, which is really his goal in all of this. He took very serious issues: terrorism, corruption, religious hippocrisy, and educated the masses on the truth behind them by making them laugh. Unfortunately the Egyptian government eventually exiled him, and he’s now unable to work for his country while accepting asylum in the United States. Do check out his YouTube videos for some comedy shorts he produced recently.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson

Basically an alternative take on the typical self-help book. I decided to read this book after reading quite a few insightful articles from Mark Manson’s blog. The book repeats some of it, but also has a solid amount of original content. The basic premise is that people are unhappy and unfulfilled in life because they care too much about things that really don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. His language and examples are sort of crude–as you can tell from the title–but they’re also laced with obvious wisdom that Mark accrued over decades.

When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold S. Kushner

This book’s title suggests it would answer the fundamental problem of evil. I didn’t have super high hopes that it would get anywhere with that intractable problem, but it also didn’t necessarily disappoint. This book is written by a Jewish rabbi with extensive knowledge of both the old and the new testaments. He basically tells a series of anecdotes and stories about innocents suffering, and the peculiarities with which humans grieve over this. Having finished it, I don’t really feel any new profound conclusions over this age old question, but I do feel my perspective has widened a bit–just knowing about new depths of suffering tends to do that.

The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben

This is one of those books that takes a seemingly boring topic–trees–and succeeds in elevating the topic to a surprising level of profundity. Peter Wohlleben is a German forester who spent his early career as a forester working for lumber companies (managing how to best cut down trees), and gradually transformed into a forestry preservationist. He pulls us into his world, imparting us with his esoteric tree wisdom that he’s slowly accumulated over the decades. He seamlessly blends anecdotes from his forest explorations with scientific facts and throws in some pseudoscience speculation that seems surprisingly possible. It was honestly a riveting read, such that when I describe a chapter of the book to a lunch table, I’m surprised to find myself commanding the whole table’s attention.

Cannibalism by Bill Schutt

Saw this at a bookstore and it drew my interest. I’ve always been drawn to morbid non-fiction explorations. This didn’t disappoint. It is a wide-reaching exploration of cannibalism, from its outsized influence in modern pop culture (think zombies, vampires), to its widespread prevalence in the animal kingdom, to instances of survival cannibalism (the Donner Party) and diseases transmitted via canibalism (Kuru). Basically, pick this up if you’re the morbidly curious type.

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow

A new very popular science fiction novel released this year, Walkaway begins describing the eventual clash between capitalism and technology that obviates the need for money. People begin “walking away” from society to join code and 3D-printer driven communes where material needs are satisfied and currency is totally unecessary. It eventually centers around the implications of a game-changing new technology–the ability to run a simulated backup of a human mind and consciousness. I found Walkaway’s concepts to be very interesting, but the plotline and characters began to grate on me by the novel’s end. The main characters aren’t particularly likable, which tore me between wanting to know what happens next with these interesting sci-fi concepts, and from wanting to stop hearing about the characters.

All The Birds in The Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

A unique mix of hard science fiction and magical fantasy. It follows a nerdy boy and an outcast girl from childhood through young adulthood, where the girl has become a powerful witch and the boy has become a scientist on the forefront of fundamental physics research. It’s also based in San Francisco, so you’ll receive some extra enjoyment if you’re an SF native.

It reminded me heavily of Good Omens by Gaiman and Pratchett, which is to say it feels whimsically ironic or nihilistic hilarity. I’ve heard it also described as absurdist literature. It’s a lightweight page-turner which really surprised me with the feelings I felt for the main characters towards the end, especially given how lighthearted the novel was throughout.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

Decided to give Murakami another shot after a largely lukewarm experience with Kafka on the Shore. My second foray into Japanese magical realism started off strong. I enjoyed the portrayal of utterly unique and relatively likable characters. Murakami is a master at introducing a character, then writing a short blurb about what sort of person the character is, giving the reader a perfect image. But finally finishing the novel was a tiring weeks-long affair. 1Q84 is a nearly 1000 page book, but the entire plot can be summed up in about 2-3 events, which leaves endless pages of detailed descriptions of very mundane aspects of life. There is an overarching love story, which I found forced, but I don’t tend to like love story fictions, so take that as you will.

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

A co-worker recommended this book to me as “the only novel he can think of with a similar premise to The Three Body Problem,” so of course I had to give it a read. It’s a pleasantly short science fiction written in the decade after World War II concerning the protectorship of Earth society by a “benevolent” alien race. The diction of the characters can seem at times old fashioned, but the story and plot are surprisingly resilient to time. It’s an okay read, but for a “first contact” type novel, I much prefer the concepts that come out of a continual struggle between humanity and aliens like in the Three Body Problem.

Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick

Pulled this read off of Bill Gates’ yearly reading list. It is a page-turning narrative of the complicated circumstances that led to the current Middle East predicament. It reads like a thriller because it tells the story from the third-person perspectives of carefully chosen actors in the conflict–a CIA counter-terrorist analyst, the King of Jordan, Al-Zarqawi, or an U.S. Stealth Commando. I finished it feeling dramatically more grounded in my understanding of Middle Eastern extremism. The book puts a face and story behind all the foreign sounding names that occassionally pop up in Western news articles. I recommend reading it if you desire to better understand the development, motivations, and goals of modern Middle Eastern extremism.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

I read the Kite Runner a year ago, and found it finish-able, but ultimately very predictable in it’s depressing plot. It further left an unsavory taste because its main character was utterly unredeemable and unlikable. This second book by Hosseini is honestly similar in that you can figure out the plot by basically imaginging the worst thing that could happen. But it was ultimately more enjoyable because the main characters were not only likeable, but worthy of praise as brave and honorable individuals–oppressed females in patriarchal Afghanistan. If you want to read a depressing story about lives ruined in Afghanistan, choose this over the Kite Runner.

The Internet of Money by Andreas Antonopoulos

With the hyper-rise of Bitcoin this year, I’ve been getting interested in cryptocurrencies. Most hardcover books about cryptocurrencies are pretty worthless–in general I find hardcover books about deeply technical computer topics to be of little use, since they’re outdated by the time they’re published, and you can generally find the content in a more native form online, up-to-date and for free. Nevertheless, I heard good things about the author. The book is basically his youtube talks distilled in text form, so you can easily check out his channel, save some money, and view the talks in their original form. His talks are surprisingly relevant despite some of them being years old. They focus on cryptocurrencies as a fundamental technological breakthrough, rather than on the surface details(price, transaction fees, etc.) that most cryptocurrency videos focus on. He also tends to avoid deep technical discussions, which also helps his videos age well. Whether you read the book or watch his videos, I highly recommend them to understand what all the hype originally came from for cryptocurrencies.