Alexandria

Bookshelf

• 1984 — George Orwell Prophetic in ways Orwell didn't intend.
• A Fire Upon the Deep — Vernor Vinge Hard sci-fi with genuinely alien civilizations and one of the better treatments of superintelligence in fiction.
• An Era of Darkness — Shashi Tharoor What British colonialism actually did to India economically.
• An Introduction to Statistical Learning — James, Witten, Hastie & Tibshirani The accessible version of Elements of Statistical Learning.
• Animal Farm — George Orwell The revolution always eats itself.
• Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy Tolstoy sneaks his real obsessions in through the side door.
• Autobiography of a Yogi — Paramahansa Yogananda One of those books that hits differently depending on where you are in life. A lot of it I can't verify but couldn't dismiss either.
• Bible, Quran, Bhagavad Gita, Ramayana, Guru Granth Sahib — God? Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you (Matthew 7:7)
• Black Holes — Brian Cox Cox is one of the best Science educators. And Black holes are fucking crazy.
• Calculus Made Easy — Silvanus P. Thompson Written in 1910 and still the best calculus introduction. The preface alone is worth it.
• Catch-22 — Joseph Heller The circular logic of the title concept is the whole book in miniature.
• Chaos: Making a New Science — James Gleick Strange attractors and the butterfly effect reframed how I think about complex systems.
• Concepts of Physics — H.C. Verma Probably the best introductory physics sequence I've encountered.
• Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky Raskolnikov's logic is airtight until it isn't.
• Demons — Fyodor Dostoevsky Stavrogin is one of literature's most haunting characters.
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications — Martin Kleppmann A book on distributed systems that isn't about distributed systems.
• Dune — Frank Herbert The ecology, the religion, the politics — Herbert built a complete world. One of my all time favorites.
• Frankenstein — Mary Shelley The real horror is Victor's abandonment of his creation, not the creation itself.
• Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World — Jack Weatherford This + Dan Carlin's Wrath of the Khans, provides a truly gripping and comprehensive look into the fascinating world of the Mongols.
• Gödel, Escher, Bach — Douglas Hofstadter About consciousness, recursion, and self-reference. One of those books that rewires how you think. Hard read, but worth it.
• Harry Potter — J.K. Rowling Read the whole series as a kid. Formed how I think about narrative. I'm not going to pretend it didn't :).
• Healing Back Pain — John E. Sarno The mind-body connection is real and medicine has been slow to acknowledge it. Hope you never have to read it lol.
• High Output Management — Andrew S. Grove Grove writes about running Intel like an engineer thinks about systems.
• History of the Peloponnesian War — Thucydides Written 2,400 years ago and still the best account of what happens when an established power meets a rising one.
• I, Robot — Isaac Asimov The three laws seem solid until Asimov systematically breaks each one. More relevant now than when it was written.
• Lifespan: Why We Age — and Why We Don't Have To — David Sinclair Sinclair's case for aging as a disease.
• Little Book of Deep Learning — François Fleuret Dense and short in the best way.
• Meditations — Marcus Aurelius Dear Diary, a Roman emperor is trying to talk himself into being a better person.
• Metamorphosis — Franz Kafka Absurdist fiction, also a story about feeling fundamentally alien to your own family?
• Notes from Underground — Fyodor Dostoevsky The underground man is insufferable and completely recognizable. The first modern anti-hero.
• Poor Charlie's Almanack — Charlie Munger Mental models as a way of life.
• Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir I love Rocky!
• Rust Atomics and Locks — Mara Bos The definitive guide to low-level concurrency in Rust.
• Rust for Rustaceans — Jon Gjengset Pinned types, variance, unsafe internals — the parts the beginner books skip over. Jon's one of the best Rust people.
• Siddhartha — Hermann Hesse Simple surface, dense underneath. One of my favorite books even today.
• Six Degrees — Duncan Watts Why everything is more connected than it looks and what that means for how things spread.
• Six Easy Pieces — Richard Feynman Fell in love with Physics reading this book. Feynman's the GOAT.
• Stephen Hawking: His Life and Work — Kitty Ferguson More biography than physics, but well done. Gifted to me by a friend.
• Steve Jobs — Walter Isaacson The genius and the cruelty aren't separate.
• Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down — J.E. Gordon Engineering explained through history, biology, and intuition.
• Superintelligence — Nick Bostrom Dense and slow, but it defined the field. Some scenarios feel dated now, the core arguments haven't been refuted.
• Tao Te Ching — Laozi Move with the grain of the world instead of against it.
• The Art of Doing Science and Engineering — Richard Hamming Hamming's lectures on how to think about engineering and science as a craft. Less about what to build, more about how to develop judgment.
• The Art of War — Sun Tzu Stratergy, planning, that kind of thing.
• The Beginning of Infinity — David Deutsch One of the most important books I've read. Explanatory knowledge as the thing that distinguishes humans.
• The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky Lot of attempts to read this one. The Grand Inquisitor chapter alone justifies the whole thing.
• The Creative Act: A Way of Being — Rick Rubin Its all vibes bro.
• The Death of Ivan Ilyich — Leo Tolstoy A hundred pages that will restructure your relationship with mortality.
• The Denial of Death — Ernest Becker Everything humans do is motivated by the terror of death.
• The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman I now look at every door handle differently.
• The Elephant and the Blind — Thomas Metzinger Nice to see you're not the only crazy one. Great book for fellow meditators.
• The Emperor's New Mind — Roger Penrose Penrose arguing that human consciousness can't be computational.
• The Epic of Gilgamesh — Anonymous The oldest story we have and it's about grief.
• The Fabric of Reality — David Deutsch Four deep theories — quantum mechanics, evolution, epistemology, computation, and the argument that they're actually one theory. Amazing book.
• The Feynman Lectures on Physics — Richard Feynman Feynman explains things the way they actually are, not the way they're convenient to teach.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams Funny in a way that doesn't age. I love this book.
• The Iliad — Homer War as it actually is: brutal, absurd, full of petty gods.
• The Innovators — Walter Isaacson History of computing from Ada Lovelace to the internet. Useful for understanding that breakthroughs are almost always collaborative and almost never how they're remembered.
• The Man Who Knew Infinity — Robert Kanigel Ramanujan's biography. Mathematics as pure intuition. One of the strangest minds in history.
• The Martian — Andy Weir Problem solving as plot.
• The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect — Roger Williams One of the more serious treatments of post-scarcity and what humans do when there's nothing left to want. Not for everyone.
• The Mom Test — Rob Fitzpatrick The most practical book on customer discovery.
• The Odyssey — Homer The original adventure novel.
• The Pragmatic Programmer — Hunt & Thomas DRY, orthogonality, tracer bullets. Still relevant today.
• The Prize — Daniel Yergin Eight hundred pages on the history of oil — the geopolitics, the wildcatters, the wars.
• The Problems of Philosophy — Bertrand Russell A hundred pages that introduce epistemology cleanly. Russell writes with a clarity most philosophers don't bother with.
• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich — William L. Shirer The eyewitness passages are chilling. Hard to read but important for understanding how fast and completely a society can collapse.
• The Road to Reality — Roger Penrose The most ambitious popular science (debatable if you can call it that) book I've encountered. Penrose expects you to learn the math.
• The Selfish Gene — Richard Dawkins The gene's POV of evolution permanently changed how I think about biology and behavior.
• The Stranger — Albert Camus Meursault's indifference reads differently before and after you've thought about absurdism.
• The Upanishads — Various Atman, Brahman, the nature of self and reality.
• The Vital Question — Nick Lane Why life is the way it is — energy, mitochondria, the origin of complexity. Biology from first principles.
• Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World — René Girard Mimetic desire, scapegoating, the origins of violence.
• Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman System 1 / System 2 is now almost a cliché, but useful for understanding your own reasoning failures.
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Friedrich Nietzsche Stop living by borrowed values and build your own. The Übermensch is mostly misread — IMO it's not about superiority, it's about self-authorship. Become who you are.
• What Went Wrong with Capitalism — Ruchir Sharma Good historical framing but the conclusions feel rushed.
• When the Body Says No — Gabor Maté The connection between suppressed emotion and serious illness.
• White Nights — Fyodor Dostoevsky A classic. Short and heartbreaking.
• Writing An Interpreter In Go — Thorsten Ball The right way to learn compilers.
• Zero to One — Peter Thiel & Blake Masters The core point about competition versus monopoly is interesting.