~/bookshelf

This page reads a JSON file that I use to track my reading list. For reviews, please visit my weblog.

Note

This compilation includes some highly controversial works. I want to clarify that I do not support or endorse every message expressed in these books—my interest in them is purely driven by curiosity. As Aristotle once said, "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." Please keep this in mind as you explore this list.

2023 (33)2022 (42)2021 (35)2020 (36)2019 (46)2018 (31)2017 (22)2016 (18)2015 (13)2014 (3)2013 (1)2010 (2)

Key: *In progress, +Did not finish/Skimmed | Last updated: Apr 25, 2023

2023

Confession - Leo Tolstoy
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
The Comedy of Errors - William Shakespeare ♫
Macbeth - William Shakespeare ♫
The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde ♫
Three Sisters - Anton Chekhov ♫
Enchiridion - Epictetus
99 Variations on a Proof - Philip Ording
The Satanic Bible - Anton LaVey
The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri, Stephen Wyatt ♫
Robot Visions - Isaac Asimov
Omitted stories collected in "I, Robot".
- Robot Visions (story) - 1990
- Too Bad! (story) - 1989
- Feminine Intuition (story) - 1969
- The Bicentennial Man (story) - 1976
- Someday (story) - 1956
- Think! (story) - 1977
- Segregationist (story) - 1967
- Mirror Image (story) - 1972
- Lenny (story) - 1958
- Galley Slave (story) - 1957
- Christmas Without Rodney (story) - 1988
- Robots I Have Known (essay) - 1954
- The New Teachers (essay) - 1976
- Whatever You Wish (essay) - 1977
- The Friends We Make (essay) - 1977
- Our Intelligent Tools (essay) - 1977
- The Machine and the Robot (essay) - 1978
- The Laws of Robotics (essay) - 1979
- The New Profession (essay) - 1979
- The Robot As Enemy? (essay) - 1979
- Intelligences Together (essay) - 1979
- My Robots (essay) - 1987
- The Laws of Humanics (essay) - 1987
- Cybernetic Organism (essay) - 1987
- The Sense of Humor (essay) - 1988
- Robots in Combination (essay) - 1988
- Future Fantastic (essay) - 1989
I, Robot - Isaac Asimov
- Robbie - 1940
- Runaround - 1942
- Reason - 1941
- Catch That Rabbit - 1944
- Liar! - 1941
- Little Lost Robot - 1947
- Escape! - 1945
- Evidence - 1946
- The Evitable Conflict - 1950
+Mein Kampf - Adolf Hitler
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway ♫
Cathedral - Raymond Carver
- Feathers
- Chef's House - 1981
- Preservation
- The Compartment
- A Small, Good Thing
- Vitamins - 1984
- Careful
- Where I'm Calling From
- The Train
- Fever
- The Bridle
- Cathedral
Weaving the Web - Tim Berners-Lee
How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius - Donald J. Robertson ♫
De Brevitate Vitae (On the Shortness of Life) - Seneca ♫
What I Believe - Bertrand Russell
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk ♫
The Healing of America - T. R. Reid ♫
The Sandman: Act III - Neil Gaiman, Dirk Maggs ♫
Nicomachean Ethics - Aristotle ♫
Permutation City - Greg Egan ♫
Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang ♫
- Tower of Babylon - 1990
- Understand - 1991
- Division by Zero - 1991
- Story of Your Life - 1998
- Seventy-Two Letters - 2000
- The Evolution of Human Science - 2000
- Hell Is the Absence of God - 2001
- Liking What You See: A Documentary - 2002
The Relativity of Wrong - Isaac Asimov
- The Moon and We - 1986
- The Minor Objects - 1986
- The Second Lightest - 1986
- Labels on the Molecules - 1986
- The Consequences of Pie - 1986
- The Enemy Within - 1986
- The Relativity of Wrong - 1986
- The Unmentionable Planet - 1986
- The Dead-End Middle - 1986
- Opposite! - 1987
- Sail On! Sail On! - 1987
- The Incredible Shrinking Planet - 1987
- The Light-Bringer - 1987
- Beginning With Bone - 1987
- New Stars - 1987
- Brightening Stars - 1987
- Super-Exploding Stars - 1987
*Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Letters from a Stoic) - Seneca ♫
What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies - Tim Urban
*On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction - William Zinsser
Journals - Kurt Cobain
I am Ozzy - Ozzy Osbourne ♫
Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground - Michael Moynihan, Didrik Søderlind

2022

*Rust for Rustaceans - Jon Gjengset
*Hacker's Delight - Henry S. Warren, Jr.
The World - Richard Haass
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values - Robert M. Pirsig ♫
*Essays of George Orwell - George Orwell
- Notes on Nationalism - 1945
- Review of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" - 1940
- Politics and the English Language - 1946
- Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels - 1946
- The Prevention of Literature - 1946
- Why I Write - 1946
- Writers and Leviathan - 1948
- Poetry and the Microphone - 1943
Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions - Sabine Hossenfelder ♫
*Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual - Mark Dvoretsky
*Silman's Complete Endgame Course - Jeremy Silman
*The Soviet Chess Primer - Ilya Maizelis
*The Complete Manual of Positional Chess – Opening and Middlegame - Konstantin Sakaev, Konstantin Landa
*The Complete Manual of Positional Chess – Middlegame Structures and Dynamics - Konstantin Sakaev, Konstantin Landa
*Chess Strategy for Club Players - Herman Grooten
Dark Days: My Tribulations and Trials - D. Randall Blythe
Seven Deadly Sins: Settling the Argument Between Born Bad and Damaged Good - Corey Taylor
README.txt: A Memoir - Chelsea Manning ♫
What If? 2 - Randall Munroe
*Passages from the Life of a Philosopher - Charles Babbage
The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels ♫
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - Benjamin Franklin ♫
Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization - Neil deGrasse Tyson ♫
Ubik - Philip K. Dick ♫
Animal Farm - George Orwell ♫
Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl ♫
Outgrowing God - Richard Dawkins ♫
*Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies - Jared Diamond ♫
Siddhartha: An Indian novel - Hermann Hesse ♫
The Stranger - Albert Camus ♫
The Greatest Show on Earth - Richard Dawkins ♫
Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet - Julian Assange
True Names - Vernor Vinge ♫
Free Will - Sam Harris ♫
+Asimov's Guide to the Bible - Isaac Asimov ♫
*100 Endgames You Must Know - Jesús de la Villa
Neuromancer - William Gibson ♫
*My System - Aron Nimzowitsch
*FCO: Fundamental Chess Openings - Paul Van der Sterren
*The Baroque Cycle - Neal Stephenson ♫
Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess - Bobby Fischer, Stuart Margulies, Donn Mosenfelder
*Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games - László Polgár
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow - Yuval Noah Harari ♫
How to Beat Your Dad at Chess - Murray Chandler
Ur-Fascism - Umberto Eco

2021

*Designing Data-Intensive Applications - Martin Kleppmann
In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays - Bertrand Russell
- In Praise of Idleness - 1932
- 'Useless' Knowledge
- Architecture and Social Questions
- The Modern Midas
- The Ancestry of Fascism
- Scylla and Charybdis, or Communism and Fascism
- The Case for Socialism
- Western Civilisation
- On Youthful Cynicism
- Modern Homogeneity - 1930
- Men versus Insects - 1933
- Education and Discipline
- Stoicism and Mental Health - 1928
- On Comets
- What is the Soul? - 1928
The Call of Cthulhu - H. P. Lovecraft ♫
The Death of Ivan Ilyich - Leo Tolstoy ♫
The Devil - Leo Tolstoy ♫
The Kreutzer Sonata - Leo Tolstoy ♫
The Linux Command Line - William Shotts
No Longer Human - Ozamu Dazai ♫
Norse Mythology - Neil Gaiman ♫
In the Beginning... Was the Command Line - Neal Stephenson
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick ♫
Twelve Angry Men - Reginald Rose ♫
Coraline - Neil Gaiman ♫
How to Live: 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion - Derek Sivers
The Sandman: Act II - Neil Gaiman, Dirk Maggs ♫
The Discourses - Epictetus ♫
A Programmable Web: An Unfinished Work - Aaron Swartz
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari ♫
The Tau Manifesto - Michael Hartl
SuperFreakonomics - Steven Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner ♫
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir ♫
A Promised Land - Barack Obama ♫
Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects - Bertrand Russell
- Why I am not a Christian - 1927
- Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilisation? - 1930
- Do We Survive Death? - 1936
- Seems, Madam? Nay, it is - 1899
- On Catholic and Protestant Sceptics - 1928
- Life in the Middle Ages - 1925
- The Fate of Thomas Paine - 1934
- Nice People - 1931
- The New Generation - 1930
- Our Sexual Ethics - 1936
- Freedom and the Colleges - 1940
- The Existence of God--a Debate Between Bertrand Russell and Father F. C. Copleston, SJ - 1948
- Can Religion Cure Our Troubles - 1954
- Religion and Morals - 1952
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days - Jessica Livingston
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky ♫
*Short stories of Anton Chekhov - Anton Chekhov
- The Bet - 1889
- The Lady with the Dog - 1899
- The Teacher of Literature - 1894
- Kashtanka - 1887
- The Student - 1894
- The Huntsman - 1885
- A Dreary Story - 1889
Notes from Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky ♫
The Sandman - Neil Gaiman, Dirk Maggs ♫
Thing Explainer - Randall Munroe
What If? - Randall Munroe
Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzsche ♫
Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche ♫
Dune - Frank Herbert ♫
Dracula - Bram Stoker ♫
God Is Not Great - Christopher Hitchens ♫

2020

*The Elements of Computing Systems - Noam Nisan
*Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges
- The Library of Babel - 1941
Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About - Donald E. Knuth ♫
Listened to the original audio lectures available on the official site.
2001: A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke ♫
We Should All Be Feminists - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors - Matt Parker ♫
A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy - William B. Irvine ♫
Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray - Sabine Hossenfelder ♫
Brokeback Mountain - Annie Proulx ♫
*Proofs from THE BOOK - Martin Aigner, Günter M. Ziegler
Freakonomics - Steven Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner ♫
How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later - Philip K. Dick
Remember It! - Nelson Dellis
Competitive Programmer's Handbook - Antti Laaksonen
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism - Prof. Shoshana Zuboff ♫
*A New Kind of Science - Stephen Wolfram
The UNIX-HATERS Handbook - Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, Steven Strassmann
A Mathematician's Lament - Paul Lockhart
On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin ♫
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius ♫
The Demon-Haunted World - Carl Sagan ♫
Creativity, Inc. - Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software - Charles Petzold
Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions - Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths
Greenlights - Matthew McConaughey ♫
How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life - Massimo Pigliucci ♫
The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka ♫
The Art of War - Sun Tzu ♫
The Grand Design - Stephen Hawking ♫
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury ♫
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card ♫
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream - Harlan Ellison ♫
*Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut
- Harrison Bergeron - 1961
Diary of a Wimpy Kid - Jeff Kinney
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules - Jeff Kinney ♫
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw - Jeff Kinney ♫

2019

The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant - Nick Bostrom
The Monkey's Paw - W. W. Jacobs
Toki Pona: The Language of Good - Sonja Lang
*Remembering the Kanji - James Heisig
Robot Dreams - Isaac Asimov
- Little Lost Robot - 1947
- Robot Dreams - 1986
- Breeds There a Man...? - 1951
- Hostess - 1951
- Sally - 1953
- Strikebreaker - 1957
- The Machine that Won the War - 1961
- Eyes Do More Than See - 1965
- The Martian Way - 1952
- Franchise - 1955
- Jokester - 1956
- The Last Question - 1956
- Does a Bee Care? - 1957
- Light Verse - 1973
- The Feeling of Power - 1958
- Spell My Name with an S - 1958
- The Ugly Little Boy - 1958
- The Billiard Ball - 1967
- True Love - 1977
- The Last Answer - 1980
- Lest We Remember - 1982
Effective Python: 90 Specific Ways to Write Better Python - Brett Slatkin
Refactoring UI - Adam Wathan
Mathematics for Computer Science - Eric Lehman, F. Thomson Leighton, Albert R. Meyer
*Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality - Eliezer Yudkowsky ♫
The Rust Programming Language - Steve Klabnik, Carol Nichols
*Cracking the Coding Interview - Gayle Laakmann McDowell
Python Tricks: A Buffet of Awesome Python Features - Dan Bader
*Fluent Python: Clear, Concise, and Effective Programming - Luciano Ramalho
Learn Vimscript the Hard Way - Steve Losh
Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought - Drew Neil
Modern Vim: Craft Your Development Environment with Vim 8 and Neovim - Drew Neil
Django for Beginners: Learn web development with Python and Django - William S. Vincent
Django for Professionals: Production websites with Python & Django - William S. Vincent
Django for APIs: Build web APIs with Python & Django - William S. Vincent
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python - Kenneth Reitz, Tanya Schlusser
*The Princeton Companion to Mathematics - Timothy Gowers, June Barrow-Green, Imre Leader
Web Hacking 101 - Peter Yaworski
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins ♫
The Martian - Andy Weir ♫
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson ♫
+Seveneves - Neal Stephenson
The Cuckoo's Egg - Clifford Stoll
iWoz - Steve Wozniak ♫
Brief Answers to the Big Questions - Stephen Hawking ♫
Permanent Record - Edward Snowden
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies - Nick Bostrom ♫
Life 3.0 - Max Tegmark
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley ♫
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason - Sam Harris ♫
Letter to a Christian Nation - Sam Harris ♫
Lying - Sam Harris ♫
Bhagavad Gita - Vyasa ♫
Tao Te Ching - Laozi ♫
*Structure and Implementation of Computer Programs - Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman
The Jargon File
The Cathedral and the Bazaar - Eric S. Raymond
The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition - Andrew Hunt, Davis Thomas
*Code Complete - Steve McConnell
The Mythical Man-Month - Fred Brooks
The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F ck - Mark Manson ♫

2018

*Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing - Neal Stephenson
- Slashdot Interview - 2004
- Mother Earth Mother Board - 1996
CSS Secrets: Better Solutions to Everyday Web Design Problems - Lea Verou
Introduction to Computation and Programming Using Python - John Guttag
The Egg - Andy Weir
They're Made Out of Meat - Terry Bisson
Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ - Bjarne Stroustrup
Learning JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms - Loiane Groner
*Pro Git - Scott Chacon
Eloquent JavaScript - Marijn Haverbeke
You Don't Know JS - Kyle Simpson
*Introduction to Algorithms - Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, Clifford Stein
*Algorithms - Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne
*The Art of Computer Programming - Donald Knuth
*Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment - W. Richard Stevens, Stephen A. Rago
*The Linux Programming Interface - Michael Kerrisk
*The UNIX Programming Environment - Brian W. Kernighan, Rob Pike
Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell ♫
The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell ♫
Start With Why - Simon Sinek
Our Final Invention - James Barret
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future - Ashlee Vance ♫
Leonardo da Vinci - Walter Isaacson ♫
Einstein: His Life and Universe - Walter Isaacson ♫
The Code Book - Simon Singh
Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson ♫
Automate the Boring Stuff with Python - Al Sweigart
Cracking Code with Python - Al Sweigart
Atomic Habits - James Clear ♫
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living - Dale Carnegie ♫
How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie ♫
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos - Jordan Perterson ♫

2017

Surreal Numbers - Donald E. Knuth
Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension - Matt Parker
The Art of Problem Solving, Volume 1: The Basics - Sandor Lehoczky, Richard Rusczyk
The Art of Problem Solving, Volume 2: And Beyond - Sandor Lehoczky, Richard Rusczyk
Physics of the Impossible - Michio Kaku ♫
Second Foundation - Isaac Asimov ♫
Fermat's Enigma - Simon Singh
My Inventions - Nikola Tesla
Cosmos - Carl Sagan ♫
The C Programming Language - Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald ♫
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry - Neil deGrasse Tyson ♫
Death by Black Hole - Neil deGrasse Tyson
The Black Hole War - Leonard Susskind ♫
Zero to One - Peter Thiel ♫
The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins ♫
The Magic of Reality - Richard Dawkins ♫
The Character of Physical Law - Richard Feynman
Cracking the Cube - Ian Scheffler
+One Piece - Eiichiro Oda
The Dark Knight Returns - Frank Miller
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams ♫

2016

*The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci - Leonardo da Vinci
Foundation - Isaac Asimov
Foundation and Empire - Isaac Asimov
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Thanks to Prof. Philip Moriarty and Numberphile.
20000 Leagues Under The Sea - Jules Verne ♫
Thanks to Dr. Emmet Brown.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain ♫
*The Bible - Unknown
The Time Machine - H.G. Wells ♫
The Invisible Man - H.G. Wells ♫
Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science - Martin Gardner
Calculus Made Easy - Silvanus P. Thompson, Martin Gardner
Infinity and the Mind - Rudy Rucker
A Mathematician's Apology - G. H. Hardy
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! - Ralph Leighton, Richard Feynman
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell ♫
Why There Is No God - Arman Navabi
Relativity: The Special and the General Theory - Albert Einstein
The Sandman - Neil Gaiman, Dirk Maggs

2015

Mathematics, Magic and Mystery - Martin Gardner
Discovering Martin Gardner for the first time was a joy. Thank you Vsauce.
Mathematical Circus - Martin Gardner
*Magic Squares And Cubes - William Symes Andrews
The Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions - Martin Gardner
The Second Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions - Martin Gardner
Hexaflexagons and Other Mathematical Diversions - Martin Gardner
The Colossal Book of Mathematics - Martin Gardner
Mathematical Magic Show - Martin Gardner
In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World - Ian Stewart
Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities - Ian Stewart
Secrets of Mental Math - Arthur Benjamin
Just Six Numbers - Martin Rees
Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill

2014

Mud, Sweat, and Tears - Bear Grylls
Rich Dad Poor Dad - Robert Kiyosaki
Shutter Island - Dennis Lehane

2013

A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking

2010

*Stories of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe
- Some Words With A Mummy - 1845
- The Tell-Tale Heart - 1843
- The Imp of the Perverse - 1845
- The Gold-Bug - 1843
*Aesop's Fables - Aesop