Updated on Wed 01 July 2020

reading

You can find the latest books and my brief thoughts on them on my [cached]goodreads profile. Books that I've particularly enjoyed or that are great examples of their field are also listed below.

Papers

Food & Drink

Non-Fiction

  • [cached]Letters from a Stoic, Seneca the Younger
    This book serves as a great introduction to Stoic philosophy, giving you a guide on how to live your life. For other approaches to the same topic or further reading, I recommend [cached]A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy and [cached]Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
  • [cached]The Life-changing Magic of Tidying, Marie Kondo
    While the title sounds like hyperbole, this book is actually great to help you get rid of all the things you've accumulated over the years that you don't really need any more, but that are still around somehow. You'll be surprised at how much you'll get rid of, and how transformed your flat/house suddenly feels.
  • [cached]The Design of Everyday Things
  • The Intelligent Investor
  • Fooled by Randomness
  • The Selfish Gene
  • Work Rules!, Laszlo Bock.
    Gives you an idea what Google looks like on the inside, and how you can use that to improve the company you work in. Recommended for everyone who has never worked at Google.
  • Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman!
  • Influence, Robert Cialdini
  • Ego is the Enemy
  • Principles: Life and Work, Ray Dalio.

Fiction

  • The Player of Games, Ian M. Banks; as well as all the other Culture books
  • Cyteen
  • The Long War
  • The Windup Girl
  • The Quantum Thief
  • The Last Ringbearer. A great alternative view of Lord of the Rings, from the point of view of an Orc. Mordor is an advanced scientific society, while the elves are the imperialist oppressors.
  • Halting State, Charles Stross.
  • Daemon and Freedom, Daniel Suarez
  • Ender's Game
  • Life of Pi
  • Cryptonomicon
  • Permutation City
  • A Deepness in the Sky
  • Stranger in a Strange Land
  • Blindsight
  • Starship Troopers
  • The Diamond Age
  • Catch-22
  • Flowers for Algernon
  • The Three-Body Problem
    Innovative Chinese SciFi.
  • Seveneves
  • The Martian
  • Shantaram
  • The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared
  • Dune
  • House of Suns
  • Snow Crash
  • The Master of Go

Textbooks

I've always been very interested in the hard sciences - if not for computer science, I would have probably gone into physics. In addition to my collection below, Less Wrong has a very good post on [cached]The Best Textbooks on Every Subject.

Computer Science

Physics

My favorite introduction to physics so far are definitely [cached]The Feynman Lectures on Physics, available for free online. While the lectures are quite old at this point - originally published 1964 - the parts about classical physics are of course still accurate today. They lectures are also available as bound volumes in a fantastic box set.

[cached]The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose also provides an extensive tour throughout most of modern physics, including the mathematics necessary to understand it - the first couple hundred pages may be a bit dry, but it's worth it for really understanding all the physics towards the end!

There is also the excellent sequence of video lectures, [cached]The Theoretical Minimumm, that I can't leave unmentioned here.

For a comprehensive selection of all books you need for both undergraduate and graduate Physics, see [cached]So You Want To Learn Physics... ([cached]previous version) by Susan J. Fowler, an excellent list.

[cached]QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (by Feynman) is also a great read.

Biology

I wildly enjoyed [cached]An Introduction to Systems Biology, it really surprised me how much organization there is inside cells, and how many similarities there are to logical circuit. [cached]The Machinery of Life has lovely (and accurate!) illustrations of cellular processes.

For molecular biology, [cached]The Processes of Life: An Introduction to Molecular Biology has been recommended to me. I will update once I've actually read it.

/r/biology also recommends [cached]Molecular Biology of the Cell and [cached]Molecular Biology of the Gene, though so far I've read neither of those two. [cached]Genomes 3 recommended by a Googler.

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