Inspired by Eli Bendersky's post
Books
The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday. A modern introduction to Stoicism. If you don't like the writing style, try Seneca or Marcus Aurelius.
Cicero - Selected Works, Penguin Classics. One of the greatest orators of all time, contrasting his speeches with modern politicians gives you a lot of perspective.
Lessons of History, Will & Ariel Durant. Lessons from their history research, personally I found it a bit underwhelming compared to the tittle, but it has a concise summary of many historical events.
The Master of Go, Yasunari Kawabata. An account of the last title match of Hon'inbō Shūsai, stretching out for nearly a year during world war 2. Must read if you like Go (the board game), if you don't know it you should try it.
Ego is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday. How to not get cocky in the face of success. I liked this a lot more than Ryan's other book I read.
Papers
In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm, Raft. Simple to understand distributed consensus algorithm, much clearer than paxos.
Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation, Unsupervised Machine Translation Using Monolingual Corpora Only. Straight out of SciFi, learning to translate with no bilingual data at all!
Tags: books