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Books to Read

· 4 min read

Contents
  1. First Principles and Mental Models
  2. Product
  3. Engineering
  4. Life, Behaviour, and Psychology
  5. Nassim Taleb, Matt Ridley, and Friends
  6. Science
  7. Writing and Memoir
  8. Films and Shows
  9. To Look Up
  10. On Thinkers vs Doers

A running list. Unfinished by design.

#First Principles and Mental Models

  • Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models — Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
  • Poor Charlie's Almanack — Charlie Munger
  • The Cold Start Problem — Andrew Chen
  • Play Bigger — Al Ramadan et al.
  • The Lean Product Playbook — Dan Olsen
  • The Great Mental Models series — Shane Parrish / Farnam Street
  • How to Decide — Annie Duke
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
  • Good Strategy Bad Strategy — Richard Rumelt
  • The Art of Thinking Clearly — Rolf Dobelli
  • Clear Thinking — Shane Parrish
  • Nudge — Richard Thaler
  • Game Theory — Brian Clegg
  • Principles — Ray Dalio
  • The Changing World Order — Ray Dalio

#Product

  • Product Management in Practice — Matt LeMay
  • Radical Focus — Christina Wodtke
  • The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman
  • Impact First Product Teams
  • The Effective Manager — Mark Horstman
  • Team Topologies — Skelton and Pais
  • Onward — Howard Schultz
  • No Rules Rules — Reed Hastings
  • Good to Great — Jim Collins
  • Timeboxing — Marc Zao-Sanders

#Engineering

  • Designing Data-Intensive Applications — Martin Kleppmann
  • The Software Engineer's Guidebook
  • Common Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms — Jay Wengrow
  • Inference — Rohatgi
  • Inference — Stapleton

#Life, Behaviour, and Psychology

  • Replacing Guilt — Nate Soares
  • The Alignment Problem — Brian Christian
  • Behave — Robert Sapolsky
  • The Ten Types of Humans — Dexter Dias
  • Read People Like a Book — Patrick King
  • How to Think Like a Philosopher
  • Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? — Julie Smith
  • The Art of Reading Minds
  • The Psychology of Money — Morgan Housel
  • Same as Ever — Morgan Housel
  • How Will You Measure Your Life — Clayton Christensen
  • The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone's Mind — Jonah Berger
  • The Laws of Human Nature — Robert Greene
  • The 48 Laws of Power — Robert Greene
  • The Almanac of Naval Ravikant — Eric Jorgenson
  • Atomic Habits — James Clear
  • The Richest Man in Babylon — George Clason
  • Die with Zero — Bill Perkins
  • Anxious People — Fredrik Backman
  • The Anthropocene Reviewed — John Green

#Nassim Taleb, Matt Ridley, and Friends

  • Anti-Fragile — Nassim Taleb
  • Skin in the Game — Nassim Taleb
  • The Rational Optimist — Matt Ridley
  • How Innovation Works — Matt Ridley
  • The Red Queen — Matt Ridley
  • On the Edge — Nate Silver
  • The Tipping Point — Malcolm Gladwell
  • How the World Really Works — Vaclav Smil
  • How to Avoid a Climate Disaster — Bill Gates
  • The Bill Gates Problem — Tim Schwab
  • Guns, Germs, and Steel — Jared Diamond

#Science

  • Principles of Neural Science — Kandel et al.
  • Molecular Biology of the Cell — Alberts et al.
  • Janeway's Immunobiology
  • Robbins Pathologic Basis of Disease
  • Cancer — Weinberg
  • Introduction to Proteins — Kessel, Ben-Tal
  • Developmental Biology — Gilbert
  • Organic Chemistry — Clayden et al.

#Writing and Memoir

  • On Writing Well — William Zinsser
  • Bullshit Jobs — David Graeber
  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz
  • Bhagavad Gita
  • Autobiography of a Yogi — Paramahansa Yogananda
  • The Paper Menagerie — Ken Liu
  • This Is Going to Hurt — Adam Kay
  • Taste — Stanley Tucci
  • My Bright Abyss — Christian Wiman
  • Everything I Know About Love — Dolly Alderton
  • 1984 — George Orwell
  • To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee
  • Poor Things — Alasdair Gray
  • The Origin of Time — Thomas Hertog and Stephen Hawking
  • Emotional Intelligence — Daniel Goleman

#Films and Shows

  • The Sixth Sense
  • Unbreakable
  • The Wave — Alex Grasshof
  • Poor Things
  • Gamechanger

#To Look Up

  • Dialogical education
  • The Psychology of Money — Netflix show
  • Morgan Housel's recommended books

#On Thinkers vs Doers

There are thinkers and there are doers. The mathematical statistics world has these theory-building Bourbaki types who write a lot, say a lot, but never get to the point. The opposite view is: maths is a bunch of tricks. It's like chess — the more middlegames and endgames you know, the higher your chance of winning. No real point in learning who originally came up with this particular middlegame variation, or why this opening works. Just learn the trick and play the game. That's the eastern school of thought, and it's what I subscribe to.

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