This would be a rudimentary version of my reading list, as I haven’t had the time to jot down all that I have been interested in. I have been getting so many ideas out of the blue these days that I genuinely can’t keep up with them. (A recent one was that I could create a ringer system for my tiny termux-powered server; another was related to shodan.) So I have decided to note down at least a rudimentary version of those ideas, which includes this reading list too.
I have been getting book recommendations for a while now and it’s such a shame that I haven’t had the time to read all of them. This year, I have touched about four books in total: Ultralearning (I have notes from this), Animal Farm, Notes From the Underground, Slow Productivity. More recently I have listened to the first two chapters from The Stranger and have been very interested in Camus and Nietzsche because of a recent conversation with a friend. I say “touched”, because I haven’t actually finished any of those books. But still, I have been getting a lot of book recommendations and it’s probably time I should note these down for posterity.
So, in no particular order, these are the books I would want to read either sooner or later. I have also added a small reason why I think I should read a particular book.
Non-fiction
- Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman): It’s quite obvious to me that I am not that intelligent, both from an IQ and an EQ perspective. My emotions are still coupled too tightly to my productivity and I think working on my emotions will improve my work ethic too. The value of just being aware of your mental state cannot be understated, and I should probably note down my thoughts about this in another post.
- Supremacy or Masters of Doom: While my uncle recommended Supremacy to me, I have been more interested in Masters of Doom, that’s the reason for the ‘or’. If and when I am done with MoD, I will read the aforementioned book. The reason I am attracted to MoD is because I had heard some cool things about John Carmack and how Doom was a revolution, not only in gaming, but in programming and graphics design. I am not interested in game programming at the moment but I would be very interested in how Carmack et. al. created this behemoth of a game. (It’s quite the disappointment that I wasn’t able to enjoy the original Doom on my PC; I had used Chocolate Doom and some settings were off - like no WASD - that speaks to the antiquity these games were conceived in.)
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra or Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche): I have been interested in Nietzsche for the better part of a fortnight now and would love to read what his genius has to offer in those books.
- The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger (Albert Camus): I think The Stranger is better as an audio book (as I have started listening to it) while Sisyphus would, I think, answer one of the more recent questions I have been plagued by. While The Stranger is fiction, I have decided to put it here because of its obvious philosophical implications.
- Nature (Ralph Waldo Emerson): I would love to read what Emerson’s got to say about the beauty of nature. I believe I will agree with him on many counts, based on what I have heard of the man and my reading of the introduction for this essay.
- Seneca’s Letters: As someone who has been interested in stoicism from my read of Aurelius’ Meditations (another book I haven’t finished, and this time I’d argue that it shouldn’t be read in one go), I would be very interested in reading some of his letters. But I am not that interested in this one in particular right now, this is more of a save for posterity.
- Completing my read of Aion (C.G. Jung): I have read the first two chapters and would like to get a good introduction to Jungian psychology by reading at least till chapter 5 (if I remember correctly, that’s where he introduces the “self”).
- Guns, Germs and Steel (Jared Diamond): I think this is a book is a history of the world and I have been interested in it for a while.
Some textbooks:
- Hands-on Machine Learning (Geron): I am actually trying to work through this book right now, I am completing some pre-requisites for it at the moment. I think this would be a great introduction to machine learning, and would allow me to make more out of Troy’s lectures too.
- A book on how the internet works → I have found that my networking foundations are very lacking and thus an introductory book/course/set of articles would serve me very well. I will look into this, I could maybe watch a few lectures from CS50 too.
- Thinking Strategically (Dixit & Nalebuff): This one stems from my interest in game theory and its real life applications. I have scouted out a course for this too.
- Economics (Dasgupta): This is a “very short introductions” book about economics, another domain I am interested in. I think economics combined with game theory can give me a really solid understanding of how the real world operates.
Fiction
- 1984 (Orwell): I liked Animal Farm (will write some of my thoughts about it soon enough) and a recent conversation with a friend revealed that 1984 is predicts the current state of the world even more accurately than the book I had read. This one’s been on my radar for a while now, but I have been postponing reading it because I wanted to sit down and actually absorb everything being said. In retrospect, I think this could function well as an audio book.
- Moby Dick (Melville): I love the premise of this book and I have enjoyed 20,000 Leagues under the Sea in the past, so I bet I will love this one. One problem though - I genuinely don’t think I am ready for this, this is a fat book and I don’t know if I will be able to read all of it. Maybe reading something lighter before this would help.
- Some short stories from my short stories book or other online sources. The most recent one I had read was The Lottery by Shirley Jackson - it wasn’t in my book so I read it online. I love short stories so much! They don’t require time investment and act as “fast food” for the literary world.
I will keep adding more books, or make modifications to this list later.