🌲 evergreen · last tended 3 weeks ago

Books

booksreading

Not an inventory. Just the ones I'd actually hand to someone.

Changed how I think

Effortless by Greg McKeown. The sequel to Essentialism. Less about doing less, more about making the important things easier.
Human Universe by Brian Cox. Makes you feel enormous and insignificant at the same time.
Ichigo Ichie by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles. Every moment only happens once. Simple idea. Harder to live by than you'd think.

Dune by Frank Herbert. Read it decades after I should have. The praise is earned. "Fear is the mind-killer."
Cumulus by Eliot Peper. Near-future dystopia. Economic inequality and big brother. Felt less like fiction every year since I read it.
The Circle by Dave Eggers. Same vein as Cumulus. A company that wants to make everything transparent, for your own good.
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. WWII codebreakers and modern-day hackers hunting gold. The book that made me care about cryptography.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Coined the metaverse before anyone tried to sell you one.
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. The moon blows up on page one. The rest is hard science and harder choices.
Polostan by Neal Stephenson. Cold war espionage. Slower burn than his other stuff but it pays off.
Daemon / Freedom™ by Daniel Suarez. An AI built by a dead game developer reshapes society. Written in 2006. Reads like a prediction now.

Spelunky by Derek Yu. Short book about making a game that redefined a genre. The parts about iteration and letting the game teach you are the best parts.