🌲 evergreen · last tended 3 weeks ago
Books
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.
Sci-fi that stuck
- 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.
Game dev
- 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.
Horror / manga
- Tomie by Junji Ito
- Uzumaki by Junji Ito