📚Finished reading: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki.

📚 Finished reading: How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg, who lists Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Kahneman, Benoit Mandelbrodt and Nassim Taleb as his main intellectual influences. It shows. And since Flyvbjerg’s book is lighter than what people on that list tend to publish it can also serve as a gateway for those not initiated in probabilistic thinking.

📚 Finished reading: Wittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds. Learned much about Wittgenstein and even more about Popper. Both were wrong, as all philosophers are, but I can’t help thinking Wittgenstein was more wrong than Popper, being so obsessed with language which — turns out — is merely the most superficial layer of human intelligence and one that’s fairly easy to emulate. I do wonder what “little Luki” would have made of LLMs.

Good boy

📚 Finished reading: Feline Philosophy by John Gray promised cats, delivered a brief review of old philosophers. This is a book that could have been a listicle, and a forgettable one at that.

📚 While I wasn’t looking, micro.blog implemented a feature that made sharing what’s in my antilibrary much easier than I thought: bookshelves can now be embedded in a page. So, here is what I am currently reading, and here is the pile for 2025, though at some point I should add the previous years.

📚 Finished reading: A Guide for the Perplexed by E. F. Schumacher, which someone on X recommended after seeing my book list for 2025. Back in 1977 Schumacher had warned that replacing religion with science left a gaping hole in humanity that would only grow larger. And so, here we are…

📚 Finished reading: Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer, though “skimmed” may be the more appropriate word: it was so thick with references spanning several millennia that my regular reading pace and depth felt inadequate. Even so, the sense of completion was there, all loose ends tied up, all characters meeting their well-deserved faiths, to the point of it feeling unusually neat — so used am I with the post-modern storytelling that an actual epic story seemed off. That said, it is time to dust off my copy of The Illiad.

📚 Finished reading: The Notebook by Roland Allen. It starts off strong, with an anecdote about the creation of the Moleskine brand, then goes in much depth about writing during renaissance and the enlightenment, topping it off with a few modern developments like BuJo. The chapters are self-contained and packed with information without being bogged down into too much detail — the Moleskine chapter is a good example of what to expect — at the expense of an overarching “story”. So, this is a collection of vignettes more than a systemic review and categorization of the types of notebooks through history, and that’s fine.

A few higlights:

• Michael of Rhodes, a 15th century member of the Venetian navy whose manuscript was the LinkedIn of the day: started of with personal interests, ended up full of useless (at best) and dangerously misleading information meant to impress future employers.
• Leonardo Da Vinci had no introspective passages in any of the thousands of pages he wrote down in his many notebooks. Janan Ganesh was right.
• The term commonplace arose from the commonplace book and used to mean a striking, exemplary passage in a book, play or speech one should write down and keep. Once commonplace books became popular and writers started including flowery passages with the express purpose of having them written down in the book the public got onto them and the adjective “commonplace” became derogatory. So it goes…
• The album amicorum or — and this may remind you of a certain online service — the friendship book made a similar turn, from an exclusive ritual of the educated few in 16th century Dutch universities to an 18th century fad among young women that was looked down upon by the patriarchy. What used to take two and a half centuries now happens in a few short years.
• The New York Times has always been evil; just read the chapter on Bob Graham’s notebooks to see why.

A more modest list for what I hope will be a more modest year:

1. Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer
2. Feline Philosophy by John Gray
3. Human Action by Ludwig von Mises
4. How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information by Jillian M. Hess
5. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
6. The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
7. Defeat at Gallipoli by Nigel Steel & Peter Hart
8. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
9. A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor by John Berger
10. The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis
11. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
12. For Blood and Money by Nathan Vardi
13. The Billion Dollar Molecule by Barry Werth
14. Broken Stars by Various
15. The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer

Remember, it’s the books you don’t read that count. And here are last year’s wish lists: 2024 — 2023 — 2022.