Posts in: books

Finished reading: I and Thou by Martin Buber 📚 and there is a message there, hidden under miles-deep layers of impenetrable German that no translator can bypass. Whether it is any more complicated than “don’t treat people like things” — I couldn’t say.

To Buber’s credit, he himself said that the book was untranslatable. Without knowing what the original was like, I tend to agree.


I don’t care much for self-help and productivity any more, but if Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity is anything like 4,000 weeks then of course I’ll get it. Pre-orders have started, and will get you some goodies if you follow these instructions before the March 5th release.


Ada Palmer doesn’t blog much, but whenever she does it goes right to the top of my reading list. Today’s text was about censorship. The key point:

The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power.

In particular:

If we believe that the purpose of the Inquisition trying Galileo was to silence Galileo, it absolutely failed, it made him much, much more famous, and they knew it would. If you want to silence Galileo in 1600 you don’t need a trial, you just hire an assassin and you kill him, this is Renaissance Italy, the Church does this all the time. The purpose of the Galileo trial was to scare Descartes into retracting his then-about-to-be-published synthesis, which—on hearing about the trial—he took back from the publisher and revised to be much more orthodox.

There are more recent examples as well, from the 1950s comic book scare to the modern-day school library controversies.

By the way, I have just started reading the first book of Too Like Lightning, her sci-fi trilogy, and two chapters in I am completely hooked.


📚 Finished reading: Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, and reading something from 70-plus years ago that now seems prophetic never gets old. What if people’s appetite for food was as distorted as their current — 1950s, mind you — appetite for sex, he asks himself and answers:

There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.

Well guess what, Mr. Lewis…


Always good to see a friend’s work out in the wild. This is Bump by Matt Wallace in the tweens section of Politics and Prose.

Photo of a bookshelf with the book Bump by Matt Wallace facing forward, a girl luchador on the cover.

Amusingly, one year ago to the day I wrote about On Bullshit, a broad, timeless, Great book if there ever was one.


📚 Finished reading: Talent by Tyler Cowen

📚 Finished reading: Talent by Tyler Cowen, and I don’t yet have an answer to my question on its Straussian — Tylerspeak for hidden — meaning. The book is despicable in some places: are you sure you want to pick people committed to their families if that means they will choose to spend time with them over doing more work? — yes, this had struck a nerve — and admirable in others: how to help people who are far from the center of the action in their selected field to even imagine what they can achieve?

I would place it in the “narrow, temporary” quadrant of the breadth/timelessness 2-by-2. It is not for everyone, and it won’t last very long. To pick an example, Cowen and Gross suggest that employers should increase their profile — by blogging, writing books, doing podcasts, basically by doing what Tyler is doing — to increase their profile and the reach of their “soft” network and, ultimately, get more self-referrals from prospective talents who have heard about them. If everyone was to do this, would be it of net benefit to the whole system? I would argue not: the benefit would be to the most prolific and vocal talent-seekers at the expense of an immense amount of noise and all around confusion. And fifty years from now, will people have known about podcasts and blogs? Lindy says no. This doesn’t mean that the book is bad! It’s just not one of the “great” books.

Compare this to my gold standard of a broad/timeless — great — contemporary book: anything from Nassim Taleb’s Incerto, which is coincidentally what taught me about the Lindy effect. If everyone were to internalize its views and the dense network of mental models it brings to the extend they can, and act accordingly, the world would be a bit less of a madhouse. The concepts it talks about being about probability, it is also timeless.

So if your goal is to read only “great” books, well, first of all don’t read anything that came out in the last 5–10 years. But if you want to read “great” book candidates — which I am, let’s be clear, not trying to do this year but may try for 2025 — well, in that case, feel free to give Talent a pass.


Currently reading: Talent by Tyler Cowen 📚 and so far the book is… reprehensible? If Cowen and his co-author Daniel Gross are serious about their recommendations on hiring then they are deserving of contempt — more on the specifics once I finish the book. But Cowen is a fan of Straussian readings; my Straussian reading of Talent is that people who take the book’s advice to heart without questioning its underlying premise are the contemptible ones.

Of course, that could be my own ego-defense mechanism talking. Surely I couldn’t have been reading and listening to Cowen for so long and not have realized that he was a sociopath.


📚 24 books for 2024

My list for the year, ordered by similarity. All are physical prints already on the bookshelf, just waiting to be snubbed for whatever else catches my attention.

  1. The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk
  2. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
  3. Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
  4. Neuromancer by William Gibson
  5. That We May Live by various authors
  6. Liberation Day by George Saunders
  7. You Should Come With Me Now by M. John Harrison
  8. Dark Gods by T.E.D. Klein
  9. False Dawn by John Gray
  10. A Theater of Envy by René Girard
  11. Philosophy and the Real World by Bryan Magee
  12. Order Without Design by Alain Bertaud
  13. Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
  14. Toxic Exposure by Chadi Nabhan
  15. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
  16. A Man of Iron by Troy Senik
  17. The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya
  18. Metamathematics by Stephen Wolfram
  19. Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails by Nassim Taleb
  20. Towards a Theoretical Biology by C.H. Waddington
  21. Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin
  22. Seeing with Fresh Eyes by Edward Tufte
  23. A Guide for the Perplexed by Werner Herzog
  24. Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino

Here are the wishlists for 2022 and 2023, and the respective outcomes.


📚 2023

At the beginning of the year, I set out to read 23 books. Mission accomplished? As expected, my favorite of the year was not on that wish list.

Here are all 23, ordered by some semblance of category.

  1. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison: Harrison at his best, just don’t expect a neat resolution.
  2. Empty Space: A Haunting by M. John Harrison: a fitting end to my favorite sci-fi trilogy.
  3. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka: if Harrison awards someone a Booker, I’d better read their book.
  4. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino: the translation was good, but I imagine the original was even better.
  5. 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline: I think about the Bronze Age collapse more than I do about the Roman Empire, actually.
  6. On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt: the year of LLM-generated garbage was a good time to refresh BS knowledge.
  7. The Revolt of the Masses by Ortega y Gasset: prophetic.
  8. Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber: bad.
  9. The Dao of Capital by Mark Spitznagel: investing should be left to the professionals.
  10. Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand: half of the book is good, but only time will tell which half.
  11. How to Listen to Jazz by Ted Gioia: got me to buy an actual CD player, just so I could listen to this anthology.
  12. Against Method by Paul Feyerabend: his statement that in science “anything goes” could have been controversial only to those who willfully misunderstood.
  13. Fundamentals of Clinical Trials by Lawrence M. Friedman: too pedantic.
  14. Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott Scheper: almost a year in and I am still using index cards, although not in the way Scott intended.
  15. Writing with Style: The Economist Guide by Lane Greene: more fun than a style guide should be.
  16. Zombies in Western Culture by John Vervaeke et al: true and unnerving.
  17. The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success by Albert-László Barabási: don’t be fooled by the self-help title, it is a good book.
  18. Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis: the most influential of the books I’ve read this year as it led directly to my favorite.
  19. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René Girard: the best book I’ve read this year, and one that I’ve been thinking about the most.
  20. Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton: I should read it again.
  21. I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter: how a scientist deals with grief.
  22. A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken: how a Christian deals with grief.
  23. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard: I still can’t believe she was in her 20s.

Not too bad, considering we had a flooded basement and our second move in three years, with some writing wedged in between. And here is last year’s list.