📚 Finished reading: Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by Ernst F. Schumacher, so enthralled I was by his guide for the perplexed that I quickly jumped to the more well-known of his works. It was good timing: Abundance is becoming the Sapiens of this generation and Small Is Beautiful is the antidote.

Even if the rich are not “idle rich”, even when they work harder than anyone else, they work differently, apply different standards, and are set apart from common humanity. They corrupt themselves by practicing greed, and they corrupt the rest of society by provoking envy.

This is from E.F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful”, published in 1973. More than fifty years later, don’t you wish we had more of the idle kind of rich?

📚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.