Against the Grain
Somewhat dry but really interesting thesis that grain agriculture was uniquely suited to taxation which enabled the formation of early states. Emphasized that early states may have been worse places to live than the surrounding areas outside of state control and how states were effectively farms for domesticating, breeding, and enslaving humans.
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Pro Git
This book is a good introduction to Git and also covers some of how Git works internally. There were a few useful things that I learned from the book, but for the most part I either already knew it from using Git or it wasn’t something I would need.
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The Dark Forest
I think this sequel was better than its predecessor, The Three Body Problem. It’s very well thought out and interesting, but at the same time somewhat slower-paced.
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Mastering Bitcoin
Mastering Bitcoin provides a solid and fairly comprehensive explanation of how Bitcoin works. It started out by going into a bit too much detail on very specific topics before explaining the bigger picture. For example it was talking about vanity addresses and HD wallets before explaining anything about transactions or the blockchain. I prefer to […]
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Civilized to Death
One of the best books I’ve ever read. Actually I had planned on writing a book on this topic but now I think I can just recommend this one. It summarizes ideas and facts from many other books and studies to show the reader how the effects of civilization are not as good as many […]
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The Mind Illuminated
This is probably the best book I’ve read for practical meditation advice. It’s pretty slow and feels repetitive, but it really seems like a thorough guide to the stages of meditation progress. It goes on at length about the kinds of challenges you will face in each stage and techniques for dealing with these challenges. […]
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Sleeping on a Volcano
This book contains a lot of interesting data and information about macroeconomic forces, particularly demographics and sovereign debt. It painted a convincing picture that the current economic status quo is not only unsustainable but almost unbelievably crazy. It doesn’t go too deep, which makes it a very fast and easy read, so I had a […]
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What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Based on the description of “A thoughtful companion volume to the earlier Surely You Are Joking…” I was expecting something similar to Surely You’re Joking, but this book was quite different. Publishers Weekly sums it up well: “In this posthumous miscellany, theoretical physicist Feynman displays only sporadically the adventurousness that captivated readers of Surely You’re […]
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Pandoras Star
It took me over 4 years to finish this book. I found most of it really boring. The prelude on the other hand was incredible. I figured if the rest of the book was half as good as the prelude it would be a great book, but it wasn’t even close to half as good. […]
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Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
This book was really more of a long list of “notes to self” that were fairly repetitive and not particularly interesting. Some of them could be used as prompts for reflection, so there may be some value in reading it, but I would think that another book that develops ideas more fully would be more […]
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