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Favorite Books
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
#01
Richard Feynman
Safe-cracking and bongo-playing used as a rigorous method for existence.
The Character of Physical Law
#02
Richard Feynman
Proof that if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it.
Eragon
#03
Christopher Paolini
A primer on why names carry weight and grammar defines reality.
Eldest
#04
Christopher Paolini
Wisdom is expensive; Paolini makes the hero pay in blood and ink.
Brisingr
#05
Christopher Paolini
The technicality of a rider's blade and the slow erosion of innocence.
Inheritance
#06
Christopher Paolini
Political realism dressed in dragon scales.
The Da Vinci Code
#07
Dan Brown
A high-speed chase through the history of a profitable lie.
Angels & Demons
#08
Dan Brown
Antimatter at CERN meets the ancient smoke of the Vatican.
The Lost Symbol
#09
Dan Brown
The latent power of thought hidden in DC's Masonic architecture.
Inferno
#10
Dan Brown
A biologist's solution to a crowded world. He had a point.
The Fellowship of the Ring
#11
J.R.R. Tolkien
A philologist's map of where fear hides in the deep woods.
The Two Towers
#12
J.R.R. Tolkien
Resilience is found on the stairs of Cirith Ungol, not in the songs.
The Return of the King
#13
J.R.R. Tolkien
Victory means leaving a piece of yourself at the Black Gate.
The Hobbit
#14
J.R.R. Tolkien
The greed of dragons vs. the charm of a comfortable hole.
The Silmarillion
#15
J.R.R. Tolkien
The Old Testament of Middle-earth. Feanor was right.
Stories of Your Life and Others
#16
Ted Chiang
Grief modeled through Fermat's Principle of Least Time.
Exhalation
#17
Ted Chiang
Philosophical thought experiments disguised as clockwork sci-fi.
Ficciones
#18
Jorge Luis Borges
Infinite libraries and the architecture of the impossible.
The Aleph
#19
Jorge Luis Borges
A point in space containing all other points. Latent space, 1945.
Labyrinths
#20
Jorge Luis Borges
Information as a virus that eventually overwrites our reality.
Gödel, Escher, Bach
#21
Douglas Hofstadter
A strange loop of logic, art, and music. The AI bible.
Superintelligence
#22
Nick Bostrom
Objective functions don't care about your feelings.
The Alignment Problem
#23
Brian Christian
Encoding human values into bits is our hardest engineering bug.
Life 3.0
#24
Max Tegmark
The inevitable transition from carbon to silicon intelligence.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
#25
Daniel Kahneman
Proof that our intuition is mostly a consistent hallucination.
Man's Search for Meaning
#26
Viktor Frankl
Purpose is the only thing the world cannot strip away.
Dune
#27
Frank Herbert
Religion and ecology weaponized into a single organism.
Foundation
#28
Isaac Asimov
Data science for empires. Hari Seldon's dream.
The Three-Body Problem
#29
Cixin Liu
Advanced physics paired with terrifying cosmic indifference.
The Dark Forest
#30
Cixin Liu
The Fermi Paradox solved with a single gunshot.
Death's End
#31
Cixin Liu
Scaling from a single life up to the heat death of reality.
The Martian
#32
Andy Weir
The scientific method used as a survival strategy.
Project Hail Mary
#33
Andy Weir
The pure joy of collaborative discovery across species.
Brave New World
#34
Aldous Huxley
Soma is the ultimate leash for a comfortable society.
1984
#35
George Orwell
If you control the words, you control the thoughts.
Meditations
#36
Marcus Aurelius
A cosmic perspective for the modern researcher.
The Prince
#37
Niccolò Machiavelli
A survival manual for those who want real-world leverage.
The Art of War
#38
Sun Tzu
Winning without fighting; the highest form of logic.