Library

I decided to keep track of the books I have read. I will keep expanding this list as I remember more of them.

Fiction

• The Hobbit — J. R. R. Tolkien. I read it as a child after my cousin got a copy. Made me quite excited to read The Lord of the Rings, although I never did.
• Robinson Crusoe — Daniel Defoe. Probably the book I have read the most times—seven or eight. I was quite obsessed with it as a child.
• The Belgariad(series) — David Eddings. Another favorite from when I was a boy.
• War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy. I enjoyed it, although it was honestly a little too long.
• The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky. Like the most Ivan's later conversation with the Devil felt like a strong influence on The Master and Margarita.
• The Master and Margarita — Mikhail Bulgakov. An interesting political satire with fantastical elements.
• Daphnis and Chloe — Longus. I expected a much more archaic reading experience from ancient Greece, but its opening is evocative and immediately feels surprisingly modern.
• The Satyricon — Petronius. It was in the same collection as Daphnis and Chloe, still a bit weird to read a novel from so long ago.
• The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories — Anton Chekhov. Chekhov often recycles same characters such as misunderstood artists and provincial doctors, but he is still my favourite writer.
• Use of Weapons — Iain M. Banks. Banks is a great writer and very pleasant to read. I rushed through it too quickly because of that.
• The Forever War — Joe Haldeman. Great and to the point
• Foundation series — Isaac Asimov. I like history books so naturally enjoyed its future pseudo history style
  
• Consider Phlebas — Iain M. Banks.
• The Player of Games — Iain M. Banks.
• The Plague — Albert Camus.
• Rendezvous with Rama — Arthur C. Clarke.
• Ubik — Philip K. Dick.
• The Name of the Rose — Umberto Eco.
• Shadow & Claw — Gene Wolfe.
• Sword & Citadel — Gene Wolfe.
• Starship Troopers — Robert A. Heinlein.
• Neuromancer — William Gibson.
• 1984 — George Orwell.
• Animal Farm — George Orwell.
• Burmese Days — George Orwell.
• A Clergyman's Daughter — George Orwell.
• Keep the Aspidistra Flying — George Orwell.
• Coming Up for Air — George Orwell.

Non-fiction

Programming

• 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them — Teiva Harsanyi. I did not get to write much Go by hand before LLMs arrived oh well. Recommended.
• Scala for the Impatient — Cay S. Horstmann. A useful introduction that helped me get started.
• Multithreaded JavaScript — Thomas Hunter II and Bryan English. I learned some things that I never got to use outside interviews.
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications — Martin Kleppmann. The author's lectures on the subject are available here.
• Domain Modeling Made Functional: Tackle Software Complexity with Domain-Driven Design and F# — Scott Wlaschin.
• Database Internals — Alex Petrov.
• Software Architecture: The Hard Parts — Neal Ford, Mark Richards, Pramod Sadalage, and Zhamak Dehghani.
• Dependency Injection Principles, Practices, and Patterns — Mark Seemann and Steven van Deursen.
• Functional Design and Architecture — Alexander Gran.

History

• Guns, Germs, and Steel — Jared Diamond. A classic; I even gave it to a friend as a present.
• Economics For Dummies — Sean Masaki Flynn. A useful overview, although I unreasonably expected something more historical and in-depth. I will need to read something else to hold my own at parties.
• An Area of Darkness — V. S. Naipaul. I enjoyed Naipaul's writing, and India is an interesting .
• India: A Wounded Civilization — V. S. Naipaul. Another book about India.
• 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow — Adam Zamoyski. Very nicely written. The attention to Polish episodes was cute, and it gave me a more historical overview of War and Peace.
• The Old World in the New — Edward Alsworth Ross. An archaic sociology book from the early twentieth century, but I still liked the author's style.
• The Huns — Hyun Jin Kim. I didn't like author's prose.
• Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico — T. R. Fehrenbach.

Other

• Man and His Symbols — Carl G. Jung. It seems that thinking a lot about dreams gives you really cool dreams. Jung's paintings are interesting too.
• Storm of Steel — Ernst Jünger. Surreal in its brutality. I need to read more by Jünger to see how his life developed after the war.
• Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy — Joseph Schumpeter.
• The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind — Julian Jaynes.
• Industrial Society and Its Future — Theodore Kaczynski.
• The Road to Wigan Pier — George Orwell.
• The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature — Matt Ridley.