Library

Alon takes the framework of dynamical systems to understanding physiology and diseases. The parts I’ve read so far go beyond showing how a certain condition arises, and make an argument for why the underlying system is constructed in such a way as to be vulnerable to the condition. I don’t have enough of a background here to judge how fruitful this approach is in clinical practice or pharmacology, but it feels like one of those things that is obviously the right theoretical lens. You’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but the cover alone feels extremely insightful.

Be aware that if you read two volumes of his short stories in short succession, you will probably get a bit tired of how clever Borges gets with things.

I don’t really have a “favorite” book, but this is probably the one that most absorbed me and tickled my brain just right. It is also the only one I happen to have a perfect music pairing for.

The titular “Story of Your Life” was the basis of the 2016 movie “Arrival”. Chiang’s short stories are probably the closest contemporary thing I’ve read to Borges and Calvino, highly recommended.

The history of molecular biology from roughly the 1930s to 1970s. Be warned, this is not a breeze to read, but it is one of the most remarkable science books I ever picked up. Reading this is about as close as you can get to having a front-row seat to how scientists go from ignorance and confusion to insight and unifying theory without being one yourself. I want to do this one justice and write more about it at some point, ping me if you see this after 2026 is over and I still haven’t!

Maybe more meme than book at this point. For the gist, read vgr’s post about the central idea of “legibility”. He hints at parallels in tech (waterfall project planning), but I often find myself thinking about this when someone wants to add 20 strictly-validated form fields across 15 rigid worflow steps in some tool, hoping it will make reality conform to the platonic ideal of the process, but most likely just making people hate their job and put everything important in the unstructured “notes” field instead.

I had been warned about the absurdity of Kafka as something to be wary of, like it would be a huge slog to get through. Turns out it’s actually hilarious.

On second read, I kind of agree with the contrarian interpretation.

I once read Asimov’s “Foundation” and felt transported into the mind of a very smart and somewhat autistic twelve year-old. Le Guin’s humanity and nuance are the antithesis to that. The love story is great too!

Less a guide for trading, more a tour of the associated worldview. I’ve encountered much of this already over the years by way of economics, interviews with people with a finance background, and “general online exposure”. This is the most concise summary of this kind of reasoning and the associated mental models I’ve seen so far. Recommended reading, even if you keep your money in a cheap broad index fund, as you probably should and which reading this will make you more likely to do.

This is the canonical book explaining timeless and domain-agnostic principles of good design. Unfortunately it also seems to fail to apply its own insight to writing and is terribly disorganized. Looking past that, I still found it worthwhile as an introduction.

Duttweiler was the founder of Switzerland’s largest supermarket chain, which (of course) is organized as a federation of cooperatives. Randomly found this in my university’s free library one day. The writing is so-so, and far from impartial, but I stuck with it and was rewarded. The origin story of Migros, and Duttweiler’s various other ventures, are a pretty inspiring example of entrepreneurial spirit winning against incumbents trying everything to entrench the comfortable-for-them status quo, majorly improving the situation for consumers. I also did not fully realize before how weirdly protectionist and cronyist Switerland used to be, e.g. enacting a law (German) that prohibited chains from opening new stores or expanding existing ones.

Sacks has recently been somewhat disgraced for apparently making up a lot of stuff in his case studies. Luckily I mainly knew him as the extremely colorful and unhinged character of this and his other memoir, so I don’t think my view shifted much and I’d probably still recommend reading this if you like the genre.