The Library

The novelist examines modern China through ten words, 'people,' 'leader,' 'revolution,' and 'copycat' among them, mixing memoir of his Cultural Revolution childhood with observation of the present. The vocabulary lesson doubles as a national portrait.

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Classic Chinese fiction that is devastating and wonderful and heartbreaking.

A novel in which an old farmer, Fugui, recounts his life: a landlord's son who gambles away the family fortune and then lives through the civil war, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. The title proves to be an ambition as much as a description.

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Get on the bandwagon before the movie comes out. I wept manly tears in the end.

A novel narrated by Klara, a solar-powered 'artificial friend' purchased as a companion for a sickly teenage girl, who observes human love and loneliness with a machine's patient attention. Ishiguro has always favored narrators who see everything except the main thing, and Klara joins the lineage.

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Possibly the best novel ever written. Read it before you die.

A novel narrated by Kathy H., looking back on her childhood at Hailsham, a secluded English boarding school, and on her friendships with Ruth and Tommy. The school's true purpose comes into view gradually, and the reader is advised to let it.

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In my opinion the best China book ever written, tragically published a little bit earlier than the AI boom. Ya-Wen Lei is the GOAT of difficult Chinese sociology, and this book will take its place in the pantheon of Perfect China Books when she updates it with an AI angle in the second edition.

A sociological study of China's turn to techno-state capitalism, tracing how the government, the tech firms, and the workers arrange themselves within the platform economy. The title gives away Lei's accounting of what the model costs those inside it.

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This is the greatest Murakami book and it's worth a careful read. Slow yourself down and let it drip from your tongue.

A novel in which Toru Okada, an unemployed Tokyo man, searches first for his missing cat and then for his missing wife, a hunt that leads through psychics, a veteran's memories of wartime Manchuria, and a dry well. Murakami, characteristically, is in no hurry.

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Possibly the greatest theory book ever written. It's so, so good that I cannot even begin to understand how many ways it's touched my thinking.

A theory of how technological revolutions unfold in recurring cycles: an installation phase driven by financial speculation, a crash, then a deployment phase. Perez finds the pattern five times since the Industrial Revolution, and each new bubble produces a fresh cohort of readers.

An analysis of wealth and income inequality across three centuries of data, arguing that when the return on capital exceeds economic growth, wealth concentrates. Piketty's remedy, a global progressive tax on capital, awaits its jurisdiction.

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This is the most autistic book ever made and I love it.

Tolkien's mythology of Middle-earth, published after his death, running from the creation of the world through the First Age wars over the Silmaril jewels to the fall of Numenor. The prose keeps the cadence of scripture, genealogies included, and rewards the reader who takes it at that pace.

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One of the best books I've ever read about China. Sweeping at times, difficult but incredibly rewarding, it looks at the last century of China through the eyes of the most important family after Mao.

A biography of Xi Zhongxun, revolutionary, reformer, and father of Xi Jinping, built from decades of party documents. The father's century of loyalty, purges, and rehabilitation doubles as a history of the Party itself.

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What a titanic book. Wendell Berry killed it, and I loved every page. It feels dated now to read and it should. It's 50 years old, but a lot of what ails modern America can be traced back to these pages.

Berry's 1977 critique of industrial agriculture, arguing that agribusiness destroys the soil, the small farms, and the culture and communities rooted in good farming. Half a century on, the complaint has aged better than the farmland.

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M.F.K. Fisher is one of my very favorite writers and oysters are one of my favorite foods. How could you not love this? She's so good and this is so good and it's so, so wonderful.

Fisher's short book of essays on the oyster: its biology, its lore, and the pleasures of eating it, with recipes woven throughout. Few writers have taken a bivalve so seriously, or been so right to.

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Another banger by M.F.K. Fisher. I love this book more than I can ever explain. Please read it slowly and carefully on vacation somewhere beautiful.

A food memoir tracing the author's life through its meals, from a California childhood to years in France and wartime crossings. Fisher treats hunger as inseparable from love and loss, an equation she works out over several decades of dinners.

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This is a pre-COVID book that reads really well as a way of dealing with the trauma of the pandemic. It's beautifully written and stayed with me for months after I finished it.

A novel following Candace Chen, a millennial office worker who keeps commuting to her New York publishing job as a fungal pandemic empties the city, then joins a small band of survivors. The narrative alternates between the end of the world and the routine-bound life that preceded it, and the satire cuts both ways.

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I cannot overstate how wonderful James C. Scott's writing is! This is the classic and I loved it. It changed the way I think about the world and it will change your perspectives on the world too.

A study of why large state-led schemes to improve the human condition have failed, from collectivized agriculture to planned cities. Scott's diagnosis is that states impose simplified, legible models on complex societies and disregard the practical local knowledge that keeps those societies running.

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Dan Wang recommended this on a podcast and I ate it up in like three days; like the Silk Road book that explained to me much of Central Asia, this will demystify huge swaths of Southeast Asia and South China. It delicately walked around a lot of difficult issues and is a tour de force.

A history of Zomia, the upland region of Southeast Asia, arguing that its hill peoples deliberately organized their agriculture and social structure to evade incorporation by lowland states. In Scott's telling, statelessness is an achievement requiring constant maintenance.

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Ok this is devastatingly difficult trauma porn, but really worth a careful read. It's a giant tome of a book, and it will take you forever to get through it, but when you do finish it, you'll be thankful you did.

A novel in three sections: an alternate 1893 New York where same-sex marriage is ordinary, Manhattan in 1993 during the AIDS epidemic, and a pandemic-ravaged 2093. Yanagihara spaces her centuries a hundred years apart and lets the echoes do the connecting.

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Wonderful survey of network science. This book really changed the way that I see the world and it rewards a careful read.

An introduction to network science, explaining scale-free networks and hubs and how the structure of a network shapes biology, the web, business, and society. Barabási finds the same architecture nearly everywhere he looks, a habit the reader is invited to acquire.

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Great book by a great American. Surprisingly well written.

A memoir by the engineer who ran the US Office of Scientific Research and Development during the Second World War, presiding over radar, the proximity fuze, and the early atomic bomb effort. Bush organized other people's genius and evidently found the organizing at least as interesting.

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This book changed my brain. I felt like a different person when I closed the last page. It has an unsavory reputation as being very right-wing but it's just an interesting scientific treatise.

An exposition of the gene-centred view of evolution, in which organisms figure as vehicles that genes build for their own replication. The book also introduced the meme, a coinage whose subsequent career its author could hardly have calibrated.

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This is a great read about an important person in the modern world. It doesn't shy away from the brutal reality of the situation at Huawei and it does a great job of telling its story candidly and clearly. I wrote this up on my blog. You can read it here.

A journalist's history of Huawei and its founder Ren Zhengfei, from Shenzhen reseller to global telecommunications power to central exhibit in the tensions between the United States and China. Dou reports on a company that half the world treats as a business and the other half as a question of state.

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A strange anthropology book on where pollution, dirt, and taboo intersect with culture. Dense and academic but really rewarding when it opens up.

An anthropological analysis of pollution, dirt, and taboo across religions and cultures, arguing that notions of uncleanness express symbolic systems of order. Douglas's definition of dirt as matter out of place has itself proved impossible to keep in place.

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Elizabeth did a great job in tracking and analyzing Xi's transformation of the Chinese state; this isn't an easy read but it's rewarding.

A US-based China scholar's analysis of how Xi Jinping has transformed the Chinese state: centralization of power, internet control, economic policy, and a more assertive foreign policy. The third revolution of the title is Xi's own.

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I wish I could force this book into the curriculum of every single engineering school on earth. It's such a wonderful celebration of open source software and it's wonderfully written.

An analysis of how modern open source software is actually made and maintained. Eghbal's data complicates the image of mass collaboration: most projects, it turns out, rest on a small number of maintainers.

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A heartbreaking personal narrative of a family that I know. Cathartic to read and wonderfully written. Raf has enormous talent.

Three short personal narratives by the Quebec writer, circling her mother's life and death and what remains in us of what the world deposits. Germain works in a minor key, which the material requests.

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Wonderful anarchistic ranting, smart, funny, and worth your time.

An essay collection on bureaucracy, arguing that an era of total bureaucratization spans both government and corporate life. Graeber, an anarchist anthropologist, examines the paperwork with professional interest and personal alarm.

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Somewhat difficult to jump into if you're not taking it deadly seriously, but if you do, it rewards a wonderful, careful read. Andy has opinions that seem kind of banal today, but back when this was written it was revolutionary. You hold a piece of history in your hand when you turn these pages.

Andy Grove's manual of management from his years running Intel, covering production principles, meetings, one-on-ones, performance reviews, and the leverage of a manager's time. Silicon Valley treats it as a founding text, and for once the reverence tracks the contents.

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My favorite historical novel from China, but you have to read it with a certain mindset: this can be dry as hell unless you allow your imagination to visualize what's going on and run with these stories as more like Greek myths. Caution to non-Chinese readers: a lot of the names in this will need to be tracked. There are good guides available online to help you with that.

A fourteenth-century Chinese historical novel dramatizing the fall of the Han dynasty and the wars among Wei, Shu, and Wu, with Cao Cao, Liu Bei, and Zhuge Liang among its enormous cast. The dynasties do not go quietly.

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Really good book, really worth your time, really dark. This book perturbed me so much I had to read it in a park to avoid feeling depressed.

An analysis of how the digital information flood has empowered networked publics to delegitimize governments, media, and experts while offering no alternatives, with the Arab Spring and Occupy among its cases. Gurri names the result a politics of negation, and the intervening years have kept supplying footnotes.

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My favourite Byung-Chul Han book and really, really worth your time. Digestible in one sitting, smart, and focused.

A philosophical essay arguing that rituals, the repeated symbolic practices that stabilize time and community, are vanishing under neoliberal pressures toward authenticity, production, and constant communication. Han mourns the form in suitably formal prose.

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This is a great book for debunking the myth of China being secular. It's mostly a useful book for winning arguments but it's also just a good read.

Reportage on the revival of religion in China after Mao, following Buddhist pilgrims, underground Christian congregations, and Daoist practitioners through a ritual year. Johnson's subject is the search for values in a society remade by growth.

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A very good book on the philosophy of science and one that was a possible ten if Carlota Perez had never written her perfect book.

The landmark 1962 work in philosophy of science, arguing that science advances through paradigm shifts, revolutions in which one framework of normal science gives way to another. It introduced 'paradigm' and 'incommensurability' into general circulation, and has spent the decades since watching the former escape all supervision.

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Everyone loved this book for a reason. It's cause it's fucking great. One hundred percent worth it. Just click the button and buy it right now, also a great audiobook.

A novel centered on the life of John von Neumann, told through the voices of people who knew him, tracing his work on the atomic bomb, game theory, and early computers. Labatut writes fiction that keeps one eye on the historical record.

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This is a data-driven, clear, cogent and wonderful read about the reality of China's public sphere in the early Xi era. This is amazing, and everyone who cares about China should read it.

A sociological monograph, built on fieldwork and case studies, on how law, media marketization, and the internet produced a contentious public sphere in authoritarian China. Lei also documents the state's subsequent efforts to contain what it had permitted.

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God Michael Lewis can write. Jim Clark is a cool interesting person and you get a bunch of the 90s Silicon Valley mania. Fun, breezy, and really really interesting anecdotes, including a lot about sailing if that's something you love like I do.

A profile of Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon, through whom Lewis captures the speculative energy of 1990s Silicon Valley. Clark emerges as a man constitutionally incapable of staying interested in anything he has already built.

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I thought this book would be about the Umbrella movement but it ended up being about how weird and wonderful Hong Kong is. This is a love letter written by a gifted author and I loved every minute of it.

A portrait of Hong Kong's contested identity, joining reportage on the protest movement to the story of the 'King of Kowloon,' the calligrapher and graffitist who claimed the city as his own. Lim writes the biography of a place while its ownership is still being argued.

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This is wonderful. It's so well-researched and it's such an important story. Everyone should read it if they care about history. It's not terrifically written but it's a compelling narrative if you are already interested in this subject.

An academic history of how the San Francisco Peninsula became a high-technology manufacturing region between 1930 and 1970, tracing the ham radio, vacuum tube, and semiconductor communities that preceded the computer industry. Lécuyer's Valley was making things for decades before it discovered software.

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Wonderful wonderful anthropology in China. Peter Martin's a genius and this book is something that any China watcher should read. Lots of original research went into this and it shows.

A history of China's diplomatic corps from the founding of the People's Republic to the combative 'wolf warrior' style of the Xi Jinping era. Martin follows the corps from revolutionary discipline to its recent taste for public combat.

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A wonderful essay and memo collection about the Studio Ghibli founder. I have no objectivity on this one because I love him and his films, so just enjoy it if you're a fan.

Essays, interviews, and memos from the first half of Hayao Miyazaki's career, covering his views on animation craft, storytelling, and the films leading up to Princess Mononoke. The animator proves as exacting on paper as on film.

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Easy breezy Murakami, you can read on a Sunday with your coffee. Some of them are ridiculous, some of them are great, some of them are just mid, but the whole thing is lovely.

A collection of seventeen short stories in which ordinary Tokyo lives are interrupted by strange occurrences: a vanishing elephant, insomnia, a kangaroo communique. Murakami reports each intrusion deadpan and moves on.

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This is a wonderful introduction to the origins of the Internet. If you've ever wondered what the fuck a packet is, this is the book that will explain it to you, gently and carefully.

A history of the internet's origins written for the general reader, from packet switching and the ARPANET to the arrival of the web. Naughton explains the plumbing that was laid before anyone thought to call it a revolution.

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Anyone who wants to do good work on a computer should read this; it's insightful and clear and Cal Newport changed the world with this a decade ago.

An argument that sustained, distraction-free concentration has grown rare and valuable in knowledge work, followed by rules and strategies for cultivating it, from scheduling to quitting social media. The reader is presumably meant to finish the book without checking anything.

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A wonderful firsthand account of China in the Second World War, really unflinching and bold. Great read.

An American writer-illustrator's firsthand account of China during the Second World War, observing daily life and the Nationalist government's decay. Peck drew what he saw as well as writing it, and neither medium flatters the regime.

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Wonderful, wonderful read. I got this out of a book swap and I could not put it down. Rewards careful attention because of the branching narrative.

A novel of 1890s England in which a widowed amateur naturalist settles in an Essex village unsettled by rumors of a sea serpent and strikes up a charged friendship with the local vicar. Perry lets natural history and faith circle one another at close range.

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Great history of an event most people don't even know about. The source material is so gripping that I don't really remember if the author did a good job writing this. I just remember devouring like 150 pages at a time on weekend afternoons and forgetting to eat or drink.

A history of the Taiping Civil War of the 1850s and 1860s, concentrating on its final years and on the Western powers' involvement in the conflict. Platt recounts one of history's deadliest wars, which many Western readers will be meeting for the first time.

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Best-in-class biography of Oppie; if you read one, read this one.

A biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer: the physics career, the direction of Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, and the 1954 security hearing that ended his public life. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

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reccomended by my friend Boyan

A history of human civilization told through its energy transitions, from foraging and agriculture through fossil fuels to modern electricity. Smil examines how capacities for converting energy have shaped economies and societies, which in his account comes close to saying everything.

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A really weird old book that will teach you a lot about the way that culture worked in the post-war era. Really, really short, punchy, and wonderful. Almost a blog post instead of a book per se.

The 1959 Rede Lecture arguing that intellectual life had split into two cultures, literary intellectuals and scientists, who no longer understand each other, and that the divide hampers solving global problems. Both cultures have been quarreling with the lecture for some sixty years, which at least gives them a shared text.

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I find it hard to separate my love of J.C.R. Licklider and this book itself. Never trust someone's opinion on their special interest. This is great and I loved every page.

A history of interactive computing arranged around J.C.R. Licklider, the psychologist whose vision and ARPA funding seeded personal computing and the internet. Waldrop's contention is that the money and the vision mattered as much as the machines.

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Satirical Chinese novel that you need a ton of context for if you're going to understand, but for the right person it will hit like a semi-truck. So much of the criticisms leveled at modern China are present here; everything that's new is old.

A satirical novel of 1930s China following Fang Hung-chien, home from Europe with a purchased fake degree, as he drifts through academia, courtship, and marriage. The title invokes the book's governing conceit, marriage as a besieged fortress that each party hopes to be on the other side of.

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I wish this book could be parachuted into every single senator's office. This really needs to be rewritten for a less academic audience, but this version is great if a little dry.

A study of the American and Chinese competition over scientific talent, covering China's overseas recruitment programs, American countermeasures such as the China Initiative, and the effects of both on researchers of Chinese descent. Zweig documents a contest in which the researchers figure, uncomfortably, as the contested resource.

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If you want to understand computers, this is great. If you don't want to understand computers, this book is probably your personal hell.

A textbook in which the reader builds a complete computer beginning from NAND gates: hardware, assembler, virtual machine, compiler, operating system. It is the basis of the Nand2Tetris course, and its first principles are meant literally.

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Dark. Worth reading, but will break you.

A novel following Xu Sanguan, a factory worker in a small Chinese town who sells his blood at moments of family crisis, decade after decade from the 1950s onward. The transactions mark the country's history as reliably as any calendar.

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One of the best books on its subject; full of gorgeous graphs and information theory.

Two classic works on the design of statistical graphics and information displays, setting out principles such as the data-ink ratio and small multiples. Tufte illustrates with historical examples of charts done excellently and charts done misleadingly, and the difference is visible from across the room.

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Difficult, morose, and disagreeable; really, really worth reading.

A philosophical essay arguing that contemporary culture has replaced beauty with the smooth: frictionless, agreeable surfaces exemplified by smartphones and consumer aesthetics. Han's essays are short and polished, a form that here verges on self-demonstration.

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God, I loved this. It's a wonderful romp through the internet's early days, readable and lovely and worth so much of your time.

A history of the creation of the ARPANET, the internet's precursor, through the engineers and researchers at ARPA and BBN who built it in the 1960s and 70s. The hours of the title were real, and government funded.

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Great China book, really worth it. Original reporting: smart, funny, and witty.

Reportage on individual aspiration in post-reform China by a New Yorker correspondent in Beijing, following dissidents, internet celebrities, and strivers chasing wealth. Osnos organizes the pursuits under fortune, truth, and faith, three commodities in varying supply.

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A beautiful book from Canada about the scars of mental illness on artists. It's immersive and beautiful in French and I wait for the translation to start buying it for friends.

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Wonderful fill-in-the-blanks around a period of Chinese history most people probably don't know. Worth a read.

A history of the decades leading up to the Opium War: the Canton trade system, British merchants and missionaries, and the Qing dynasty's internal decline. Platt argues the war was contingent, and that contemporaries on both sides opposed it.

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One of the greatest thinkers of our time, talking about a very large and important subject.

A systematic study of growth wherever it occurs, in microorganisms, animals, energy systems, cities, and economies, examining the trajectories and limits they share. Smil concludes that growth on a finite planet must eventually end, a finding he declines to soften.

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This is so good! Using a single individual as a point of entry into the relationship between China and America during the first half of the 20th century. Well written, clearly argued, and wonderfully edited. A triumph that flew under my radar far too long. (Don't think for a second this is American Military Porn, it is quite different from that type of book.)

A biography of General Joseph Stilwell, the US commander in the China-Burma-India theater, through which Tuchman traces American involvement with China from 1911 to 1945. His fraught relationship with Chiang Kai-shek supplies much of the drama.

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If you ever want to get excited about letter writing, this is a wonderful book to ignite that passion. They are all wonderful writers and this is worth your time.

The collected correspondence between the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, spanning their love affair and the decades of friendship that outlasted it. She remained his most trusted reader long after the romance had ended, an arrangement the letters record from both sides.

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This is an exhibition catalog of my favorite artist from China; if you're unfamiliar with her work, it's probably not going to interest you, but if you're a fan it's a great way to understand her work more deeply.

An exhibition catalogue surveying the work of the Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei, whose videos and installations take up urbanization, factory labor, and virtual worlds in contemporary China.

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Chef writes lovely and totally impossible ideas about a better world.

A chef's exploration of a more sustainable way of eating, pressing past farm-to-table toward cuisines built around whole farm ecosystems. Barber would like the menu written by the landscape, with the chef taking dictation.

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Very interesting book if you read it through an AI lens. You'll feel that some of these ideas are applicable to your work if you work in AI.

An account of five evolutionary breakthroughs in the history of brains, from the first steering mechanisms to language, with attention to what each reveals about building artificial intelligence. Evolution, on this telling, ran the research program first.

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Way better than its reputation would like you to believe. This is a legit book and it's worth your time.

A history of Silicon Valley in its formative window, 1969 to 1976, told through seven less famous figures who shaped the chip, PC, video game, and biotech industries. Berlin's case is that the interesting years came before the celebrated ones.

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Loved it, simple, direct, and gives you the soul of the man.

A short biographical portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer by a physicist who knew him at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. Bernstein writes from the vantage of the office down the hall, which biography rarely gets.

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Wonderful biography of a weird guy. Excellent Second World War Father's Day present for a dad just getting into war books.

A biography of Emperor Hirohito arguing that he took an active role in Japan's wars and in shaping the postwar settlement, a portrait at some distance from the passive constitutional monarch of legend. It won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

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Stewart Brand is a wonderful writer and a wonderful person. You can learn a lot from this book although it rambles quite a bit.

An exploration of maintenance as a neglected discipline, examining how ships, buildings, infrastructure, and civilizations are kept running, with examples from naval fleets to right-to-repair debates. It is the first part of a serialized book, and thus itself a work under maintenance.

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I loved this even though it's very hard to get into initially. Burke toes the line well between glorifying and criticizing and the book just sped by. Best read in a great European city.

The second volume of Burke's social history of knowledge, covering how the West gathered, classified, stored, and disseminated it from the Enlightenment encyclopaedias to Wikipedia. The encyclopaedists, one suspects, would have recognized the ambition.

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Deliciously juicy biography of decadent corruption. Wonderful read and humanizing.

A biography of the Empress Dowager Cixi, who ruled China from behind the throne for nearly five decades of the late Qing. Chang argues that she was a modernizing force, a considerable revision of her conventional image.

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Solid Tyler Cowen writing about sustained economic growth and its benefits. You should read this just so you can win arguments against idiots more than any other reason.

A philosophical argument that sustained economic growth is a moral imperative, its benefits compounding across future generations. Cowen asks the reader to care about people centuries off, a request economics does not often make.

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Smart, funny, and revealing. Unhesitatingly recommend to people that want to know China better. This book also helps you win arguments against idiots, which is always a useful thing in a book.

A study of how the Chinese Communist Party governs China through its cadre system, and of how party discipline and organization shape both state and society. Fitzgerald's subject is, in effect, the personnel department that runs a country.

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Very very smart and clever research with a well-written scaffold. Trends to airporty at points but saves itself by the quality of its thought.

An account of social network science, showing how obesity, smoking, happiness, and other states travel through webs of social ties. Christakis and Fowler suggest that your friends' friends are quietly rearranging your life from several degrees out.

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left my copy in airbnb, ordered second copy to finish Oct 24th

A world history recentered on the trade routes linking East and West, running from ancient Persia through the spread of religions and empires to oil politics and the modern rise of Asia. Frankopan moves the center of the map east and records what follows.

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worthy of a read, mostly because HWF knows the continent so well. This book, like many of the NYT boomer journalist generation, still believes that the plural of "anecdote" is "data". That said, this is an excellent on-the-ground witnessing of a momentus event in modern history that remains almost totally unexplored by modern political economists and China watchers.

Reportage on the roughly one million Chinese migrants who have settled in Africa, gathered across a dozen countries: their farms, their businesses, their frictions with local populations. French asks what the migration means for both continents.

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re-read

An argument that the humble checklist prevents failure in complex fields, drawing on Gawande's surgical checklist work with the WHO and on examples from aviation, construction, and medicine. The thesis is modest and the evidence keeps agreeing with it.

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Weird, wacky American capitalism but make it scaly.

An account of why the United States exports most of its own seafood while importing most of what it eats, told through New York oysters, Gulf shrimp, and Alaskan salmon. Greenberg lets the arithmetic of the absurdity speak for itself.

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Another special interest book, but I liked it and I would read more of it.

A handbook for working food and agriculture systems into the planning and design of twenty-first-century cities. The authors treat the food supply as a design problem, one that planners have historically been content to leave to someone else.

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This is fine and gives you a good history of the digital revolution but Isaacson's writing doesn't seem inspired compared to the Jobs book or the Elon book.

A group history of the digital revolution, from Ada Lovelace and Babbage through the transistor, the personal computer, and the web. Isaacson's emphasis falls on collaborative teams, a corrective to the lone-genius biographies he has himself supplied.

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I love this. It taught me things and it's very easy to read. Everyone should pick it up if you care about China, but read it with a grain of salt as the author is quite biased and overly excited about China.

An economist's account of how China's economy actually works, covering its state-market hybrid, financial system, tech sector, and younger generation. Jin's argument is that the standard templates, socialist and capitalist alike, fail to describe it.

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This is so grim but so important and will be an important book in your canon of why idealistic things sometimes fail.

A reported examination of human interventions meant to repair environmental damage caused by earlier interventions: electrified rivers to stop invasive carp, engineered coral, proposals for solar geoengineering. Kolbert's subject is the control of the control of nature, a recursion she examines without pretending it can be unwound.

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Fantastic book about contemporary Thailand. It's wonderful. Read this. It's short stories. It's really easy to get into and it'll remind you of Murakami at his finest.

A debut collection of short stories set in contemporary Thailand, largely following young Thais and their families as tourism, poverty, and family obligation shape their lives. Lapcharoensap watches the beach economy from the side of it that lives there year round.

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Read this after I came back to Christopher Alexander in 2026 to make sure I wasn't missing any of the theory. It's a very solid overview and worth your time.

An introduction to Christopher Alexander's pattern theory, explaining patterns, pattern languages, and their application beyond architecture to software and organizational design. Leitner writes for readers who want the ideas without first serving an apprenticeship in Alexander's own volumes.

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Jessica managed the impossible here. She made a book about technology that doesn't feel outdated twenty years after it was written. Even some of these companies you've never heard of, still read them. The questions are plain and good and clean and you learn something that is applicable even today.

Interviews with startup founders, including the creators of Apple, PayPal, and Gmail, about their companies' earliest days. Livingston asks plain questions and receives the primary sources over which future historians will quarrel.

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Great read on the origins of the creative culture through the lens of creating art. Well written, clever and quick. Worthwhile to read through and enjoyable from page 1.

A history of collaborations between artists and engineers in Cold War America, including initiatives such as Experiments in Art and Technology, which joined art to aerospace, electronics, and computing. The two professions found more to discuss than either had expected.

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This is the only self-help book that has ever had a profound impact on me as I read it. I just nodded along and immediately was a different person as the pages turned.

A psychoanalytic account of how sensitive children adapt to their parents' emotional needs, losing touch with their own feelings and carrying depression and grandiosity into adulthood. The gifted child of the title is gifted chiefly at pleasing, which Miller counts as the injury.

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Classic for a reason. Just read it.

Two storylines converge across a dreamlike Japan: a fifteen-year-old runaway fleeing an Oedipal prophecy and an old man who talks with cats. Murakami supplies fish falling from the sky and declines, as usual, to explain them.

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I'm not into this type of book in general- this is the late stage, goofy, mystical phase that great authors sometimes manifest. This reminded me so much of late Tolstoy but toned down and a little more focused. Also, there's only so much incest one can read about before the whole thing begs to be discarded

A novel chronicling the lifelong love affair between Van Veen and his cousin Ada, set on Antiterra, an alternate version of Earth, and framed as Van's memoir composed in old age. It stands among Nabokov's longest and most elaborately styled works, which is saying a good deal.

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This is great. It's smart, it's clever, and it's easy to read.

An examination of how production processes become dramatically cheaper and more efficient over time, drawing on case studies from industries like steel, lighting, and semiconductors. Potter attends to the unglamorous machinery by which prices fall, a subject with fewer historians than it deserves.

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History and food systems in one book means that I cannot be an unbiased critic but I really like this and I would love to read more from these two.

A history of how food systems built, sustained, and eventually toppled civilizations, from ancient Mesopotamia and Rome to the modern industrial network. The pattern repeats often enough across the millennia to qualify as a warning.

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This is fun, easy to read, dark and brooding. The setting is wonderful and the writing shines.

A semi-autobiographical novel about a Beijing student sent to Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution, where he becomes absorbed in the grassland nomads' way of life and their relationship with wolves. The wolves carry a good deal of symbolic freight, which the novel is happy to itemize.

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My favorite Mao biography; smart and funny and worth it.

A full-length biography of Mao Zedong by a former BBC correspondent, from the Hunan childhood through the founding of the People's Republic, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution.

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Dry and academic but important as ammunition in the debate about colonialism.

A concise academic survey of how the European colonial empires were dismantled after World War II, covering the causes, course, and consequences of independence movements across Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.

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The political movement born out of Abundance will be more important than the book itself, but that doesn't mean you should not read the book. If you're used to Ezra in your ears, you'll be very comfortable with the way that this is written. I am an unapologetic Ezra head so my opinion on this is probably biased but heck it's a good book. He should have written way more about China though.

An argument that American liberalism should turn its attention to removing the bottlenecks in housing, energy, infrastructure, and science that stand between the country and material plenty. Klein and Thompson propose that the party of government relearn the habit of building.

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This is wonderful. Difficult but rewarding. A hundred percent worth your time.

A novel set in 1938 Manhattan, in which a chance encounter with a wealthy banker in a jazz bar draws a young working-class woman into New York high society over the course of a year. Manners, as the title suggests, receive close attention.

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Fred Turner is a damn genius and this book will give you a through line between Stewart Brand and Apple Computer. 100% worth it.

A scholarly study in media and cultural history of how Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network carried the 1960s counterculture into the emerging computer industry. The connection shaped the utopian ideology of the internet era.

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Amusing, lighthearted and easy to read in an afternoon, with not a lot of meat on the bone but a great story. Writing a lighthearted book about this subjet was not an easy feat, and I congratulate WXW on this.

Essays on technology's remaking of rural China: blockchain-tracked free-range chickens, AI pig farming, Taobao villages, e-commerce entrepreneurs. Wang uses the reporting to question the assumed divide between metropolitan and rural life.

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I loved this, because I'm fascinated by Xi. I'm not sure if it was good or not, but I really liked it as a read. I remember waking up and wanting to read it, which is always a good sign.

A journalist's account of Xi Jinping's rise and his consolidation of power over the Chinese Communist Party, the military, and society. Wong documents how a party of some ninety million members came to answer, in practice, to the man of the title.

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Lu Xun is a national treasure of China, and this is a great read. Although you will spend more time asking Claude about the stories than you will reading them yourself. Best enjoyed with a heavy amount of context through language model co-reading.

The short fiction of Lu Xun, the foundational writer of modern Chinese literature, including 'Diary of a Madman' and 'The True Story of Ah Q.' The portraits of early twentieth-century Chinese society are satirical, and they have kept their edge.

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This is great and worth your time. Parts of it feel amateurish but the voice is very strong. It's a hero's journey of entrepreneurship so what's not to like?

A novel following two friends, Sam and Sadie, who meet as children in a hospital games room and go on to build video games together across thirty years of collaboration and estrangement. The Macbeth in the title is doing honest work.

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If you have a big hole in your understanding of history when it comes to the nomadic peoples of the steppe and the relationship between Russia and China, this book will fix it.

A travel account of a journey down the Amur River along the border of Russia and China, with the history of the Mongol, Cossack, Qing, and Russian contests over the region woven in. The river has rarely lacked claimants.

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Kind of mid. It was my first book on Xi so I enjoyed it a lot more because I had not read Joseph Torigian's The Party's Interests Come First yet. Suffers by comparison but it's still a great book.

A short primer on Xi Jinping's worldview, his political program, and the ideas behind the 'China Dream.' Brown intends an accessible introduction to how Xi's China thinks about itself and the world.

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Helped me a lot in my life.

A practical guide to building good habits and dismantling bad ones through small incremental changes, organized around a four-step model of cue, craving, response, and reward. The book practices the incrementalism it preaches.

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Wonderful and worth your time, but if you read only one, read Purity and Danger.

An anthropological study of how social structures shape symbolic systems, ritual, and ideas of the body across cultures, developing Douglas's 'group and grid' framework for comparing cosmologies. Douglas reads the body as a society's favorite diagram of itself.

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Wonderful book mixing lessons from Bell Labs with smart philosophy.

A book grown from Hamming's capstone course at the Naval Postgraduate School on how to do significant technical work, mixing lessons from his Bell Labs career with material on computing and systems engineering. His abiding question, why able people so seldom work on the important problems, runs under the whole syllabus.

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Wonderful for understanding the Japanese aesthetic. Also devilishly difficult to get through if you've never been to Japan.

An essay by the Japanese graphic designer Kenya Hara on white as a concept in Japanese aesthetics: emptiness, paper, light, and space, and their place in design and perception. The book is brief, as its subject would seem to require.

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A great biography of a wonderfully interesting figure in Chinese history. Clear, concise writing and a good placement of his life in the broader sweep of Chinese history. Lacking the Mao-centric issues of other bio of DXP I've read in the past- shows his triumphs and tragedies as his own story.

A biography of Deng Xiaoping covering the whole life, from revolutionary beginnings through the Long March and the purges to his leadership of the reform era. The authors draw on Soviet archival documents, a vantage with its own opinions of the subject.

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If you want to understand how the Communists won China's civil war from the perspective of the Americans, this is the book.

An account of 1949 as seen from Washington: how Truman, Acheson, and their circle responded to the Communist victory in China's civil war. The decisions of that year, the book shows, shaped US-China relations long after it ended.

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This is really great. This is a classic of organization theory for a reason. It's fun to read. It's got good ideas. It's original and Miles and Snow do a great job of making it digestible.

A classic of organization theory proposing that companies adapt to their markets through four identifiable strategic types: defenders, prospectors, analyzers, and reactors. The taxonomy has the tidiness of a bestiary, which no doubt accounts for its longevity.

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This was often quoted to me as "indispensable" reading on Asia, but I found it to be an interesting historical artifact and nothing more. These kind of books that simplify cultural differences (she invented "guilt culture VS shame culture") are inevitably overtaken by better, more insightful and sympathetic cultural criticism. If I could turn back time on this one, I would have read the wikipedia summary not the book.

A 1946 anthropological study of Japanese culture, commissioned by the US government during the war and composed, of necessity, without fieldwork in Japan. Benedict analyzes obligation, hierarchy, shame, and honor from a considerable distance.

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Really, really important book in anthropology but very hard to get through and hard to understand in the modern context because it is almost a hundred years old. I can't say I enjoyed reading it but I toughed it out and I got a lot out.

A foundational work of cultural anthropology comparing the Zuni, Dobu, and Kwakiutl peoples to argue that each culture selects certain human possibilities and integrates them into a distinct configuration. Benedict treats whole societies rather as one treats personalities, a habit her successors have been arguing about since 1934.

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This is really a fun romp, it doesn't take itself too seriously and Nick's a great writer. Sadly does not include anything of the juicy era of Elon. He really needs to do a sequel.

A journalist's account of Twitter's founding and of the power struggles among its four co-founders as the company grew. Bilton found that the platform for short messages was built amid very long grudges.

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This is the kind of book where you read it and it all makes sense, but then you kind of imagine that Ryan's actual way of doing this is way different from whatever theories he's proposed. Kind of feels like a post hoc rationalization of a guy who's just really rizzed up.

A short handbook on startup recruiting from Bolt's founder, covering sourcing, interviews, reference checks, and closing candidates, templates included. It treats hiring as a pipeline to be engineered, which at a startup it had better be.

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Great building block if you want to be a better person.

An examination of the difference between what Brooks calls resume virtues and eulogy virtues, built around biographical profiles of figures like Frances Perkins, Dwight Eisenhower, and Augustine. The dead, conveniently, cannot object to being recruited as exemplars.

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Lovely design thinking but outdated in the era of language models.

IDEO's chief executive explains design thinking as a method for innovation, with cases showing how organizations have applied it beyond product design. The method has since spread far past the studio, a diffusion this book did much to arrange.

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This one is the first in the Patternist series, so the writing is fresh and easy to get into. Worth a read, but they're not all this good.

A science fiction novel set in the far future of Butler's Patternist series, where telepaths joined in a mental Pattern rule over ordinary humans and fight the mutated Clayarks. Two brothers compete to succeed the dying Patternmaster who controls the network, a succession question with unusual stakes.

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Fun and light and wonderful. Definitely worth a read in the age of the AI bubble.

A history of the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, from the Netscape IPO through the crash, with attention to the mania's financial and cultural roots. Cassidy wrote close to the event, while the rubble was still warm.

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Scholarly essay collection. Well done but really hard to get through if you're not very interested in this subject.

An edited volume of scholarly essays on the People's Liberation Army under Xi Jinping, covering its extensive organizational reforms and its evolving roles and missions.

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Worthwhile quick anecdotal read on the rise of car ownership in China. Suffers from the problem of a journalist making a series of articles into a book.

An account of driving across China during its motorization boom, told in three parts: a journey along the Great Wall, years spent in a village north of Beijing, and time in a factory town in Zhejiang. The author reports from a country learning to drive at scale.

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Another book that fills in a hole in history. I knew nothing about Hawaii before I picked it up and I learned a lot.

A general history of the Hawaiian Islands from Captain Cook's arrival in 1778 through the overthrow of the monarchy and annexation to US statehood in 1959. Daws covers nearly two centuries of visitors who stayed.

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The title sucks but the book is great. Everyone should read this even if it can be a little biased at times.

An economic history of the long twentieth century, which DeLong runs from 1870 to 2010, tracing how technology, corporations, and globalization produced unprecedented wealth while stable, just societies stayed out of reach. The title, borrowed from Yeats, gives away the ending.

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This is really really great even though it is a rather dry book. If you want old school management as a discipline type of advice, this is a great place to go. A lot of this seems self-evident but in 1954 it was not.

Drucker's 1954 book, the one that established management as a discipline, covering the manager's job, management by objectives, organization structure, and developing people. Most of what the airport shelf has said since is here first, and shorter.

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This is a great book, but I'm sure very few people would read it and enjoy it like I did. This is a multi-hundred page book about record keeping in the Qing administration. If you think this kind of thing is interesting, this is a great example of a book written well.

A history of Qing administrative record keeping, arguing that eighteenth-century reforms demanding routine documentation produced an archive in which the state appeared, to its own eyes, ever more corrupt and unmanageable. Dykstra's empire is undone in some part by its own filing.

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Another rather bland process book but this one's well written. Consumer technology focused and it's fun.

A four-step model for designing products that form user habits (trigger, action, variable reward, investment), illustrated from consumer technology. Eyal explains the mechanism plainly, and leaves the reader to decide how comfortable to be about it.

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This book is weird if you know Paul Graham from his essays only; this is basically one slightly expanded essay but it's fun and it talks about nerd culture in the 90s with a lot of care and love.

Essays by the programmer and investor Paul Graham on programming languages, startups, the creation of wealth, and the habits of nerds. The title announces his claim that the two trades are cousins, both in the business of making things.

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If you like space opera, you'll like this. Definitely an acquired taste kind of sci-fi book but if you know this genre, you'll like Peter.

The opening novel of a space-opera trilogy in which a team of experts is sent to assess a crashed alien starship, in a 23rd century stitched together by portal technology, interleaved with a far-future storyline of humans raised to fight an alien enemy. Hamilton opens the trilogy at both ends.

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Byung-Chul Han is such a strange writer but this is like sub a hundred pages and digestible in one sitting.

A philosophical essay on the Chinese practice of shanzhai (creative copying), arguing that Chinese thought handles originals, copies, and continuous transformation on terms quite different from the Western cult of originality. Han finds the forgery philosophically respectable, which is more than the trademark lawyers will allow.

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This is one of those books where if you really want to understand something, it's great, but it is unforgiving. Xin He does nothing to make you feel accommodated as a reader. You have to go into this with Germanic intrinsic motivation or you will not get through.

An academic overview of how China's courts and judges operate, and of the judiciary's place within the party-state. Xin He surveys the machinery with a specialist's patience.

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A simple, direct, easy read on the B&R project, with the unfortunate problem of being a combination of a bunch of different essays that were written for different publications and never meant to be in book form. As a result, many sections repeat themselves in the most obnoxious fashion. EDIT YOUR FUCKING BOOKS.

An examination of China's Belt and Road Initiative grounded in travel to project sites across Asia, Europe, and Africa. Hillman measures what the infrastructure push actually delivers against its ambitions, and the gap is part of the subject.

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Ben chews the scenery and talks about his successes but for a 12-year-old book it stands up really well and it's definitely worth reading through. Feels light as a feather.

A management book drawn from the author's time as CEO of Loudcloud and Opsware, concerned with the parts of running a company the other books skip: layoffs, demotions, firing friends, and managing one's own psychology. The title is an accurate table of contents.

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Good book that nevertheless is basically a rehashing of Carlota Perez's work. If you have patience for dry and academic work, just read her stuff instead. It's so much better.

An argument that speculative bubbles can drive technological progress, with case studies running from the Manhattan Project and Apollo to fracking and Bitcoin. Hobart and Huber offer a defense of mania, at least the varieties that leave infrastructure behind.

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Wonderful for its time period but probably outdated by the time you read this. Just know that this book was wildly important in 2024.

A technical guide to building applications on foundation models, covering evaluation, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, finetuning, and the optimization of inference. Huyen writes for practitioners in a field where the syllabus changes quarterly.

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Very good text on what venture capital was like before the age of AI. Draper is a legend and it's cool to read about him.

A memoir and primer on venture capital by one of Silicon Valley's earliest VCs, covering how investors and entrepreneurs work together from pitch to exit. The primer benefits from the memoir, since Draper has been present for most of the industry's instructive mistakes.

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This is cute and fun and will make you think differently about language and food.

A linguist's tour of what the language of menus, food names, and reviews reveals about history, culture, and psychology. Jurafsky can trace ketchup across three continents, and does.

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If you love Italy, you'll love this. It's a wonderful read, and I'm a gigantic GGK stan. This is probably his eighth book I've read and I regret nothing.

A historical fantasy set in a world modeled on Renaissance Italy, narrated by an aging courtier recalling his youth and his entanglement with two rival mercenary commanders. Kay's Italy wears its fictional veil thinly, the better to rearrange history with good manners.

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Legit book on engineering management but you need to read it through an AI lens, which is kind of hard given that it's seven years old. Heavily changed by AI but nevertheless has some classic wisdom that you should interpret.

A handbook of engineering management, covering team sizing, organizational design, systems thinking, and the processes by which technology companies grow. Larson writes as a working manager, with the diagrams to prove it.

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This was interesting and surprisingly well written; Fei-Fei got hands. It's a China and AI book so I'm not to be trusted with objectivity.

A memoir by the AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, braiding her immigration from China and her family's struggles with the scientific career that produced ImageNet. The dataset that trained a generation of neural networks turns out to have a biography attached.

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Another 60s counterculture-to-personal-computing book. Not as great as Where Wizards Stay Up Late but still really good.

A history of how the 1960s counterculture around Stanford shaped the birth of personal computing, centering on Doug Engelbart, psychedelics, antiwar politics, and the milieu of the Homebrew Computer Club. The title comes from Jefferson Airplane, which tells you the decade.

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I regret to inform you that Peter Thiel can write. This is great. It's fun. It's relevant still. It's 12 years old and it reads like something that could have been written yesterday.

A book on startups adapted from Thiel's Stanford course notes, arguing that real value comes from creating something new, the move from zero to one, and that successful companies are built on secrets, monopoly, and definite optimism. The course notes have since outsold most courses.

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This is a weird book: it's actually like someone's journal but it's a record of an important time in the history of computing and it's wonderfully done. Stripe Press books are sometimes bad but the aura of Stripe Press boosts them up. This is not one of those cases.

The journals Jordan Mechner kept from 1985 to 1993 while creating the video game Prince of Persia, a first-person record of game development and creative doubt. The doubt receives at least equal billing.

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A deeper way to your Oppenheimer bio that is more about his intellectual life and less about the bomb.

A full-length biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that gives his physics and intellectual life the same weight as the Manhattan Project years and the 1954 security hearing. Monk brings to the physicist the attention he previously gave Wittgenstein and Russell, brilliance in difficulty being his settled subject.

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This is great work that has been so integrated into technology product thinking that you might find it a little boring. Read it to see where the origination of a lot of the ideas that govern Silicon Valley's modern ethos existed at first.

A marketing framework for technology products, fixed on the gap between early adopters and the mainstream market and on how companies get across it. The chasm of the title has since become the industry's standard name for the place where startups disappear.

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Extremely biased because this is about the place I grew up, but Munro's talent shines on every page.

A collection of short stories set mostly in small-town and rural Canada, attending to women in the middle of marriages, departures, and the long aftermath of earlier choices. Munro fits whole novels into thirty pages without visible strain.

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Few books have been more influential in the food space than this one and it's well made. Although it contains many falsehoods, they are all small and forgivable. Pollan is an interesting guy and an interesting writer and this book should be taken seriously.

An investigation of where American food comes from, structured around four meals traced back through their supply chains: industrial, big organic, local pastoral, and hunted-gathered. Pollan follows the corn, and the corn turns out to be everywhere.

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This is fine but it's not amazing, and my memory of it is somewhat tainted by my low opinion of modern crypto. Probably better than I remember it being.

A history of Bitcoin's early years, following the programmers, libertarians, and entrepreneurs who carried it from cryptographic experiment to global phenomenon. Popper's cast believed the money of the future was being invented in their chat rooms, and events have declined to fully contradict them.

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Think of this as an artifact of the ZIRP era more than something that you should get into in 2026. Feels like an artifact from another culture but it's still got some fun ideas.

A methodology for building startups through rapid build-measure-learn loops, minimum viable products, and validated learning, all meant to spare the founder the elaborate upfront plan. Its vocabulary escaped the startup world some years ago and now roams general management unsupervised.

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A dry but powerful survey of Taiwan's political history. If this is a missing piece of the world in your brain, this book will help you solve that problem.

An academic survey of Taiwan's political history, from Dutch and Qing rule through Japanese colonization, the Nationalist retreat, and democratization, to its cross-strait relations with the PRC.

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This is sweet and grounds business in some kind of shared humanity. It's light in the good reading, and it feels true even today.

A business self-help book arguing that the generous sharing of knowledge, networks, and compassion is the path to career success. Sanders means the title literally, or as literally as business titles allow.

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This is a reference book. Keep it on your shelf and pull it out when you want to check a theory. Very few people will read this cover to cover and get anything meaningful out of it.

A design reference setting out 253 interlinked patterns for humane towns, buildings, and rooms, offered so that anyone might design and build their own environment. Architects have been arguing with it since 1977, which is one measure of a book's success.

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Patti Smith did a great job understanding New York in the 70s and her story is touching and wonderfully written and poetic. This book also made me take fashion more seriously because she writes so beautifully about it.

A memoir assembled from reflections at the author's corner cafe and on her travels, moving through writing, coffee, detective shows, beloved books, and the loss of her husband. The itinerary is largely interior.

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A dry and analytical look at how open source won in the nineties. It's about as flavourful as sawdust but it teaches you a lot.

A political scientist's analysis of how open source software development works as a system of production and governance in the absence of conventional property rights or hierarchy. Weber treats the licenses as constitutions, which is roughly how the participants treat them too.

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Clean, 2h read on the ways the world changed in 2020

Six short essays written in the early months of the 2020 pandemic, reflecting on lockdown, contempt, privilege, and the practice of writing itself. Smith donated the royalties to charity.

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dense so far.

Essays from the final years of the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, on attention, affliction, the love of God, and human obligation. The concerns are late in every sense.

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Incredible history of the Opium Wars, lovingly written by an expert.

A history of the First Opium War of 1839 to 1842 and the personalities on both sides, drawing on Chinese as well as British sources. Lovell then examines the war's afterlife in Chinese nationalist mythology, which has proved considerably more durable than the fighting.

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Great handbook, but it's not something to peruse cover to cover; keep it on your shelf for when you're stuck on a design problem.

A reference handbook cataloguing 100 design research methods, from card sorting to usability testing, each allotted a two-page spread. It is intended as a practical toolkit for researchers and designers, and is organized with the tidiness it recommends.

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Really interesting survey of post-World War business history. If you've ever wondered how modern corporations are formed, this is the book to read.

A study in business history of how DuPont, General Motors, Standard Oil, and Sears arrived at the decentralized multidivisional corporation. Chandler's thesis, that structure follows strategy, has outlived most of the strategies.

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A book that is not very well written but really well researched, and will teach you a lot of things that you didn't know before.

A synthesis of research on the Americas before Columbus, arguing that the hemisphere was more populous, older, and more thoroughly engineered by its inhabitants than the textbooks allowed. Mann covers demography, agriculture, and civilizations from the Amazon to Mesoamerica.

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Bill Porter did a cool trip and this takes you with him. It's more or less travel journalism but it's great.

A travel account of a journey through the Jiangnan region south of the Yangtze, calling at the sites attached to China's poets, artists, and philosophers. Porter, who translates under the name Red Pine, travels like a man visiting old acquaintances.

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A very scholarly but very well done biography; it's fucking huge, so be careful if you are not committed to understanding the man deeply.

A scholarly biography of Deng Xiaoping concentrated on his leadership after 1978: reform and opening, relations with the United States and Japan, and Tiananmen. Vogel worked from extensive documentary research and interviews.

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Dry and boring but if you're into urban ag, this is good.

An edited collection of studies on urban agriculture in cities of the developing world, taking up livelihoods, land use, water, and health. The scholarship is addressed to planners for whom the farm inside the city is already a fact on the ground.

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Extraordinarily mid methodology book. Just read some of the IDEO ideas around the same subject. You learn more in those 20 pages than in these 250.

A step-by-step methodology for entrepreneurs that insists on validating the customer's problem and the solution before any scaling begins. The title is the argument, in the approved order.

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If you've ever seen that picture with near-infinite aura of the Fairchild people, then you should buy this book and investigate them. It's written by a technical person and it shows in both the good and the bad.

A documentary history of Fairchild Semiconductor, pairing scholarly analysis with reproductions of the company's founding documents, lab notebooks, and patent records. The firm is allowed to testify in its own paperwork.

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Everybody in San Francisco told me to read Butler and then when I did I didn't like it. Feels like something that I would have loved when I was 17 though.

A science fiction novel in Butler's Patternist series concerning Mary, a young telepath in Los Angeles bred by the immortal Doro, whose transition to full power links other telepaths into a networked pattern. Her growing strength sets her against her creator.

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Some people have told me this really fixed them; it worked kind of for me.

A twelve-week program for recovering one's creativity, organized around daily 'morning pages' and weekly 'artist dates,' the whole presented as a spiritual practice. Cameron asks for twelve weeks and a measure of faith, and says so plainly.

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Old school Shang civilization overview. Great photos, interesting scholarship, but very much an 80s civilization book.

An archaeological and historical synthesis of China's Shang dynasty, drawing on the Anyang excavations, oracle bone inscriptions, and traditional texts. Chang reads the excavated and the transmitted evidence together.

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A fine work but nothing you can't pick up on Andrew Chen's Twitter. Felt like a vanity project more than a book that needed to be made.

A book on network effects, examining how products like Uber, Slack, and Airbnb survive the phase when a network has too few users to be useful. The problem of the empty room, treated with the seriousness it deserves.

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There are frustratingly few books on Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu, but this one will teach you some things if you're desperate for information.

A survey of China's technology sector, profiling companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu and the entrepreneurs behind them. Fannin covers how Chinese firms compete with Silicon Valley and where they part company with it.

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This is well-made and useful even in conventional relationships, and is required reading for both people who are interested in modern relationships and also want to avoid having therapy speak used against them in conflicts where they don't know the theory.

An application of attachment theory to consensual nonmonogamy, examining how trauma and attachment styles play out in multi-partner relationships. Fern extends a literature built on the mother and infant to arrangements considerably more crowded.

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This is a very well-researched oral history; it suffers only because the people it interviewed are not the people at the center of the action.

An oral history of Silicon Valley assembled from interviews with founders, engineers, and hangers-on, arranged as a collage of voices running from the Atari and Xerox PARC era through Google and Facebook. The voices do not always agree, which is itself part of the record.

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Michael Frolic did a great job with this; it's an easy read with lots of good anecdotes. At times it dips into self-congratulatory, ambassador, ego, clout chasing but mostly it sticks to the right side. It also has the enviable position of being the only remotely readable book on its own subject.

A history of fifty years of relations between Canada and China, from diplomatic recognition in 1970 to the Meng Wanzhou affair, written by a scholar who participated in much of what he describes. Frolic's presence in the story lends the diplomatic history a memoirist's texture.

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This is hilarious because basically eight years of progress have invalidated most of the thesis. It pairs well with Abundance and it's great to read in the age of AI when we're making progress on this stuff.

An engineer's investigation of why the futuristic technologies predicted in the mid-twentieth century failed to arrive, blaming regulation, risk aversion, and cultural stagnation, and arguing that energy abundance is the key to restarting progress. The flying car itself is treated as a solved engineering problem awaiting permission.

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Airport book: avoid.

Essays on present-day challenges, taking in technology, politics, nationalism, fake news, and the problem of meaning, from the author who had already handled humanity's past and its future in earlier volumes. The present, it turns out, also fits in one book.

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This is weird and quasi-religious and odd.

A book claiming that human consciousness can be calibrated on a numerical scale of levels using applied kinesiology muscle testing. The instrument of measurement is the human arm, which the reader must take on trust.

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This has got a lot of radical theses for an academic book, and it doesn't quite land the plane. I read about half of it with some bemused attachment and the other half a little angrily.

A study arguing that China's rural-urban divide in education and health has left much of its workforce underprepared for a high-income economy, threatening the country's rise. Rozelle and Hell locate the constraint in the countryside, some distance from where visitors tend to look.

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This is a really lovely book about the British Empire. It's easy to read and fun to flip. Don't take it too seriously and have a great time.

A history of the British Empire told through ten of its cities, from Boston and Bridgetown to Bombay, Hong Kong, and Liverpool. Hunt examines how empire shaped urban form and life in each, the metropole included.

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Important to read, but hard to get through. The experience of reading this is similar to being beaten by a blunt object. Editing is wonky, probably from translation. Not great. Would not have finished if I wasn't on a long flight.

A documentary history of the famine of 1958 to 1962, which killed tens of millions during the Great Leap Forward, compiled by a Xinhua journalist from provincial archives and interviews. It is banned in mainland China, a circumstance that amounts to its own review.

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Feels a little thin and a little dreary to read but has some good insights.

An operating manual for managers and company builders, drawn from the author's time as COO of Stripe and an executive at Google, covering hiring, team structure, performance management, and operating cadences. It is the rare management book that reads as though its author has actually run the meetings.

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Extremely mid and forgettable.

A study of the environments that produce innovation, identifying recurring patterns across science, technology, and nature: the adjacent possible, liquid networks, slow hunches, exaptation. Johnson's answer to his title's question is, broadly, other people and sufficient time.

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Airport vibes, avoid.

A summation of Kahneman's research on judgment and decision making, organized around two modes of thought: the fast intuitive System 1 and the slow deliberate System 2. Cognitive biases, heuristics, and prospect theory follow, few of them flattering.

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This is very information-dense and fun but it should have been about Jensen rather than the company. Way too much time is spent on tertiary characters in NVIDIA. Halfway through the book it gives up and just admits it's a cult of personality, but one guy in focus is more there.

A history of Nvidia and a portrait of cofounder Jensen Huang, from the company's near-death struggles in the 1990s graphics-chip wars to its dominance in AI computing. Kim traces how a company built to render video games ended up rendering the AI boom possible.

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Incredibly outdated in the era of language models.

A guide to product management grounded in design methods, arguing that products succeed when built through empathy with users and deliberate emotional intent. Kolko would like the product manager to feel things on purpose.

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Lame, avoid.

A survey of urban agriculture and local food initiatives, from rooftop farms to food policy councils, and of how cities can support them. The revolution here proceeds by zoning variance.

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Asian Virginia Woolf, it's good. It's hard to read but it hits like a truck if you get through it.

An autofictional novel following Li, a writer who shuttles between New York and his aging parents' home in Taipei, obsessing over health, diet, toxins, and drugs while trying to imagine a way out of modern society. The title announces the project.

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This is very dry, very serious, and very good. It will teach you a lot but you will struggle to get through it if you don't lock your phone in a vault and put on some Mozart.

An academic study of the political institutions and governing processes of the People's Republic of China, analyzing the party-state's structure, leadership, and policy making.

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Interesting and would be compelling if I was a neurosurgeon but mostly just a little bit out of my wheelhouse. It's definitely a better book than my review would suggest it is, I just struggled to get into it.

A British neurosurgeon's memoir of cases from his career, the failures included, with reflections on what it means to operate on the organ doing the reflecting. Marsh is candid about error to a degree his profession does not generally encourage.

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This is fun. Easy to read and feels like it came from a different era but in a nice way.

A strategy framework arguing that companies succeed by creating uncontested market space, leaving the crowded waters of existing markets to their rivals, with tools and case studies supplied. The red and blue oceans have since entered the permanent vocabulary of the whiteboard.

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You need to know two things about this book: serious semiconductor people think it's bullshit but people that don't know a lot about the industry love it. I am one of the second people and so I recommend it but apparently a lot of things are wrong.

A history of the semiconductor industry as a geopolitical contest, a subject where metallurgy and grand strategy turn out to require each other's company. Miller follows the transistor from its invention through Silicon Valley and Japan to TSMC's Taiwan, where the world's most advanced manufacturing now sits at the center of the rivalry between the United States and China.

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Forgettable.

An evolutionary psychologist's account of consumer behavior, arguing that most purchasing is costly signaling of fitness traits such as intelligence and personality. On this view the luxury car is a peacock's tail with cupholders.

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Interesting, funny, and ahead of its time but outdated.

A practical guide to working with large language models, offering principles for treating AI as a collaborator in work, teaching, and creative effort. Mollick's advice amounts to inviting the machine to the table and watching it closely once seated.

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Read this during my vegan curious arc, it's fine but very biased and very un-serious.

A history of the American meat industry from the colonial era to modern agribusiness, examining how consumer demand for cheap and abundant meat shaped the system. Ogle's argument implicates the shopper along with the packer.

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I thought this would capture the right magic of Oppie at his height of power, but the book was strangely not impactful.

Lectures delivered by J. Robert Oppenheimer in the years after World War II, on science, atomic weapons, and the place of scientific knowledge in culture and politics. The author had unusual standing to discuss all three.

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My mom bought this for me for my birthday and I liked it. The pages turn easily, it's fun.

The fifteenth Chief Inspector Gamache mystery, in which Gamache, demoted yet returned to the Surete du Quebec, searches for a missing woman while spring floods threaten the province. Penny's readers will know the drill by now, and will be glad of it.

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Super super hard to read and super worth it.

Plath's second collection, published after her death, gathering the intense late poems of her final months. The poems have since acquired a mythology of their own, which they survive.

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Extremely mid and outdated. Avoid.

A collection of MIT Sloan Management Review articles on how companies adopt AI to complement human work, illustrated with cases from firms such as Netflix and Walmart. The findings arrive in the measured cadence of the executive briefing.

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This is better written and more interesting and worth listening to as an audiobook more than reading.

A book on the entrepreneurial mindset, arguing that the core of entrepreneurship is an attitude and that the attitude can be trained. The capitalization of the title gives a fair preview of the register.

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I lived on a street just like this, so I liked it for nostalgic reasons, but it's probably a forgettable book for everybody else.

Portraits of the residents of a single Shanghai street, by the NPR correspondent who lived on it: a flower seller, a sandwich-shop owner, a family displaced by development. Their lives supply the ambition and upheaval of modern urban China at walking scale.

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This was great in the moment that it was written but has been outdated quite a bit as the culture has moved on. No longer worthy of a read.

A short handbook on building communities, drawn from interviews with organizers and centered on the counsel that one builds alongside one's members from the start. The advice is brief, and the interviews do the carrying.

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People raved about this but I thought it was mid. Rambly and poorly written.

A guide to how fungal mycelium works and how it can be put to use filtering water, cleaning up toxins, restoring forests, and improving soils, with practical cultivation methods alongside the mycology. Stamets's enthusiasm for his kingdom is total, and a good deal of it proves contagious.

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Outdated, but interesting if you want to know what people were thinking about AI at the dawn of the transformer.

An MIT physicist examines what artificial general intelligence could mean for the future of life, laying out scenarios for how superintelligence might develop and how its goals might be brought into line with human ones. Tegmark offers a scenario for every temperament.

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You really want me to rate the Odyssey? What I'm reviewing is Emily Wilson's translation, which I cared about. For the poem itself, find someone with a wrinklier brain than I, and read their interpretation.

The ancient Greek epic recounting Odysseus's ten-year journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, and his wife Penelope's stand against the suitors occupying his house. Western literature has been finding its way back to it ever since, in imitation of the hero.

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Tough, fertile book that makes you stare at the wall after you finish chapters.

Oral histories gathered by a dissident writer from Chinese people at the bottom of society: a professional mourner, a public-toilet manager, a former Red Guard, a corpse walker. The accounts are first person and sit well outside the official narratives, which is much of the point.

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This is cute and it's very Douglas Adams-y. I honestly have very little memories of it other than the fact that I liked it.

A metafictional novel about a time machine repairman in a small science-fictional universe, searching for his missing father with the help of a book bearing this novel's own title. Yu closes the loop as neatly as the paradox permits.

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This book went over my head. If you are really really smart, I think it's worth it, but I lack the wrinkles to understand what the fuck this was about.

Austin's lectures, published after his death, which founded speech act theory through the analysis of performative utterances, the sentences that accomplish the very acts they name. His examples marry, christen, and bet, and philosophy has minded its manners around verbs ever since.

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A bland and pragmatic book for people looking for bland and pragmatic advice.

A field guide to the job of a startup chief executive, covering strategy, hiring, board management, fundraising, and personal discipline. Blumberg proceeds on the sensible premise that the role is a job like any other, only with more of it.

An argument that transformative discoveries come from unconstrained researchers, and that peer review and managed funding have choked off the supply. Braben ran the experiment himself, funding mavericks at BP's Venture Research unit.

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People raved about this and I didn't love it. Felt like Dollar Store Andy Weir.

Eight science fiction stories, among them 'Story of Your Life,' in which a linguist learning an alien language finds the grammar rearranging her perception of time (the film Arrival descends from it). Chiang takes a single premise and follows it to its logical end with unusual patience.

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Outdated, avoid.

A step-by-step handbook for the customer development process: getting out of the building to test hypotheses about customers, channels, and pricing before scaling. The word manual in the title is meant literally, checklists included.

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Struggled to get through it, ironically.

A journalist's investigation into why attention spans are collapsing, blaming surveillance-driven tech design, diet, stress, and work culture. Hari argues for collective remedies alongside personal ones, having concluded that individual willpower is outmatched.

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So very colonial and smug. Avoid.

A 1928 history of Shanghai's International Settlement from the opening of the treaty port in the 1840s, written by a longtime missionary educator who presided over St. John's University in the city. The author wrote as a resident, which makes the book a source as well as a survey.

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It's not terribly well written but it's interesting stuff. It's very very flag-wavy so proceed with caution if you are not an American patriot.

An argument that the US is in a gray war with China and Russia, fought over information technology and spanning the software of disinformation and the hardware of chips, cables, and 5G networks. In Helberg's account the conflict is already underway, conducted along the infrastructure of the title.

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This was dumb and biased and poorly written.

A Belgian scholar of international politics argues that China's rise, given its territorial claims and its neighbors' resistance, makes military conflict in Asia likely despite Beijing's stated intentions. The title declines to bury the lede.

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This starts with arrogance and ends with humbling obnoxious lists. I have rarely encountered a book with a bigger divide between the bold ideas of the first chapter and its spotty, listless and often flabby arguments. Disappointment was massive.

A cultural history of how experiences of time and space changed between 1880 and 1918, as the telephone, cinema, and railroad rearranged both. Kern traces the shift through art, literature, philosophy, and the outbreak of World War I.

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Despite the title being from a poem I loved, I found this book, when I read it in 2017, to be strangely spiritually bankrupt. Smart people I know love this book but I did not.

A history of the long divide between researchers building artificial intelligence to replace humans and those building tools to augment them, from the 1960s laboratories of McCarthy and Engelbart to modern robotics and self-driving cars. Markoff follows both lineages and the quarrel that runs between them.

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Lame, avoid.

Two MIT researchers' account of how digital technologies are transforming work and the economy, producing what they call bounty (abundance) and spread (inequality). The machines have moved on from muscle to cognition, and the economists are still drafting the reply.

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Boring and outdated, avoid.

A guide to doing business in China, built from case studies out of the author's years there as a Wall Street Journal bureau chief and business executive. McGregor's lessons arrive with the tuition already paid.

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This book made me depressed at how unserious the urban agriculture movement is.

An argument for growing food in public urban spaces such as parks, plazas, and streetscapes, with municipal support, surveying examples of city-led agriculture. Nordahl would like the municipal shade tree to earn its keep.

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I don't know why I bought this; way better as a podcast.

An oral history of the AI boom from 2019 to 2025, assembled from the author's podcast interviews with researchers, lab leaders, and economists. It is the unusual oral history compiled before anyone involved knew the ending.

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Boring but if you have problems, this book can give you solutions.

A practical guide to building and running a startup board of directors, covering composition, meetings, governance, and the relationship between CEO and board. Written for founders who acquire a board before anyone has explained what one is for.

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This is a book written by an AI agent and you can tell that it's not human edited. It's a novelty but it's cool.

A fantasy novel of 79,456 words, written autonomously from start to finish by the Hermes AI agent, set in a city where law is sung and contracts are sealed in sound. It stands among the first published AI-authored novels, which is at minimum a new answer to the question of where books come from.

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Wonderful when it came out but very very outdated in the era of language models.

A practitioner's guide to folding user experience design into agile development, favoring rapid experiments and shared understanding over polished deliverables. Gothelf and Seiden ask designers to ship their thinking before it is beautiful.

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This is interesting and has a kind of anarcho-libertarian bent to it that you don't see much these days. I don't remember much about the book other than the fact that I smiled a lot while I read it.

A manifesto by a former CIA officer arguing that open-source intelligence, open data, and transparent self-governance should replace secretive, centralized institutions. It has the manifesto's characteristic virtues: conviction, urgency, and impatience with intermediate steps.

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This was really interesting but I kind of feel like it's bullshit. Taleb's gigantic leaps are infuriating to read. If you like anecdata, you'll love this.

An argument that certain systems gain from volatility, stress, and disorder, and that modern efforts to suppress volatility leave institutions and people fragile. Taleb supplies the coinage himself, the dictionary having failed him.

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Very mid and very old. It's not about LLMs but about the generation of AI technologies before them.

A financial journalist's survey of China's artificial intelligence industry, covering its companies, its government backing, and the gap between its real capabilities and its publicity. Xiang audits the hype with an appraiser's patience.

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This book almost made me sell Palantir position I have held since it went public. It's terrible, convoluted, and makes very few good points. Could have been an email type of book.

An argument by Palantir's CEO and a colleague that Silicon Valley has abandoned national purpose for consumer trivialities, and that the software industry should rebuild its partnership with the state. The authors' employer, it is fair to note, is already in that line of business.

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Jordan Schneider's podcast made me read this and it was a cursed month of my life.

A scholarly essay collection on strategic thought and practice from antiquity to the digital age, the third incarnation of the classic Makers of Modern Strategy volumes. Each generation, it seems, must remake its Makers.

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This process is bullshit and it might take you a hundred pages to figure that out. Feels like something that tried to make protean creation into an assembly line. I hated it.

A framework for launching a startup in twenty-four ordered steps, from choosing a customer to designing the product, drawn from the author's course at MIT. Aulet brings engineering's fondness for checklists to an activity famous for ignoring them.

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I thought this would be serious but it's kind of like an airport book that broke containment.

An examination of the four fish that dominate the global seafood trade, salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna, covering the condition of the wild fisheries and the state of aquaculture for each. Greenberg's ocean has narrowed to four names, which is much of his point.

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Bill is great but this book wasn't for me. It felt more like a collection of friendly anecdotes from people he admired than a genuine portrait of entrepreneurship. It's fun, it's easy but it's as profound as a birdbath.

A career guide from the venture capitalist Bill Gurley, expanded from his widely shared speech of the same name, on building a career around work one loves. The advice arrives with the conviction of a man who has watched compounding operate at close range.

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Airport book, avoid.

A popular account of the neuroscience of decision-making, weighing when intuition serves and when deliberation does, through cases running from pilots to quarterbacks. Lehrer's examples move quickly, and the neuroscience is asked to keep up.

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I feel like this was all decently written and had decent explanations, but for whatever reason I finished it and did not remember a single thing inside its pages. I read this on vacation so it could be that my mind was what was not good but it did not land at all.

A history of the fabless business model, which separated the designing of chips from the manufacturing of them, with profiles of companies from TSMC to Qualcomm. It is an insider's account of a divorce that enriched both parties.

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This is HOT GARBAGE. There are some compelling ideas inside a huge list of random China factoids, which manages to be both boring and also frantic. The feeling I was left with was that anytime a person of Chinese ancestry or Chinese connections organized anything at all, it was listed as a terrifying new threat to the world order. It is actual garbage, written poorly and edited by chimpanzees.

An investigation of the Chinese Communist Party's influence operations in Western countries, across politics, business, universities, and media. The authors argue that these activities amount to a coordinated effort to reshape democratic institutions.

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Mid, avoid.

A memoir by a businessman who, with his then-wife Whitney Duan, built a fortune through connections to China's political elite before she disappeared into detention in 2017. Shum writes from abroad, which is the position from which such memoirs get written.

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I hated every page of this book, yet I can acknowledge its importance.

Two AI-alignment researchers argue that building superhuman artificial intelligence with anything like current techniques would cause human extinction, and make the case for an international halt to the race. The title spares the reader any suspense.

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Hated it but it's probably useful for somebody who's trying to build institutional knowledge of hiring.

A hiring manual presenting what the authors call the A Method: scorecards defining outcomes for a role, structured sourcing, a sequence of four interviews, and techniques for selling top candidates. The premise throughout is that hiring is a procedure, and procedures can be learned.

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I honestly conflate this with the Penguin history all the time. I don't remember which one was better. They both kind of seem like the same book in my memory.

A single-volume academic history of China from prehistory to the modern era, organized around the development of the imperial state and its transformations. It has served generations of undergraduates as the standard survey.

An analysis of the Chinese Communist Party's internal culture: its language, rituals, beliefs, and sources of legitimacy, and how these sustain its power under Xi Jinping. Brown treats the Party as an institution with a faith to maintain.

An analysis of why people love or hate everyday objects, proposing three levels of emotional response to design: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. It is a companion to Norman's earlier work on usability, this time attending to the heart as well as the handle.

An argument that the technology companies, with Google and Facebook as the pioneering cases, have founded a new economic logic on extracting behavioral data to predict and shape human action. Zuboff contends that the arrangement threatens autonomy and democracy.

An illustrated survey of one hundred manga artists, with profiles and sample artwork running from the classic masters to contemporary creators. One consults it as one consults an atlas, happily and out of order.

An anthology of fifty first-person dispatches from young American farmers on starting and running small farms. The testimony arrives fresh from the field, mud included.

A guidebook to Scotland's bothies, the free unlocked shelters scattered through the mountains, with locations, access routes, histories, and practical advice for reaching and staying in them. The title's ecclesiastical confidence proves roughly proportionate to the coverage.

An illustrated survey of photography's history from the camera obscura and the daguerreotype to the digital era, covering the key photographers, technologies, and movements. The pictures, appropriately, do much of the arguing.

An introduction to the oceanography behind surfable waves, written for surfers: how swells are generated, how they travel, and how they break. Butt supplies the fluid dynamics on the understanding that the reader will supply the wetsuit.

The second volume of Michel Lambert's encyclopedic history of Quebec home cooking, this one devoted to the sea, the coastal regions, and their products. Lambert is compiling the province's kitchen memory one volume at a time.

An oversized illustrated atlas of hand-drawn maps covering dozens of countries, dense with plants, animals, foods, and landmarks. The Mizielińskis draw with a density that rewards the tenth viewing as fully as the first.

A survey of designs for urban agriculture drawn from the exhibition of the same name: buildings, rooftop farms, community gardens, and products. The catalogue makes its case that growing food in cities is, among other things, an architectural question.

An illustrated guide to American food politics, pairing hundreds of editorial cartoons with Nestle's commentary on farm policy, food marketing, and nutrition. The cartoons make the arguments quickly, and the commentary supplies the evidence.

A cookbook and photographic record of René Redzepi's Copenhagen restaurant, documenting its foraging-based approach to Nordic ingredients. For most kitchens the recipes read best as a manifesto.

A collection of Tolkien's own illustrations, maps, and sketches made while writing The Lord of the Rings, with commentary by two leading Tolkien scholars. It documents the curious case of an author who had to draw the world before he could report on it.

A practical guidebook for hiking the Wonderland Trail, the roughly 93-mile circuit of Mount Rainier, covering permits, itineraries, gear, resupply, and trail conditions. The prose confines itself to logistics, on the reasonable theory that the mountain will supply the rest.

A cookbook of more than fifty fried chicken recipes with sides, collected from restaurants, chefs, and home cooks across the United States. This is scholarship of a kind, conducted at the fryer.

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Great China introduction. Nothing earth-shaking, just a good old romp through Chinese history from 1850 to the present.

A journalist's single-volume narrative history of China from 1850 to 2008, written for general readers and covering the Qing collapse, the republican era, the Mao years, and the reform-era rise. The period rarely permitted a dull chapter.

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Another special-interest read. This one's really hard even for me to call great: if you don't really care about surfing, this book will probably make you want to die.

A concise introduction to the physics of ocean waves, from the wind that raises them to the beaches where they break, with chapters on tsunamis and wave measurement. It appears in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, which enforces brevity.

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Avoid.

A short business book urging companies to adopt design thinking as a management discipline and the engine of continuous innovation. Neumeier supplies the principles and practices for building a design-led culture.

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This book made me feel stupid by design. It felt like someone who was flexing on their audience instead of trying to guide them through to a love of statistics.

A historian of statistics traces seven ideas on which the discipline rests, aggregation, likelihood, and regression among them, each through its historical development. Some quantitative background is assumed of the reader.

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Avoid, it's really mid.

A biography of Joseph Needham, the Cambridge biochemist who traveled wartime China and then devoted the rest of his life to the encyclopedic Science and Civilisation in China. Winchester covers the expeditions, the love affairs, and the question Needham made his own: why Chinese science fell behind the West.

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Terrible. Avoid at all costs.

An anthology drawn from the Edge.org annual question, in which scientists and thinkers each nominate an established scientific concept they consider ripe for retirement. The essays are short and the executions brisk.

An account of E. Forbes Smiley, a respected dealer in rare maps who was caught cutting valuable maps out of library atlases and selling them, a method of acquisition the libraries had not approved. Blanding pairs the case with a history of the antique map trade.

A history of paper and papermaking from its invention in China through the Islamic world and Europe to the digital age, using the technology as a lens on writing, printing, and the diffusion of ideas. Kurlansky, who has given this treatment to salt and to cod, here takes up the medium the others were recorded on.

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AP's work makes me feel physically sick when I read it, there's so much dread on the pages. This is the literary equivalent of a Lars von Trier film- for sure art, and powerful art, but also art that serves as a black entropic hole sucking the joy and communion out of life.

A novel that opens with an uninvited guest kissing the hostess at a christening party, an indiscretion that dissolves two marriages and blends six children into one stepfamily. Patchett follows the entanglement across five decades of California and Virginia.

A history of the Great Migration, in which six million Black Americans left the South between 1915 and 1970, told through three individuals who took different routes north and west. Wilkerson built it from more than a thousand interviews.