Please email me book recommendations. The books listed below do not reflect my personal views, as I read books with a broad range of views. As Montaigne put it, “All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice.”

Books and Essays

Previous reading lists: Spring 2024, Summer 2024.

I find myself recommending the following books often; I maintain a high standard for recommending a book here; the list is in no particular order.

  1. Lee Kuan Yew: From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000.
  2. Cixin Liu: Remembrance of Earth’s Past.
  3. Ted Chiang: Exhalation and Story of Your Life.
  4. Stefan Zweig: The World of Yesterday.
  5. Robert Caro: LBJ Biography Series.
  6. John Didion: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play It As It Lays, The Year of Magical Thinking.
  7. MTW: Gravitation is my favourite GR textbook.
  8. Edwin Abbott: Flatland is an exhilarating “mathematical fiction”.
  9. Marcel Proust: Swann’s Way.

Literature

  1. Thomas Mann: Magic Mountain.
  2. J. W. von Goethe: Faust.

On Political Philosophy.

  1. Leo Strauss: List, Reason and Revelation
  2. William James: The Moral Equivalent of War
  3. Francis Bacon – The New Atlantis
  4. Immanuel Kant: Zum Ewigen Frieden (1795)
  5. Peter Thiel: The Straussian Moment (2007), The Optimistic Thought Experiment (2008)
  6. Robert Howse: The Use and Abuse of Leo Strauss in the Schmitt revival on the German Right: The Case of Heinrich Meier
  7. Friedrich Hayek: The Use of Knowledge in Society, The Intellectuals and Socialism
  8. John Stuart Mill: Theism (1874)
  9. T.S. Eliot: Tradition and the Individual Talent
  10. Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
  11. Paul Valery: The Conquest of Ubiquity
  12. Tom Wolfe: Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died
  13. Joseph Schumpeter: Kapitalismus, Sozialismus und Demokratie.
  14. Martin Heidegger: The Question Concerning Technology
  15. R. Barbrook & A. Cameron: The Californian Ideology (1995)
  16. Joan Didion: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
  17. Rene Girard: Innovation and Repetition, Dionysus versus the Crucified
  18. Yoram Hazony: Leo Strauss and the Bible
  19. Wolfgang Palaver: Hobbes and the Katechon: The Secularization of Sacrifical Christianity

History of 20th Century Industrial Capitalism

  1. Ron Chernow: Titan
  2. Alfred Chandler: Scale and Scope

On New Branches of Engineering.

  1. Richard Feynmann There’s Plenty of Room At The Bottom
  2. Norbert Wiener: Cybernetics
  3. John von Neumann: Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata
  4. Eric Drexler: Engines of Creation
  5. A. M. Turing (1950): Computing Machinery and Intelligence
  6. Rich Sutton: The Bitter Lesson

Misc.

  1. George Orwell: Books vs. Cigarettes.
  2. William Strunk Jr. & E. B. White: The Elements of Style.
  3. Graham Moore: The Last Days of Night.

Literature-related essays.

  1. David Foster Wallace: Consider the Lobster

Rare(-ish) Books

The Great Books are rightly held in high regard. However, even if you believe that most Great Books are recognized at some point as works of great merit, you should not be blinded and believe that there are no great but forgotten books. There are books that are too wrong, maybe too dangerous, or simply out-of-fashion and are thus not well-known at all today. While I haven’t found as many of these books as I would like yet, I want to share a few here to illustrate my argument. If you come across any forgotten books that you think are great, please email me!

  1. Ivan Turgenev: Smoke, A Novel.
  2. Ivan Turgenev: Virgin Soil.
  3. Normann Angell: The Great Illusion; Recommendation from Peter.
  4. Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov: War, Progress, and the end of History, Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ. Three Discussions; Recommendation from Peter.
  5. Wendell Willkie: One World; Recommendation from Peter.

Physics Textbooks

I learned most physics through German textbooks which I will not link here. The few English ones I still own are:

  1. Gravitation: Charles W. Misner, John Archibald Wheeler, and Kip Thorne
  2. An Introduction to Differential Geometry: T. J. Willmore
  3. Tensors: Mathematics of Differential Geometry and Relativity: Zafar Ahsan
  4. Curvature in Mathematics and Physics: Shlomo Sternberg
  5. TBC

Memos

I sometimes come across interesting memos and curate the best ones below.

  1. “The Downfall of a Great American Airplane Company: An Insider’s Perspective” Memo by Boeing engineers on the downfall of their commercial airline division.
  2. The Secret Diary of a ‘Sustainable Investor’ Memo by Tariq Fancy, former CIO for Sustainable Investing at Blackrock, outlining why ESG is not working.