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. Alexandre Kojeve: The Christian Origin of Modern Science, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel
  6. Peter Thiel: The Straussian Moment (2007), The Optimistic Thought Experiment (2008)
  7. Robert Howse: The Use and Abuse of Leo Strauss in the Schmitt revival on the German Right: The Case of Heinrich Meier
  8. Friedrich Hayek: The Use of Knowledge in Society, The Intellectuals and Socialism
  9. John Stuart Mill: Theism (1874)
  10. T.S. Eliot: Tradition and the Individual Talent
  11. Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
  12. Paul Valery: The Conquest of Ubiquity
  13. Tom Wolfe: Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died
  14. Joseph Schumpeter: Kapitalismus, Sozialismus und Demokratie.
  15. Martin Heidegger: The Question Concerning Technology
  16. R. Barbrook & A. Cameron: The Californian Ideology (1995)
  17. Joan Didion: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
  18. Rene Girard: Innovation and Repetition, Dionysus versus the Crucified
  19. Yoram Hazony: Leo Strauss and the Bible
  20. 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

  1. Ivan Turgenev: Smoke, A Novel; Virgin Soil.
  2. Normann Angell: The Great Illusion; Recommendation from Peter.
  3. Frederic Lane: Profits from Power; Enterprise and secular change.
  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.