Books
Currently reading: Russell, The Sparrow (Kindle, ~25%) · Kracht, Air (finishing) On deck: Smil, How the World Really Works (audio, follows Zeihan) · Ogawa, The Memory Police (fiction)
- Perkins, Die With Zero — spend down into experiences, not estate. DWZ framework conversation; premise already landed.
- Brin, Uplift series — humanity uplifts other species into galactic civilization. Reading Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time; followed the thread. Children of Time
- Egan, Diaspora — posthuman hard sci-fi, identity and physics. Wanted to read Egan for years; hard sci-fi, math fiction.
- Egan, Permutation City — simulation theory and cellular automata. Same as above.
- Tetlock & Gardner, Superforecasting — calibrated probabilistic thinking method. Risk note thread; Iran, China/Taiwan, AI bubble.Economic and Geopolitical Risk Scenarios for the Next 3 Months
- Fedarko, The Emerald Mile — fastest raft run through Grand Canyon in flood. Dave Eyvazzadeh recommended; environmentalism conversation.
- Abbey, Desert Solitaire — living alone in Arches, anti-development polemic. Recommended to Dave in same conversation; need to actually read him.
- Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang — eco-sabotage fiction, the classic. Same.
- Greenblatt, The Swerve — rediscovery of Lucretius; Epicurean ideas, very readable. Epicurean thread; good entry point before the primary sources.
- Wilson, How to Be an Epicurean — modern application of Epicurean philosophy. Same thread.
- Lucretius, De Rerum Natura — the main surviving Epicurean text; a poem. Primary source; after Greenblatt.
- Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus” — his core ethics; 20 min read, free online. Primary source; start here.
- Dobelli, Stop Reading the News — case against news as an information diet. News framework conversation; short book.
- Seth, Being You — consciousness as controlled hallucination, neuroscience-grounded. Consciousness rabbit hole; best accessible entry point.
- Chalmers, The Conscious Mind — philosophy of the hard problem. Hard problem conversation; the serious treatment.
- Dennett, Consciousness Explained — deflationary view; hard problem is an illusion. Read against Chalmers; they sharpen each other.
- Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” — subjective experience resists objective explanation. Foundation of the hard problem; 20 min read, free online.
- Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach — consciousness from self-referential loops. Strange loop angle on the same rabbit hole.
- Taleb, Fooled by Randomness — how we mistake luck for skill; first of the Incerto. Loved The Black Swan; high-signal, no filler.
- Taleb, Antifragile — things that gain from disorder and volatility. Same thread; the constructive follow-up to Black Swan.
- Taleb, Skin in the Game — asymmetry, risk, and who bears the downside. Same thread.
- Bricker & Ibbitson, Empty Planet — dedicated case for demographic decline, faster than UN projections. Zeihan follow-up; the deep version of the one leg that convinced me.
- Smil, How the World Really Works — numerate, deflationary energy-and-materials realism; anti-grand-narrative. The Zeihan corrective; distrust the confident sweeping forecast. Read this next.
- Khanna, Connectography — opposing thesis: connectivity and supply chains deepen, not collapse. The anti-Zeihan on the shipping/deglobalization leg I doubted.
Negotiation
Financial-negotiation interest. Read order for the money angle: Shell + Nalebuff, then Voss.
- Fisher & Ury, Getting to Yes — principled negotiation; interests vs positions, BATNA. The bedrock everything else reacts to.
- Shell, Bargaining for Advantage — Wharton; research-grounded, style-aware, deal-oriented. Best single starting point.
- Nalebuff, Split the Pie — game-theory framework for dividing value fairly. The most explicitly financial one.
- Voss, Never Split the Difference — FBI tactical empathy, calibrated questions, anchoring. Best for high-stakes one-on-one.
- Malhotra & Bazerman, Negotiation Genius — Harvard; rigorous deal-making and reading the other side. The serious tactical treatment.
- Cialdini, Influence — persuasion psychology under every deal; not negotiation-specific. Foundational.
- Doody, Fearless Salary Negotiation — tactical, tech-comp specific. Directly useful for SWE comp.
- McKenzie, “Salary Negotiation” (kalzumeus.com) — best tech salary-negotiation writing, free online. Read before the next comp conversation.
Like Piranesi
Labyrinths, unreliable narrators, worlds with their own logic. Sparked by Piranesi.
- Borges, Labyrinths — the short stories Piranesi grew from; “The Library of Babel” and “The House of Asterion” are Clarke’s named sources. Direct ancestor; short, start here.
- Morgenstern, The Starless Sea — a labyrinth of doors, keys, and nested stories beneath the world. Closest contemporary cousin in atmosphere; strong full-cast audio.
- Danielewski, House of Leaves — a house immeasurably bigger inside than out; the architectural uncanny turned to dread. The dark counterpoint to Piranesi’s wonder. Print, not audio, the typography is the book.
- Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun (start Shadow & Claw) — a narrator claiming perfect memory that you learn not to trust; mythic, dense, built to be reread. Scratches the “unpack everything, read it again” itch.
- Ishiguro, The Buried Giant — an old couple journey through a Britain where a mist steals memory. Memory-loss and myth, Piranesi’s quieter, sadder cousin.
Heinlein
Loved The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Next:
- Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land — outsider human raised by Martians; counterculture classic.
- Heinlein, Starship Troopers — the source material; leaner and more political than the film.
- Heinlein, The Door into Summer — time travel, shorter, fun.
- Heinlein, Double Star — political identity thriller; quick read.
Good on audio (great narration)
Vetted for the recording, not just the book. Antidote to the Egan / Three-Body bad-reader problem.
- Weir, Project Hail Mary (narr. Ray Porter) — problem-solving hard SF; Porter builds a whole musical alien language by voice. 2022 Audiobook of the Year; start here.
- Corey, The Expanse (Leviathan Wakes…) (narr. Jefferson Mays) — propulsive space opera with a long runway for runs and bikes.
- Stephenson, Anathem (multicast) — monastic, philosophical hard SF; feeds the consciousness thread.
- Jemisin, The Fifth Season (narr. Robin Miles) — decorated narrator’s showcase; audio smooths the hard second-person structure.
- Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow (narr. Nicholas Guy Smith) — not SF; warm, savoring, Epicurean in temperament.
- Scalzi, Old Man’s War (narr. William Dufris) — explicit Starship Troopers homage; the clean next step after Heinlein.
- Brown, Red Rising (narr. Tim Gerard Reynolds) — legendary narration; easy to binge while moving.
- Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built — short, gentle, philosophical solarpunk; quiet Epicurean palate cleanser.
Cool and dreamy (the Piranesi / Perfection / Air thread)
One tone, two poles: immersive-dreamy interiority vs detached-ironic surfaces. Reading a strong pick from each to find which one it actually is. Slog lives at either extreme (plotless and slow one way, airless and characterless the other). Anchors already read: Perfection, Piranesi, Air.
Immersive / dreamy — time in one consciousness, texture, uneventful by design:
- Ogawa, The Memory Police — a sealed island world quietly dissolving; spare, uncanny, deep melancholy under still prose. Strongest overall match; the accessible starter.
- Murnane, The Plains — a man contemplates an invented inland country; hermetic, dreamy. Shortest and purest of the set.
- Abe, The Woman in the Dunes — one man trapped in a sand pit; uncanny, hypnotic, propulsive. Non-slog entry point.
- Borges, Ficciones — impossible architectures; “The Library of Babel” is basically the House’s blueprint. The fountainhead for Piranesi.
- Oyamada, The Hole — deadpan and slippery; the ordinary sliding into the uncanny.
- Walser, Jakob von Gunten — aimless dreamy school-for-servants; the Swiss-German ancestor Kracht writes downstream of.
- Ishiguro, The Unconsoled — dream logic at length; the most Piranesi-like thing he wrote. Slog risk: 500pp of dream.
- Mann, The Magic Mountain — boredom and time dilation in a sealed sanatorium. The deep end; live in it for a month or skip.
- Sebald, The Rings of Saturn — a walking, digressive, melancholy mind; less plot than motion. Immersive ancestor; can drift.
Cool / ironic — deadpan surfaces, detachment, a life catalogued:
- Camus, The Stranger — Meursault, a man estranged from his own life and unmoved by its meaning; the origin of the detached-narrator lineage. Short. The tonal ancestor under this whole pole.
- Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties — the direct ancestor of Perfection; a life told through its objects. Short. Start here to test the cool pole.
- Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy — nouveau roman at its purest; psychology drained out into the furniture. The cold extreme; slog risk if the chill leaves nothing to hold.
- McCarthy, Remainder — a man reconstructs half-remembered scenes; deadpan estrangement with an actual engine.
- Kitamura, Intimacies — an estranged narrator observing a glassy expat world; measured chill.
- Cusk, Outline — narrator nearly absent, everyone else talking; cool, sharp, absorbing.
- Cole, Open City — melancholic urban drift, essayistic; beauty shadowed by emptiness.
- Baker, The Mezzanine — a whole novel inside one escalator ride; the detail you love, played deadpan and funny.
Finished: Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin Finished, liked it: Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning — demographics is the locked-in pillar; the US-quits-the-seas collapse is the contingent, weaker leg. Welded together they overreach into apocalypse. Unresolved tension: geographic determinism vs the whole thing hinging on American choice. Finished, with notes: Children of Time, Recursion, Detour, Perfection, Piranesi
Films and TV
[cold]Kinds of Kindness — Lanthimos triptych on control, devotion, and who owns you. If Bugonia landed, this is more of him, colder.[wry, uneasy]A Different Man — a man gets a new face, then watches someone else play the old him; identity comedy that curdles. Bugonia’s self-delusion, different key.[heavy epic]The Brutalist — postwar émigré architect, art against capital, shot as a real epic. One Battle’s ambition and sweep.[heavy]Nickel Boys — Jim Crow reform school told almost entirely in first-person POV; formally daring, heavy. For the camera experiment as much as the story.[gentle]After Yang — a family’s android breaks down; a quiet meditation on memory and what counts as a life. The thinky sci-fi under Bugonia’s premise, played tender not paranoid.[eerie, sad]I Saw the TV Glow — two teens and a canceled show that may be more real than their lives; unreality and identity. Dread-tinged but idea-driven, not horror.[fun]Anora — sex worker marries a Russian heir; class and self-invention, kinetic, Best Picture. One Battle’s manic energy and comedy.[tense]Weapons — a town’s children all vanish at 2:17am; dread-logic mystery. Backrooms’ liminal unease with a real engine under it.[dark, tense]Longlegs — occult procedural, all atmosphere and threat. Same creeping wrongness as Backrooms.[fun]Challengers — Guadagnino tennis love triangle; propulsive, stylish. For the craft and momentum.[quiet, eerie]Presence — Soderbergh ghost story shot entirely from the ghost’s POV. A formal camera trick like Backrooms.[cold, bleak]Under the Skin (Glazer) — alien as anthropologist; nearly wordless, pure idea and dread. Dead-center pick; start here.[tense]Ex Machina (Garland) — tight AI-consciousness chamber piece. The other bullseye.[cold, dread]The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Lanthimos) — coldest, most unsettling logic puzzle he’s made.[heavy]The Master (PTA) — two men, control and belief; his most cerebral.[calm]Columbus (Kogonada) — two people and modernist architecture; stillness as the point. Same register as After Yang.[unhinged]The Lighthouse (Eggers) — two-hander descent into madness; claustrophobic and strange.[bittersweet]The Florida Project (Sean Baker) — poverty from a kid’s-eye view; devastating without saying so.[anxious, wild]Beau Is Afraid (Ari Aster) — three-hour anxiety odyssey; divisive, pure thinky-absurd.[fun, wild]Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley) — telemarketer discovers a “white voice”; anti-capitalist satire that goes completely off the rails. One Battle’s absurdist-political cousin.[fun, big-hearted]Everything Everywhere All at Once — multiverse chaos with real feeling underneath; kinetic and thinky at once.[fun]Glass Onion — Rian Johnson whodunit; brisk, clever, satisfying.[fun, stylish]The Grand Budapest Hotel — Wes Anderson at his most delightful and precise. For the craft, zero homework.[fun, sharp]American Fiction — a novelist writes the cynical book the market wants; publishing satire, smart and warm.[fun]Palm Springs — time-loop romcom that actually has ideas under the jokes.[fun, mean]Triangle of Sadness — eat-the-rich satire on a luxury cruise gone wrong; The Menu’s nearest cousin, same squirm.
The canon (Letterboxd required-reading; actually good)
[aching, romantic]In the Mood for Love — Wong Kar-wai; restraint and longing, the most-flexed four-favorite. Watch first.[slow, heavy]Stalker — Tarkovsky; a slow walk into a wish-granting Zone. The deep end.[eerie dream]Mulholland Drive — Lynch; dream logic and identity, the one that rewards a rewatch.[bleak]Synecdoche, New York — Kaufman; a life staged as an endless play. Heavy.[gutting]Aftersun — a father-daughter holiday remembered; quiet, gutting.[melancholy]Paris, Texas — Wenders; American loneliness, one of the great endings.[light]Chungking Express — Wong Kar-wai; the light, lovesick counterpart to In the Mood.[harrowing]Come and See — the harrowing WWII one; watch once, never again.
Watched: Sinners (2025, liked it) · The Backrooms, Obsession, One Battle After Another, Bugonia (all liked) · Portrait of a Lady on Fire (loved it) · The Menu (loved it; dark satire, funny and deeply uncomfortable)
Music
- Brian Eno, ambient catalogue — Music for Airports, On Land. Connects to ambient drone machine build.