Must-Reads

I may update this page with my full library soon.

Non-Fiction

A quick note on my philosophy of reading non-fiction. Oftentimes, the core ideas of the books I read are summarized in the first few chapters and the rest of the book is devoted to providing additional arguments or evidence for its core ideas. This isn’t the case for all books – especially books that recount history like Sapiens – but I get the feeling that for many self-help books, authors have been pressured by their publishers to thicken their books to help consumers justify their purchase. For this reason, I’ve probably skipped pages or chapters here and there for some of the books on this list, though I’m confident that I understand their core intellectual contributions.

Life-changing books (in the order I read them)

• Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
• Life 3.0 - Max Tegmark
• The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
• Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter (more than a few chapters, but not all)
• Eros and Civilization - Herbert Marcuse

Books on my own To-Read list (have started most, but finished none)

• The Dragons of Eden - Carl Sagan
• Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Atomic Habits - James Clear

Great books to flip through

• A Pattern Language - Alexander et al.
• A New Kind of Science - Stephen Wolfram
• Tribe of Mentors - Timothy Ferriss
• Making Sense - Sam Harris

Most inspirational academic papers I’ve read

• On the necessity of abstraction - Konidaris
• From Skills to Symbols - Konidaris, Kaelbling, and Lozano-Perez
• How to Grow a Mind - Tenenbaum et al.
• Neurosymbolic AI - Garcez and Lamb
• Composition in Distributional Models of Semantics - Mitchell and Lapata

Fiction

Top Sci-Fi Books

• iRobot - Isaac Asimov
• 2001: A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke
• Contact - Carl Sagan
• The Martian - Andy Weir

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