March 12, 2024

What I Read in 2023

Took me long enough to write this one up :)

January

Blindsight - This book is bonkers (in that it posits a world where Vampires are real) but was very interesting and made me reflect on the nature of consciousness.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals - A philosophical meditation on how to ensure you accomplish the important stuff and enjoy your life from a self-described “recovered productivity obsessive”.

Dopamine: The Molecule of More - Spanish translation
Hackers - Never read this before. Pretty cool stories from the people who created so much of the culture of programming.
Super Pumped - Spanish translation - I knew a lot of the story but not all of it. There is something resembling a greek tragedy in the story of Uber in that the things that made Travis Kalanick uniquely suited to lead Uber to success when they were upstarts combatting evil taxi monopolies (insane drive, pathological competitiveness, and a willingness to flout regulations) is also what made him uniquely ill-suited to lead a multi-billion dollar global company. This was fun to read in Spanish and pick up a bunch of startup vocabulary.
Echopraxia - Sequel to Blindsight. I enjoyed it significantly less than Blindsight.

The AI Revolution in Medicine - A team of medical doctors and researchers got early access to GPT-4 to see how it affected care. This mirrored a lot of my thoughts about the possibilities and limitations of generative AI. I am convinced widespread AI will be a society altering change, probably a bigger change than the adoption of personal computers and the internet.
Project Hail Mary - Spanish translation - I loved this book so much.

The Creative Act - Rick Rubin is a weird and uniquely talented dude. The book sometimes veers into faux mysticism that I’m constitutionally allergic to, but also contained some really good prompts to unblock thinking.
What’s Our Problem? - I love Wait But Why. Tim Urban makes a lot of very good points as he tries to figure out how societal discourse seems to have gone off the rails. I also think he oversimplifies quite a bit and falls victim to false equivalencies in several places. We should all aspire to consistently be high rung thinkers.
Action Hero Scouting Report - Shea Serrano is one of my favorite writers and I enjoy how much fun he’s having with little projects like this.
Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon - FTX is another story I’d followed and was fairly informed on but there still were a lot of absoluely amazing stories in here. I feel like Michael Lewis wrote this about as sympathetic to SBF as possible and I still read it as “he committed massive financial fraud”

Los Detectives Salvajes - Spanish - I spent 4½ months with with this book. I went into it pretty much entirely blank with only a vague recollection that Roberto Bolaño was a big deal when I was in Spain in 2003, died young, and occupies sort of a Spanish language David Foster Wallace niche in my mind. I won’t attempt to summarize the book, but it is very, very good. I’m glad I read it and am confident it’s going to stick with me for a long time.

Resumen de Historia del Ecuador - Spanish - We were going to Ecuador and I didn’t know anything about the history of the country so I found this 200 page cliff’s notes history written for Ecuadorean high school students.
The Savage Detectives Reread - I had a feeling I was missing quite a bit so sought out this academic English language book to get deeper context.
On the Origin of Species - We were going to the Galapagos, and I’d never actually read Darwin so I figured now was the time. Victorian prose is rough, but it is amazing how much he got right. I enjoyed this series of an evolutionary biologist blogging through reading the book in 2009.