Library
This is a massive (but extremely incomplete) list of things I’ve read or mean to read.
The following lists are seriated.
Currently reading§
| How to Solve It | George Pólya |
| The Visual Display of Quantitative Information | Edward Tufte |
| The Elements of Typographic Style | Robert Bringhurst |
| The Copyeditor’s Handbook | Amy Einsohn |
| A Dictionary of Borges | Evelyn Fishburn & Psiche Hughes |
| Labyrinths | Jorge Luis Borges |
| The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922–1986 | Jorge Luis Borges |
| Flatline Constructs | Mark Fisher |
| A Scanner Darkly | Philip K. Dick |
| The Tainted Cup | Robert Jackson Bennett |
| Kidnapped | Robert Louis Stevenson |
| The Fellowship of the Ring | J. R. R. Tolkien |
| Earthsea: The First Four Books | Ursula K. Le Guin |
| The House in the Cerulean Sea | T. J. Klune |
| Night Watch | Terry Pratchett |
| Candide & Other Works | Voltaire |
| Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion | David Hume |
| Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong | J. L. Mackie |
| The Nicomachean Ethics | Aristotle (tr. Ross) |
| The Philosophy of Action | ed. Alan R. White |
| Consciousness Explained | Daniel C. Dennett |
| The Selfish Gene | Richard Dawkins |
| The Demon-Haunted World Required reading for fighting dragons permeable to flour. |
Carl Sagan |
Read§
| the void | nostalgebraist |
| Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach | Stuart Russell & Peter Norvig |
| Introduction to Algorithms | Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest & Stein |
| The Computer and the Brain | John von Neumann |
| God & Golem, Inc. | Norbert Wiener |
| Superintelligence | Nick Bostrom |
| The Sequences | Eliezer Yudkowsky |
| Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality | Eliezer Yudkowsky |
| What If? | Randall Munroe |
| Mort | Terry Pratchett |
| Guards! Guards! | Terry Pratchett |
| Going Postal | Terry Pratchett |
| Eragon | Christopher Paolini |
| Eldest | Christopher Paolini |
| Brisingr | Christopher Paolini |
| Inheritance | Christopher Paolini |
| Northern Lights | Philip Pullman |
| The Subtle Knife | Philip Pullman |
| The Amber Spyglass | Philip Pullman |
| Raven’s Gate | Anthony Horowitz |
| Evil Star | Anthony Horowitz |
| Nightrise | Anthony Horowitz |
| Necropolis | Anthony Horowitz |
| Oblivion | Anthony Horowitz |
| At the Mountains of Madness | H. P. Lovecraft |
| The King in Yellow | Robert W. Chambers |
| And Then There Were None | Agatha Christie |
| Little Brother | Cory Doctorow |
| The Raw Shark Texts | Steven Hall |
| The Garden of Forking Paths | Jorge Luis Borges |
| Stories of Your Life and Others | Ted Chiang |
| There Is No Antimemetics Division | qntm |
| Ra | qntm |
| Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories | qntm |
| The Metropolitan Man | Alexander Wales |
| Branches on the Tree of Time | Alexander Wales |
| Instruments of Destruction | Alexander Wales |
| This Is How You Lose the Time War | Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone |
| The Machine Stops | E. M. Forster |
| The Dispossessed | Ursula K. Le Guin |
| The Left Hand of Darkness | Ursula K. Le Guin |
| The Serviceberry | Robin Wall Kimmerer |
Docket§
| Machine Decision Is Not Final | ed. Benjamin Bratton, Anna Greenspan, Amy Ireland & Bogna Konior |
| If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies | Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares |
| A Map that Reflects the Territory | LessWrong |
| Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking | Daniel C. Dennett |
| Kinds of Minds | Daniel C. Dennett |
| God’s Utility Function | Richard Dawkins |
| The Character of Physical Law | Richard P. Feynman |
| “Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman!” | Richard P. Feynman |
| A Mind at Play: The Brilliant Life of Claude Shannon | Jimmy Soni & Rob Goodman |
| Behind Deep Blue | Feng-hsiung Hsu |
| Artificial Life | Steven Levy |
| An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms | Melanie Mitchell |
| The C Programming Language | Kernighan & Ritchie |
| Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries | Kory Stamper |
| True Color | Kory Stamper |
| The Advancement of Learning | Francis Bacon |
| The Story of Mankind | Hendrik Willem van Loon |
| Middlemarch | George Eliot |
| Dracula | Bram Stoker |
| A Man Called Ove | Fredrik Backman |
| Intermezzo | Sally Rooney |
| Almond | Won-pyung Sohn |
| Worth the Candle | Alexander Wales |
| The Northern Caves | nostalgebraist |
| The Two Towers | J. R. R. Tolkien |
| The Return of the King | J. R. R. Tolkien |
| A Deadly Education | Naomi Novik |
| Katabasis | R. F. Kuang |
| Babel | R. F. Kuang |
| Kraken | China Miéville |
| Piranesi | Susanna Clarke |
| Invisible Cities | Italo Calvino |
| If on a winter’s night a traveller | Italo Calvino |
| Infinite Jest | David Foster Wallace |
| Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance | Robert M. Pirsig |
| Gödel, Escher, Bach | Douglas Hofstadter |
| Science and Sanity | Alfred Korzybski |
| Language, Truth and Logic | A. J. Ayer |
| Meaning and the Moral Sciences | Hilary Putnam |
| Reasons and Persons | Derek Parfit |
| Utilitarianism | John Stuart Mill |
| A Short History of Ethics | Alasdair MacIntyre |
| Debt: The First 5,000 Years | David Graeber |
| Moral Ambition | Rutger Bregman |
| Natural Causes | Barbara Ehrenreich |
| The Anthropocene Reviewed | John Green |
| Seeing Like a State | James C. Scott |
| Capitalist Realism | Mark Fisher |
| Enshittification | Cory Doctorow |
| The Age of Em | Robin Hanson |
| Permutation City | Greg Egan |
| Blindsight | Peter Watts |
| V for Vendetta | Alan Moore & David Lloyd |
| Monstrous Regiment | Terry Pratchett |
| Small Gods | Terry Pratchett |
| Unsong | Scott Alexander |