Deep Reading

BigCat's Close-Reading Shelf

One book a day · the distilled essence · read this page instead of the whole book
Mind, Psychology & Self 11/11 Read 1Thinking, Fast and Slow — two systems in your head, and how they fool youDaniel Kahneman Read 14Escape from Freedom — why people hand back the freedom they just wonErich Fromm Read 15Flow — the best moments come from total absorption in a hard, worthy taskMihaly Csikszentmihalyi Read 16Man's Search for Meaning — the last freedom no camp can takeViktor Frankl Read 28What Life Should Mean to You — which way you point inferiority decides allAlfred Adler Read 52aThe Interpretation of Dreams — what you remember is a doctored translationSigmund Freud Read 52bCivilization and Its Discontents — forbidden aggression becomes your conscienceSigmund Freud Read 81Man and His Symbols — the myths you discarded now decide for youCarl Jung Read 84Give and Take — both ends of the ladder are giversAdam Grant Read 85The Geography of Thought — he saw the fish, you saw the pondRichard Nisbett Read 98The Varieties of Religious Experience — judge it by fruits, not rootsWilliam James
Philosophy, Ideas & Literature 52/60 Read 8Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — the cycle you're really working on is yourselfRobert M. Pirsig Read 9Meditations — the world is not yours to run, but your view of it isMarcus Aurelius Read 10The Republic — justice is the healthy order of a soul ruled by reasonPlato Read 12Discipline and Punish — the most efficient control makes you watch yourselfMichel Foucault Read 13The Second Sex — one is not born, but becomes, a womanSimone de Beauvoir Read 23aThe Brothers Karamazov — if there is no God, is everything permitted?Fyodor Dostoevsky Read 23bCrime and Punishment — a murder, and the conscience that convicts itFyodor Dostoevsky Read 24A Theory of Justice — not knowing who you'll be born as, what society would you pick?John Rawls Read 29Ways of Seeing — looking is never innocent; whom does it serveJohn Berger Read 30Walden — the cost of a thing is the life you pay for itHenry David Thoreau Read 31Nicomachean Ethics — good people are made by doing, not by knowingAristotle Read 36aThe Iliad — one man's wrath, and pity for our mortalityHomer Read 36bThe Odyssey — ten years homeward: the archetype of Western narrativeHomer Read 37Confessions — I want to, so why can't I do it?Augustine Read 38The Divine Comedy — the punishment is your own shapeDante Read 39aHamlet — not nerve he lacks, but ground he can trustShakespeare Read 39bKing Lear — subtract everything, see what is leftShakespeare Read 40Don Quixote — a delusion dies not of exposure but of indulgenceCervantes Read 41Essays — what do I know? doubt written as a questionMontaigne Read 45The Tale of Genji — the more you can feel, the more you loseMurasaki Shikibu Read 50Meditations on First Philosophy — throw it all out, see what ground is leftDescartes Read 51Critique of Pure Reason — objects must fit you to count as objectsKant Read 54Philosophical Investigations — don't ask what a word stands for, watch what it doesLudwig Wittgenstein Read 55Being and Time — you are not in time, you are timeHeidegger Read 56Ethics — God is Nature, and loves no oneSpinoza Read 58War and Peace — nobody is driving historyTolstoy Read 59Moby-Dick — the whale you hate has never heard of youMelville Read 61In Search of Lost Time — one mouthful brings the whole lost world backProust Read 62One Hundred Years of Solitude — the names change, the fate does notGarcía Márquez Read 63Ulysses — the epic, broken up and handed outJoyce Read 64Dream of the Red Chamber — no villain, and everything is lost anywayCao Xueqin Read 66Phenomenology of Spirit — truth is not a conclusion but the road walkedHegel Read 67Nineteen Eighty-Four — they want belief, not obedienceGeorge Orwell Read 68The Aeneid — the founding bill, paid by othersVirgil Read 69The World as Will and Representation — the urge has no reason and no goalSchopenhauer Read 71aThus Spoke Zarathustra — after God, who legislates?Friedrich Nietzsche Read 71bBeyond Good and Evil — is your morality a master's or a slave's?Friedrich Nietzsche Read 74Reality+ — virtual worlds are not fake worldsDavid Chalmers Read 77aThe Myth of Sisyphus — no meaning, and no need to dieAlbert Camus Read 77bThe Stranger — condemned for not crying, not for killingAlbert Camus Read 79Brave New World — no need to ban books, nobody wants oneAldous Huxley Read 86Summa Theologiae — grace does not abolish nature but perfects itThomas Aquinas Read 87The Hebrew Bible — even God agreed to be bound by contractVarious Read 88The Quran — not a book, a recitationAnonymous Read 89The Epic of Gilgamesh — he chased deathlessness, came home with a wallAnonymous Read 92The Trial — nobody names the charge, so you go looking for itFranz Kafka Read 97Paradise Lost — the devil had to be convincing for the defence to workJohn Milton Read 99An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — habit, not reason, holds up tomorrowDavid Hume Read 105Middlemarch — ideals are rarely crushed, mostly worn awayGeorge Eliot Read 107Things Fall Apart — civilizations are not defeated, but taken apartChinua Achebe Read 108Beloved — a mother, a murdered child, a past that returnsToni Morrison Read 109Fear and Trembling — either faith outranks ethics, or he's a murdererSøren Kierkegaard
Read 113Invisible Man — a Black man rendered invisible in AmericaRalph Ellison
Read 114Ficciones — labyrinths, mirrors, and infinityJorge Luis Borges
Read 115Faust — a soul wagered for knowledge and experienceJohann Wolfgang von Goethe
Read 116On the Nature of Things — atoms and void: ancient materialism in verseLucretius
Read 118The Tale of the Heike — the proud fall: a samurai clan's ruinAnonymous
Read 119The Master and Margarita — the devil visits Soviet MoscowMikhail Bulgakov
Read 120The Enneads — the One and emanation: Neoplatonism's mysticismPlotinus
Read 121The Masnavi — the summit of Sufi mystical poetryRumi
Eastern Thought 12/13 Read 6Tao Te Ching — the Dao never forces, yet everything gets doneLaozi Read 7Zhuangzi — what binds you isn't the world but the grid in your headZhuang Zhou Read 32The Analects — you are made a person by doing; rén lands inside ritualConfucius Read 33Bhagavad Gita — a right to the action, never the fruit: acting without grasping is freedomVyasa (attrib.) Read 34The Upanishads — the one who watches is you; Self and cosmos are oneAnonymous Read 35The Dhammapada — mind precedes all: tame this mind and suffering ceasesAnonymous Read 70The Platform Sutra — dust lands only because you built the standHuineng Read 72The Art of War — win before you fight, or you cannot fightSun Tzu Read 76Instructions for Practical Living — you didn't act, so you never knewWang Yangming Read 83The Diamond Sutra — whatever you can grasp is already not itThe Buddha (tr. Kumārajīva) Read 101Mencius — you can; you simply will notMencius Read 104The I Ching — it grades your stance, not your fateAnonymous
Read 117The Ramayana — Rama's exile and dharma: India's great epicValmiki
Science & Nature 14/15 Read 2The Selfish Gene — you're not the gene's purpose, you're its survival machineRichard Dawkins Read 17Gödel, Escher, Bach — the "I" is a loop matter makes by bending back on itselfDouglas Hofstadter Read 18aThe Order of Time — physics strips time away, then hands it back to usCarlo Rovelli Read 18bHelgoland — nothing exists in itself; things appear only in interactionCarlo Rovelli Read 20Being You — consciousness is the brain's controlled hallucination, and so are youAnil Seth Read 53On the Origin of Species — the shoddy bits are the proofDarwin Read 57The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — not a building going up, but regime changeThomas Kuhn Read 73The Embodied Mind — the world isn't ready-made; the path is laid in walkingVarela, Thompson & Rosch Read 75Complexity: A Guided Tour — no one is in charge, yet the whole gets smartMelanie Mitchell Read 80Superintelligence — danger needs no malice, only a goal that missesNick Bostrom Read 93The Principia — the apple and the Moon obey one lawIsaac Newton Read 106Silent Spring — the spring when no birds sangRachel Carson Read 110A Brief History of Time — a beginning with no edge, like the South PoleStephen Hawking Read 112The Feynman Lectures on Physics — if one sentence survives, make it atomsRichard Feynman
Read 122What Is Life? — life feeds on negative entropyErwin Schrödinger
Society, History & Civilization 23/23 Read 3aSapiens — shared fictions let strangers cooperate at scaleYuval Noah Harari Read 3bHomo Deus — a sated humanity sets out to upgrade itself into a godYuval Noah Harari Read 4aGuns, Germs, and Steel — the inequality of nations is rooted in geography, not raceJared Diamond Read 4bCollapse — why once-thriving societies destroy themselvesJared Diamond Read 11The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism — earning hard yet never enjoying it, an accidental by-product of religious anxietyMax Weber Read 21From the Soil — the differential mode: ties ripple outward from the selfFei Xiaotong Read 221587 — an uneventful year hiding a civilization's institutional dead endRay Huang Read 25Amusing Ourselves to Death — ruined by what we loveNeil Postman Read 42The Prince — asks only what works, never what's rightNiccolò Machiavelli Read 43Leviathan — covenants without the sword are but wordsThomas Hobbes Read 44The Social Contract — free only under laws you helped makeJean-Jacques Rousseau Read 46On Liberty — unless you harm others, how you live is yoursJohn Stuart Mill Read 47The Muqaddimah — the force that wins a realm is spent by holding itIbn Khaldun Read 48Democracy in America — people love equality more than freedomAlexis de Tocqueville Read 78Eichmann in Jerusalem — it took no monster to do thisHannah Arendt Read 82The Better Angels of Our Nature — violence fell because the arithmetic changedSteven Pinker Read 90Second Treatise of Government — power is borrowed, and taking it back is not revoltJohn Locke Read 91Records of the Grand Historian — if the good starve, does Heaven mean anythingSima Qian Read 94The Origins of Totalitarianism — it destroys the space between peopleHannah Arendt Read 95History of the Peloponnesian War — justice holds only between equals in powerThucydides Read 102Orientalism — a body of knowledge that was never about the EastEdward W. Said Read 103The Wretched of the Earth — he called violence a cure but his case notes disagreedFrantz Fanon Read 111The Gulag Archipelago — the line between good and evil runs through every heartAleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Economics & Decisions 6/6 Read 5The Wealth of Nations — prosperity woven from specialization and free exchange by an "invisible hand"Adam Smith Read 26Antifragile — some things grow stronger when shakenNassim Taleb Read 27Poor Charlie's Almanack — being consistently not stupid beats occasional brillianceCharlie Munger Read 49Capital — every trade is fair, yet profit appearsKarl Marx Read 60The General Theory — mass unemployment can be an equilibriumKeynes Read 65The Road to Serfdom — good planners end up in the same placeHayek

Off-List · Ad-Hoc Reads

Career, Management & Leadership 23/23 —Wild Courage — nine insults that are actually engines of successJenny Wood —Radical Candor — care personally and challenge directly, at onceKim Scott —An Elegant Puzzle — systems thinking for running an engineering orgWill Larson —High Output Management — your output is your whole team's outputAndy Grove —The Manager's Path — each rung up is a whole new jobCamille Fournier —The Making of a Manager — a first-hand field guide to year oneJulie Zhuo —Staff Engineer — not a more senior senior; a different jobWill Larson —The Great CEO Within — the bottleneck is usually the CEOMatt Mochary —Turn the Ship Around! — stop giving orders, let them say "I intend to"L. David Marquet —Measure What Matters — goals you dare set vs. goals you are graded onJohn Doerr —The Five Dysfunctions of a Team — the base leaks, every floor above fallsPatrick Lencioni —Team of Teams — the bottleneck is the wall between teamsStanley McChrystal —The Staff Engineer's Path — leading a whole org without a single reportTanya Reilly —The Software Engineer's Guidebook — every rung redefines your outputGergely Orosz —The Effective Engineer — same hour, aimed where leverage is highestEdmond Lau —Team Topologies — your team chart is your future system diagramSkelton & Pais —Accelerate — speed and stability aren't a trade-off, they rise togetherForsgren, Humble & Kim —The Software Architect Elevator — the broken part is the shaft between floorsGregor Hohpe —The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — win with yourself before anyone elseStephen R. Covey —The Speed of Trust — thick process marks a thin trust accountStephen M. R. Covey —The 4 Disciplines of Execution — strategy dies in the daily whirlwindMcChesney, Covey & Huling —Amoeba Management — split the firm into units that keep their own booksKazuo Inamori —Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings — most great leaders could have been replacedJared Diamond
Habits, Willpower & Self-Improvement 5/5 —Atomic Habits — 1% compounding and the four lawsJames Clear —The Power of Habit — the cue-routine-reward loopCharles Duhigg —The Willpower Instinct — the "I will / I won't / I want" powersKelly McGonigal —Good Habits, Bad Habits — 43% of behavior is habit, not willpowerWendy Wood —Mindset — "you're smart" announces you are being measuredCarol Dweck
Health, Longevity & Body 5/5 —Outlive — don't just live long; train decades ahead for your last decadePeter Attia —ROAR & Next Level — women aren't small men: how to train and eat across lifeStacy Sims —Ageless Aging — the extra years women get are sick yearsMaddy Dychtwald —The Body Keeps the Score — the body doesn't know it's overBessel van der Kolk —Protocols — it's not discipline you lack, it's the right stateAndrew Huberman
Communication, Persuasion & Negotiation 5/5 —Getting to Yes — negotiate interests, not positionsFisher & Ury —Never Split the Difference — don't split it, get "that's right"Chris Voss —Nonviolent Communication — under every accusation, an unmet needMarshall Rosenberg —Influence — seven switches that fire even when you see them comingRobert Cialdini —Crucial Conversations — the anger comes from the story you told yourselfPatterson et al.
Focus, Time & Energy 3/3 —Deep Work — one switch and the rest of your day isn't yoursCal Newport —Getting Things Done — your brain is for thinking, not rememberingDavid Allen —Four Thousand Weeks — you can't finish, and that's the starting pointOliver Burkeman
Thinking, Decisions & Strategy 4/4 —Think Again — hold opinions as hypotheses, not identityAdam Grant —Thinking in Systems — new people, same structure, same behaviourDonella Meadows —Good Strategy Bad Strategy — no trade-off, no strategyRichard Rumelt —Superforecasting — an unscored forecast is just a performanceTetlock & Gardner
Cognition, Language & Ideas 3/4 —Metaphors We Live By — metaphor isn't rhetoric, it's the skeleton of thoughtLakoff & Johnson —The Social Animal — not what kind of person, but which situationElliot Aronson —NeuroTribes — autism as human variation, not a list of deficitsSteve Silberman
—Why Buddhism Is True — your brain was built by evolution to fool youRobert Wright
Economics, Society & Public Issues 6/6 —Poor Economics — every "irrational" choice hides a ledger you can't seeBanerjee & Duflo —Capital in the Twenty-First Century — the equal decades were the exceptionThomas Piketty —Fault Lines — when wages stall, governments hand out credit insteadRaghuram Rajan —Invisible Women — no data gets read as no problemCaroline Criado Perez —East West Street — protect the group, or protect the individualPhilippe Sands —The Psychology of Money — wealth is the money you didn't spendMorgan Housel
Philosophy, Life & Biography 3/3 —The Wisdom of Life — happiness is negative; you can only subtract painArthur Schopenhauer —Lust for Life — starting at twenty-seven, ten years, two thousand worksIrving Stone —A Compass to Fulfillment — only mindset can go negativeKazuo Inamori