Road to Reality by Rodger Penrose

It is out of filial obligation that I wanted to read this book. I am indebted to my physics professor father for using tiny rectangles to show me how to calculate the area under a parabola when I was in 4th grade. He instilled in me the belief that the world is both incredibly complex, but that math and science were tools that we could use to understand it. Years later, I regret that I have not learned as much physics as I could have. Though I do not remember where, this book was promised to me as the most efficient path to having a firm mathematical understanding of general relativity and quantum physics. I probably will never know whether that promise holds up.

Wolfram Physics by Stephen Wolfram and contributors

That spark eventually turned into a deep love of logic, programming languages, and the foundations of math. After reading Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science I thought this might let me understand the foundations of physics from a computational perspective to replace the quantum physics foundations I was neglecting to read about.

Accelerando by Charles Stross

Do I need to read this book as we increasingly living in it? My favorite manager recommended Accelerando as I complained that the systems we were building would be obsolete in 1-2 years. Instead, as my motivation drained and my despair increased, I increasingly read LessWrong and kept up with the latest AI news.

The Consciousness Instinct by Michael S. Gazzaniga

Other than a brief moment of insanity, when I thought reading Gary Markus’ Kluge might make me more sympathetic to his increasingly insane AI timelines, this has remained my top choice for getting a more up to date picture of the field of Cognitive Science. I mostly haven’t read it because I wasn’t able to get an audiobook from my libraries.

Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

I managed to read Worm by Wildbow even without an audiobook. My libraries also doesn’t have an audiobook of this; I’m amazed I never got around to reading this regardless.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

This book is revered by many of my friends. I’ve felt that I lack the harmony and attention I need to be able to give this book; perhaps reading this book that would help grant me that harmony and attention.

The books I have forgotten

I remember next to nothing not inferable from the title for any of these books, but have written paragraphs for each of them: David Epstein’s Range, Caroline Criado Perez - Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw, Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain, William MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future, Michael Dummit’s The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years, Charles L. Marohn Jr. - Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation Systems for Strong Towns.

Other books, I didn’t even consider important enough to write anything down for.

It’s sad to contemplate the time and attention I lost by reading without purpose.

How to write good prompts by Andy Matuschak

Perhaps someday I’ll use Anki or flashcards to remember the things that I find the most important. This seems like a useful guide for doing so well. Mnomonic medium not book.