I can’t say that I read as much as I would have liked during 2019, but I made a concerted effort in the final third of the year to set aside a dedicated part of each day to spend reading. All told, I completed 12 books over the course of 2019 (and dabbled in a few others, some will be finished in 2020, others probably permanently set aside) — here are the titles:
- Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
- How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone (Brian McCullough)
- The Laws of Simplicity (John Maeda)
- The Paper Menagerie and Other Short Stories (Ken Liu)
- Prisoner’s Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory and The Puzzle of the Bomb (William Poundstone)
- Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (Carlo Rovelli, et al.)
- 1984 (George Orwell)
- Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life (Nir Eyal)
- The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu)
- The Dark Forest (Cixin Liu)
- Death’s End (Cixin Liu)
- Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (Patrick Radden Keefe)
This year marked my first foray into modern science-/speculative-fiction. Both Ken Liu’s short stories and Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy are incredibly rich and thought-provoking.
I also dipped back into the classics with 1984. The social/political commentary continues to be applicable today.
Skin in the Game was a bit of a plodding read, but introduced me to some interesting concepts, like the Lindy Effect. It also reinforced some ideas I’ve been mulling over regarding the perils of applying statistical measures in decisions where asymmetry in risk/reward exist.
Finally, I found Say Nothing to be a remarkably well written history of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. My wife and I visited Belfast in 2018; I both wish I’d been able to read this book prior to visiting and found the context provided by my time there to evoke even more immersion in an already-immersive work.
Machad[.i/]o 