Shelf

October 01, 2025

I used to read widely. Never the same book twice. Over time I became intensely dissatisfied with my understanding of the world. I spoke of topics while my words rung shallow, I was right without ever quite knowing why. Writing, speaking, thinking felt empty. It was not that I had never understood, nor that I could not with some effort. The understanding was just never all mine.

Now I only read the books below, and in some sense treat them as a set of prompts for data generation. As AI advances, I suspect the value of shallow understanding will crater while the value of deep understanding will rise, so in another sense these represent the intellectual bets I want to make over the next decade. Consider choosing your bets as well.

• Automata Studies
• Nonequilibrium Quantum Field Theory
• Mean Field Models for Spin Glasses: Volume 1
• Homotopy Type Theory: Univalent Foundations of Mathematics
• Finnegans Wake
• The Tao Is Silent
• Pieces of the Action
• The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025
• The Fabric Book
• Ideal Commonwealths
• Venus as a Boy
• Kalpa Imperial
• The Cyberiad
• Studies in Hegelian Cosmology
• Markings
• The Pale King
• Steps to an Ecology of Mind
• Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence
• Xenosystems
• The Red Book of Varieties and Schemes
• The Rising Sea: Foundations of Algebraic Geometry
• Topology from a Differentiable Viewpoint
• The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
• Grand Futures
• Intercourse
• Synchronicity
• Fanged Noumena
• Log-Concave Sampling
• The Energetics of Computing in Life and Machines
• Proceedings of the 27th Solvay Conference on Physics | The Physics of Living Matter: Space, Time, and Information