The Newt and Demon
Edwin M. Griffiths
An alchemist and a demon run a shop in a swamp town. Low stakes, high comfort.
Mike Semenov / Library
What I would recommend.
A curated selection, not a log. Everything here is something I would hand to a friend and say "read this" or "watch this". I read far more than I watch.
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Reading now The Unbearable Lightness of Being Watching now Star Trek: The Next Generation
01 / Books
73 books.
Tree of Aeons
SpaizZzer
Reincarnated as a tree. Centuries pass, heroes come and go, and the tree keeps growing. Slow in the best sense.
Outlive
Peter Attia
The science and art of longevity: metabolic health, exercise, sleep, emotional health. The actionable half of the longevity shelf.
Taxtopia
The Rebel Accountant
An anonymous accountant on how the tax system really works, and for whom. Angrier and better informed than most economics writing.
All the Skills
Honour Rae
A deck-building LitRPG: a boy with no talent and a dragon egg. Progression driven by cards rather than stats.
Build
Tony Fadell
An unorthodox guide to making things worth making, from the iPod and Nest. Opinionated on hiring, management and when to quit.
The Power Law
Sebastian Mallaby
A history of venture capital from ARD to Sequoia and SoftBank. Explains why the asset class behaves the way it does.
He Who Fights with Monsters
Shirtaloon
An Australian wakes up in a magic world and talks his way through it. Big system, bigger mouth.
The Cold Start Problem
Andrew Chen
How network effects actually get started, from an a16z partner who ran growth at Uber. The atomic network is the idea worth stealing.
Dungeon Crawler Carl
Matt Dinniman
Earth is turned into a galactic game show and Carl descends with his cat. Violent, very funny, and secretly about keeping your humanity.
Lifespan
David A. Sinclair
Ageing as a disease of information loss. Speculative in places, but the epigenetic framing is useful.
Alchemy
Rory Sutherland
The surprising power of ideas that don't make sense. Why the logical solution is often the wrong one.
Ritualist
Dakota Krout
Completionist Chronicles book one: a man enters a VR world as a forbidden class and reads every scrap of lore. For people who do the side quests.
How to Change Your Mind
Michael Pollan
The history and new science of psychedelics, with the author as test subject. Even-handed and well sourced.
After On
Rob Reid
A social network wakes up and the Valley carries on pitching. A satire of start-up culture that doubles as a thought experiment on superintelligence.
Life Reset
Shemer Kuznits
New Era Online book one: a top player is cursed into a goblin body and builds a clan from nothing. Town-building and numbers that go up.
Stealing Fire
Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal
Flow states, from Navy SEALs to Burning Man. The research on altered states and performance, with the hype left in.
This Is Going to Hurt
Adam Kay
Diaries of a junior doctor in the NHS. Very funny until it suddenly is not.
We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
Dennis E. Taylor
First of the Bobiverse: a software engineer wakes up as a von Neumann probe and starts copying himself. Engineering problems treated as adventure.
Tools of Titans
Tim Ferriss
Distilled routines and tactics from a few hundred podcast guests. Best dipped into than read through.
Never Split the Difference
Chris Voss
An FBI hostage negotiator on tactical empathy, mirroring and calibrated questions. Works on landlords too.
Children of Time
Adrian Tchaikovsky
A terraforming experiment goes sideways and uplifts the wrong species. The spider civilisation is the best alien society in modern science fiction.
Seveneves
Neal Stephenson
The Moon breaks apart and humanity has two years to get off the surface. Orbital mechanics as plot, then a five-thousand-year jump.
The Membership Economy
Robbie Kellman Baxter
Why recurring relationships beat transactions. The playbook behind every subscription product.
The Culture Map
Erin Meyer
Eight scales for how cultures communicate, decide and disagree. Essential for anyone selling across the UK, Nordics and US.
Zero to One
Peter Thiel with Blake Masters
Competition is for losers; build a monopoly on something new. Short, contrarian, quotable.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Ben Horowitz
Running a company when there is no good option. The honest counterweight to every start-up memoir.
The Courage to Be Disliked
Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
Adlerian psychology as a dialogue between a philosopher and a sceptical youth. Separation of tasks is the idea that sticks.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
A brief history of humankind through three revolutions: cognitive, agricultural, scientific. Shared fictions as the human superpower.
Blindsight
Peter Watts
First contact handled by a crew that includes a vampire and a man with half a brain. Asks whether consciousness is an evolutionary mistake.
Horus Rising
Dan Abnett
Opens the Horus Heresy: the Imperium at its height, before the betrayal. Military science fiction with a tragic arc you already know the end of.
Little Black Book of Connections
Jeffrey Gitomer
6.5 assets for networking. A short, blunt manual on giving value before asking for it.
Metro 2033
Dmitry Glukhovsky
Survivors of nuclear war live in the Moscow Metro, one station per faction. The tunnels are the character.
Blue Ocean Strategy
W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
Make the competition irrelevant by creating new market space. The strategy canvas alone justifies the read.
Poor Charlie's Almanack
Charles T. Munger
Munger's talks and the latticework of mental models. Invert, always invert.
Empire of the Angels
Bernard Werber
A man dies and becomes a guardian angel to three mortals. Werber's playful metaphysics, part of the Thanatonauts cycle.
The Innovator's Dilemma
Clayton M. Christensen
Why well-run incumbents lose to worse, cheaper products. Disruption before the word was worn out.
Harry Potter
J. K. Rowling
All seven, from the cupboard under the stairs to the Battle of Hogwarts. A boarding-school story that grows up with its reader.
Red Mars
Kim Stanley Robinson
First of the Mars trilogy: the first hundred colonists argue about terraforming, politics and who owns a planet. Hard science fiction with real economics.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
Four lives in Prague around 1968, and the question of whether anything that happens once matters at all.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
Earth is demolished for a bypass and the last human hitches a lift. The funniest book about bureaucracy ever written.
Shōgun
James Clavell
An English pilot shipwrecked in 1600 Japan, drawn into the politics that made Tokugawa shogun. Twelve hundred pages that move.
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
Shunryu Suzuki
Talks on practice from the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities.
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
The Devil visits Stalin's Moscow with a talking cat; a writer's manuscript refuses to burn. Written in secret, published decades after the author died.
Dune
Frank Herbert
Ecology, religion and feudal politics on a desert planet whose spice runs the economy. Still the benchmark for world-building.
Hard to Be a God
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
An observer from a future Earth embedded in a medieval planet is forbidden to intervene. The Strugatskys on power and the limits of progress.
Solaris
Stanisław Lem
A sentient ocean answers a research station's probing by materialising their memories. The definitive argument that contact may be unintelligible.
Have Space Suit—Will Travel
Robert A. Heinlein
A teenager wins a second-hand space suit in a contest and ends up on trial for the whole human race. Heinlein's juveniles at their most generous.
The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien
A ring, a quest and the end of an age. The book the entire genre descends from.
East of Eden
John Steinbeck
Two families in the Salinas Valley and the Cain and Abel story retold. Timshel: thou mayest.
Foundation
Isaac Asimov
Psychohistory: predicting the fall of a galactic empire statistically and shortening the dark age that follows. The template for every long-range plan since.
The Martian Chronicles
Ray Bradbury
Linked stories of Earth colonising Mars and losing what it came with. Bradbury's prose over everything else he wrote, and he wrote a lot worth reading.
Three Comrades
Erich Maria Remarque
Three veterans run a garage in Weimar Germany; one falls in love. Friendship, cars and the dusk before the war.
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
A society engineered for contentment, and the savage who refuses it. The soft dystopia, which turned out to be the accurate one.
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
An American ambulance driver on the Italian front and the nurse he deserts the war for. Hemingway at his sparest.
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
A German schoolboy's class volunteers for the trenches. The war novel every other one answers to.
The Garin Death Ray
Aleksey Tolstoy
The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin: a Soviet pulp thriller about a scientist with a heat ray and a plan for world domination. Dated and glorious.
Ulysses
James Joyce
One day in Dublin, 16 June 1904, told in eighteen styles. Difficult, and worth it.
The Cherry Orchard
Anton Chekhov
A family loses the estate it cannot afford and will not sell. Chekhov called it a comedy.
The War of the Worlds
H. G. Wells
Martians invade Surrey and are beaten by bacteria. The original alien invasion, told as reportage.
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Three brothers, a murdered father, and the Grand Inquisitor. Dostoevsky's last and largest argument about God and freedom.
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
A student murders a pawnbroker to prove a theory and spends the book being hunted by his own conscience.
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
Pip, a secret benefactor and Miss Havisham's stopped clocks. Dickens' tightest plot.
Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol
A con man tours the provinces buying dead serfs still on the census. Gogol's comic epic of Russian landowners.
A Hero of Our Time
Mikhail Lermontov
Pechorin, the bored, brilliant officer in the Caucasus, told from five angles. The first Russian psychological novel.
Eugene Onegin
Alexander Pushkin
A novel in verse: a bored aristocrat rejects a girl, kills a friend, and regrets both. The foundation of Russian literature.
The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli
How to take and hold power, written for a Medici. Misread as cynical; it is mostly accurate.
Letters from a Stoic
Seneca
Seneca's letters to Lucilius on time, death and enough. The most practical Stoic text.
On Living and Dying Well
Cicero
Cicero on old age, friendship and duty, written in the last year of the Republic.
Bhagavad Gita
Vyasa (attrib.)
A dialogue on duty and detachment on the eve of a battle. Do the work, release the result.
The Last Days of Socrates
Plato
Euthyphro, Apology, Crito and Phaedo: Socrates on trial, in prison, and facing death without flinching.
Tao Te Ching
Laozi
Eighty-one short verses on acting without forcing. The quietest book on strategy there is.
The Art of War
Sun Tzu
Thirteen chapters on winning without fighting. Still the shortest serious book on strategy.
Nothing in this genre here.
02 / Films
7 films.
The Gentlemen
Guy Ritchie
An American cannabis baron tries to sell his British empire and everyone makes a move. Hugh Grant as a sleazy private investigator steals it.
Joker
Todd Phillips
Arthur Fleck's slow collapse in a Gotham that looks like 1981 New York. A character study wearing a comic-book costume.
RocknRolla
Guy Ritchie
London property, Russian money and a lucky painting. Ritchie's most quotable ensemble.
The Man from Earth
Richard Schenkman
A professor tells his colleagues he is 14,000 years old, in one room, in real time. Written by Jerome Bixby on his deathbed; no effects, all argument.
V for Vendetta
James McTeigue
A masked anarchist against a fascist Britain. Ideas are bulletproof.
Blade Runner
Ridley Scott
Replicants, rain and the question of what counts as alive. The look of every future city since.
The Godfather
Francis Ford Coppola
A family business. Still the best film about succession.
Nothing in this genre here.
03 / Series
6 series.
Chernobyl
Craig Mazin
Five episodes on the 1986 disaster and the cost of lies. The most precise television about engineering and bureaucracy ever made.
True Detective
Nic Pizzolatto
Season one: two detectives, seventeen years, one case in the Louisiana bayou. Time is a flat circle.
Silicon Valley
Mike Judge, John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky
A compression start-up and everything that goes wrong between seed and exit. Documentary-level accurate.
Person of Interest
Jonathan Nolan
A billionaire builds a machine that predicts crimes; it quietly becomes a show about artificial superintelligence. Ahead of its time.
Sherlock
Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat
Holmes in modern London with a smartphone. The first two series are as good as adaptation gets.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Gene Roddenberry
Picard's Enterprise: diplomacy first, phasers second. The optimistic future, with a moral dilemma an episode.
Nothing in this genre here.