The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. I can honestly say it's not only impacted the way I think about habits, but it's impacted my actual habits as well, and for the better I might add! Leisure read turned life hack textbook :)
Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. Pretty basic - looking for a good read though and my reading list is running dry. Manning is releasing some good stuff on reactive development that I'd recommend - the Reactive Design Patterns material that is available is super good.
It's about High Frequency Trading (algorithmic trading) and how the market reacted; and what a few individuals did to solve the problem. It's a seriously addicting book.
Flash Boys is a little strange. It's presented as David vs. Goliath, but "the little guy" is J. P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs.
Which is not to say there's nothing that could be done to improve our financial infrastructure, or no problems relating to anything deserving the HFT label - there's plenty of both.
It's the most thought provoking book I've ever read on entrepreneurship and some of Peter Theil's stories are jaw-dropping. It's the first book that has had me thinking I'm actually a pretty conventional thinker and not nearly ambitious enough.
Yes, it's an entire book. It has a better organized superset of the material from the lectures. Many things missing from the lectures are in the book and many things explained briefly in the lectures are explained in detail in the book.
If I can scrounge up the time, I'll write a review soon.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horrowitz.
It's pretty good, though I personally find his view of business management to be dated and out of touch like his view of title inflation vs Facebook's title normalization. Still a good and insightful read.
"The Devil's Cup" is great! He also has "In the Devil's garden", which is quite good as well. It presents the history of food in terms of the seven deadly sins.
Recently finished Robert Cialdini's Influence: Science and Practice, a great horrifying psychology book. Now I've started Iain Banks' Excession, giving his Culture universe another go. (Player of Games was good, but not great.)
In the midst of reading this, too. Horrifying is an understatement. I've thought of specific individuals who have abused some of the techniques in that book to great success.
I'm halfway through the last volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and I admit I'm proud of it. I don't know what can be said in a small space about a novel so large and canonical, but I've deeply enjoyed it. An unexpected quirk of the novel is that though I've been heavily absorbed in it the whole way, and found it moving, funny, and in general a complete literary experience, I can't really recommend it to others without absurd sounding qualifiers, e.g., "As long as you can put up with hundreds of pages on end of detailed descriptions of things like churches, landscapes, flowers, parties, dinners, families, manners, morals, and the like, you'll find it immeasurably beautiful and immediately personally meaningful!" --where I'd of course have never previously taken that bait.
I hoped my French would be up to Proust, but sadly it wasn't, and I didn't want re-learning French to be an impediment to the enjoyment of the story. So I've read the Enright versions.
Ok. I know no French at all (il y a un poisson dans votre bibliotheque) but that novel is something I've been interested in trying. Maybe I'll give that a shot.
One summer in high school I decided to read In Search of Lost Time before school started up again.
I only made my way through Swann's Way (the first of seven books in the series), but I'm so glad I did. I think it was probably the toughest piece of literature I'd ever read, but one of the most rewarding by far.
I know exactly what you mean. The Combray part was hard to dig into, but full of enough psychological insight to make me want to continue. Then the long, brutal debasement of Swann, such an inspiring character, was intensely painful, sometimes enough to make me squirm in my seat, but with a conclusion so unexpected, peculiar, and profound, I was hooked.
Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett. It's great, now I'm equipped to annoy my friends with arguments like 'dogs are not sentient but computers could be.'
William Vollmann's Rising Up & Rising Down is worth your time. If you're inclined towards philosophy of science or epistemology, I'd also recommend R Nozick's Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World.
Just finished Patrick Leigh Fermor's "A time of gifts" and I can't recommend it enough! One of the best English books that I have read. You will particularly like it if you're interested in European history (political, as well as art history), if you like traveling, if you're into foreign languages and if you don't mind using a dictionary once in a while. I'm really excited to start its sequel "Between the woods and the water".
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadExcept you consider them to be tech read to be leisure. ;)
I read it in college, and now that I'm reading it again with a full time job, it's amazing how much better it reads.
It's about High Frequency Trading (algorithmic trading) and how the market reacted; and what a few individuals did to solve the problem. It's a seriously addicting book.
Which is not to say there's nothing that could be done to improve our financial infrastructure, or no problems relating to anything deserving the HFT label - there's plenty of both.
It's the most thought provoking book I've ever read on entrepreneurship and some of Peter Theil's stories are jaw-dropping. It's the first book that has had me thinking I'm actually a pretty conventional thinker and not nearly ambitious enough.
I saw a pre-release copy on sale on abebooks but wanted to wait for the reviews.
If I can scrounge up the time, I'll write a review soon.
It's pretty good, though I personally find his view of business management to be dated and out of touch like his view of title inflation vs Facebook's title normalization. Still a good and insightful read.
What do you mean by horrifying?
I only made my way through Swann's Way (the first of seven books in the series), but I'm so glad I did. I think it was probably the toughest piece of literature I'd ever read, but one of the most rewarding by far.
Evening train ride: Problem Solving with Algorithms and Data Structures using Python.
Best read in a while: The Obstacle is the Way. Great intro to Stoicism, and only $4.00 on the kindle.