Reading in 2025

3-minute read

This post is my attempt to reduce my consumption of short-form media by outlining specifically what I am reading.

Books are either NS (not started), IP (in progress), A (abandoned), or C (complete).

Non fiction

  • Narnie (lev, satnik, a carodenica) (CS Lewis) [C]
  • Superintelligence [C]
    • Quite an academic text. Given it was published in 2014 and how rapidly AI seems to move, I didn’t find the book to be dated at all. There were many interesting ideas in here. Most of the arguments were not premised on AI looking a particular way or taking a particular form, but were quite general. My general takeaway was that the existential risk posed by AI is not vastly overlooked, and the problem should be treated in a similar fashion as the problem of nuclear weapons. One interesting focus of the early part of the book was predicting the form of a ‘takeoff’: how rapidly AI may radically change human life.
  • The code book [C]
    • This was a highly entertaining and informative read. There was sufficient technical explanation of topics like asymmetric cryptography that I felt like I was reading a textbook, rather than something more pop-science-y. There was broad historical coverage, from ancient Greece to Mary Queen of Scots to quantum information. Alongside technical explanations were anecdotes about the various significant figures in cryptography: Alan Turing, the folks behind RSA, the various GCHQ employees who independently thought up many ideas in symmetric and asymmetric cryptography.
  • American Kingpin [C]
    • An easy but entertaining read. It did a good job capturing the speed at which the Silk Road took off. The author didn’t lionize nor vilify Ross Ulbricht, but tried to present the evolution of the Silk Road as a natural progression of the ideologies which interested him during university. I was a little dissatisfied that there was no exploration of crypto laundering techniques.
  • The power of habit [C] (garbage self help)
  • Sentient [IP]
    • An eye opening read covering a broad spectrum of species of which I had never heard.
  • People’s history of the USA [A]
  • Hry o zivot (Suzanne Collins) [IP]
  • SPQR (Mary Beard) [NS]
  • Murderbot Diaries [NS]
  • How to take smart notes [NS]
  • Brave New World [NS]
  • Billion dollar whale [NS]
  • Barbarians at the gate [NS]
  • When genius failed [NS]
  • Timeless way of building
  • Jim Coplien books

Fiction

  • Do androids dream of electric sheep? [C]
  • Earthsea [C]
  • Quicksilver [NS]
  • Never let me go [IP]

Audio

  • The simple path to wealth (JL Collins) [IP]
  • How we learn: why brains learn better than any machine (Stanislas Dehaene) [IP]

Other

  • Matt Levine
  • The Atlantic