Posts tagged "books:":
Reading List
How this page is structured
This is my current reading list, and contains books I’ve read, am reading, and want to read for fun during my commute. It contains books roughly from 2020 and onwards with a few books from 2019. This is simply because that’s when I decided to start tracking my reading habits. The books aren’t listed in any particular order, but added haphazardly to a spot next to other books that I feel it has some connections to, or not! It’s really impossible to tell.
The list is split into a number of different sections and subsections in order to make structuring easier. I of course plan to read everything listed, but as a rule of thumb I tend to alternate between reading fiction and non-fiction. Recently I’ve experience a significant decrease in the amount I read due to the fact that I now try and keep up to date on world affairs through my subsciption to the Economist as well as my studies at University.
It’s written in Gnu Emacs Org-mode and so its appearance is decided by the Org-Mode syntax. Each entry is split into three parts.
The current status of a book. This can have four different values.
Plan on reading § Plan on reading but already posses the book - In progress in some capacity X Have finished at least once - The title of the book.
- The authors name. && if multiple authors.
Please do consider sending me book recommendations (Preferably via E-mail) if you think there’s something you think I’d enjoy, I add books way too liberally. I’d like to read more books by women, so those would be even better.
Fiction
Miscellaneous
While this section is much shorter than the one on non-fiction, it is equally (or not more!) as important. The difference in lenght is merely due to the ease in finding new topics to read about in non fiction works compared to creative ideas by fiction authors.
| Title | Author | |
|---|---|---|
| X | Catch 22 | Joseph Heller |
| X | Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad |
| X | Faust | Goethe |
| X | Never Let Me Go | Kazuo Ishiguro |
| X | The Buried Giant | Kazuo Ishiguro |
| The Unconsoled | Kazuo Ishiguro | |
| Thank You For Smoking | Christopher Buckley | |
| - | Infinite Jest | David Foster Wallace |
| X | The Elementary Paricles / Atomised | Michel Houllebecq |
| X | Serotonin | Michel Houllebecq |
| X | The Bell Jar | Sylvia Plath / Victoria Lucas |
| X | The New York Trilogy | Paul Auster |
| X | Eggplant | Ogden Nesmer |
| § | Gravity’s Rainbow | Thomas Pynchon |
| X | Dune | Frank Herbert |
| X | Mig Äger Ingen | Åsa Linderborg |
| X | Min Kamp 1 | Karl Ove Knausgård |
| City Come a-Walkin’ | John Shirely | |
| Near to the Wild Heart | Clarice Lispector | |
| § | My Year of Rest and Relaxation | Otessa Moshfegh |
| Libra | Don Delillo | |
| Roadside Picnic | Arkady Strugatsky && Boris Strugatsky | |
| § | Buddenbrooks | Thomas Mann |
| Omega Minor | Paul Verhaeghen | |
| § | Kafka on the Shore | Haruki Murakami |
| § | Norwegian Wood | Haruki Murakami |
| Augustus | John Williams | |
| The Left Hand of Darkness | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| Shōgun | James Clavell | |
| Don Quixote | Miguel de Cervantes | |
| Blindness | José Saramago | |
| History | Elsa Morante | |
| Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe | |
| Endangered Species: Short Stories | Gene Wolfe | |
| Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| Romance of the Three Kingdoms | Lou Guanzhong | |
| X | The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoevsky |
| X | The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea | Yukio Mishima |
| Storm of Steel | Ernst Jünger | |
| Berlin Alexandrplatz | Alfred Döblin | |
| § | The Master and Margarita | Michail Bulgakov |
| The Tartar Steppe | Dino Buzzati | |
| Diaspora | Greg Egan | |
| Pimp: The Story of My Life | Iceberg Slim | |
| Madame Chrysanthème | Pierre Loti |
Bret Easton Ellis’ Works
Ellis is by and large my favourite author. Several of his books, especially Less than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and Imperial Bedrooms are not dissimilar, but I just eat his prose up like candy.
| Title | |
|---|---|
| X | American Psycho |
| X | Glamorama |
| X | The Rules of Attraction |
| X | Imperial Bedrooms |
| Lunar Park | |
| X | Less than Zero |
| The Shards |
The Sprawl Trilogy
I read Neuromancer and found it entertaining and influential, if not intellectual.
| Title | Author | |
|---|---|---|
| X | Neuromancer | William Gibson |
| Count Zero | William Gibson | |
| Mona Lisa Overdrive | William Gibson |
Non-Fiction
Miscellaneous
| Title | Author | |
|---|---|---|
| Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs | Harold Abelson et al. | |
| Envisioning Information | Edward Tufte | |
| Zhuang Zi | Zhuang Zi | |
| The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe | Roger Penrose | |
| Trees, Maps, and Theorems | Jean-luc Doumont | |
| Walden / Life in the Woods | Henry David Thoreau | |
| The Gulf War Did Not Take Place | Jean Baudrillard | |
| § | Thinking, Fast and Slow | Daniel Kahneman |
| Biography of Kim Jong-Il | Kim Jong-Il |
Economics
| Title | Author | |
|---|---|---|
| X | Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy | Henry George |
| X | An Inquiry into the Nature of Causes of the Wealth of Nations | Adam Smith |
| X | Capital: A Critique of Political Economy | Karl Marx |
| Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance | Douglass North | |
| The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy | Daniel Yergin && Joseph Stanislaw | |
| The Art of the Deal | Donald Trump && Tony Swartz |
Philosophy
Sadly I don’t remember the exact quote, but Kojeve wrote something like “He who reads the Phenomenology must love philosophy”, and so by definition I seemingly love it.
| Title | Author | |
| X | Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia | Gilles Deleuze && Felix Guattari |
| X | Phenomenology of Spirit | Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel |
| Elements of the Philosophy of Right | Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | |
| X | Introduction to the Reading of Hegel | Alexandre Kojeve |
| The Myth of Sisyphus | Albert Camus | |
| The Rebel | Albert Camus | |
| The Ego and Its Own | Max Stirner | |
| Sun and Steel | Yukio Mishima | |
| The Question Concerning Technology | Mardin Heidegger |
Jacques Ellul
I have a lot to say on Ellul, and semi-regularly update my writing on him.
| Title | |
|---|---|
| X | The Technological Society |
| Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes | |
| X | Presence in the Modern World |
| Anarchy and Christianity | |
| The Political Illusion | |
| Prayer and the Modern Man |
Society
| Title | Author | |
|---|---|---|
| The Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How | Theodore John Kaczynski | |
| The Myth of the Machine | Lewis Mumford | |
| The German Ideology | Karl Marx && Friedrich Engels | |
| Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business | Niel Postman | |
| The Disappearance of Childhood | Niel Postman | |
| CIA: Manual for Psychlogical Operations in Guerilla Warfare | A. M. Nagy | |
| Silent Weapons for a Quiet War | ||
| Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil [sic] | Thomas Hobbes | |
| Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World | Nazih Ayubi | |
| Nothing to Envy; Ordinary Lives in North Korea | Barbara Demick | |
| Libidinal Economy | Jean-François Lyotard | |
| Interpretation of Dreams | Sigmund Freud | |
| X | Civlization and Its Discontents | Sigmund Frued |
| How to Blow Up a Pipeline | Andreas Malm | |
| The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence | T.H. Breen | |
| The Structure of Scientific Revolutions | Thomas S. Kuhn | |
| The History of Sexuality | Michel Foucault | |
| Prussianism and Socialism | Oswald Spengler | |
| Stride Toward Freedom | Martin Luther King Jr. | |
| Kris i befolkningsfrågan | Alva Myrdal && Gunnar Myrdal | |
| Infocracy: Digitization and the Crisis of Democracy | Byung-Chul Han | |
| America against America | Wang Huning |
History
This and the “Society” section are those who grow the fastest. Whenever I read up on something or read another book, I add books about the same subject or add the references themselves to these lists.
| Title | Author | |
|---|---|---|
| Queen of the Oil Club: The Intrepid Wanda Jablonski and the Power of Information | Anna Rubino | |
| The History of the Standard Oil Company | Ida Tarbell | |
| X | The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power | Daniel Yergin |
| X | The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World | Daniel Yergin |
| X | The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations | Daniel Yergin |
| X | The Conquest of Gaul | Gaius Julius Ceasar |
| The Civil War | Gaius Julius Ceasar | |
| The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia | Peter Hopkirk | |
| The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia | Lutz Kleveman | |
| The Making of the Atomic Bomb | Richard Rhodes | |
| Homelands | Timothy Garton Ash | |
| How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History the Soviet Internet | Benjamin Peters | |
| X | Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History | Thomas Barfield |
| The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo | Jason K. Stearns | |
| Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 | Benny Morris | |
| Rhodesia: A Complete History | Peter Baxter | |
| Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia | Christopher Clark | |
| Imperialism: A Study | John A. Hobson | |
| The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806 | Jonathan I. Israel | |
| Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers | Derek William | |
| The History of Peter the Great, Emperor of Russia | M. de Voltaire | |
| Staring at God: Britain in the Great War | Simon Heffer | |
| The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century | Jürgen Osterhammel | |
| Statistics and the German state 1900-1945: The making of modern economic knowledge | Adam Tooze |
- Geo- Politics
Title Author The Prince Machiavelli X Russia 2010 Daniel Yergin && Thane Gustafson X Kina Klas Eklund X China’s World Kerry Brown The Influence of Sea Power Upon History Alfred Thayer Mahan The European Union: Readings on the Theory and Practice of European Integration Brent Nelsen && Alexander Stubb International Relations and the European Union Christopher Hill && Michael Smith && Sophie Vanhoonacker X The Prisoners of Geography Tim Marshall - Industry
Title Author Tiger Technology: The Creation of a Semiconductor Industry in East Asia John Mathews && Dong-sung Cho X Chip War: The Fight For the World’s Most Critical Technology Chris Miller Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry Daniel Nenni && Paul McLellan Focus: The ASML way - Inside the power struggle over the most complex machine on earth Marc Hijink DisneyWar James Stewart Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing Mar Hicks && William Aspray Silent Spring Rachel Carson