Experiments
Reading Log 2025: Every Book, Annotated
A living document. Every book I finish in 2025, with a short annotation and a single sentence on whether it changed how I think.
Reading Log 2025: Every Book, Annotated
A living document — updated as I finish each book.
The Format
For each book: a short description, a difficulty rating (1–5), and one sentence on whether it changed anything.
Q1 2025
The Pragmatic Programmer — Hunt & Thomas Difficulty: 2/5 A collection of practices that separate craftspeople from coders. The tip about "tracer bullets" — getting thin slices of a system working end-to-end before building out any layer fully — reordered how I approach new projects. Changed something? Yes.
Thinking in Systems — Donella Meadows Difficulty: 3/5 The best introduction to systems thinking I've read. Stocks, flows, feedback loops, leverage points. After reading this, I started seeing feedback loops everywhere, which is mostly useful and occasionally maddening. Changed something? Significantly.
The Dawn of Everything — Graeber & Wengrow Difficulty: 3/5 A complete demolition of the standard story of human prehistory. The argument: our ancestors were far more politically sophisticated, experimental, and diverse than the "from band to tribe to state" story suggests. Humbling and liberating. Changed something? Yes — made me more suspicious of just-so stories about human nature.
Attention and Effort — Daniel Kahneman (1973) Difficulty: 4/5 Not the famous Thinking, Fast and Slow — this is the older, denser cognitive psychology. Kahneman's mental effort model is surprisingly applicable to thinking about AI cognitive load and task design. Slow going but rewarding. Changed something? Modestly.
Currently Reading
- The Utopia of Rules — David Graeber
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications — Martin Kleppmann