Jump to Books, Essays, Rare Books, Physics Textbooks, Movies, Memos.

This page is under construction. If you want to recommend any books or essays to me or want to talk about any of these books, feel free to email me. I answer all my emails.

Books

The books on my reading list do not imply endorsement of their views. Or, to state it differently, by quoting Montaigne: “All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.” Starting January 2024, I will regularly share books I’ve read in reading lists:

  1. Spring 2024
  2. Summer 2024

I find myself recommending the following books often; I maintain a high standard for recommending a book here; the list is in no particular order.

  1. Lee Kuan Yew – From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000.
  2. Cixin Liu – Remembrance of Earth’s Past.
  3. Graham Moore – The Last Days of Night.
  4. Ted Chiang – Exhalation and Story of Your Life.
  5. Stefan Zweig – The World of Yesterday.
  6. Thomas Mann – Magic Mountain.
  7. Robert Caro – LBJ Biography Series.
  8. John Didion – Most of her books, in particular: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play It As It Lays, The Year of Magical Thinking.
  9. George Orwell – Books vs. Cigarettes.
  10. William Strunk Jr. & E. B. White – The Elements of Style.
  11. MTW – Gravitation is my favourite GR textbook.
  12. Edwin Abbott – Flatland is an exhilarating “mathematical fiction”.
  13. Hal Varian – Microeconomic Analysis.
  14. J. W. von Goethe – Faust.
  15. Marcel Proust – Swann’s Way.

Essays

On Political Philosophy.

  1. Leo Strauss
  2. William James – The Moral Equivalent of War
  3. Immanuel Kant (1795) – Zum Ewigen Frieden
  4. Peter Thiel – The Straussian Moment
  5. Robert Howse – The Use and Abuse of Leo Strauss in the Schmitt revival on the German Right – The Case of Heinrich Meier
  6. Friedrich Hayek – The Use of Knowledge in Society
  7. Friedrich Hayek – The Intellectuals and Socialism
  8. Peter Thiel – The Optimistic Thought Experiment
  9. John Stuart Mill (1874) – Theism
  10. T.S. Eliot – Tradition and the Individual Talent
  11. Edmund Burke (1790) – Reflections on the Revolution in France, Part I
  12. Paul Valery – The Conquest of Ubiquity
  13. Tom Wolfe – Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died

On History.

  1. The Storm Before the Storm
  2. The Final Pagan Generation

On New Economics.

  1. Joseph Schumpeter. Kapitalismus, Sozialismus und Demokratie.
  2. Jonathan Nitzan & Shimshon Bichler – Capital as Power.
  3. Hayek

On Political Philosophy, History, and Technology.

  1. Martin Heidegger – The Question Concerning Technology
  2. R. Barbrook & A. Cameron (1995) – The Californian Ideology
  3. Joan Didion – Slouching Towards Bethlehem
  4. Rene Girard – Innovation and Repetition

On Political Theology.

  1. Leo Strauss – Reason and Revelation
  2. Yoram Hazony – Leo Strauss and the Bible
  3. Rene Girard – Dionysus versus the Crucified
  4. Wolfgang Palaver – Hobbes and the Katechon: The Secularization of Sacrifical Christianity

On New Branches of Engineering.

  1. Richard Feynmann There’s Plenty of Room At The Bottom
  2. Norbert Wiener – Cybernetics
  3. John von Neumann – Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata
  4. Eric Drexler – Engines of Creation
  5. A. M. Turing (1950) – Computing Machinery and Intelligence
  6. Rich Sutton – The Bitter Lesson

Literature-related essays.

  1. David Foster Wallace – Consider the Lobster

Rare(-ish) Books

The Great Books are rightly held in high regard. However, even if you believe that most Great Books are recognized at some point as works of great merit, you should not be blinded and believe that there are no great but forgotten books. There are books that are too wrong, maybe too dangerous, or simply out-of-fashion and are thus not well-known at all today. While I haven’t found as many of these books as I would like yet, I want to share a few here to illustrate my argument. If you come across any forgotten books that you think are great, please email me!

  1. Ivan Turgenev – Smoke, A Novel.
  2. Normann Angell – The Great Illusion; Recommendation from Peter.
  3. Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov– War, Progress, and the end of History, Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ. Three Discussions; Recommendation from Peter.
  4. Wendell Willkie – One World; Recommendation from Peter.

Physics Textbooks

I learned most physics through German textbooks which I will not link here. The few English ones I still own are:

  1. Gravitation – Charles W. Misner, John Archibald Wheeler, and Kip Thorne
  2. An Introduction to Differential Geometry – T. J. Willmore
  3. Tensors – Mathematics of Differential Geometry and Relativity – Zafar Ahsan
  4. Curvature in Mathematics and Physics – Shlomo Sternberg
  5. To be completed.

Movies

Some of my favourite movies:

  1. Alfred Hitchcock – The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Birds, Psycho, Vertigo
  2. The Right Stuff
  3. Chef’s Table on Netflix

Memos

I sometimes come across interesting memos and curate the best ones below.

  1. “The Downfall of a Great American Airplane Company – An Insider’s Perspective” Memo by Boeing engineers on the downfall of their commercial airline division.
  2. The Secret Diary of a ‘Sustainable Investor’ Memo by Tariq Fancy, former CIO for Sustainable Investing at Blackrock, outlining why ESG is not working.