Jump to Books, Essays, Rare Books.

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

I will share some of my recent readings below. Any book listed is not necessarily an endorsement of the views or the quality of the book, as I believe that engaging with a broad variety of diverging views is important.

  1. Spring 2024
  2. Summer 2024

Starting from January 2024, I will regularly share some of the best books I have read. 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.

The following books are more books I enjoyed, including textbooks.

  1. MTW – Gravitation is my favourite GR textbook.
  2. Edwin Abbott – Flatland is an exhilarating “mathematical fiction”.
  3. Hal Varian – Microeconomic Analysis.
  4. J. W. von Goethe – Faust.
  5. Marcel Proust – Swann’s Way.

Essays

On Political Philosophy.

  1. William James (1906) – The Moral Equivalent of War
  2. Leo Strauss (1952) – Progress or Return? The Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilization
  3. Leo Strauss (1943) – The Re-education of Axis Countries Concerning the Jews
  4. Leo Strauss (1940) – The Living Issues of German Post-War Philosophy
  5. Leo Strauss (1941) – German Nihilism
  6. Peter Thiel (2007) – The Straussian Moment
  7. Robert Howse – The Use and Abuse of Leo Strauss in the Schmitt revival on the German Right – The Case of Heinrich Meier
  8. Friedrich Hayek (1945) – The Use of Knowledge in Society
  9. Friedrich Hayek (1949)– The Intellectuals and Socialism
  10. Peter Thiel (2008) – The Optimistic Thought Experiment
  11. John Stuart Mill (1874) – Theism
  12. T.S. Eliot (1919) – Tradition and the Individual Talent
  13. Edmund Burke (1790) – Reflections on the Revolution in France, Part I
  14. Paul Valery (1928) – The Conquest of Ubiquity
  15. Tom Wolfe (1996) – Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died
  16. R. Barbrook & A. Cameron (1995) – The Californian Ideology
  17. Leo Strauss (1963) – On Tyranny
  18. Leo Strauss (1952) – Persecution and the Art of Writing
  19. Leo Strauss (1962) – The Crisis of Political Philsophy and The Crisis of Our Time
  20. Leo Strauss (1975) – The Three Waves of Modernity
  21. Immanuel Kant (1795) – Zum Ewigen Frieden

On Political Theology.

  1. Leo Strauss (1948) –- Reason and Revelation
  2. Yoram Hazony (2016) – Leo Strauss and the Bible
  3. Rene Girard (1984) – Dionysus versus the Crucified
  4. Rene Girard (1990) – Innovation and Repetition

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

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.

Some 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 while researching my latest curiorisities. I curate and share the most interesting 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.