Book Recommendations

Science / Biology / Complexity

• Chance and Necessity — Jacques Monod
• What Is Life?
• Life Ascending — Nick Lane
• Life as No One Knows It — Sara Imari Walker
• The Vital Question
• How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality — Per Bak
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
• Against Method

Mind / Brain / Philosophy

• Brains Through Time
• Braintrust
• Plato: Symposium
• Philosophy for Life: And Other Dangerous Situations — Jules Evans
• Ways of Seeing

Society / Economics / Culture

• The WEIRDest People in the World — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_World
• Talking to My Daughter — Yanis Varoufakis
• Technofeudalism — Yanis Varoufakis
• Undutchables
• The Beginning of Infinity — noted as a Sam Altman favorite
• Steve Jobs — Walter Isaacson

Fiction / Literature / Novels / Plays

• Slowness (1995)
• The Hedgehog and the Fox
• Arcadia (play)
• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
• The Player of Games
• Childhood’s End — Arthur C. Clarke
• No One Here Reads Tolstoy
• Katabasis (novel)
• Watership Down
• The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
• Sympathy Tower Tokyo: A Novel — Rie Qudan
• Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace
• The Dice Man
• Shakespeare’s Memory — Jorge Luis Borges
• Animal (possibly Animal Triste)
• The Wall
• Night Train to Lisbon
• The Neverending Story
• The Master and Margarita
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Essays / Memoir / Reflection

• Gratitude — Oliver Sacks
• The Conquest of Happiness — Bertrand Russell

Notes

• Added from Slack on 2026-03-16.
• A few titles may need cleanup or disambiguation later (for example: What Is Life?, Brains Through Time, Braintrust, and Animal / Animal Triste).