Book Recommendations

Science / Biology / Complexity

• Chance and Necessity — Jacques Monod
• Serendipity: Accidental Discoveries in Science
• What Is Life?
• Life Ascending — Nick Lane
• The Lives of a Cell — Lewis Thomas
• 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
• Novacene — James Lovelock
• Turing’s Cathedral — George Dyson
• Darwin Among the Machines — George Dyson
• Open Socrates
  • https://wwnorton.com/books/open-socrates

Mind / Brain / Philosophy

• Brains Through Time
• Braintrust
• Plato: Symposium
• Philosophy for Life: And Other Dangerous Situations — Jules Evans
• Ways of Seeing
• The Four Views of Free Will
• The Mind of a Bee — Lars Chittka
• Honeybee Democracy — Thomas D. Seeley

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
• Children of Time — Adrian Tchaikovsky
• The Golden Age — John C. Wright
  • Source tweet: https://x.com/yishan/status/2040574699034509428

Essays / Memoir / Reflection

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

Notes

• Needs cleanup or disambiguation: What Is Life?, Brains Through Time, Braintrust, and Animal / Animal Triste.

Imported from Google Keep (2026-03-23)

Additional sci-fi / author leads

• Becky Chambers — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becky_Chambers
• Alexander Wales

Extra recommendation context from Keep

• The Conquest of Happiness — Bertrand Russell
• Braintrust
• Shakespeare’s Memory — Borges
• Imported and consolidated from book recos, books scifi, and retreat bus trip reco.
• Some titles may still need cleanup / disambiguation.