Books I’ve found useful

General notes on reading books. I don’t “recommend” any book in particular unless exceptionally written out so in its description. Most books have quite quick diminishing returns, many pad their intros with motivation without content, and don’t have much content past halfway. I do still generally read in order, but I just read fast and skip things that are too obvious/uninteresting.

Books I read past 18

Personal development

• The Miracle Morning: This was one of the first “self help” books I read and I to this day enjoy its enthusiasm at saying “a better life is possible”, that one can wish and make reasonable steps to achieve a good life. Its specific advice about mornings isn’t bad to try out either! I gave it a serious go, following the routine for a month, which gave me a strong ability to get up on demand. As with many self-help books, I recommend trying the techniques earnestly for a while and then figuring out what worked or didn’t work for you.
• Atomic Habits: I only ever got a third through, but was good
• The Checklist Manifesto: This was a quick and fun read, I do recommend knowing how to use checklists!
• Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It: got halfway through, also good re inspiration

General psychology

• The Great Psychotherapy Debate
• The 3 Faces of Victim

General psychiatry

• Reading DSM 5 entries
• knowing basic diagnostics for giftedness, adhd, autism, others

Meditation theory, or ~Buddhism

• The Mind Illuminated: very good practical guide for the analytical minded to get into meditation, to have a first model of things.
• Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha

Fiction

• Terry Pratchett
• A Wizard of Earthsea: Wow. poetic, deep, insightful, slow. Especially first third.

SF

• Permutation City by Greg Egan: an interesting take that ends with taking mathematical realism and functional theories of consciousness ~seriously
• Diaspora by Greg Egan: the intro worldbuilding a very interesting look at what a future world might look like (the humans, the uploaded to virtual worlds, the uploaded to robots investigating more of physics)

~Classics

• À Rebours by Huysmans: An interesting book, imo about psychology and phenomenology.

Philosophy

• The Feeling of Value: Moral Realism Grounded in Phenomenal Consciousness by Sharon Rawlette: A very good recap of weak arguments for moral realism and their defeats, and a stronger case for moral realism. Good to understand the whole debate and get a cogent take. I didn’t read that far into it but generally believe there are some true ~objective moral facts ie “there is a kind of suffering that no being would want to experience”, but don’t take that as compelling towards “and thus everyone has a duty to make less of that kind of suffering exist”
• Reasons and Persons: didn’t read past the intro, looked good

Books I read pre 20

Formative, but dunno that I’d rec for adult reading.

• HP, LOTR, Eragon
• Les Chevaliers d’Émeraude et Le Porteur de Masque, ~“petit bonhomme” (tree story of little guys)
• Legend by David Gemmell: wow. the most centrally heroic book I read to this day I guess
• others by Gemmell
• War and Peace; meh, not very dense/repetitive

A bunch of the Bible. I do rec Ecclesiastes. There’s a particularly useful training of “what value can I get from this”.

Children books

• baby owls: top tier children book, big beautiful pages
• gruffalo!

European comic strips

• gaston lagaffe
• …