* James Clear - 'Atomic Habits'
* Gabor Mate MD - 'When The Body Says No'
Both helped me kick some bad habits and start to undo years of self-inflicted mental/physical abuse.
How did you get on this year?
Really helped organize and structurize my thoughts on living, investing and managing stressful situations.
2nd book is ‘Direct Truth’ by Kapil Gupta. Really direct, bold and honest answers on big questions we ask ourselves. The book is short but you have to read every conversation few times, because we are programmed differently for some questions and we don’t really know the truth.
Anyway here is my list.
Bullshit Jobs - This is a controversial book (and paper) for obvious reasons. However, it really resonated with me at the time I read it. I think it was the thing that pushed me to find a different job.
Sid Meier's Memoir! - I've had a passing interest in developing games for a long time and having the opportunity to peek into the life and mind of someone who created one of the most iconic games of all time was really valuable to me. Inspirational read.
Starting Forth - Ok, maybe not exactly life changing. I was in search of something else for programming microcontrollers and I found Forth. It breathed new life into my interest in this domain.
The Little Book of Big Change: The No-Willpower Approach to Breaking Any Habit - It remains to be seen if this book was really life changing, but I found it insightful either way. Overall I think the content is valuable but I had to make a conscious effort to look past some of the pseudoscientific aspects like such as the numerous mentions of the "Universal Mind".
I can relate. My goal for this year was to read 75 books, and I think I'm at 33 or 34 right now. The main one that has stood out to me so far was The Universe Speaks In Numbers by Graham Farmelo. Explaining why this book stood out to me would take a lot of words, and I plan to write a blog post on it at some point. But briefly, it comes down to it getting me excited about math again.
And as something of a counter-point to that book, I also read Lost in Math by Sabine Hossenfelder, which was also very good.
Others that were definitely worth reading:
Analogy Making As Perception by Melanie Mitchell
Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky (re-read)
Engineering General Intelligence, Part 1 by Ben Goertzel
The AGI Revolution by Ben Goertzel
And on a lighter note, some fun - if bizarre - cyberpunk styled novels I read were Necrotech and Nanoshock by K.C. Alexander.
Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushroom by Stamets - great for anyone who wants to culture and grow a variety of mushrooms.
The Fungal Pharmacy by Rogers - This book is less useful but fascinating. It has a bunch of traditional uses of mushrooms, but also has references to modern papers on fungal use in medicines. It also lists common industrial uses as well (like the production citric acid).
A very Short Introduction: Fungi by Money - this is a very short book that covers many aspects of fungi.
Ham Radio Jargon and Q-codes by KC2TAV - this is more of a reference than a true book. It's ok, but the internet is probably a better resource.
The Organic Gardener's Handbook by Ellis and Martin - I read most of this, but got it mostly as a reference to identify and manage pests and diseases in the garden. This finally motivated me to build a compost barrel.
A couple of mushroom cookbooks.
We Get Confessions by Joseph - this one is good to understand how interrogations are correctly conducted, what your rights are in that situation, and what tricks are used by police. It's written with law enforcement as the target audience.
The Tactical Edge by Remsburg - this is geared toward law enforcement too. This can be valuable to understand police thinking and tactics. Some of the material can be helpful in self-defense or other high stress scenarios (first few chapters on body response, visualization, force continuum, etc).
Defensive Tactics by Christensen - still in progress with this one. I'm not sure how I like it so far - some of the stuff seems useful but some also seems impractical. I plan to read the main parts of the book. Then there are the individual parts for specific holds/strikes/etc. I'll probably skim these and select the 3 I think would be most useful to self defense for me. There's too many in the book to learn all at once, or even maintain true proficiency in unless you spend a lot of time practicing.
Boundaries by Dr. Henry Cloud helped me to step back from taking responsibilities for people & things that are not mine. It also helped me to face choices I’ve made. Note: this book is tied to Christianity.
It’s a surreal allegory about journeys and one’s experience when “seeking” (however defined)
This book almost electrically invigorated my sense of existence and appreciation for life’s variety.
If you intend to read it, I’d heavily recommend averting your eyes from all descriptions/ synopses/reviews. But if you must, the Goodreads description treads lightly, while the Wikipedia one has spoilers and (IMO) also misses the point
It changed my life in 2020, and 2019, and 2018. It's been changing people's life for close to a century. It's timeless advice.
Gave me a wider perspective of things. Should have read it much earlier.
Yuri Rytkheu - When the Whales Leave
Running a blog of mine, https://confessionsoftheprofessions.com, I was looking for something to keep my visitors entertained and interested, as I do every year -- try to come up with a unique project that I focus on, and decided I would start collecting COVID-19 stories. I got one straight out of Wuhan China on the first try and while it wasn't anything that was earth-shattering, it was really cool to get a story from a Chinese woman. https://confessionsoftheprofessions.com/my-life-in-china-dur... (I even rehired most of the women from China to get their stories which made my website go viral in China in just a month)
This actually sparked my interest in another idea: what are women's lives like around the world? Family life? Government treatment? Work life? Goals? Failures? Successes? Various questions surrounding the topic. Figured they could give me about 500-750 words -- but a glimpse.
It was then that I realized I had access to women in over a hundred countries around the world through Fiverr, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Most were home, most needed work, so I offered them all about $10 to $20 each to write me a story. Fiverr doesn't have access to every country, so once those women were done with their stories, I looked at their surrounding countries and asked if they had any networks of friends or family they could ask and I'd double the rate as long as they gave half to the woman who responded and completed the assignment. I also did the same thing on Fiverr when there weren't any women available in certain countries -- I asked men, and they were all quite helpful. While there were plenty of no to helping answers in the beginning, I began coming across people who were fascinated and wanted to help me complete this project. The women who joined were excited and really wanted to see it.
My goal was all the countries Fiverr had in their listings... and then I just kept going to get every country, including North Korea, Cuba, and several other communist counties, where I actually had to hire someone, which I found one guy who had a cousin working in a refugee camp, so he was able to obtain the story for me. I paid for several translations to get every story back into English. Doing this project changed my life to realize that we still have a world that is very common with [sex] slaves, sex trafficking, child brides, and prostitution which is all quite common.
On a brighter note, it was amazing to hear and read so many women changing things in their lives and in their countries for the better, breaking out of abusive family traditions, routines, and norms. Building companies, making changes, petitioning against laws that put them at a disadvantage, etc. My team (the men I hired on Fiverr and women I rehired) and I ended up speaking to about 1500 women from every country in the world, including a massive amount of islands and territories, quite a few around the Scotland area and South America, as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The final result ended up being 530 women from 201 countries.
After collecting all of the stories for this project, originally meant to be published on my blog, I realized I needed to somehow memorialize and add this one to the history books, quite literally, so I turned the collection into a book called My Life As A Woman: World Edition, which is available on Kindle and as a Paperback on Amazon. I actually posted about it and someone downvoted me for some reason and that killed the post. But if you're interested, you don't talk to 1500 women, just as you won't read the stories of 530 women, and not have it change your life in some way. It's just a very inspiration and motivational book. You can read more about it at https://mylifeasawomanproject.com
My year was about mindfulness and productivity. So, I've read a dozen books on mindfulness and happiness this year. One of the most insightful turned out to be "10% Happier" by Dan Harris".
Harris was a skeptic himself, cynical of the practice, and fully addresses the reservations he had before. There’s a lot of logical explanation in this book that will make you want to try it out too, since joining him on his journey from the lows of life before mindfulness and then seeing the positive impact it had on him makes for captivating reading. It also teaches certain meditation techniques to help you on your own personal journey, such as short breathing exercises that help you focus on the present.
Here are my reviews of some of them: https://productive.fish/blog/mindfulness-books/
- Unsavory Truth by Marion Nestle
- The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson
- The Simple Path to Wealth by J.L. Collins
- The New Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins