Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
by Peter Thiel, with Blake Masters, 2014

Good short book about the importance of businesses being actual improvements over what came before. Thiel is focused on technology, and his advice is not generalizable to all industries. He says that any new product should be a 10x improvement over the previous offering in order to gain acceptance. 10x easier to use, cheaper, better, and/or faster. Anything less won’t overcome the switching costs of moving to the new product.

I really liked the discussion of society’s optimism/pessimism and beliefs about whether the future is determinate or indeterminate. The US used to be deterministic optimists. We knew the future would be better than today and specific projects were undertaken to bring about this improvement. Somewhere along the lines, the determinate became indeterminate in the US. People still thought the future would be better than the present, but they weren’t really sure how. In a determinate world, many of the brightest minds become inventors, scientists, and engineers striving to create the future. In an indeterminate world (like today in the US), many of the brightest minds become attorneys, consultants, and bankers in order to profit from a better world without really creating it themselves. This is part of the reason why many of the technology thought leaders (Elon Musk comes to mind) seem so eccentric nowadays. They often have a view of the future that they want to create, and this clashes with an indeterminate populace that is not really sure how to move progress forward. At least we’re not pessimists like much of the rest of the world.

The End of Eternity
by Isaac Asimov, 1955

Excellent science fiction about time travel and reality alterations. Highly recommended. Reads almost like a detective novel with surprising revelations in places.

Is man destined to remain on Earth or spread throughout the stars?

The Road
by Cormac McCarthy, 2006

Post-apocalyptic novel about a man and his boy traveling and surviving in a world in which the sun is blacked out by ash and food no longer grows. Very emotional. I thought the man’s actions rang true throughout, and it was very well-written.

I don’t really like trigger warnings. However, to put it nicely: has aspects of uncivilized behavior that may cause discomfort.

Bird by Bird
by Anne Lamott, 1994

Great little book about writing. Contains tips for staying motivated and writing well, along with a lot of funny anecdotes about the author’s personal journey. Focused on fiction writing, but useful nonetheless. The following paragraph, about saving ideas on index cards, is fairly representative of the book at large:

I eventually throw away a lot of my index cards, either because I use what’s on them in a paragraph somewhere or because it turns out that the thought wasn’t all that interesting. Many index cards on which I write in the middle of the night tend to be incoherent, like some incredibly bright math major thinking about oranges or truth while on LSD. Some contain great quotes that I sharew with my students, although I unfortunately often forget to write down whose quote it is. Like this one, for instance: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us.” Now, I”m almost positive Ralph Waldo Emerson said this, but with my luck some critic will point out that it was really Georgette Mosbacher. (Who was it that said, “A critic is someone who comes onto the battlefield after the battle is over and shoots the wounded”? I have it written on an index card somewhere…) Other cards just sort of live with me, in little piles and drifts. My son will probably have to deal with them someday, after my death. They are my equivalent of all the cats that those nutty Bouvier aunts own. But my cards do not smell or shed or go wee-wee on the floors, and I think [my son] should be aware that he is getting off easy. Most of them will not make much sense to him. There are many with just one or two words on them that would have reminded me of entire scenes and empires, but he will have to stand there scratching his head.

How to Win Games and Beat People: Demolish your family and friends at over 30 classic games with advice from an international array of experts!
by Tom Whipple, 2015

Quick read. Relatively funny descriptions of 30 games. Unfortunately, each game wasn’t given enough room for non-trivial descriptions of strategy and technique. Perhaps worth a read as a quick diversion and for some brief tidbits, but not worthwhile for someone looking for something more in-depth.

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
by Michael Lewis, 1999

I wasn’t on the internet much before the dot-com bust, so this book was an interesting view into the internet and Silicon Valley culture of the 90’s. The book was written by Michael Lewis (The Big Short, Moneyball) in 1999, around the time Google was getting started, and the book quips about how silly it is that Google was valued at $75M at the time in one of the final chapters. The central figure is Jim Clark, who helped found Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon, which all (briefly) became billion dollar companies. Reading it, you’re struck by how flimsy the business notions of many internet companies are. The Netscape browser was popular, but never really had a way to make money and was eventually bought by AOL. I use the Firefox browser nowadays, which is the biggest remaining “branch” of the Netscape browser. Healtheon wanted to insert itself into the middle of the health care bureaucracy, somehow, in a way that never made sense in the book. It eventually merged with WebMD. Throughout the book, Microsoft was the big, bad wolf lurking in the background, with the clout to swamp any startup/industry it focused upon.

Nowadays, this book is valuable for the look into the internet culture of the 90’s and for understanding how Silicon Valley acquired so much power. Lewis was embedded with Clark for many months to write the book, so there is a lot of discussion of tech entrepreneur behavior, which often seems crazy from the outside. An interesting book to read, but only if the subject matter appeals to you.

Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind
by Gary Marcus, 2008

The premise of the book, that our mental capabilities sometimes leads to odd workaround behaviors, is interesting enough. And I did like certain parts of the book. But overall, it just wore me down. Not particularly recommended. Discusses the difficulty of remembering a specific piece of information, the imperfect nature of language, overconfidence, not knowing what makes us happy, and coping with mental illnesses. I listened to this on audiobook, and Maria gave up after a few chapters.