Once upon a time, at an end-of-year teaching team dinner, I was talking with a friend of mine about New Year’s Resolutions. Every year, she said, she set herself the goal of reading 52 books the following year. What an amazing achievement! To read one book a week! I realised I wanted to spend substantially more time reading and, one day, achieve this myself.

I haven’t made it yet, but ever since the beginning of 2019, I’ve kept a list of all of the books I have read. Actually, I’m counting more than just books, for example there are a few web comics in my log, and I’m counting more than just reading, for example there are a couple of audiobooks and lecture series. That’s why I called this post ‘generalised reading.’

This weekend, I set myself the task of reviewing that the first six years of my log. I’ve grouped by topic and in roughly chronological order within topics all of the books from the list, and with some brief notes about why I picked up each book or what I remember about reading it (sometimes there is not much).

As a disclaimer, there’s not much general insight to be found here for anyone other than me. I wrote this for myself in the process of reflecting on my reading habits. I am only posting it to encourage myself to complete that reflection thoroughly.

For some deeper reflections, wait for my upcoming post fear of missing out. Going forward, I’ll try to make more in-depth book summaries and reviews at the time of reading, so see 2026 for that (as I note below, I might re-read a few of the books from this list at some point).

§Gödel, Escher, Bach

It may be a slight exaggeration to say that there’s life before one reads GEB, and there’s life afterwards. In my case, it’s at least literally true that this list covers my life from the point when I read this classic by Douglas Hofstadter.

I picked up a copy on a recommendation in a CS lecture from my colleague and mentor Justin Zobel. I was a TA for the course at the time, having already graduated from a degree in computer science. In this sense, I think I was a bit late to the party.

Even though I had a few years of experience teaching students about recursion and the limits of computation, I’ve never dived that deeply into music or art, and I hadn’t actually studied Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, so the book had plenty of interesting and new material for me.

I am sure this book has since implicitly shaped my thinking, and even the trajectory of my career, in countless ways. I should consider a re-read. After all, RICERCAR!

§The Sherlock Holmes canon

I read the entire Sherlock Holmes canon from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, including the four novels and the five short story collections. I found the characters and mysteries very entertaining. I have also watched some of the film and TV adaptations, and I reliably enjoy them too.

One of the most memorable things about the writing is the archaic expressions that came up from time to time. One notable example is the many uses of the word ‘singular,’ which I hadn’t encountered many times before in standard usage. As it happens, soon after reading the canon, I would become a student in the Melbourne Deep Learning Group, spending some of my time studying singular learning theory, and becoming familiar with the mathematical version of the term. In fact I ultimately used a quote from one of the first few short stories as the epigraph for my Master’s thesis:

I felt that he must have some solid grounds for the assured and easy demeanour with which he treated the singular mystery which he had been called upon to fathom.
—Dr. John H. Watson, “A Case of Identity,” The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

§The Rosie Trilogy

At one point in his life, Graeme Simsion was a data modelling consultant who earned a PhD from and taught at my alma mater and wrote the textbook used in my least favourite undergraduate subject. But my distaste for INFO20003 Database Systems wasn’t exactly Graeme’s fault. In fact, by the time I enrolled, he had left industry, taken some writing courses at RMIT, and published his debut novel The Rosie Project to national acclaim.

This I learned when I took INFO20003 and the lecturer explained who had written the slides and why someone else was now teaching the course. Several years later, in 2019, I found a copy of the book and its sequel (The Rosie Effect) in an op shop, and I decided to give them a shot. I found them totally hilarious and delightful, and soon after ordered the third installment (The Rosie Result) to complete the trilogy.

My only complaint is that my lecturer had said that the main character had been loosely based on someone from the University, but, with no further clues, I couldn’t figure out who it was.

§Some science fiction

I read Encounter with Tiber by actual astronaut Buzz Aldrin and actual writer John Barnes. I could not remember a thing about this book, even after re-reading the synopsis on the Wikipedia page just now, so that shows you how much of an impression it left.

I liked Shelley’s Frankenstein. In particular, I thought her take on what it’s like to become conscious for the first time was pretty interesting.

I read Douglas Adams’s five-part Hitchhiker’s Trilogy. Apparently fans of the books don’t like the 2005 movie, but I watched the movie a while before and liked it, and it helped me follow the shenanigans in the first book. I found the later books increasingly harder to follow, but still sometimes pretty funny. I liked the ending of book 4, and probably should have stopped there, or given the sequel by Eoin Colfer a shot.

I found a really nicely bound edition of Asimov’s Foundation trilogy in an op shop for a few dollars! I found the premise of psychohistory and the Seldon plan interesting, as well as some of the political dynamics that play out over the years. However, I found the frequent and long time-skips and the later sections involving plots based on extensive psychological manipulation quite jarring.

My nice edition of the Foundation trilogy also contained The Stars, Like Dust. I thought the ending was a bit cheap, but maybe it’s because I’m not an American. I haven’t read the rest of the Galactic Empire series.

I later found a second-hand copy of a short story collection called Machines That Think, edited by Asimov and others, which contained some more Asimov and other works by various other classical sci-fi authors.

In 2021, I would return to Asimov for the Robots series (The Caves of Steel; The Naked Sun; The Robots of Dawn; and Robots and Empire). I also read the short story anthology The Complete Robot. I liked this series much more than the Foundation series. It had cooler big ideas about cultural clashes between different branches of space-faring civilisation and actual recurring characters like Susan Calvin and R. Daneel Olivaw. Again, not a big fan of powerful psychological manipulation as a plot device, but somehow it was not as overdone here. At some point, I plan to read the Foundation prequels and sequels, mainly for the tie-ins.

I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, the book that invented the metaverse, popularised the term avatar, and inspired the invention of Google Earth. Very cool to see where these ideas came from before they migrated from science fiction to reality.

I continued to look out for classic sci-fi novels in my local second-hand book shop. Eventually I got a copy of Ringworld by Larry Niven. It was interesting, but not enough to get me to look into the sequels or his other work.

In contrast, I quite enjoyed William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the cyberpunk classic. I eventually found copies of the sequels Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, though I didn’t find them as strong as the original.

More recently, I found the webcomic Dresden Codak by Senna Diaz. I read Hob and Dark Science (to date). It is amazingly illustrated, rich with philosophical texture, and every page takes an unexpected turn. I don’t know how she does it. I am still reading whenever new pages come out.

§A little fantasy

I haven’t read that much fantasy as an adult. I have noticed that I find some fantasy writing a bit hard to follow, since the rules of the world can be quite detached from the reality I am expecting. (Maybe a similar problem came up with softer science fiction like Hitchhiker’s.)

One example is Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, a seminal fantasy classic that has been famously underserved in adaptation. I found the world really interesting, though a little hard to follow in the places where it was more fantastical. I would like to return to Earthsea (and some of Le Guin’s other works) when I get the chance.

I find it much easier to follow fantasy in graphic novel form. For example, I somehow found the work by the Finnish artist Minna Sundberg and read through Stand Still. Stay Silent. (both series). These were beautiful and gripping post-apocalyptic survival stories. I was particularly impressed by how Sundberg visually communicated the dynamic of characters speaking in a bunch of different languages. I also enjoyed her shorter web comics Lovely People and A Redtail’s Dream.

I later read Guilded Age by T Campbell, Erica Henderson, and Phil Kahn, a webcomic about a fantasy RPG-style adventure, with some sci-fi twists. It was quite good.

It occurs to me now that a modern fantasy story that inherits all of the tropes and touchstones pioneered by earlier fantasy writers is generally going to be something I find easier to follow. I’m already familiar with the rough shape of the fantastical ‘logos’—the laws of the fantastical reality therein. Whereas, someone like Le Guin who is writing outside (before) that framework has been established, and who is genuinely creating new fantastical realities, is going to be harder to follow, at least without me putting in more effort or reading more work that adopts a similar logos.

§Other comics and manga

I have already mentioned a couple of webcomics above, let me collect the rest of my graphical media here.

I enjoyed Darths and Droids by the Comic Irregulars—a comic made entirely from screenshots from the Star Wars movies, edited with dialog as if the stories are being played out by a D&D party. It’s hilarious. I caught up at the time I read it in 2021, but haven’t kept up since.

I worked through the entire archives of xkcd by Randall Munroe. Maybe this should be listed under ‘classics.’

As for manga, I was up to date with One Piece before this list began, and I kept up throughout the period. It’s a steep buy-in but once you are in, there is no more epic or romantic adventure tale.

I also read the physical 12 volume set of Death Note books, which I bought as a child after really liking the anime. It took me a while, but I finally got around to it in this period.

Finally, at some point I decided that reading One Piece was not enough, and I made the questionable decision to binge another extremely long best-selling shōnen serial I had watched the first few episodes of as a kid: Naruto. It was pretty fun and nostalgic to see out the stories of the characters I had met as a child. I particularly appreciated the themes of family and tradition that it explored in the later sections.

§On history

I acquired an old book titled Sarton on the History of Science, collecting some of George Sarton’s essays on various periods and figures from the history of science and medicine. I remember finding this quite interesting, though at this point the only thing I can recall is Sarton’s evocative claim that science alone of mankind’s endeavours is truly cumulative. I would definitely like to read this one again.

I also read Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. I was disappointed because I had hoped that this would be a comprehensive introduction to the history of the human species that could help me fill in gaps in my own model of world history. In reality, it was more like an impassioned reply that assumed massive amounts of existing context. This is not necessarily a knock on the writer, who is not responsible for my expectations. I do think the book had some interesting takes, e.g., it points out that the agricultural revolution was actually great from the perspective of the crops themselves, who Harari casts as domesticating us in a sense. But it was also quite long, and I have since held off reading Harari’s other works.

I later found and started reading The Outline of History by H. G. Wells, which was much more like what I was looking for, though it’s a very long book and I didn’t make it very far. I should try again, or maybe start with A Short History of the World, which is obviously shorter.

§On the future

When I started getting into the field of AI safety I read some of the popular books on the topic.

I started with the slightly less well-known The AI Does Not Hate You by Tom Chivers. This is a journalist’s exploration of the AI safety / EA / rationalist ecosystem, and it contained lots of interesting cultural insights. After being in this space for a few years, I hope to revisit it and see if some of the community references make more sense now.

Of course I also read Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence. As for many in the field, the taxonomies and definitions developed in this book have framed a lot of my thinking since then. My physical copy ended up with a LOT of margin notes as my intuitions clashed with Bostrom’s claims, and particularly his suggestions for various cryptographic alignment schemes. There were also cases where he opened my eyes to flaws in my own position, such as how I previously thought that merging with AIs was a promising path forward, however he pointed out that the human–computer interface would always be a bottleneck. I would like to revisit this book as well some day, in physical form so that I can also review my old reactions in the margins.

Finally, I read Stuart Russell’s Human Compatible. The first parts of the book, where Russell is laying out the challenge of the alignment problem, were really compelling to me, whereas the later chapters, where he lays out his lab’s at-the-time solution of beneficial AI and assistance games, were deeply flawed. I would therefore recommend only the early parts of the book, or to take the later parts with a lot of salt.

§Existentialist literature

I watched JBP’s lecture series Maps of Meaning (along with Personality and its Transformations), which I found pretty insightful (without endorsing his more recent move into the culture war). Throughout his lectures, he makes a lot of references to existential philosophy and literature, and I followed some of these up. (In a similar vein, I listened to about two thirds of John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis lecture series. This was some pretty profound stuff and I want to re-watch and finish it some day.)

I have wanted to try Nietzsche for a while. I haven’t made much progress, but I did manage to read his autobiography Ecce Homo and a short audiobook called On the Future of our Educational Institutions. I really want to read more, but I haven’t had the time, mental space, or the courage so far.

I also read Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, plus a small collection of short stories from other holocaust survivors. These were quite emotionally challenging reads, but I think ultimately valuable. It’s important to know what the stakes are when thinking about the future of AI.

I tried a little Dostoyevsky. While I haven’t yet found the time or mental space for his longer works, I did find some audiobooks of Notes from Underground and a collection of nine of his short stories, including, memorably, A Novel in Nine Letters, The Heavenly Christmas Tree, and The Crocodile.

§Some more philosophy

A long time ago, I bought myself a nice edition of some of the works of Plato. I eventually got around to trying them. The collection included the short dialogues Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, as well as the much longer dialogue The Republic. I am pleased that I managed to follow the dialogues for the most part, with the exception maybe of some of the stuff concerning the afterlife towards the end.

I read some essays by stoic philosopher Seneca (“On the shortness of life;” “Consolation to Helvia;” and “On tranquility of mind”). I generally find some value in some parts of stoicism, but I wouldn’t say that reading these essays was that enlightening. I do remember finding “On the shortness of life” fairly compelling, though I don’t think the impression lasted, I probably need to read it again.

I found a nice old collection of some of the works of John Stuart Mill. I read some of the shorter works (Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties; Bentham; and Inaugural Address at St. Andrews), mainly because this was more achievable than reading the longer and deeper ones; I don’t know that I got much from them. When I did try Utilitarianism or On Liberty (can’t remember which one), I got stuck and put it aside, with the intention to return, some day.

I read Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics. I’m a fan of Singer’s based on some of his impact, and I had been self-studying a little moral philosophy at the time, so I was pleased to find it second hand. Unfortunately, while a lot of the conclusions made sense, I recall being somewhat disappointed by some of the arguments and their presentation in the book.

As a more casual entry on this list, I read the entire backlog of the excellent Existential Comics. This webcomic is fantastic, and I totally recommend learning about existential philosophy through satire.

§Some other classics

One of the best things that happened to my reading habit was moving to Geelong, where there was an excellent second-hand book shop. Many of the above readings had come from the philosophy and literature shelves there. Some more finds, mostly from that book shop are as follows.

I read The Art of War by Sun Tzu, which I think I mostly followed, and The Prince by Machiavelli, which I think I mostly did not.

I read the short essay “Civil disobedience” by Thoreau, but didn’t manage to make much of a dent in Walden.

I read a couple of societal parodies. As a budding AI safety researcher, I read Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. I read through Voltaire’s Candide, though I think most of it was lost on me. A bit later, I read Utopia by Thomas More, which didn’t leave much of an impression on me.

I finally managed to read Orwell’s 1984. Of course, everyone knows a lot about the contents of this book without even having read it. I read this immediately before reading Neuromancer, and the contrast in writing styles was extremely stark: Orwell spends a lot of time explicating the dynamics of and functions of his dystopia (which is the real subject of the book I suppose), whereas Gibson throws you into his future and lets you piece together how the world works implicitly through the references made by the narrator or the characters.

Not itself a classic but a window into some old mythology: I read Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology, containing his telling of the ancient stories. I found this pretty disappointing, and I would like to find a different perspective on these stories.

§On self-improvement

I am not above seeking easy solutions to perceived inadequacy in areas of my life!

Deep Work by Cal Newport was very uplifting and left a lasting impression. I have re-read it once since the first time in 2019. At some point I completely quit Facebook, and I don’t exactly remember but this book might have been instrumental in that decision. Definitely still worth reading again and pushing harder to get more deep work into my life!

In late 2019 I was preparing to learn German as part of my exchange semester to ETH Zürich, and I read The Fast, Easy Way to Learn a Language by Bill Handley, a Melbourne-based author of study guides, as this book was recommended to me by a family member. I don’t remember finding it very insightful. I had much more luck with my own systematic learning approach, though my motivation was cut short when the pandemic hit a couple of weeks into my exchange.

I do remember reading Ultralearning by Scott Young, and finding it very uninsightful. There were some interesting anecdotes throughout and I don’t have objections to the specific recommendations, but the taxonomy put forward in the book is embarrassingly, unforgivably lazy and underdeveloped, and this made reading it perhaps more enraging than inspiring. Another memorable thing about this book is that merely reading the foreword by James Clear made me swear off ever reading Atomic Habits.

I would go on to read Peak by K Anders Ericsson. That is a much better book about how to learn and get better at things than Ultralearning. Deliberate practice is a core concept in how I think about learning, though I wouldn’t say I have succeeded in implementing it in my life as thoroughly as I would like.

I later read Grit by Angela Duckworth. I found this one inspiring but also challenging to read. Whenever I take these kinds of psychological surveys for measuring personality traits, I don’t know how to interpret the questions. I can see myself strongly agreeing or strongly disagreeing depending on what kind of contexts in my life I am thinking about. In this case, the results tell me I am either in the bottom 10th percentile or the top 10th percentile for grit. So helpful!

At some point I read an old book called Rational Recovery by Jack Trimpey. This is a book about mastering alcoholism but I interpreted it more broadly as about self-control and discipline. Anyway, it really resonated with me and I think has led to some actual improvements in my life, though perhaps I should revisit it and see if I can eke out some further improvements from this vein.

Straight after reading Trimpey I read The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef. I know this is a popular book, but everyone hears about popular things for the first time at some point, and I happen to remember that in my case, I heard about this book when I was speculating to some rationalist colleagues that maybe militaries have developed particularly useful practical knowledge about gathering information and forming accurate world models, and that I would be interested in learning from these sources. Well, I was informed that my idea was not original, in fact professional rationalist Galef had last year published this book on a similar topic. Great, that saved me a lot of trouble!

I liked the book, but in the end I realised that I had already internalised a lot of what it had to say. At least I had internalised it on an intellectual level—not that I’m a master at putting it all into practice. But no book is going to help me much with that part of the process. Anyway, come to think of it, while the scout/soldier terminology is inspired by a military analogy, I don’t remember whether the book itself drew that much on lessons from the military world. Maybe something still to ponder.

§Books received as gifts

Giving books as gifts is pretty hard. I don’t always read books that I receive as gifts. At some point, I noted I did read In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick, and a biography of Albert Einstein by Sri Lankan professor K. A. I. L. W. Gamalath. I wouldn’t have picked these books myself, but I remember enjoying them at the time.

§Eliezer Yudkowsky

In 2024 and 2025, for reasons I will describe in an upcoming post, I found almost no time for reading books at all as my “generalised reading” habits got a bit stuck on listening to TTRPG podcasts. The one author who was able to cut through this has been Eliezer Yudkowsky (a somewhat divisive figure, I’m a fan overall).

In late 2024 when I arrived in Oxford, I resolved to finally read ‘the sequences’ (a.k.a. Rationality: from AI to Zombies). I made this feasible by finding an audiobook version, and now many of my walking paths around Oxford trigger memories of snippets of the book. I had already internalised most of the ideas before reading, including since there is some overlap with some of Yudkowsky’s publications on existential risk, but there were still a few new things that stood out to me as valuable frames, and it’s always good to get a reminder to put this stuff into practice.

I read a bit of Inadequate Equilibria but didn’t get the chance to finish it at the time. I got the main idea from the first few sections, which is a sign of a well-written book if you ask me.

I pre-ordered If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (Yudkowsky and Soares), and I read the whole thing the Saturday after it arrived. I thought this was a solid read, and I have recommended it to a few family members and close friends. It was particularly nice to see the modern argument for AI risk all at once. Of course, this was highly relevant to me, as I view my research aim as turning this argument from one driven by intuition and analogy to one that has been rigorously empirically tested.

§Books I haven’t read

I bought a lot more books than I read over this period. Most of them are back home in Australia at the moment. The year I read the most books over this period was 2020. In that year, I set myself a rule that I should read 12 books, and if I buy a new book, I have to increase the target by one. Therefore, I limit the rate at which my book collection can get away from me.

This worked well as an incentive, but I don’t actually think collecting unread books is a bad thing in itself. See the Japanese concept tsundoku or Umberto Eco’s concept of an antilibrary. My ever-growing book collection can, in principle, serve as an important reminder of the sublime depth and breadth of human civilisation as I aim to extend our knowledge for the good of all of us. While I left my collection at home, my favourite place in Oxford is the Norrington room at Blackwell’s, since that place instills in me the same feeling (and because it has lots of levels).

However, there is a failure mode I am at risk of falling into. One thing I would like to do now after having looked at the books I have gotten around to reading, is to look over my bookshelf at all the books I have not gotten around to reading. I suspect I will find a pattern where I tend, not always but more often than not, to put off reading things that seem too deep or demanding of my attention. The result is that I end up wasting my time with shorter and more shallow reads, or books that I am reading just for the sake of saying I have read them. Evidently, a few years later, many of these books have left no lasting impression on me. That is a real shame.

I have had some quite intense experiences of nostalgia, profundity, and joy when reading good books throughout my life. It’s not always possible to tell in advance when I am going to feel these things, but sometimes I have good reason to think a book is going to have this kind of effect, and I actively put off engaging with it, rationalising that ‘now is not the time.’ But there is never a ‘time’ for reading unless I make it.

Here’s hoping I can be more bold in my choices of titles going forward.