Book Recommendations

Ok, not a book but an old CSPAN website devoted to interviews with non-fiction authors that is very nostalgic for me.

Filled with fascinating stories of Arundhati Roy’s childhood and early adult life, her turbulent relationship with her mother, and descriptions of living in India.

There are a lot of theories of why so many of our modern systems function poorly: lobbying, regulations, monopoly, monopsony, biased algorithms, or reductive objectives like GDP or share value. All these can be true. This book offers one more: poor decision making on the part of large, complex institutions due to an inability to accurately understand their own operations or the real world. It’s a story of how abstractions lead people astray.

A funny and well-argued analysis about why so much of the software we use is bad and difficult to repair.

A page-turner sci-fi book with great world building. Nominally about monks who find aliens — don’t want to say too much and spoil it.

One of my favorite books of all time: sometimes funny, great characters, and a page-turner. Nominally about humanity’s first encounters with a civilization of intelligent spiders — don’t want to spoil it. I loved all the books in this series.

Beautiful parable set around a supernatural mystery.

At over 1000 pages each, this book series can feel like a big commitment but honestly, I obsessively read through them over a season and was sad when I ran out of books. Great story. Great characters. Epic fantasy tale with themes of oppression and redemption.

Necromancers in space. The heads of each major house come together to resolve a mystery. Great world building and characters.