Favourite books:
Click here for a list of textbooks I regularly use
I'm always hungry for a new non-fiction book to read... Any free moment is spent reading.
My views on reading
Here are some books I've read and loved (in no particular order):
Disclaimer: I've attempted to group these books by a general notion of category, although I'm sure
many of these authors would protest the grouping I've chosen.
However, I like clustering things for ease of navigation, and I apologize in advance for the suboptimality
of my clustering scheme.
General Science
- The Phenomenon of Science - by Valentin F. Turchin
- A Short History of Nearly Everything - by Bill Bryson
Language
- The Mother Tongue - by Bill Bryson
- The Signs of Language - by Edward Klima and Ursula Bellugi
Brain + Philosophy
- Descartes' Error - by António Damásio
- On Intelligence - by Jeff Hawking
Brain
- Connectome - by Sebastian Seung
- The Brain that Changes Itself - by Norman Doidge
- How to Create a Mind - by Ray Kurzweil(*)
Psychology
- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - by Oliver Sacks
- Stumbling on Happiness - by Daniel Gilbert
- The Upside of Irrationality - by Dan Ariely
- Predictably Irrational - by Dan Ariely
- Thinking Fast and Slow - by Daniel Kahneman
- An Unquiet Mind - by Kay Redfield Jamison
Computing + Philosophy
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - by Douglas Hofstadter
- Affective Computing - by Rosalind W. Picard
- The Society of Mind - by Marvin Minsky(*)
Philosophy
- Artificial Intelligence - by John Haugeland
- Plato Republic - translated by G.M.A. Grube
Cosmos
- A Brief History of Time - by Stephen Hawking
- A Briefer History of Time - by Stephen Hawking
Finance + Probability
- Fooled by Randomness - by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Economics + Society
- The World is Flat - by Thomas L. Friedman
- Naked Economics - by Charles Wheelan(*)
History + Society
- Guns, Germs, and Steel - by Jared Diamond
- Small Places, Large Issues - by Thomas H. Eriksen
- The Conquest of America - by Tzvetan Todorov(*)
Psychology + Society + Behavioural economics
- Outliers - by Malcolm Gladwell
- The Tipping Point - by Malcolm Gladwell
- Blink - by Malcolm Gladwell
- Made to Stick - by Dan and Chip Heath
- Freakonomics - by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
- Superfreakonomics - by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Evolution
- The Selfish Gene - by Richard Dawkins
- Your Inner Fish - by Neil Shubin
- Mean Genes - by Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan (Psychology)
- Sex at Dawn - by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá
Health
- Trick or Treatment - by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst
Animal societies
- The Superorganism - by Bert Hölldobler and Edmund O. Wilson
Other
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! - by Richard P. Feynman
- What the Dog Saw - by Malcolm Gladwell
- Moonwalking with Einstein - by Joshua Foer
(*) in-progress
on my to-read list