Diaspora by Greg Egan: Hard sci-fi about quite a few things but mostly centering around the nature of consciousness. Although it is about a number of different big ideas and spans a long, long time, the story gels together really well. A lot of the physics and maths stuff flew over my head, but the plot is followable. Leviathan Wakes(Expanse #1) by James S. A. Corey: First book of the Expanse series.…

Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks: This is a book about how to tell better stories, by an award-winning Moth storyteller. The book also talks about how to find better stories from your life. Besides surgically analyzing what goes into crafting a great story, the book is filled with great stories from the author’s own life and so is really entertaining to read. The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova: This book documents the journey of a journalist who goes from knowing almost nothing about poker to becoming a pro player.…

Tiassa by Steven Brust: Part of the Vlad Taltos series. This one was really good. It is written from the perspectives of different characters in the story– not first-person like the other books in the series, but the focus shifts between different different people in each chapter, and you get to learn about other characters. The story itself is also pretty cool. The Jhereg cook up a really large hoax– an imminent Jenoine attack– just to rope in Vlad, but Cawti prevents that from happening.…

Deep Work(Audiobook) by Cal Newport: Somewhat of a re-read. I read most of the book a few years ago but never finished it. Like most of the books in the category, most of the value from reading this book comes just from getting nudged into assessing the things you value and improving your current systems even if just by a smidge. Jhegaala by Steven Brust: Entertaining read but I found the ending to be a bit unsatisfying.…

The Start-Up of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha: A career book by a LinkedIn cofounder. Emphasizes networking as an essential tool to advance your career; unsurprisingly advocates using LinkedIn to do this. Ultralearning by Scott Young: The book describes an approach to learning by immersing yourself in projects which will teach you the skills you are interested in. It also discusses incorporating techniques like retrieval practice, spaced repetition into the projects to speed up your learning process.…