Books

Why read

Reading nourishes the mind and refreshes it when it is wearied with study; nevertheless, this refreshment is not obtained without study. — Seneca

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (re-reading): I'm intentionally reading only a few pages every day to remind myself to live like him. His long and useful life is something I admire.

Theo of Golden (in progress): I cannot remember exactly how this book came up to me (I think I was finding books about paying attention) but I’m glad it did. Besides it being a nice light read, especially before bed, it constantly reminds me to be kind.

Eat Your Ice Cream (read): I discovered this book after reading Something is very wrong with modern longevity science by Dhruv Khullar. It caught my attention because I always felt all the health gurus’ claims to be too excessive for most people and could do more harm than good. (I wrote about what I do instead.) After reading the introduction, I found it is contradictory that he disagrees with people spending too much time pouring over too much information to optimize too little of their lives but his introduction is rather verbose and not simple. The remaining chapters are better but it does have quite a bit of “other experts disagree with me but trust me bro” and unclear claims (e.g. “I have been told that my chocolate obsession is not bad.”) Overall, it has good, simple reminders for living a healthy and fulfilling life.

The Daily Dad (re-reading): Its short daily pages make it an easy daily morning read. It has helped me through several challenging parenting periods and reminded me to cherish our time with our children.
How to Teach Your Baby to Read (in progress): I chanced upon this book at a second-hand book shop run by challenged young people and their parents. It was timely because I have been exploring ways to teach my son how to read. It turns out the book shop owner and mother of the two challenged young men actually went for Glenn Doman’s workshop in Philadelphia, and she highly recommended this book. Glenn Doman and his team were researching how to help brain-injured kids and discovered that they could help the kids learn to read through flashcards. What if they applied that to healthy babies too? I’m not sure how effective this method is yet but I’ll report back.

Confucius Analects with selections from traditional commentaries (re-reading): This version pulls commentaries and interpretations from various sources, which I have found to be more useful in understanding the text. I read it with the digital Chinese version because I like to learn the original Chinese text.

Inside the Box (in progress): Now that I’m working for myself, I have total freedom on what to do and when to do them. But I suspect having constraints are important. So I’m reading this now. Now that coding is much easier with AI, I had the tendency to keep fixing bugs and adding small improvements and to neglect more important work such as making sure the messaging is clear, we have a core USP, the product actually solves a problem people care about, and perhaps most important of all, launch and get customers. As Kevin Yien shared, does it get the first dollar?

Storyworthy (in progress): I came across Matthew Dicks in Craig Mod's newsletter. Then, I spotted Storyworthy on Calvin French-Owen's bookshelf. I was also recently struggling with what to write and felt my writing is less valuable when it's about me and not some grand, timeless thesis. But Gemini told me I'm wrong: relatability is also important.
The Notebook (reading): I noticed Austin Kleon, Ryan Holiday, and Robin Sloan recommended this book in their newsletter. Also, I used to have a notebook business and am building Fernsage, a notebook app, now.