Reading List
Books that have substantially changed how I see the world — plus guilty pleasures for those drawn to pursue the Dao. The second list may consume several weeks of your life. You have been warned.
Essential Reads
The Master and His Emissary
Iain McGilchrist
On the divided brain and the making of the Western world.
The Matter with Things, Vol. 1 & 2
Iain McGilchrist
The magnum opus — consciousness, matter, and how we got everything backwards.
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter
Strange loops, self-reference, and the emergent mind. A genuine brain-rewriter.
Fooled by Randomness
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The hidden role of chance in markets and in life. Once you see survivorship bias, you see it everywhere.
The Black Swan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The impact of the highly improbable — why rare, unforeseeable events run the world, and why we keep modeling them away.
Titans of History
Simon Sebag Montefiore
A procession of the people who bent the arc of civilisation — for better and worse.
The Gulag Archipelago
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The cost of ideology unchecked by reality. Read it slowly.
From Third World to First
Lee Kuan Yew
The Singapore story, from 1965 to 2000: how a small island with no resources built a nation on pragmatism.
The Hidden Reality
Brian Greene
Parallel worlds and the full multiverse landscape laid bare.
Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield
Jeremy Scahill
What is done in your name, far from view.
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond
Why some civilisations dominated. Geography as destiny.
Guilty Pleasures — Xianxia & Web Fiction
Warning: some of these may drain away all your time and your life for the next few weeks.
Lord of Mysteries
Cuttlefish That Loves Diving
Steampunk + Lovecraftian horror + cultivation. The Beyonder system is one of the most intricate magic systems written.
I Shall Seal the Heavens
Er Gen
Er Gen's masterwork. Have faith in Lord Fifth, and you shall gain eternal life.
Renegade Immortal
Er Gen
Wang Lin — arguably the most tragic protagonist in xianxia. Lonely and relentless.
A Will Eternal
Er Gen
Lighter than Er Gen's other works. Bai Xiaochun is genuinely funny. A palate cleanser.
Cultivation Chat Group
Legend of the Paladin
Modern-day cultivators in a WeChat group. Absurdist, surprisingly heartfelt.
The Greatest Estate Developer
BK_Moon
Korean manhwa. A civil engineer reincarnates into a novel and proceeds to fix everything with infrastructure. Somehow works.
The Legendary Moonlight Sculptor
Heesung Nam
The OG Korean VRMMO isekai. Weed is the most lovably shameless protagonist in the genre.