Books

Categories of books Web-Link

These categories are meant to help you match your current energy level to the energy required to read the book. Captured on: [2023-02-09 Thu 17:09], from You Don’t Hate Reading: How to Easily Read 100 Books This Year - YouTube. I have not decided to categorise the books I read into these categories because I don’t really have a need to. At the moment I’m still trying to build the habit of reading, so just forcing myself to read when and where I can.

Informative

Every chapter makes a clear and distinguished point. Might be too dense to read.

Expressive

Share opinions and thoughts of the writer. Information is delivered in tiny concepts. These books take away energy and make you feel like stopping the book.

Storybooks

Deliver the whole content in one group. Examples include fiction books and memoirs.

List of Books for Which I might Have Notes

List of Textbooks

Processing

Reading

2023 Reading Goals

In my 2023 Goals I’ve decided to read 12 books by the end of the year. I got nowhere near to completing what I set out. I realise that I was not dedicated to reading as much as I hoped. Nonetheless this was my plan for 2023.

Month	Book	Current Page	Total Pages	%
January	Powerful Focus	62	62	100
February	Make Time	n/a	259	0
March	Being Mortal	263	263	100
April	Metamorphisis	52	52	100
May	A Heartbreaking Work…			0
June	Undoctored			0
July	Can’t hurt me	357	357	100
August	Do no harm			0
September	A brief history of time			0
October	No longer human			0
November	Man’s search for meaning			0
December	Meditations			0

Additional books I read

How to take smart notes in Obsidian : April 10 in one sitting on the flight

2024 Reading Goals

Taking a look at last year’s goals and just reflecting in general the main problems were that when I came across a book that didn’t really engage me I didn’t really read that much. I figured I should just make a list of books I should read as opposed to setting a book to finish each month. Its difficult to force myself to read a particular book that month especially if that book does not interest me at that time and that month is demanding. Instead what might be best is to make a list of books I want to read:

[-] The bullet journal method
[-] Feel good productivity
[-] Hitch hiker’s guide to the galaxy
[-] Atomic habits
How to talk to anyone
The art and business of online writing
Undoctored
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Do no harm
A brief history of time
Man’s search for meaning

Read

These are books that I’ve finished reading but have not yet started processing my highlights or notes on them.

Linking

These are books with notes that I have begun linking to other notes

Completed

Dopamine Detox: A Short Guide to Remove Distractions and Get Your Brain to Do Hard Things

Postponed

The 4-Hour Work Week : postponed because it doesn’t seem to apply to Medicine. Though I guess it might change once I start my career

Deep Work : Didn’t really end up finishing it

The Silence of the Lambs : Finding it hard to start a fiction book

Recommendations

Atomic Habits

The White Coat Investor

Digital Minimalism

Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari

Recommended by a couple of people (including Ali Abdaal, Elizabeth Filips) and the book Make Time: How to focus on what matters every day

No longer human

? Dark psychology fiction read

The Psychology of Emotions

4000 weeks

Rapt by Winifred Gallagher

Recommended by John Zeratsky (author of Make Time: How to focus on what matters every day)

A hearbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Thought it might be an interesting read in the context of a Quarter-Life Crisis

Undoctored - Adam Kay

Given for my birthday (2023) by Harry, Yash, Tim, Aayush and Ziyang

Man’s search for meaning

Recommended from 9 self-help books that changed my life - YouTube, gives some stuff about Meaning

Meditations

Recommended by Sakib and Asad

The expectation effect

Why we age

Recommended reading while reading Being Mortal

Creativitiy: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention Web-Link

Captured on: [2023-01-26 Thu 13:18], from (156) 13 great books to read in 2023 that no one talks about - YouTube

The death of Ivan Ilyic and Other Stories - Leo Tolstoy Web-Link

Captured on: [2023-05-05 Fri 17:40], from (2) 53 extremely specific book recommendations (from your requests) - YouTube

Also recommended by Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

Recommended by : Elizabeth Filips - Human psychology - Just introspection and thoughts

The Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Nietzsche

Recommended by : Elizabeth Filips - Philosophy - Described as problematic

The Courage to be Disliked - Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi

Recommended by : Elizabeth Filips - She hated it at first because it didn’t seem genuine - But it gave her a new framework on different aspects on life - “If you don’t live your life, who will live it for you”

Also recommended by: Taimur Abdaal on podcast How can we get into the habit of reading on Wednesday, 28 April 2021

Adventures Down a Rabbit Hole

Recommended by : Elizabeth Filips

War Doctor

a heartbreakingly personal story about what it’s like for a woman who isn’t a developer to work at tech startups that worship bros with engineering prowess and the ability to code. It’s also a story about change — the change that comes from moving across the country, getting a new job with new co-workers, or the creeping realization that the relentless optimizing that the world had about the tech industry (and that the tech industry had about itself) in the early 2010s may not actually be warranted.

Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership Web-Link

Captured on: [2023-06-29 Thu 19:42], from The best nonfiction tech books of all time

Captured on: [2023-06-29 Thu 19:43], from The best nonfiction tech books of all time

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Brought up in the book being mortal

Never Finished - David Goggins Web-Link

Captured on: [2023-09-05 Tue 20:07], from (49) review of david goggin’s new book, never finished - YouTube

Recommended by Jay Skullz. Bought it for Harry Pan’s birthday

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller

A hollywood crew want to convert his life into a film. He realises his life is not story worthy and his life was just easy. He didn’t have any difficult goals or conflict. He realises that a good life story is all about overcoming adversities.

Somehow we realise that great stories are told in conflict but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story that we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather a master story teller. —Donald Miller

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

He explains our moral intuitions by talking about 6 different moral taste receptors. It helped Ali understand why people are right winged or conservative.

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

Story Worthy by Matthew Dicks

Its a book about how to become a better storyteller but much more. Storytelling permeates so many different parts of our life that its quite important.

Homework for life: every night you spend 5 minutes just going over your day and writing a few words to describe the most story worthy moment of your day. This slows down the passage of time. Maybe a day review at the end of the day would be nice to include as a template (I guess something to consider for Saturday, 01 May 2021, Sunday, 02 May 2021 and Monday, 03 May 2021).

Designing data intensive applications by Martin Kleppmann

Captured from iPad at 5 Nov 2023 at 9:38:46 pm from YouTube

Related to getting into programming

The Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger

The Elephant in the Brain by Simler and Hanson

War Doctor by David Nott

Natives by Akala

Effortless - Greg McKeown - Web-Link

Captured on: [2023-09-13 Wed 19:36], from https://www.youtube.com/shorts/V0HyNEd3GHs

(13) The Race to the South Pole 🏁 - YouTube

The Intelligent Invester by Benjamin Graham Web-Link

Captured on: [2023-12-25 Mon 08:04], from https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2023/04/26/five-books-on-the-best-approaches-to-being-an-investor?utm_campaign=a.&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=12/23/2023&utm_id=1838954

This is the foundational text for serious investors, written by the mentor of Warren Buffett, arguably the most successful investor of the modern era. Ben Graham was the archetypal “value investor”, looking for bargains in the market. He honed his skills after the Wall Street crash of 1929 when equity valuations had plunged. Accordingly, some of his methods for finding bargains are difficult to apply today when stocks are more expensively valued. But his principles remain sound. Much depends on the price paid for stocks, so beware of fashionable industries. As he notes “obvious prospects for physical growth in a business do not translate into obvious prospects for investors” whereas “a sufficiently low price can turn a security of mediocre quality into a sound investment opportunity”.

The Clash of Cultures by John Bogle Web-Link

Captured on: [2023-12-25 Mon 08:10], from https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2023/04/26/five-books-on-the-best-approaches-to-being-an-investor?utm_campaign=a.&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=12/23/2023&utm_id=1838954

Like Ben Graham, Jack (as he was usually known) Bogle focused on the difference between investment and speculation. But rather than buy individual stocks, Mr Bogle believed that investors should have exposure to the broad stock market. He was thus the father of the tracking fund which mimics the behaviour of benchmarks like the S&P 500 index. He also set up the Vanguard group, a mutually-owned company which offers low-cost trackers and is one of the world’s largest institutional investors. Mr Bogle was the author of many books but this one, published in 2012 towards the end of his life, sums up his message. Too many investors pursue hot stocks and hot funds; they buy high and sell low, and pay high fees to the financial sector in the process. As he writes: “investors need to understand not only the magic of compounding long-term returns, but the tyranny of compounding costs.”

Lying for Money by Dan Davies Web-Link

Captured on: [2023-12-25 Mon 08:11], from https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2023/04/26/five-books-on-the-best-approaches-to-being-an-investor?utm_campaign=a.&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=12/23/2023&utm_id=1838954

Trading too often, and paying high fees, are two pitfalls faced by the average investor. The third is succumbing to financial fraud. This entertaining book, published in 2018, describes some of the most common scams. If there is a shared theme, it is that investors simply can’t be bothered to check the details when the rewards look great. Although regulators can fall asleep at the wheel, fraud is more common in unregulated areas, as the history of cryptocurrencies has shown. The golden rule is to watch out for extremely rapid growth; such examples need to be checked thoroughly. As the saying goes “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns Web-Link

Captured on: [2023-12-25 Mon 08:12], from https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2023/04/26/five-books-on-the-best-approaches-to-being-an-investor?utm_campaign=a.&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=12/23/2023&utm_id=1838954

One of the highlights of the investment year is the annual review of financial markets produced by three academics from London Business School, most recently in association with Credit Suisse (a bank that perhaps could have paid better heed to the advice therein). The trio have assembled a trove of data from around the globe, focusing on the returns from shares, bonds and Treasury bills. They summed up the 20th century in a book, published in 2002, which helped to explain why “the cult of the equity” had developed—namely that shares had consistently outperformed other asset classes. But the book also provides a useful corrective. America’s great success tends to skew investor impressions. Elsewhere, investors have seen their savings wiped out by hyperinflation or revolutionary governments. Just because the optimists were right in the 20th century doesn’t mean they will always be proved right in the 21st.

Investing Amid Low Expected Returns by Antti Ilmanen Web-Link

Captured on: [2023-12-25 Mon 08:13], from https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2023/04/26/five-books-on-the-best-approaches-to-being-an-investor?utm_campaign=a.&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=12/23/2023&utm_id=1838954

The last book in the list was written by an academic-turned-investor, and thus has more of a bent towards investment professionals. Nevertheless, small investors will gain a lot from reading this tome, an update on the author’s excellent earlier work “Expected Returns”. The main thesis is that the low yields on bonds and equities that prevailed at the time of publication will reduce the likely returns on investment (making them lower than those described in “Triumph of the Optimists”). The thesis appeared to be borne out by a horrible year for both bonds and equities in 2022, the year it was published. But the book also provides an excellent explanation of many different strategies from momentum investing (buying assets that have risen in price) to private equity.

The hunger games

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

The Magic of Thinking Big

Author: David Joseph Schwartz Recommended by: Ali Abdaal in How can we get into the habit of reading where he says its life changing for someone who is young and starting entrepreneurship.

Drive by Daniel Pink

Recommended by: Ali Abdaal in his video about quitting medicine
Is about Intrinsic Motivation.

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