• Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee. I got this book when it was mentioned in Zhedong Wang’s 2024 letter, where he said “Min Jin Lee is one of the only authors I’m a completionist for.” I understand why. At the beginning, I felt like the book was beneath me in some aspects (which is generally a terrible attitude to approach a book with). The writing was plain, there wasn’t much nuance, and I felt like everything was being told directly to me. I also struggled to relate to the nicher aspects of Korean culture discussed in the book. But about two thirds of the way through I realised I was just stupid and slow for not realising how important all the characters were. I saw aspects of my life and the lives of those around me within the myriad ecosystem of these quite beautiful and flawed people. In many ways, I felt it was if Emily Brontë had written the script for Love Actually. And there was also the quite relieving fact that it wasn’t just a novel about love - it made me feel a lot better about how difficult it is to know what to do with your life in your twenties. It’s nice to know that there are some people out there who would have turned down that job too. “Words never mattered’ he said, ‘seasons mattered.’”
  • The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. A very Douglas Adams-style exposition on whether we have free will, whether God is apathetic or not, and what the whole point of it is depending on the answers to those two questions. There is a comfort to be found in the fact that even if our civilisation’s history is a manipulation of cosmic forces for an alien race to get a repair part to one of their stranded travellers, then at least we got to be around to unknowingly be a part of it. I also found some interesting parallels between the pace of AI development and the Tralfamadorians (see here). “It took us that long to realise that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
  • Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli. To be honest, not the world’s biggest fan. Seemed way too superficial to be able to get any insight from it - basically good if you want to go to a party and be able to say confidently “Quantum spinfoam makes up space-time, and is a better theory of quantum gravity than string theory.” But I wouldn’t say you get anything beyond surface-level understanding. One interesting idea that jumped out at me, however, is how the maximum information content of a certain volume provides a link between quantum mechanics and general relativity. I had heard this idea previously in Dwarkesh Patel’s episode with Adam Brown, and so I decided to try and understand it in this post.
  • Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. In this ingenious work, Nabokov crafts a novel structured as a 999-line poem by fictional poet John Shade, accompanied by an elaborate commentary written by the unreliable narrator Charles Kinbote. I actually need to write a whole other post on this. I have never seen anyone else twist the shape of what a novel can be. And the shape wasn’t contorted or wrestled into being thus; it seemed like it fell out of the Platonic form of exactly what this story was. I’m also slightly ashamed about how long it took me to disentangle the deranged fiction of the narrator from the truth of his relationship with John Shade. It’s also pretty cool that the book was such an inspiration for Blade Runner 2049, and is even where the meme comes from. “Cells interlinked within cells interlinked \ Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct \ Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.”
  • Middlemarch by George Eliot. A beautifully observed portrait of provincial life in 19th century England. I wrote my full thoughts on this one.