Reading Notes

Books

Psychology, self-help, and philosophy books from my Goodreads. The ones marked Notes have written quotes and summaries; the rest are logged here but the write-up is still in my head.

35 books · 12 with notesSelf-Help· 4Psychology· 16Philosophy· 15

Eat, Pray, Love

Elizabeth Gilbert

A memoir-as-self-help disguised as a travelogue: one year, three countries, one woman trying to put a divorced self back together without lying to herself about how it's going.

Read · August 2024

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess

A teenage thug, a state-mandated cure, and the most uncomfortable question in moral psychology: is a person who can no longer choose evil still a moral being at all?

Read · July 2024

The Stranger

Albert Camus

A man buries his mother, kills an Arab on a beach, and faces a court that wants him to lie about both. The novel that gave existentialism its case file.

Read · June 2024

The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel van der Kolk

A psychiatrist's three-decade investigation into how trauma reshapes the body and brain, and the surprisingly effective treatments that follow once we take that seriously.

Read · May 2024

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Leo Tolstoy

A 19th-century judge realizes, over the course of a hundred quiet pages, that his successful life has been a costume — and that no one around him is willing to admit it with him.

Read · April 2024

Essays in Love

Alain de Botton

A philosopher's debut — half novel, half essay — that turns a single mostly-unremarkable relationship into a careful x-ray of how love actually works in the mind.

Read · March 2024

Moonwalking with Einstein

Joshua Foer

A journalist follows the U.S. Memory Championship for a year, gets sucked in, and ends up winning it — using techniques that have been around for two thousand years.

Read · February 2024

The Celestine Prophecy

James Redfield

A divisive 1990s bestseller that smuggled a self-help manual inside a Peruvian adventure novel — and got a lot of people to take "coincidences" seriously for the first time.

Read · January 2024

On the Shortness of Life

Seneca

A two-thousand-year-old letter from a Stoic to a friend, arguing that life is not actually short — we just spend most of it not paying attention.

Read · December 2023

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius

The private notebook of a Roman emperor talking himself, every morning for years, into being a slightly better human being.

Read · November 2023

Flowers for Algernon

Daniel Keyes

A first-person diary of a man whose IQ is surgically tripled — and then, slowly, slips back. The most affecting case study ever written about what intelligence actually costs.

Read · October 2023

The Analects

Confucius

Two and a half millennia of saved fragments from a teacher who refused to write a book, organized by his students into the most quietly demanding ethical handbook in print.

Read · September 2023

80/20 Your Life!

Damon Zahariades

Damon Zahariades takes the Pareto principle out of the boardroom and aims it at ordinary life — arguing that a ruthless focus on the vital few, and the nerve to drop the trivial many, is what actually buys back your time.

Logged · June 2026

The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes

A man in his sixties is forced to revisit a single decision from his youth, and discovers his memory has been editing the record for forty years.

Logged · November 2023

The Republic

Plato

Plato's Socratic dialogue on justice, the ideal city, and the philosopher-king — the seed text most Western political philosophy is still arguing with.

Logged · August 2023

The Trial

Franz Kafka

A bank clerk is arrested by an opaque authority for a crime no one will name. Kafka's most-quoted study of bureaucratic paranoia and the dissolution of the self.

Logged · July 2023

The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky's last novel — four brothers, a murdered father, and the longest sustained meditation in fiction on faith, doubt, and what people do with their guilt.

Logged · June 2023

The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann

Seven years inside a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium where time stops and Europe argues with itself — Mann's portrait of the world right before it broke.

Logged · May 2023

Anthem

Ayn Rand

A short dystopia about a society that has erased the word "I" — and the man who, against the rules of his civilization, has to rediscover what it means.

Logged · April 2023

We

Yevgeny Zamyatin

The Soviet dystopia that Orwell and Huxley both read before they wrote theirs — a glass-walled state where every minute is scheduled and individuality is a disease.

Logged · March 2023

The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood

Atwood's near-future theocracy where women's bodies have been re-classified as state property — built, she's said, only from things that have actually happened somewhere.

Logged · February 2023

Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison

An unnamed Black narrator describes the long process of becoming invisible to a country that refuses to see him — and what living underground does to the mind.

Logged · January 2023

The Age of Reason

Jean-Paul Sartre

Two days in the life of a Parisian philosophy teacher trying to scrape together the money for an abortion — Sartre's existentialism with the abstractions cut out.

Logged · December 2022

Animal Farm

George Orwell

A barnyard fable about the Russian Revolution that ends up being a more general theory of how revolutions eat their own slogans.

Logged · November 2022

The Screwtape Letters

C.S. Lewis

A senior demon writes to his nephew with advice on how to corrupt a single human soul — an inverted moral handbook that's funnier and more uncomfortable than it sounds.

Logged · October 2022

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson

The original split-self novella — a respectable Victorian doctor distills the part of himself he can't admit to, and lets it out for the evening.

Logged · September 2022

No Exit and Three Other Plays

Jean-Paul Sartre

Four short plays including the one with the famous line — "hell is other people" — though the line means something stranger in context than the way it's usually quoted.

Logged · August 2022

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor Frankl

A psychiatrist's account of surviving Auschwitz, followed by a sketch of logotherapy — the school of psychology he built around the observation that meaning is something a person can keep when everything else is taken.

Logged · July 2022

Hunger

Knut Hamsun

An unnamed narrator wanders nineteenth-century Christiania, slowly starving — one of the first novels to take the inside of a single hungry mind as its entire subject.

Logged · June 2022

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

A cult-favourite synthesis of Leary's eight-circuit model, Korzybski's general semantics, and Wilson's own scepticism — a guidebook to noticing your own mental shortcuts.

Logged · May 2022

Wind, Sand and Stars

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The author of *The Little Prince* writing as himself — a pilot's memoir of mail routes over the Sahara, near-fatal crashes, and what those silences taught him about being human.

Logged · April 2022

Life is Elsewhere

Milan Kundera

Kundera's portrait of a young poet who treats his own life as a draft of someone else's poem — and the slow damage that does to the people around him.

Logged · March 2022

Zorba the Greek

Nikos Kazantzakis

A bookish narrator meets an old miner named Zorba and spends a year being patiently dismantled by a man who refuses to live in his head.

Logged · February 2022

Factfulness

Hans Rosling

Ten instincts that quietly distort how educated people read the news — written by a Swedish physician who spent decades teaching the world to think in distributions, not headlines.

Logged · January 2022

How Doctors Think

Jerome Groopman

A Harvard internist on the cognitive shortcuts that get patients misdiagnosed — anchoring, availability, attribution — and how to ask a doctor the question that breaks the loop.

Logged · December 2021