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 · 34 with notesPsychology· 11Philosophy· 22Self-Help· 2

How Doctors Think

Jerome Groopman

Jerome Groopman, a physician at Harvard Medical School, investigates the cognitive errors behind medical misdiagnosis (anchoring, attribution bias, premature closure), and argues for restoring genuine conversation between doctor and patient as the primary diagnostic tool.

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. Camus's clearest account of the absurd.

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 nineteenth-century judge realizes across a hundred pages that his respectable life was merely a costume, and that nobody around him will acknowledge the truth.

Read · April 2024

Factfulness

Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling documents the ten systematic cognitive instincts that cause educated people to hold a more pessimistic picture of the world than the data supports. His remedy, factfulness, replaces dramatic instinct with a set of rules.

Read · March 2024

The Celestine Prophecy

James Redfield

A 1990s bestseller that disguised a self-help manual inside a Peruvian adventure novel, prompting mainstream readers to reconsider the meaning of everyday coincidences.

Read · January 2024

Moonwalking with Einstein

Joshua Foer

Joshua Foer, a journalist covering the US Memory Championship, ends up training for and winning it, using his experience to investigate the history of memory techniques, the science of expertise, and why humans outsourced their memories to external devices.

Read · January 2024

No Exit

Jean-Paul Sartre

Three people arrive in a Second Empire drawing room furnished as a hell with no mirrors, no windows, and no sleep, and gradually discover they are each other's torturers.

Read · December 2023

The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes

Tony Webster, retired and content, receives a bequest from his first girlfriend's mother that forces him to revisit a friendship and a letter from his youth, discovering that his memory has been systematically editing the record in his favor for forty years.

Read · November 2023

The Analects

Confucius

A collection of Confucius's conversations with his students and contemporaries, compiled after his death, addressing virtue, political legitimacy, ritual propriety, and the relationship between education, character, and governance.

Read · November 2023

Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison

An unnamed Black narrator recounts his journey from a Southern college through Harlem's political organizations to a basement where he lives surrounded by 1,369 light bulbs, tracing how American institutions, white liberal and Black nationalist alike, refused to see him as a person.

Read · October 2023

Flowers for Algernon

Daniel Keyes

Told through the progress reports of Charlie Gordon, a 32-year-old man with an intellectual disability who undergoes experimental surgery to increase his intelligence, watches it peak above genius level, and then watches it decline again.

Read · September 2023

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

A practical manual for examining and reprogramming your own nervous system, organized around Timothy Leary's eight-circuit model of consciousness, with exercises at the end of each chapter designed to make the reader question their default reality tunnel.

Read · August 2023

The Republic

Plato

Plato's central dialogue, in which Socrates constructs an ideal city in argument to answer the question of why a just person is happier than an unjust one, producing along the way the Theory of Forms, the Allegory of the Cave, and a political philosophy that has been debated and condemned for 2,400 years.

Read · August 2023

The Trial

Franz Kafka

Josef K., a bank clerk, is arrested one morning by an opaque authority for a crime no one will name, and spends the rest of the novel attempting to navigate a court system that is entirely inaccessible to anyone who tries to engage it directly.

Read · July 2023

Life Is Elsewhere

Milan Kundera

A satirical novel about Jaromil, a Czech poet of revolutionary ardor whose mother has designed his entire emotional life around his artistic destiny, traced from his conception through his death at twenty.

Read · July 2023

Hunger

Knut Hamsun

A nameless narrator wanders Christiania in a state of near-starvation, refusing charity and employment out of a pride he cannot fully explain, producing one of the first sustained literary portraits of consciousness destabilized by deprivation.

Read · June 2023

The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky's final novel, in which three brothers of radically different temperament are implicated in their father's murder, and which he built to carry his arguments for and against the existence of God.

Read · June 2023

The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann

Hans Castorp arrives at a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium for a three-week visit to see his cousin and stays for seven years, drawn into the suspended time and intellectual ferment of the mountain while Europe descends toward the war below.

Read · May 2023

The Age of Reason

Jean-Paul Sartre

The first volume of Sartre's Roads to Freedom trilogy, following philosophy lecturer Mathieu Delarue through forty-eight hours in 1938 Paris as he tries to raise money for an abortion and confronts his inability to commit to anything without feeling it constrains his freedom.

Read · May 2023

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson

A Victorian horror novella in which a scientist chemically separates his respectable identity from his suppressed impulses, only to find the second self growing stronger until it no longer needs the chemical to emerge.

Read · April 2023

We

Yevgeny Zamyatin

The Soviet dystopia that Orwell read before writing 1984: a glass-walled One State where every hour is scheduled, citizens are addressed by number rather than name, and D-503, a spacecraft engineer, begins to develop an interior life after meeting a woman from the underground.

Read · March 2023

The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood's portrait of a near-future American theocracy assembled entirely from historical precedents, told through Offred, a fertile woman assigned as a reproductive vessel to a high-ranking commander.

Read · February 2023

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess

Set in near-future Britain, Burgess follows Alex, a teenage gang leader who speaks in Nadsat slang and commits crimes for sport, until the state captures and conditions him into passivity. The novel's moral debate is whether good behavior is meaningful if it is forced rather than chosen.

Read · January 2023

Animal Farm

George Orwell

A fable in which the animals of Manor Farm overthrow their human farmer and build a society of animal equality, which deteriorates steadily into a pig dictatorship indistinguishable from what it replaced.

Read · January 2023

Anthem

Ayn Rand

A short dystopia in which the first-person singular pronoun has been abolished and a young man rediscovers the concept of the individual self after finding an electric light in a forbidden underground tunnel.

Read · January 2023

Eat, Pray, Love

Elizabeth Gilbert

A memoir of the year Elizabeth Gilbert spent in Italy, India, and Bali after her marriage collapsed: eating well, learning meditation, and falling in love again.

Read · January 2023

Essays in Love

Alain de Botton

A philosophical novel about falling in love and its aftermath, structured as a series of analytical essays embedded in a first-person romantic narrative.

Read · January 2023

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl's account of his years in Nazi concentration camps, followed by logotherapy, the framework he derived from the observation that prisoners who found meaning survived longer than those who did not.

Read · November 2022

The Screwtape Letters

C.S. Lewis

A senior demon named Screwtape writes to his nephew Wormwood with detailed tactical advice on how to corrupt a single human soul, producing an inverted moral handbook in which every recommended sin illuminates the corresponding virtue by its absence.

Read · October 2022

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius

Private journal entries from a Roman emperor who was also a Stoic philosopher, written as self-instruction rather than publication, in which Marcus Aurelius reminds himself daily of what he actually believes about duty, impermanence, and the control of attention.

Read · August 2022

On the Shortness of Life

Seneca

A letter from a Roman Stoic to his father-in-law, arguing that life is not short, only wasted on activities that don't constitute living, and that most people reach old age without ever having fully inhabited any of their time.

Read · June 2022

Wind, Sand and Stars

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

A lyrical memoir of flying mail routes over the Sahara and Andes in the 1920s and 30s, near-fatal crashes in the desert, and what those extremities revealed about solidarity, craft, and human dignity.

Read · April 2022

Zorba the Greek

Nikos Kazantzakis

A bookish narrator meets an old miner named Zorba on a boat to Crete and spends a year being slowly dismantled by a man who treats life as something to be consumed entirely rather than observed from a safe distance.

Read · February 2022

80/20 Your Life!

Damon Zahariades

Damon Zahariades applies the Pareto principle to daily routines, arguing that focusing on a vital few priorities and dropping the rest is what genuinely buys back time.

Logged · June 2026