Rating: 8.4/10. This book is about the life of an Ojibway Indian, living in northern Ontario and growing up in the 60s. When he was young, they sent him to a residential school where he was badly treated and not allowed to speak his own language. He found hockey and got really good at it,…
Author: Bai Li
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
Rating: 6.9/10. A bullshit job is one where the worker feels does not contribute anything useful to society, but is obligated to pretend otherwise. About 40% of all jobs in the USA are bullshit by this definition. People feel unhappy in these jobs because they must pretend to work, yet ultimately the work is pointless,…
Man by Kim Thuy
Rating: 4.9/10. A short novel by a Vietnamese-Canadian refugee, it tells the story of a girl who immigrated from Vietnam to Montreal to escape the war, just like herself. Translated from French, the book is comprised of short chapters of a paragraph to a page each. There is a lot of poetic descriptions of scenery…
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
Rating: 7.7/10. Book that discusses various aspects of how habits work. On a high level, habits have three components: cue, routine, and reward. The cue is a set of conditions, such that you automatically perform a routine in order to get a reward. After a while, you will crave the reward when given the cue,…
The Fundamentals of Ethics by Russ Shafer-Landau
Rating: 9.5/10. Intro book on ethics — it’s not an easy read (took me about 6 months to finish it) but it contains a lot of deep ideas in 300 pages. The book is divided into three parts: what is the goal in life, how to do the right thing, and what is the status…
My Warren Buffet Bible by Robert Bloch
Rating: 6.8/10. A bunch of quotes by famous investor Warren Buffett about principles of investing. They follow a few basic motifs, like invest based on fundamental long-term value, avoid speculation, keep control of your emotions. [redacted] got this from the bookstore and I decided to read it too. Most of the advice is trivially true…
How Your Brain Works by New Scientist
Rating: 6.3/10. A fairly short book (200 pages) by a team of neuroscientists that covers various aspects of neuroscience like memory, intelligence, emotion, perception. The subject should be very interesting but the book was a dull read, it basically gave a bunch of facts and lacked character, with no attempt to string them together in…
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
Rating: 7.7/10. This book gives a comprehensive scientific overview of sleep. Although there are still many unanswered questions, there’s been a lot of research lately and this book sums it up. Sleep is a very necessary function of life. Every living organism requires it, although in different amounts, and total lack of sleep very quickly…
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
Rating: 7.4/10. [WARNING: SPOILERS!] Second book I read by Agatha Christie, it was okay but I liked the first one better (And Then There Were None). In this mystery, detective Hercule Poirot is on a train in Eastern Europe when one of the passengers is murdered, and also the train gets stuck in a snowbank…
Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Rating: 8.2/10. I read this Dostoyevsky book as a recommendation from [redacted] because it’s partially about a man who tries to rescue a prostitute. It turns out that the rescuing prostitute part is not really the central event of the book, but nevertheless I found it quite interesting. The novella is short enough (90 pages)…
The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan
Rating: 4.5/10. A classic book by astronomer Carl Sagan about how to distinguish science from pseudoscience. The beginning is really interesting and talks about a man who seems well-read, but his knowledge is completely wrong. Stuff like aliens, UFOs, ghosts, Atlantis, crop circles, other supernatural stuff. The book proceeds to debunk all of these in…
Factfulness by Hans Rosling
Rating: 8.4/10. This book was written by Hans Rosling (the same guy that made The Joy of Stats documentary) just before he died in 2017. [redacted] recommended it to me. It uses stats to show that despite what the media portrays, and despite popular conception, the world is not such a bad place. Extreme poverty…