Rating: 8.3/10. [WARNING: SPOILERS!] Pachinko is the name of the Japanese pinball game, where you watch metal balls tumble through a machine. It’s also the name of this novel, that traces a Korean family in Japan through four generations (Yangjin/Hoonie/Hansu -> Sunja/Isak -> Noa/Mozasu -> Solomon/Phoebe). Sunja is the first generation to immigrate to Japan…
Category: Topics
Visual Intelligence by Amy Herman
Rating: 8.0/10. This book uses art to teach you to notice your surroundings more, which is very interesting. The basic premise is there’s a lot of things that we miss, but can be quite important. The two biggest ideas in this book for me: Train yourself to be more visually perceptive by looking at art,…
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Rating: 8.1/10. [WARNING: SPOILERS!] This novel tells the story of the geisha Sayuri, from her childhood until her death. It pretends to be a real memoir, but it’s written by an American man. The facts are thoroughly researched, so we get a feel of what Kyoto was like before the war. Essentially, society in Japan…
Dying Words by Nicholas Evans
Rating: 8.0/10. There are over 6000 languages in the world, but many of them are endangered. Often, they structure their grammar in really weird ways, like keeping track of absolute directions instead of left/right, or needing to specify how one got some information. There are lots of reasons why studying and preserving endangered languages are…
Birth of a Theorem by Cedric Villani
Rating: 7.4/10. Memoir by Fields medalist Cedric Villani describing the process of discovering a mathematical proof. It’s inspiring that even for somebody as smart as him, math is difficult and he doesn’t always know what he’s doing. However, he does a poor job of explaining the math — his expositions are way too technical, aimed…
Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan
Rating: 8.5/10. This is a memoir by a 24 year old girl who developed a rare neurological disease, called “Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis”. It’s rare enough that initially, all the doctors were unable to correctly diagnose the disease, instead thinking she had bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Her condition worsened and she became psychotic, until they identified…
Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
Rating: 8.2/10. Why is the city of Nogales, Arizona so much richer than Nogales, Sonora, when they’re only separated by a fence? This book explains why some countries like Canada are so much better off than Mexico, and most countries in sub-Saharan Africa are struggling to survive. According to this book, the crucial difference is…
Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Rating: 7.6/10. This is the second book I read by this author, after Black Swan. An antifragile object is something that becomes stronger when stress is applied (up to a certain point). To make it antifragile, it should be exposed to positive black swan events, where it will gain a lot from randomness, and have…
Consider Your Options by Kaye A. Thomas
Rating: 5.0/10. I got this book because options are a big part of tech company compensation and people don’t understand them that well, so I wanted to get a better understanding of them. This book sorta does it, but most of it focuses on all sorts of very technical tax details. It was so taxing…
So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport
Rating: 7.0/10. Life and career advice book by Cal Newport, the guy that writes study blog. He offers a few pieces of advice, kind of similar to Larry Smith’s book: Don’t pursue your passion, because most people don’t have any passion that can be turned into a career Focus on career capital, that is, increase…
The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
Rating: 6.5/10. Book about how to manage a small business, basically avoid doing all the work in your business and get other people to do it for you in a scalable way, run it as if you were running a franchise. The ideas make sense, but when it comes to specifics, the book doesn’t really…
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Rating: 5.5/10. This book describes the complete history of genetics, from Darwin and Mendel to DNA to modern gene therapy and the Human Genome Project. The book is 500 pages, which is way too long in my opinion. Most of the stuff I already kind of knew from high school biology, the book goes a…