LIBRARY

A Nigerian business career told through leverage, reversals and recovery. A genuinely useful insight into operating in instability.

FIRST READ: 2025

A revenge story with momentum that avoids treading through a minefield of tropes.

FIRST READ: 2024

How railways, corporations, overworked labour and mass production assembled modern American industry and the institutions built around it.

FIRST READ: 2024

Engineering at civilisational scale: railways, bridges and ships pursued with extraordinary ambition and uneven regard for cost.

FIRST READ: 2024

Iteration means tolerating thousands of failed versions without treating failure as evidence that the problem is insoluble.

FIRST READ: 2023

How Xiaomi used online communities, rapid feedback and tightly managed launches to turn users into its distribution system.

FIRST READ: 2023

Drug patents, indentured robots and manufactured desire. A useful argument about who gets to own autonomy.

FIRST READ: 2022

Democracy rebuilt around information and private actors, then tested by whoever controls the facts. So basically just democracy amirite.

FIRST READ: 2022

Invention as an organised process: laboratories, capital, teams and commercial systems rather than one man waiting for inspiration.

FIRST READ: 2022

Duveen did not sell art. He learned how to stoke desire in people who have it all.

FIRST READ: 2022

Stop predicting what political actors want and ask what their material constraints will actually allow them to do (will reread Post-Trump and see if it stands up).

FIRST READ: 2022

Suarez imagines a hyper-developed AI, but with a completely different trajectory from the one we eventually saw: an AI with 2060 intelligence but 2010 technology. Très intéressant.

FIRST READ: 2021

I've been told I'm too optimistic to be a short-seller (I disagree). This was an interesting look into a life betting against success.

FIRST READ: 2021

A memoir about constructing an identity from incomplete inheritances.

FIRST READ: 2021

Superior distribution and positioning > product. Superior product does not create scale (fight me). Shouldn't stop us from making great things.

FIRST READ: 2021

A glimpse into the bear case for a post-AI underclass. Also AI-run hotels.

FIRST READ: 2020

The future as a stack of corporate power, damaged people and machine intelligence. Very unrelatable.

FIRST READ: 2020

A drop-out who hired art historians for the country's premier commercial light lab. Land is the maverick I walk behind.

FIRST READ: 2020

An interesting book to come back to in a post-AI world. Is the jury out on whether it'll remain true?

FIRST READ: 2020

A dense but worthwhile attempt to explain mind as information processing: perception, motivation and selfhood as parts of one architecture.

FIRST READ: 2020

Philosophy, robots and the Metaverse. Literally all my favourite buzzwords in one book.

FIRST READ: 2019

You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become Emperor of Arrakis.

FIRST READ: 2019

Quality sits before the split between objective and subjective. Useful for thinking about craft without reducing it to technique.

FIRST READ: 2019

Morality begins with social mammals, attachment and threat response not abstract rules handed down from the sky.

FIRST READ: 2019

Great manhua. Not a true fan of progression fantasy, but Mad Snail's worldcraft is vast enough to make up for it.

FIRST READ: 2018

If magic required knowledge of physics, or Hogwarts but for a PhD.

FIRST READ: 2018

A coming-of-age story about loyalty as a trap: the better one serves, the less of a life one gets to keep.

FIRST READ: 2018

My culture says the tongue has power; Rothfuss paints a fiction where this is woven into the fabric of reality. Wish he'd finish the series.

FIRST READ: 2017

A machine sentience that runs a post-mortality, post-scarcity world. At 13 this was all I needed to jump into the AI rabbit hole.

FIRST READ: 2017

Fast, funny fantasy held together by a detective skeleton, sharp dialogue and a world that keeps getting stranger.

FIRST READ: 2016

A childhood horror epic.

FIRST READ: 2015