Books Read in 2026

Goal

Read 40 Books in 2026

2026 Finish Plan

Written 🗓️/2026/08/02. The problem is not the wishlist, it is that 33 books are open at once.

The Arithmetic

Pace so far	20 books in 213 days = 10.7 days per book
Projected at that pace	34 books — six short
Required	20 books in 151 days = 7.5 days per book
Speed-up needed	41% faster
My 2024 and 2025 pace	8.9 days per book — I have never read this fast

I cannot get to 40 by reading harder. I get there by not starting anything new and converting what is already open. A half-read book is the cheapest finish available.

Four States, Not Two

• #📚/status/currently-reading — genuinely in rotation. Target 6–8 books, not 33
• #📚/status/paused — deliberately set down, will return. The missing state, and where most of the shelf belongs. Honest, and it clears the decision without declaring failure. Mirror as a paused tag in StoryGraph
• #📚/status/did-not-finish — dead. Orientalism, Meditations for Mortals, Good Anger, Relativity, Slow Birding, Saved in Time
• #📚/status/reference — never “finished”, only consulted. Great Short Books, Engineering in Plain Sight, Fluent Forever, Modern German Pronunciation, German - How to Speak and Write It. These should not sit on the active shelf at all

Protected exception: Meditations and 365 Tao are daily readers that complete on 31 December. I did exactly this with The Daily Stoic in 2024 — started 13 Jan, finished 25 Dec. Leave them running. Two books that land in December.

Tier 1 — Short and Already Started → 27 Books

Highest return per hour on the whole list. Seven books, all part-read, several open for years.

1. Ethan Frome — ~100pp
2. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction — already have a highlights note
3. German Men Sit Down To Pee — short and light
4. A Philosophy of Walking — pairs with Wanderlust - A History of Walking
5. Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (Dover Thrift, 90pp) — ~$4, one or two evenings. Not the standalone 30pp essay, which does not clear the bar for a counted book. See Thoreau
6. There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness — ~112pp, open 33 months
7. Feminist City

Tier 2 — Audio, a Separate Budget → ~33 Books

The real unlock. Audiobooks run on walks, commutes and chores, so they do not compete with page time. Six already owned or in progress.

1. Sapiens — in progress
2. In Patagonia — 8h27m, owned
3. Entangled Life — owned
4. Hot and Bothered — in progress
5. Braiding Sweetgrass — in progress
6. The Joy Luck Club — owned
7. You’re Not Listening — owned

Tier 3 — Hard Books, Budget Exactly Two → ~35 Books

Not zero. The point of the year is not only volume.

1. Middlemarch — the one I have said I am glad I am doing
2. The Silk Roads — illustrated edition, not the audiobook

Park Faust and Walden as paused. They are good books at the wrong moment.

Tier 4 — Top up in My Proven Lane → 40 Books

Short literary fiction, the shape I reliably finish: Dept. Of Speculation, The Dry Heart, Death in Venice, Agostino, Bonjour Tristesse.

1. The Hour of the Star
2. As I Lay Dying
3. Madame Bovary / The Trial / To the Lighthouse — pick from these
4. Plus two or three more of the same size

The Rule

Stop opening books. Start closing them. Tier 1 alone is 33 months of accumulated stored value. No new starts until the active shelf is under eight.

Resources

• Storygraph 2026 Book Challenge
• Politics and Prose 2026 Reading Challenge

Finished Books

1. 🗓️/2026/01/index Good Inside 📚/status/finished
2. 🗓️/2026/01/04 Charlotte’s Web 📚/status/finished
3. 🗓️/2026/01/06 Captains Courageous 📚/status/finished
4. 🗓️/2026/01/19 Abundance 📚/status/finished
5. 🗓️/2026/01/25 The Country Girls 📚/status/finished
6. 🗓️/2026/01/31 Walking Practice 📚/status/finished
7. 🗓️/2026/02/03 Quiet 📚/status/finished
8. 🗓️/2026/03/07 Hunchback 📚/status/finished
9. 🗓️/2026/03/11 Last of the Breed 📚/status/finished
10. 🗓️/2026/03/17 Born a Crime 📚/status/finished
11. 🗓️/2026/04/01 Greenlights 📚/status/finished
12. 🗓️/2026/04/02 Brave New World 📚/status/finished
13. 🗓️/2026/06/13 Project Hail Mary 📚/status/finished
14. 🗓️/2026/06/13 Jonathan Livingston Seagull 📚/status/finished
15. 🗓️/2026/06/17 The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck 📚/status/finished
16. 🗓️/2026/06/25 Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman 📚/status/finished
17. 🗓️/2026/07/06 Death in Venice 📚/status/finished
18. 🗓️/2026/07/18 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz 📚/status/finished
19. 🗓️/2026/07/19 Dept. Of Speculation 📚/status/finished
20. 🗓️/2026/07/27 The Dry Heart 📚/status/finished

Currently Reading

1. Ethan Frome 📚/status/currently-reading media-type/ebook priority/1
2. Sapiens 📚/status/currently-reading media-type/audio priority/1 📚/library/audible
3. My Family and Other Animals 📚/status/currently-reading media-type/family priority/1
4. Middlemarch 📚/status/currently-reading media-type/ebook priority/2
5. Wanderlust - A History of Walking 📚/status/currently-reading media-type/ebook priority/2
6. Great Short Books 📚/status/reference media-type/ebook priority/3
7. 🗓️/2024/08/31 Faust by Goethe 📚/status/paused media-type/ebook priority/2
   • 🗓️/2026/08/02 Restored and moved here from Up Next. I culled this claiming it was the wrong entry point to German literature and that I had “read exactly one play in five years.” StoryGraph says I started it 🗓️/2025/12/07 and it is currently-reading. I was arguing against a book I am in the middle of.
   • The lesson is about sources, not about Goethe: my Obsidian list did not know this. StoryGraph is where my real reading state lives.

Reconciled From StoryGraph 🗓️/2026/08/02

These were all currently-reading or to-read in StoryGraph and completely absent from this note. StoryGraph is the source of truth for status; this note is where the reasoning lives. The gap was 17 books.

German Language & Culture

1. Modern German Pronunciation by Christopher Hall 📚/status/reference media-type/print — started 🗓️/2026/04/14
2. German - How to Speak and Write It by Joseph Rosenberg 📚/status/reference media-type/ebook — started 🗓️/2026/05/25
3. Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner 📚/status/reference media-type/ebook — started 🗓️/2026/03/12
4. German Men Sit Down To Pee & Other Insights Into German Culture 📚/status/currently-reading media-type/ebook — started 🗓️/2025/12/03
   • Four books in progress on German, plus a learn-german tag in Readwise, and none of it appeared on this list. The single largest blind spot the reconciliation found — and the most relevant thing I am doing since moving to Freiburg

Walking, Place & the Natural World

1. A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros 📚/status/currently-reading media-type/ebook — started 🗓️/2026/05/14
   • Direct companion to Wanderlust - A History of Walking, which is also in progress
2. The Place of Tides by James Rebanks 📚/status/paused media-type/ebook — started 🗓️/2026/05/23
3. Of Thorn & Briar - A Year with the West Country Hedgelayer by Paul Lamb 📚/status/paused media-type/ebook — started 🗓️/2026/06/04
4. The Way Around - A Field Guide to Going Nowhere by Nicholas Triolo 📚/status/paused media-type/ebook — started 🗓️/2026/01/13
5. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer 📚/status/currently-reading media-type/audio — started 🗓️/2025/01/24
   • Same author as The Serviceberry, which I read 🗓️/2024/12/24
6. Outside Lies Magic by John R. Stilgoe 📚/status/paused media-type/print — started 🗓️/2023/11/index
   • Six books in progress on walking, place and noticing. On the evidence this is my strongest current interest, and the Up Next list did not represent it at all

Thoreau

1. Walden by Henry David Thoreau 📚/status/paused media-type/ebook — started 🗓️/2025/09/27
   • Stays paused. The masterpiece, but the wrong shape for a 40-book year, and I already stalled on it once. Read “Walking” first — it is the same argument in a tenth the length. If it lands, Walden stops being an obligation
2. Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau 📚/status/paused media-type/print — started 🗓️/2025/09/27
   • 🗓️/2026/08/02 Superseded by the collection below rather than dropped. Read it there
3. Civil Disobedience and Other Essays by Henry David Thoreau 📚/status/to-read media-type/print priority/1
   • 🗓️/2026/08/02 Dover Thrift, 90pp, ~$4. Contents: Civil Disobedience (p1), Slavery in Massachusetts (p19), A Plea for Captain John Brown (p31), Walking (p49), Life Without Principle (p75). Goodreads 4.06 on the fuller collection
   • Why the collection and not the essay. A 30pp pamphlet is not one of my 40. I built 📚/status/reference precisely because I care about counting honestly, and taking the tick here would corrode the number. The collection is a defensible book, still one or two evenings, and it satisfies “I want to have read Thoreau” with the political essay rather than instead of it
   • I already chose “Walking” and then read something else. In Wanderlust - A History of Walking (#🗓️/2025/03) I left myself the task “Read something from Thoreau. ‘Walking’ would be a good start” — still unchecked — and tagged the neighbouring highlight add-book-to-read. Six months later I opened Walden and Civil Disobedience instead. Neither was the one I picked
   • The vault agrees. Every Thoreau trace I have is nature, attention and walking, never politics: Wanderlust - A History of Walking, Alexander von Humboldt (Walden Pond, twice), and How to Do Nothing — which quotes Civil Disobedience but uses it to argue about withdrawing attention. “Walking” is the founding document of the six-book walking/place cluster above, which is my strongest current interest
   • On the essay’s own merits, honestly. Its reputation exceeds its argument — it is a posture, not a theory, occasioned by a Massachusetts poll tax, the Mexican-American War and American slavery. Thoreau spent one night in jail and someone paid the tax over his objection; the philosophy was built afterward by Gandhi, King and Rawls. Also squarely the US-centric civic material I am done with. Not enough to cut at 30pp inside a book I want anyway — enough that it should not be the reason I read Thoreau
   • Bonus: Life Without Principle is about work and attention, which is my territory, and is arguably the better political Thoreau
   • Free first, buy second. Thoreau is public domain. Gutenberg #1022 is “Walking” on its own — EPUB into Calibre alongside the Walden I already have, ~30pp, zero cost. Read that before spending anything; it is the actual test of whether his prose works for me
     • Gutenberg #9846 — Excursions is the free alternative to Dover and is entirely the Thoreau this vault points at — Walking, A Winter Walk, Autumnal Tints, Wild Apples, Natural History of Massachusetts, A Walk to Wachusett, Night and Moonlight. Assembled by Emerson in 1863. Counts as a book, but no Civil Disobedience, and 71k words / 4h30m is the wrong size for a year needing 7.5 days/book
       • 🗓️/2026/08/02 Saved to Reader → Excursions. Full text, tagged thoreau walking nature public-domain. “Walking” starts at the 50% mark — jump straight there, the essay alone is ~1h
     • Dover still wins the counted slot: 90pp, and the only option that ticks “I want to have read Thoreau” including the famous essay
     • Check the Calibre Walden file first — many editions bundle Civil Disobedience in the same book

Everything Else

1. Revolutions - How Women Changed the World on Two Wheels by Hannah Ross 📚/status/paused media-type/ebook — started 🗓️/2026/04/05
   • Cycling lane with Wheels of Change and Bicycle Diaries, both read
2. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs 📚/status/currently-reading media-type/ebook — started 🗓️/2026/04/12
   • I already keep a highlights note for this one
3. Peace Corps - The Great Adventure 📚/status/paused media-type/ebook — started 🗓️/2026/04/09
4. 365 Tao - Daily Meditations by Deng Ming-Dao 📚/status/currently-reading media-type/ebook — started 🗓️/2025/11/28
5. The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali 📚/status/to-read media-type/print — added 🗓️/2026/03/19

Up Next

1. 🗓️/2025/02/11 In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin 📚/status/to-read media-type/audio priority/1 📚/library/audible
   • 🗓️/2026/07/31 Purchased on Audible before cancelling. Unabridged Penguin Audio edition narrated by Hugh Fraser, 8h27m
2. Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake 📚/status/to-read media-type/audio priority/1 📚/library/audible
   • Book about Fungi.
   • 📚/library/in-calibre
   • 🗓️/2026/07/31 Purchased. Narrated by the author, ~9h — worth hearing even though the text is already in Calibre
3. 🗓️/2025/06/26 The Joy Luck Club recommended by people/friends/clarissa-lee 📚/status/to-read media-type/audio priority/1 📚/library/audible
   • 🗓️/2026/07/31 Purchased on Audible before cancelling
4. You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters 📚/status/to-read media-type/audio priority/1 📚/library/audible
   • Recommended by people/friends/kolt-kane while discussing How to Know a Person
   • 🗓️/2026/07/31 Purchased on Audible before cancelling
5. 🗓️/2026/07/31 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
   • Replaces The Sound and the Fury, which I cut because source/ai/chatgpt had picked it and it is the hardest thing Faulkner wrote. I want to have read a Faulkner, and this is the entry point.
   • ~250 pages, 59 short chapters across 15 narrators. Faulkner’s modernist technique in a form that stays legible, unlike The Sound and the Fury.
   • Fits the short-literary-novel lane I actually finish: Death in Venice, The Dry Heart, Dept. Of Speculation, Agostino, Bonjour Tristesse
6. Trillions by Robin Wigglesworth 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
   • Book recommendation In a post, Summer Reading by people/authors/jl-collins
   • This is best described as the biography of the index fund. Compelling reading if you are a huge fan of these things and how they’ve vastly improved the investment world for us individual investors. But even if your interest is mild, Robin Wigglesworth does such a brilliant job, you’ll likely find it a compelling read. (View Highlight)
   • 🗓️/2026/07/31 Ranked high. I invest only in index funds (VT), so this is the origin story of what I already own — Jack Bogle founded Vanguard and Nate Most invented the ETF structure. Both halves of the ticker are characters in the book.
   • Same shape as the nonfiction I actually finish: biography-of-a-thing. Cod, Wedding of the Waters - The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, The Brompton - Engineering for Change, Wheels of Change, Just for Fun - The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary
   • Caveat: the last third moves into ETF-industry mechanics and the index-concentration debate, which is drier than the Bogle origin material
7. 🗓️/2026/08/01 Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood by Lisa Damour 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1 people/family/andrea-sooter
   • Ranked high because it is the most time-sensitive book on this list. My eldest (f, 14) is squarely in the window right now; my youngest (f, 11) reaches it in a year or two. This book has an expiry date the others do not.
   • GR 4.52 across 19,592 ratings — the highest-rated book in the entire parenting cluster by a wide margin.
   • Seven strands: Parting with Childhood, Joining a New Tribe, Harnessing Emotions, Contending with Adult Authority, Planning for the Future, Entering the Romantic World, Caring for Herself. Each chapter has a “when to worry” section separating normal adolescence from real concern.
   • 🗓️/2026/08/01 I had culled this one. The reason was wrong: my old note apologised that it was “focused on girls” and argued the approach could apply to boys — because I had filed it in a run of books about my son. I judged it by its neighbours. I have two daughters; this is the on-target book, not the extrapolation.
   • Follow-on if this lands: Under Pressure by the same author, on stress and anxiety in girls — the girls-specific counterpart to The Anxious Generation
8. 🗓️/2026/08/02 The Silk Roads - A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan 📚/status/to-read media-type/audio priority/1 📚/library/audible
   • Book recommendation In a post, Summer Reading by people/authors/jl-collins
   • ⚠️ Get the illustrated edition before starting. I already own this on Audible, but audio is the worst possible format for this specific book. The single most common complaint about it is that it badly needs maps — it covers Persia, Central Asia and the steppe, places most readers cannot picture. An audiobook strips out the one thing the text is already short of. The illustrated edition adds proper maps and plates. Read that, or at minimum keep it open alongside the audio.
   • 🗓️/2026/08/02 I had culled this. The reason was wrong: I read the “I wish there were more and better maps” line as my own verdict, but it is people/authors/jl-collins reviewing the book in the post above — a minor caveat inside a recommendation. I have not read it. Same misreading I made on Trillions, from the same post.
   • GR 4.18 across 42,526 ratings
   • Anchors a cluster I am actively building rather than duplicating Sapiens: trade routes, commodities and East–West exchange. See The Travels of Ibn Battuta and Nathaniel’s Nutmeg on this list, and Cod, Wedding of the Waters - The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation and On the Hippie Trail already read. Sapiens is species-level deep time; this is geopolitics and commerce. Different projects.
   • Honest caveats: historians flag real overclaims (an asserted Ramayana/Homer link, South American plunder financing the Taj Mahal), the definition of “silk roads” is elastic and bent toward Frankopan’s own specialism, and the final third on the 20th century is the weakest and most polemical stretch
9. The Hour of the Star
10. Hot and Bothered - What No One Tells You About Menopause and How to Feel Like Yourself Again by Jancee Dunn 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1 people/family/andrea-sooter
    • 🗓️/2026/08/02 Author and reason recorded — the entry was previously just a bare title with no author, which made it unassessable and easy to cull by accident.
    • Reading this for Andrea, not for me. Menopause affects her now or in the near future and I would rather understand it early than react to it late.
    • GR 4.18. Part memoir, part practical — Dunn is a journalist writing from inside the experience.
    • Sits with Untangled as the other book here about a phase happening to someone I love on a timeline I do not control
11. Thinking in Systems - A Primer 📚/status/paused media-type/ebook priority/3
12. Meditations 📚/status/currently-reading media-type/ebook priority/3
13. Engineering in Plain Sight 📚/status/reference media-type/ebook priority/3
14. 🗓️/2024/08/index Feminist City 📚/status/currently-reading media-type/ebook priority/1
15. Nathaniel’s Nutmeg 📚/status/currently-reading media-type/ebook priority/1
    • 🗓️/2026/08/02 Un-paused. I am finding it genuinely interesting and intend to finish it, so “paused” was misleading.
    • Sits with The Silk Roads and The Travels of Ibn Battuta — spice trade, trade routes, East–West exchange
16. How to Know a Person 📚/status/paused media-type/ebook priority/1
17. There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness 📚/status/currently-reading media-type/ebook priority/1
18. 🗓️/2023/10/index Factfulness by Hans Rosling 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
    • 🗓️/2026/08/02 Confirmed keeper, not a survivor of the cull. I really liked How I Learned to Understand the World (#🗓️/2024/03/15) and want the argument book from the same man, not just the memoir. The “fourth optimism book” objection does not apply — the pull here is Rosling himself.
19. 🗓️/2025/01/26 Connections by James Burke 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
20. How Big Things Get Done 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
21. 🗓️/2026/07/31 The Self-Driven Child by William Stixrud and Ned Johnson 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
    • Replaces Raising Children Who Think for Themselves, which I had added purely because I liked the title. The content did not hold up — GR 3.78, and a reviewer caught the exact flaw: it “suggest[s] to parents how to raise children in a manner that the author considers ideal, rather than how parents and children can think for themselves.”
    • This is the book that actually argues that title. GR 4.32 across 6,128 ratings. Thesis: parent as consultant, not controller — give kids real decisions and let them own the outcomes.
    • Grounded in self-determination theory (autonomy, competence, relatedness) rather than the 2001 media-panic framing Medhus used. Covers growth mindset, flow, and intrinsic motivation.
    • Complements rather than duplicates what I have read: Good Inside is young kids and emotional regulation; The Anxious Generation is phones and external direction; this is autonomy and control. Same problem, different mechanism.
    • Connects to Independence and Curiosity
    • ⚠️ Caveat: roughly half the book is anchored to conventional US schooling — test prep, homework, college admissions. Ned Johnson runs a test-prep company and it shows. Living in Germany, discount that half harder than a US reader would.
    • 🗓️/2026/08/01 Timing is right, not early: the book targets school-age through teens and my three are 14, 12 and 11. This is the sweet spot for all of them at once.
22. 🗓️/2025/01/26 War and Peace 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
    • Darien Mitchell-Tontar mentioned he planned to read it as it is Eric North’s top recommendation. High praise in Darien’s opinion given Eric has a Linguistics degree
23. 🗓️/2025/02/04 Built - The Hidden Stories Behind Our Structures by Roma Agrawal 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
24. 🗓️/2025/03/11 Time’s Echo 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
25. 🗓️/2025/03/11 The Year of Less 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
26. 🗓️/2025/01/31 Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future by Vince Beiser 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
    • Interview on the Daily Show
27. 🗓️/2025/01/26 How Infrastructure Works (View Highlight) by Deb Chachra 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
    • Recommended by people/authors/patrick-tanguay
28. 🗓️/2024/12/20 7 Pillars by Lawrence of Arabia 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
29. 🗓️/2024/08/31 Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1) by Marcel Proust 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
    • Proust’s monumental work is a deep exploration of memory, time, and society. It’s often regarded as one of the greatest literary achievements of the 20th century.
    • 🗓️/2026/07/31 Narrowed from the full 7-volume cycle to Vol. 1 so it is actually startable. Decide on Vol. 2 only after finishing
    • Translation matters: Moncrieff/Enright (Modern Library) for one consistent voice, or Lydia Davis (Penguin) for Vol. 1 specifically — Davis is the sharper prose but Penguin switches translators each volume
30. 🗓️/2024/08/31 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
    • This novel is a classic in realism, depicting the life of Emma Bovary and her romantic and existential struggles. It’s known for its stylistic perfection and critique of bourgeois society.
31. 🗓️/2024/08/31 The Trial by Franz Kafka 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
    • The Trial is one of Kafka’s most famous works, capturing the sense of alienation and absurdity as the protagonist, Josef K., navigates a nightmarish legal system. It’s a quintessential example of Kafka’s exploration of bureaucratic oppression.
32. 🗓️/2024/08/31 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
    • This novel is a key work of modernist literature, known for its stream-of-consciousness technique and its deep exploration of the interior lives of its characters. It reflects on themes of time, memory, and the nature of artistic creation.
33. 🗓️/2024/07/22 The Open-Air Life 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
34. The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
35. 🗓️/2024/07/22 Dark Matter 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1 twilio/people/kat-chaires
36. 🗓️/2024/06/17 Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
37. 🗓️/2025/01/16 Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari 📚/status/to-read media-type/audio priority/2
    • Interview on the Daily Show
    • 🗓️/2026/07/31 Good audio candidate, deferred — don’t want two Harari books back to back with Sapiens
38. Constructive living by David Reynolds 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
    • Recommended by people/friends/kolt-kane
      • “It’s kind of an introduction into two Japanese concepts/therapy techniques (morita therapy and bailan) that focus on productive action as therapy vs western ideas about talking about your feelings or uncovering some repressed feelings etc. it’s very refreshing. I feel like I had let go of a great deal of skepticism on the subject over the years. It’s nice to recover a healthy amount”
39. Midlife by Kieran Setiya 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
    • In Four Thousand Weeks, he mentions how he was moving towards 40 and feeling an emptiness. I’ve felt certain feelings in this area and would like to dig in more 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
40. The Travels of Ibn Battuta 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
41. 🗓️/2023/12/03 The Anatomy of Peace by The Arbinger Institute people/authors/the-arbinger-institute 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1 people/family/andrea-sooter
    • Andrea mentioned it. She stated it aligns with Good Inside
42. 🗓️/2024/05/31 The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
43. 🗓️/2024/12/10 Story of Your Life novella it was based on for so much additional nuance.
    • Ready to read in Readwise Reader
    • Recommended by people/authors/jeff-atwood in this post 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
    • The movie Arrival is based on this book
44. In a post from Helen Russell, she mentions:
    • This time, we discussed Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky - a tsunami of a novel that explores the fluidity of time, memory, and water. Beginning in ancient Mesopotamia, it follows a raindrop’s journey through centuries, from the hair of King Ashurbanipal to Victorian London, where it lands on the tongue of Arthur Smyth, an impoverished child who later becomes a renowned Assyriologist. Arthur is based on a real life Victorian, George Smith - a self-taught scholar who discovered and translated the Epic of Gilgamesh from cuneiform tablets in the 19th century. Like Arthur in the novel, Smith rose from humble beginnings to become a key figure in the study of ancient Mesopotamian history. The novel fictionalises his journey, along with a young Yazidi girl and a hydrologist who investigates water’s memory.
    • It’s a book that had me turning down corners, scribbling notes (always a good sign) and seeking out a stack of other books that relate to the big umbrella-problems of morality, ecology and belonging. (View Highlight)
45. Memories, Dreams, Reflections - Carl Jung’s autobiography (View Highlight)
    • Mentioned in a post by Oliver Burkeman 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
46. Burning the Books 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/3
    • 🗓️/2026/08/02 Pulled back from the cull to evaluate properly later, not to read now. Parked at the end deliberately.
    • The case against: added 🗓️/2021/06/23 and untouched for five years. The entire provenance was “Ajay David mentioned he was reading it.”
    • The case for, which I did not check at the time: I keep a Little Free Library project and the vault has a live thread on libraries and public knowledge. Worth testing that before deciding.
47. 🗓️/2023/08/25 How to Write Short - Word Craft for Fast Times by Roy Peter Clark 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/3
    • 🗓️/2026/08/02 Pulled back from the cull to evaluate properly later, not to read now. Parked at the end deliberately.
    • The case against: minor craft book, dormant since 2023.
    • The case for, which I did not check at the time: I said “I am not primarily a writer” without looking. On Writing is 215 lines and there is a Writing Tasks/ directory. Recommended by people/authors/richard-reeves, whose Of Boys and Men I rated 5.0.
48. 🗓️/2026/08/03 Fortune’s Formula - The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1 people/friends/kolt-kane
    • Recommended by people/friends/kolt-kane. Third Kolt recommendation on this list after Constructive Living and You’re Not Listening — his hit rate is the reason this ranks where it does.
    • Three braided threads: Claude Shannon inventing information theory at Bell Labs, John Kelly deriving the Kelly criterion from Shannon’s channel-capacity math, and Ed Thorp carrying it from blackjack tables to the first quant hedge fund. A mob/wire-service subplot runs underneath about bookies profiting from information latency.
    • The idea worth the price of admission: bet a fraction of bankroll proportional to your edge. Kelly maximises long-run geometric growth, not expected value — which is the formal argument for why volatility drag is real and why maximising expected return eventually bankrupts you. Directly load-bearing for how I already think about a globally diversified VT position.
    • Pairs with Trillions as the other finance book on this list, and they cover opposite halves of the same question. Trillions is what to own (the index fund, Bogle, Nate Most). This is how much to bet (position sizing, ruin risk). Read Trillions first; it is the more relevant of the two to what I actually do.
    • Also sits in the biography-of-a-thing shape I reliably finish: Cod, Wedding of the Waters - The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, The Brompton - Engineering for Change, Just for Fun - The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. Here the “thing” is an equation.
    • Shannon connection to Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman (#🗓️/2026/06/25) — same era, same kind of playful polymath. Speculation, but I suspect that portrait is why Kolt thought of me rather than the betting maths.
    • ⚠️ Caveat: Poundstone is a populariser and the maths stays gestural. If it lands and I want rigour, the follow-ons are Thorp’s A Man for All Markets (better memoir) and Kelly’s original 1956 paper, which is six pages and readable. Do not add either until this one is finished.
    • The Samuelson-vs-Kelly academic fight is the intellectual spine of the back half — whether log utility is the right objective function at all. Poundstone does not declare a winner, which is to his credit.
49. 🗓️/2026/08/03 Annals of the Former World by John McPhee 📚/status/to-read media-type/print priority/2
    • The deep-time book Timefulness wants to be. Pulitzer for General Nonfiction, 1999. Five books collected into one: McPhee drives Interstate 80 across the United States with a different geologist in each volume and reads the continent off the roadcuts.
    • The reason to read it is the prose, independent of subject. McPhee is the structural craftsman other nonfiction writers study — which also makes it a live entry for the How to Write Short / On Writing thread rather than only the natural-world one.
    • Joins the walking-place-noticing cluster the StoryGraph reconciliation found is my strongest actual interest: Wanderlust - A History of Walking, A Philosophy of Walking, Outside Lies Magic, The Way Around.
    • ⚠️ Caveat, and it is the real one: ~700 pages, and it is a Tier 3 hard book. The 2026 budget for those is exactly two and both are spoken for (Middlemarch, The Silk Roads). This is a 2027 book. Print, not audio — same failure mode as The Silk Roads, it needs maps and cross-sections.
    • Cheap way in if I want to test McPhee first: Basin and Range, the first ~200pp volume, published standalone.
50. 🗓️/2026/08/03 Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott 📚/status/to-read media-type/ebook priority/1
    • If what actually attracted me to Timefulness was how landscape and infrastructure decisions play out over centuries, this is the book — and it is closer to my urbanism lane than to my geology one.
    • Thesis: states impose legibility on complex systems — cadastral maps, scientific forestry, standardised surnames, Brasília — and the simplification that makes a system administrable is the same simplification that makes it fail. Scott’s counter-concept is mētis, local practical knowledge that resists being written down.
    • Direct line to Jane Jacobs, whom Scott credits explicitly, and to Feminist City and How Infrastructure Works already on this list. Also the sharpest available frame for what I do professionally: schema design, canonical data models and Protocols are legibility projects, and they fail in exactly the ways Scott describes.
    • Also the honest counterweight to Abundance (#🗓️/2026/01/19) — same subject, opposite instinct about what high-modernist planning is for.
    • ⚠️ Caveat: academic register, and the German forestry and Tanzanian villagisation case studies run long. The first hundred pages carry most of the argument.
    • Living in Freiburg makes the Normalbaum scientific-forestry chapter unusually concrete — that is literally the Schwarzwald, and the failure Scott opens with (Waldsterben) happened here.

(tag:#📚/status/to-read OR tag:#add-book-to-read) file:-"Books Read in 2026"