The Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe

I started the year with the first two volumes of a book that had been highly recommended but which I ended up really disliking. Set in a far future where medieval aesthetics coexist with advanced technology, The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe follows Severian, an apprentice torturer who is exiled for showing mercy to a prisoner. The story is told from Severian’s perspective, challenging the reader with his unreliable narration. Before his expulsion, Severian had acted as a obedient cog in the bureaucratic machinery of The Autarchy, the all-powerful authoritarian regime in his society, and the book deals with his reckoning of his new role as a lower-level traveling brute. The world-building is rich, but the plot is slow and I found the writing style and language to be unnecessarily pretentious. To boot, many of the plot lines were overt allegories of Christian theology, which I didn’t care for.

With its focus on semiotics, the nature of knowledge, and bend towards medieval history, at times I wished I had just been reading Umberto Eco’s fiction instead. I do not plan to finish the series.

Skin in the Game - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This is the fourth book I read from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Incerto series, missing only his book of aphorisms, The Bed of Procrustes. In his own words, Skin in the Game is a book about:

a) uncertainty and the reliability of knowledge

b) symmetry in human affairs, that is, fairness, justice, responsibility, and reciprocity

c) information sharing in transactions

d) rationality in complex systems and in the real world

Also in his own words, “the entire point of the book is that in the real world it is hard to disentangle ethics on one hand from knowledge and competence on the other.”

This focus on ethical decision-making comes down to accountability by having personal stakes in the outcome of the decisions one makes on behalf of others – skin in the game. It is really aligned with my libertarian-leaning worldview. Making decisions for ourselves is already hard, so we should be extra careful when making decisions for others whose reality we can’t possibly understand as well as our own. Taleb argues that people make better, more cautious, and more ethical decisions when they personally stand to lose something from the outcomes, preventing reckless risk-taking. Without skin in the game, decision-makers (think policymakers, corporate executives, or bureaucracies) end up reaping the benefits if things go well while transferring risks to others (taxpayers, employees, customers) when they don’t. This is a clear reason to build institutions with aligned incentives and build natural checks against the unintended consequences of harmful decisions.

The book is an explicit critique of crony capitalism and bad incentive structures in every day life. The world is too complex to be explained by sound bites and top-down solutions. Taleb’s writing style in this book is just as arrogant and condescending as in previous works of his I had read, but his ideas are thought-provoking and, I tend to think, correct, so it is worth putting up with his tone.

Call Center Optimization - Ger Koole

I read this book when I was exploring an idea in the revenue operations space, just before deciding to start InScope.

The insight I was trying to apply came from a problem I had seen at Vouch, where complex sales required many cross-team handoffs. As in other businesses, managers often didn’t have visibility outside their silo, leading to local optimization. The theory of constraints tells us that businesses waste resources improving anything but the bottleneck, losing revenue and increasing costs. I wanted to apply this to staffing and prioritization in complex sales teams, but I needed to get a refresher on queueing theory first. This book was a suggestion from my Kellogg ops professor, Martin Lariviere.

My idea was simple: to automatically map entire sales motions using data that companies are already collecting (in Salesforce, Zendesk, etc), and then to use that data to optimize the sales process. Analyzing the pipeline end-to-end could allow the team to identify the limiting factors keeping deals from closing. This would mean focusing on the most impactful changes or new hires to make, rather than the most visible problems or the loudest executive’s views.

Koole’s book is a comprehensive guide to the mathematical modeling of call centers, and those models are analogous to other operations management problems. It covers the basics of queueing theory, Erlang formulas, and the mathematics of staffing and scheduling. I found it useful to brush up on the math, re-learn the terminology, and to get a sense of the complexity of the problem. It was a good starting point for a project I didn’t start.

Confessions - Augustine

I read Augustine as part of a Catherine Project class, motivated by Martin Hägglund’s repeated references to it in This Life. Confessions is Augustine’s autobiographical account of his youth and conversion to Christianity, exploring themes of personal responsibility, free will, and sin. It’s a foundational text for Christianity, with enduring relevance in Western thought.

I latched on to Augustine’s focus on language, and what he calls “the semantic problem,” our struggle to communicate a shared reality. The book begins with his reflections on learning to speak as a child, distinguishing learning by study from learning by experience—a concept that feels surprisingly modern. His introspection on this topic, and especially Book X’s discussion of memory, imagination, and free will, reads almost like Wittgenstein or Douglas Hofstadter.

The book has many emotional scenes of grief and family drama. One poignant scene recounts Augustine’s encounter with a drunken beggar in Milan, contrasting his own anxiety-driven ambitions with the beggar’s fleeting joy. This moment encapsulates Augustine’s struggle between temporal pleasures and eternal joy. Like the strikingly modern discussion on language I mentioned earlier, this passage describes an experience that someone like me could easily have walking the streets of San Francisco in the 2020s.

As a non-religious reader, I found myself rolling my eyes often. Despite its deep insights, Confessions offers incomplete answers, making it a thought-provoking but unresolved meditation on human existence. Find my more detailed, more meandering review here.

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

When talking about classic literature, my friends are always surprised I never read any of the books they were forced to read in high school. Growing up in Costa Rica, the canon I was exposed to barely included any US authors (for some reason the only one I recall having to read is Poe). My knowledge of US classics is pretty limited, so when Hannah suggested that we read The Great Gatsby together, I was excited to finally get to it. Set in the Roaring Twenties, it is a classic rags-to-riches novel about love, wealth, and to some extent a critique of the American Dream. The novel shows how the relentless pursuit of wealth and status erodes authenticity and meaning, reducing everything to a spectacle.

The story revolves around new and old money, and the upper class’ hope for a permanent spot in society contrasted with the promise of upward mobility that keeps the lower class engaged in the system. Crime, corruption, and sex were all much more present than I’d have expected for a novel written a hundred years ago and prescribed in the average US high school curriculum. It was a fun read, and I’m glad that I now understand the shared references to Gatsby that pop up every once in a while, but I expected it’d be more profound given its popularity.

La Hojarasca - Gabriel García Márquez

I picked up La Hojarasca (Leaf Storm) during my trip to Colombia. It is the short novel where García Márquez introduced his fictional town of Macondo, which would later serve as the setting for One Hundred Years of Solitude. Like in his other works, García Márquez begins with a dramatic scene and ties the reader in knots through the complexities of his layered narration. The book tells the story of a reclusive doctor who commits suicide, leaving his burial to a contentious promise upheld by one of the main characters, the aging Colonel. The doctor’s isolation —rooted in his refusal to treat wounded soldiers and his questionable relationship with his indigenous housemaid— earned him the town’s scorn before his death, forcing the colonel into a moral struggle on his behalf.

As the narrative unravels the doctor’s mysterious past, it highlights the intersecting burdens of memory, war, and loyalty in a decaying Macondo. The book’s brevity makes it easier to hold on to the details and characters and to fully appreciate its complexity —something I struggled with in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Yet, despite its concise form, the novella is a powerful exploration of history’s impact and the ways unresolved conflicts and buried truths shape the lives of individuals and communities alike.

The title refers to the literal litter accumulated in the town —most vividly in the doctror’s abandoned house— but also metaphorically in the unresolved conflicts and tensions that haunt Macondo’s inhabitants. This “leaf storm” operates on both personal and political levels, from interpersonal betrayals to the larger upheaval brought by the arrival of the banana company, whose capitalist exploitation is hinted at through broader themes of historical and social decay. That last topic, unfortunately, was barely touched upon in the book, so it left me eager to explore more of Márquez’s work.

Acid for the Children - Flea

I’ve been a huge Red Hot Chili Peppers fan forever. Their 1999 album Californication was one of the first records I consciously chose to buy, and I’ve been listening to them since. Acid for the Children is Flea’s (the band’s bassist’s) autobiography. I got to watch them at Bottlerock in Napa, which inspired me to listen to the audiobook, narrated by Flea himself, and really enjoyed it.

Acid for the Children is a coming-of-age story that follows Flea from his “normal” childhood in New York City, and splitting time in Australia after his parents’ divorce, to the harsh transition to his wild teenage years in Los Angeles after his mom moves the family there. In LA, he gets interested in jazz through his stepfather’s influence and picks up the trumpet. Attending high school there, he meets the friends with whom he’d later form RHCP, and is introduced to the chaotic world of punk rock, and the drugs and mayhem of the LA scene. The book is raw, filled with stories of his struggles with his identity, addiction, poverty, and loss. Describing the violence at home and the chaos of his life skipping school and living on the streets, Flea writes with a sense of humor and self-awareness that makes the book both heartbreaking and uplifting.

The Storyteller - Dave Grohl

The Storyteller is Dave Grohl’s autobiography, which I also listened to as an audiobook narrated by the author. I was inspired to read it by a great show, too – the band headlined Outside Lands in ‘23, and it might be one of the best live performances I’ve ever seen. Whereas Flea’s book focuses on his life pre-RHCP, The Storyteller spans the milestones of Grohl’s career and what came after success. It almost comes off as bragging.

While it’s mostly positive and inspiring, loss is also a recurring theme throughout the book. There’s Kurt Cobain’s suicide, the obvious instance any reader expects, but his childhood friend’s Jimmy Swanson’s death weighs even heavier than Cobain’s, at least in writing.

Grohl’s book is very family-oriented, crediting his mother for his early interest in music, while critiquing his dad for his lack of support for his musical ambitions. He describes getting into punk through his “cousin” in Chicago during a summer road trip, and how that shaped his musical tastes and his career. The book chronicles his rise to becoming rock royalty, climbing the ranks from the DC punk scene to Nirvana and then Foo Fighters, with surreal anecdotes about performing at the White House for Obama and his close friendship with Paul McCartney. The vignette about the Beatle teaching Grohl’s daughter to play piano was a far cry from his punk days.

I was not that into Foo Fighters until much later in life, but I’m glad I eventually found them. While Grohl’s recent admission of infidelity violates a lot of the good-boy persona he tries to construct in this book, I still think it is worth the time.

Slouching Towards Utopia - J. Bradford DeLong

I’ve been reading DeLong’s blog for 10+ years now, so I was excited to finally read one of his books with Slouching Towards Utopia. Blending economic history with incisive commentary on human aspiration and failure, DeLong creates a grand narrative of economic theory and ideology meeting the actual political actions of the last hundred years and change. DeLong clearly marks 1870 as the beginning of an unprecedented era of economic transformation and sustained economic growth, cataloguing key ideas, players, and events through the present. He calls this period “long twentieth century.” Admitting the end of his named period is fuzzy – perhaps the 9/11 attacks, the ‘08 crisis, or even the rise of Trump or COVID – he goes with 2016 due to the regime change in the US, and leaves the question open for future scholars. His core argument is that this period saw a growing belief that humanity could solve political-economic problems and escape the Malthusian trap by improving governance and using knowledge. This belief took many shapes, bearing fruit fueled by technology and globalization. However, the compounding effects of progress came with a century of dislocation.

Noting that the rise of industrial capitalism happened in tandem with mass migration and new ideologies, the book repeatedly highlights how ideas shaped economic and political outcomes. DeLong explores the efficiency gained from markets, the evolution of their dynamics, and their discontents, from Hayek’s celebration of decentralized problem-solving and Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” to Keynes’ intermediated market system and Polanyi’s double movement critique. He also discusses the social experiments in Europe and the parallel fascist embrace of nationalism and war, underscoring how beliefs — both utopian and dystopian — redirected historical trajectories. Focusing on the US and its leaders, DeLong argues that while their role was exceptional, many of the policies that they coalesced around came up in large part due to luck and path dependence — the contingency of who was in the seat at key moments.

The book is both an optimistic testament to progress and a sobering reminder of its limits. The marriage of market efficiency and state intervention that the Allies embraced (and pushed) after WWII, as seen in mid-century social democracies, worked temporarily but ultimately unraveled. Despite technological advancements that granted humanity “godlike powers,” societal challenges — inequality, nationalism, and environmental crises — have proved stubborn. So DeLong asks why, with so much capacity, do we remain so far from utopia? He challenges readers to think critically about whether humanity’s slouch toward utopia is inevitable or if renewed efforts are required to build a world worthy of our technological and organizational capabilities.

I am glad he is asking these questions, because too many people take progress for granted.

Grit - Angela Duckworth

Grit explores the idea that passion and perseverance are more critical to success than innate talent, encapsulated in Duckworth’s memorable “effort counts twice” formula. Through anecdotes ranging from her research on which West Point cadets drop out and which ones succeed to studying Olympic athletes’ training regimes, Duckworth illustrates how sustained effort often outpaces raw ability in achieving long-term goals. Her central thesis is compelling, and the blend of research and real-world stories makes the book approachable, though it’s more inspirational than groundbreaking in its insights.

That said, the book was pretty forgettable (something I can attest to a year and a half after listening to it). An hour long podcast interview or even her short TED talk would have sufficed for me, in retrospect. Grit is simply pop-psychology, with the tone of a motivational airport read instead of the rigorous scientific exploration I was hoping for.

Tale of love and darkness - Amos Oz

Until last year, Amos Oz was likely the author who had languished the longest in my to-read list. After sitting in the queue for at least 15 (!) years, I had the (un)fortunate timing of deciding to read him during my trip to Israel a few months before the conflict exploded again. A Tale of Love and Darkness is Oz’s memoir, covering his childhood in Jerusalem and his later life in Kibbutz Hulda, along with a very personal telling of his family’s history. The book is a meditation on family, the nature of memory, and the ways in which we construct our own narratives.

The book takes intimate moments like planting and keeping gardens with his dad or reliving the grief after his mom’s suicide, and interweaves them with Oz’s first-person chronicle of the nascent state. It is a moving portrait of a family, a country, and a time. Even in English translation, you can feel the rebirth of the Hebrew language and the formation of Israeli culture through its pages, as Oz captures both the ancient roots and tells us of his family’s involvement in the creation of the nation. The formation of the Israeli identity was not accidental, and you can see traces of it throughout the whole story.

Much of the book deals with the War of 1948. While I have a lot to say about Oz’s view on the Zionist movement of the 30s and the 40s, and its leaders, I will instead just reproduce a section that stuck with me, and probably struck me more than anything else in the book:

I asked Ephraim if he had ever, in the War of Independence or during the troubles in the 1930s, shot and killed one of those murderers. I could not see Ephraim’s face in the dark, but there was a certain subversive irony, a strange sarcastic sadness in his voice as he replied, after a short pensive silence: “Murderers? What d’you expect from them? From their point of view, we are aliens from outer space who have landed and trespassed on their land, gradually taken over parts of it, and while we promise them that we’ve come here to lavish all sorts of goodies on them—cure them of ringworm and trachoma, free them from backwardness, ignorance, and feudal oppression—we’ve craftily grabbed more and more of their land. Vell, what did you think? That they should thank us? That they should come out to greet us with drums and cymbals? That they should respectfully hand over the keys to the whole land just because our ancestors lived here once? Is it any wonder they’ve taken up arms against us? And now that we’ve inflicted a crushing defeat on them and hundreds of thousands of them are living in refugee camps—what, d’you expect them to celebrate with us and wish us luck?” I was shocked. Even though I had come a long way from the rhetoric of Herut and the Klausner family, I was still a conformist product of a Zionist upbringing. […] “In that case, what are you doing here with your gun? Why don’t you emigrate? Or take your gun and go and fight on their side?” I could hear his sad smile in the dark: “Their side? But their side doesn’t want me. Nowhere in the world wants me. Nobody in the world wants me. That’s the whole point. It seems there are too many of my kind in every country. That’s the only reason I’m here. That’s the only reason I’m carrying a gun, so they won’t kick me out of here the way they kicked me out of everywhere else.”

Reading this passage today, in the context of current events, is particularly poignant. Oz managed to capture both the complexity and the tragedy of the situation in a way that feels as relevant now as it was then. The book is a masterpiece of memoir writing, and a much needed perspective of the complexity of humanity in a region where narratives are too often reduced to simplistic binaries.

Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain

I was first drawn to Anthony Bourdain through his TV show Parts Unknown and picked up his memoir, Kitchen Confidential, after his suicide in 2018. The book, first published in 2000, offers irreverent glimpses into his early career —from dishwasher in Cape Cod to celebrity chef in NYC haute cuisine— largely crediting his peers rather than his formal education at CIA. It was published when celebrity chef culture was nascent, unveling gritty behind-the-scenes details of restaurant kitchens and received as an exposé.

Although I hoped to get some cooking lessons out of it, the book focuses more on industry realities than culinary skills. The big reveal is how much butter and shallots are used in restaurants. Beyond the cooking tips, Bourdain candidly shares unsettling industry practices and personal struggles, like how high-pressure environments fueled his drug issues. Despite these disclosures, his narrative is sharp, witty, and filled with a genuine passion for the craft. Some of the stories are surprisingly hilarious, and outright vulgar. Other highlights include his vivid recounts of travels to Japan and France, foreshadowing his future TV success. Kitchen Confidential is a great book for any foodie, especially one with a sense of humor.

La Invención de Morel - Adolfo Bioy Casares

Last year, I took a Catherine Project class on Bioy Casares, the first they offered in Spanish. I had been eager to explore Bioy Casares’ work for years after reading Borges mentioning him and his work.

La Invención de Morel (The Invention of Morel) is an early exercise in speculative fiction, blending philosophical inquiry with a narrative of obsession and isolation. The novel explores technology as a means to transcend mortality, dramatized through a fugitive narrator who stumbles upon a mysterious island with eerie, deserted structures and a group of odd tourists who seem to ignore him. He soon realizes these are not people but recordings replayed by Morel’s invention—a device that captures human essence in a perpetual, unaltered loop.

Bioy Casares uses an unreliable narrator to emphasize the ambiguity of reality versus illusion, blurring distinctions between signifier and signified. Morel, both inventor and participant in his recordings, gives a speech to his guests’ avatars which made me think of Cory Doctorow’s take on mind uploading in Walkaway and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, particularly in relation to recent AI advancements. Unlike Morel’s subjects’ recurring lives, Doctorow’s approach is dynamic, where consciousness is uploaded to a digital medium, allowing characters and copies to exist as active players in virtual environments, offering an immortality that is interactive and evolving.

We can trace a clear line from simple cameras and phonographs that motivated Bioy Casares in the 1930s to the early aughts’ computers that inspired Doctorow, all the way through today’s LLMs. The appearance of LLMs have begun to make the latter’s “immortality” closer to reality, with “griefbots” simulating deceased loved ones by using data they left behind as input, for example. Both Bioy Casares and Doctorow explore the limits of technology to capture consciousness and the implications of extending existence through it, posing ethical questions about identity, continuity of self, and what it truly means to be alive. La Invención de Morel is a sharp commentary on the perils of mistaking images for reality, and reading nearly a century after its publication made this metaphysical puzzle on immortality feel remarkably prescient.

El Sueño de los Héroes - Adolfo Bioy Casares

Following La Invención de Morel, I read El Sueño de los Héroes (The Dream of Heroes), which I liked the least of the trio. The psychological thriller follows Emilio Gauna and friends as he tries to make sense of the disjointed events of a black-out carnival night a few years prior. Gauna’s recollections blend into a surreal mess, making the story a slow burn, with Gauna’s life, memories, and dreams intertwining as he reconstructs the past. As the story unfolds, Gauna develops an ambiguous romantic relationship, and his friendship with people he previously admired unravels.

Early in the book, Gauna meets Taboada, a seer who serves as a guide of sorts, nudging him toward revisiting the fateful carnival night. His insights and cryptic behavior suggest he understands more about Gauna’s destiny than he lets on, though. The novel builds a suspenseful recursive narrative where mundane choices ripple into monumental consequences, confronting the reader with a tension between free will and the deterministic pull of destiny.

At its core, the novel is about memory and the deceptive nature of self-perception. Themes of honor and masculinity thread Emilio’s journey, as he questions who his real friends are, and whether his actions are driven by his own choices. The novel’s slow pace and intricate plot where dreams, fate, and reality overlap left me a bit lost. Perhaps the most interesting piece is the implicit contrast between the rich and educated with the poor as they navigate the neighborhoods of old Buenos Aires. The book is a challenging read, but some call it Bioy Casares’ best work, so I might have missed some of the subtleties that make it a classic of Argentine literature.

Diario de la Guerra del Cerdo - Adolfo Bioy Casares

The last book I read for the Bioy Casares class was Diario de la Guerra del Cerdo (Diary of the War of the Pig), a dark comedy about generational conflict where a mysterious political movement causes young people in Buenos Aires to attack and threaten the elderly without apparent reason. The narrative follows Isidoro Vidal, a retiree who considers himself between the two age groups, as he becomes embroiled in the chaos of the escalating violence.

The novel reflects on the fear of aging and the value society places on youth. It also touches on the cyclical nature of life, as young characters grapple with the realization that they too will one day be old, and targeted by the same violence. Bioy Casares uses the purge as an allegory for broader social exclusion and violence, warning of how easily communities can scapegoat others under the right conditions. Unfortunately, no one in the class knew much Argentinian history, but we agreed that it was an allegory for real political tensions in Argentina during the late 1960s, where much like in the rest of the world at the time, the youth were rebelling against the establishment.

Founder vs Investor - Elizabeth Joy Zalman and Jerry Neumann

After following Neumann’s blog Reaction Wheel for years, I felt lucky that I got to attend the Bloomberg Beta book launch event in SF to hear Neumann and Zalman discuss Founder vs Investor. The book is structured as a set of dialogues exploring the relationship between these two groups, clarifying when incentives are aligned and when they grow apart, and how the dynamics play out over time as companies grow and more investors get involved. Zalman takes the vantage point of a founder, a role she’s successfuly been in multiple times, while Neumann sits across the table as her former investor, and a venture veteran.

The conversations cover a wide range of topics, from general advice on fundraising, to specific deals the authors were involved in and how they were negotiated, how to choose investors (or pick founders), dealing with boards of directors, specific fundraise terms worth negotiating for, and more. Needless to say, the two authors don’t always agree, which is half the fun. As Neumann says, understanding “how the person on the other side of the table thinks is more important, practically, than what you believe.” The book is a good exercise in building empathy and driving clarity between two groups that are forced to work together, but whose members can’t really understand each other.

Now who’s writing Founder vs. Founder?

Blindness - José Saramago (translated by Giovanni Pontiero)

Blindness is an allegory of human fragility, community, and the veneer of civilization. Saramago’s story captures the chaos that unfolds when an epidemic of blindness suddenly hits an unnamed town, leaving its society grappling with the breakdown of their daily routines, norms, and eventually all the systems that held it together. The narrative, often brutal and always intimate, slowly ramps up from a single crime to full collective dehumanization as the disease spreads among unnamed characters.

I was not particularly fond of Saramago’s signature run-on style, and the lack of punctuation made following some plot lines harder than necessary, but the book’s themes and imagery make up for it in their powerful portrayal of human nature in the face of societal collapse. Existential inquiry resonates throughout. Saramago probes at how humanity frays when stripped of its structures and senses, with people in the story constantly questioning their inherited morality. At the same time, the characters try to remain “good,” struggling to maintain their dignity through small, cleansing acts. The passages where the group discusses governance and the lines between justice and vengeance, or survival and self-degradation, recurringly made me think of Holocaust stories, and how the people in real life are sometimes forced to make similar choices.

Blindness is a masterclass dystopia, and a reminder of how fragile the social fabric we take for granted truly is.