I love reading, here's a few meatier books I've read recently:

* Seeing Like a State - great overview of how states (and corporations) lose visibility into reality due to the abstraction levels they operate at

* Normal Accidents - all about how things like nuclear reactors, ships and large systems naturally have accidents

* Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty - great easy read about how high reliability organizations manage complexity and dangerous, high tempo situations.

I've mostly been reading short SF stories recently, most of them from Dangerous Visions.

Here's a few of the ones I've read and enjoyed:

“The Jigsaw Man” by Larry Niven

“The Night That All Time Broke Out” by Brian W. Aldiss

“A Toy for Juliette” by Robert Bloch (although I was surprisingly not a fan of Harlan's continuation)

“The Man Who Went to the Moon — Twice” by Howard Rodman

“Flies” by Robert Silverberg

Oh I've got some recs for you if you want meaty! I've been reading classics this year. It started with East of Eden; if you've got a philosophical leaning and appreciate your characters deeply fleshed out, you owe it to yourself to read this book.

The next one was Lonesome Dove, this was my first time reading a western and I didn't think I'd enjoy it as much as I did. The book is also absolutely hilarious and has one of my favorite characters in a book(shoutout to Gus).

I'm currently reading The Count of Monte Cresto and, boy, it's turning out to be quite the epic tale of revenge(no spoilers please!).

Fiction:

I'm on Book Two of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series.

Non-Fiction:

More than I can count, as far as "I've read at least some, put a bookmark in it, and intend to finish it eventually." But in terms of the books I'm really actively engaging with right now, the top one is:

Neuroscience: Exploring The Brain[1] by Mark F. Bear, Barry W. Connors, and Michael A. Paradiso

And sort of in parallel with that, is

Analog Computing: Development, Programming, Applications, and Future Directions[2] by Bernd Ulmann

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0781760038/

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Analog-Computing-Development-Programm...

Just finished a David Foster Wallace kick. I listened to the new 30th anniversary audiobook of Infinite Jest (twice) and then The Pale King (twice). Then I listened to "Of course you end up becoming yourself" which is a long-form interview with Wallace by David Lipsky, traveling with him on the Infinite Jest book tour.

I had to listen to the books twice because there are a lot of details that you won't get the first time through unless you're extremely intentional and detail oriented, but I found it was worth it to listen again. I'll probably listen to Infinite Jest again sometime soon, even though it's 64 hours long. IJ is actually really great sci-fi with some important questions for our time.

'Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States', Alex Wellerstein.

> "Over the course of this book, we have looked at some eighty years of this history. We have seen how the idea of nuclear secrecy was initially born out of a very specific fear—that the world’s worst nation could achieve nation-destroying power—that, over the course of many transformations, morphed into something more generalized. More than totalitarian regimes were the target of this secrecy: allied nations, private industry, democratic institutions, and “the public” more broadly became understood as targets as well, for reasons both justifiable and not. The secrecy problem moved wherever the problem of the bomb went, which was far indeed. The desirability of control over nuclear knowledge became totalizing because the threat of loss of control was tied to the almost unimaginable power of the bomb itself. These two forces—the desire for control, the fear of its loss—became locked in a vicious cycle, each driving the other."

"Collapse" - A friend gave me the book in a bag he was going to donate. its been great. Theres obviously a huge undertone of preachy "humans struggle with sustainable resource utilization" but the views into failed societies are just fascinating. Really enjoying it, though I've slowed down and might not finish.

"7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy" - Recommended by @pc in an interview. I'm ~50 pages in and not really blown away. Its a nice accumulation of Alpha creating strategy... but I think its really missing some nuance. I do LOVE that they take an economist approach and actually provide the math/algorithms behind the concepts. Theres some good stuff in here but so far it feels like 30 pages stretched out to make a book.

"Monetizing Innovation" - dropped this book, do not recommend. I was expecting a really nice accumulation of how pricing should work with companies who are innovating... and it came no where near that hopeful concept. The case studies were weak, the hypothesis were weak, the writing was weak.

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.

About halfway through- it’s really good so far. He makes a compelling case for how our culture has changed in many ways, often for the worse, with the introduction of television.

Airframe by Michael Crichton. It's riveting.

I'm jumping across several short story collections:

- "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang - "Ficciones" by Borges - "I have no Mouth and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison.

I'm also slowly plowing through "The Big Book of Science Fiction" edited by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer.

I love short speculative fiction. And the above are among my favorites.