Appendix C
A reading list, or, how to fall down better rabbit holes.
A small note before the list. This is not a comprehensive bibliography. This is not a syllabus.
It is, instead, a curator's set of suggestions, organized in a way that I hope makes it easy to pick the next book based on what you actually want from it. I have tried to keep the list short, because long reading lists are, in my experience, a way of feeling well-read without being so. Each entry has a brief, honest note. Where I have an opinion, I have stated it. Where the book has a flaw worth mentioning, I have mentioned it. I would rather you read three of these books carefully than fifty of them casually.
A reading list is, on inspection, an act of compression in the sense of Chapter 16. There are far more books I have benefited from than will fit in this appendix. The ones below are the ones I would recommend to someone who finished this book yesterday. Other lists, by other writers, would look different. They would not be wrong, and this one is not exhaustive.
∗ ∗ ∗
If you want to learn the actual mathematics
Books that teach the underlying material, gently.
Infinite Powers.Steven Strogatz.
The best popular book on calculus I have ever read. Strogatz, a working mathematician at Cornell, is one of the few writers who can explain the derivative and the integral to a determined non-mathematician without either talking down or losing precision. If Chapter 4 made you curious about calculus, this is the next book.
The Joy of x.Steven Strogatz.
Strogatz's earlier book, a tour through mathematics for the general reader, originally a series of essays in the New York Times. Shorter than Infinite Powers, broader in scope, less deep. Useful if you want a survey rather than a deep dive.
How Not to Be Wrong.Jordan Ellenberg.
A working mathematician on the everyday usefulness of mathematical thinking. The chapters on probability and on linear regression are particularly good. Ellenberg is funny in a dry way that I would consider this book's nearest stylistic relative, if I were being generous to myself.
Thinking, Fast and Slow.Daniel Kahneman.
The classic treatment of how the human mind actually handles probability and decision-making, by a Nobel laureate in economics who was actually a psychologist. Long, occasionally repetitive, deeply rewarding. The chapters on the difference between System 1 and System 2 thinking will, I suspect, change how you read your own decision-making.
A Mathematician's Apology.G. H. Hardy.
Short, beautiful, slightly bleak. Hardy's 1940 meditation on what it means to do mathematics, written when he believed his best work was behind him. The book is, on inspection, also about depression, which Hardy treats with the same dignified restraint he brings to number theory. Useful for the reader who wants to see what serious mathematics, written about by someone who actually did it, sounds like.
Chaos.James Gleick.
The popular history of chaos theory, the field that Chapter 15's three-body problem helped to start. Forty years old and still the best book on the subject. Gleick is a working journalist whose science writing has more authority than most working scientists' writing.
∗ ∗ ∗
If you want to learn the actual computer science
Books that teach the engineering, with discipline.
The Mythical Man-Month.Frederick Brooks.
Brooks managed the IBM System/360 software project in the 1960s, learned everything the hard way, and wrote a small book about it that is still, sixty years later, the most useful book ever written about software project management. Short, witty, occasionally devastating. Read this if you have ever managed engineers.
Refactoring.Martin Fowler.
The book that named the practice that Chapter 21 is about. Fowler is a clear writer with very strong opinions, and the book is, in its second edition, a working reference rather than a single-sitting read. If Chapter 21 made you want to look more carefully at what refactoring actually involves, this is the canonical source.
Test Driven Development: By Example.Kent Beck.
Beck is the programmer who, more than any other single person, popularized the practice Chapter 19 describes. The book is small. The examples are slow. If you write code professionally and have not learned this, Beck's book is the best way to learn it. If you do not write code, you will get less from this than from Chapter 19 by itself.
The Pragmatic Programmer.David Thomas and Andrew Hunt.
A working programmer's guide to the small daily disciplines that distinguish thoughtful engineers from the rest. Less theoretical than the others on this list. More like an experienced colleague offering quiet advice over coffee. The twentieth-anniversary edition is the one to get.
Algorithms to Live By.Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths.
A computer scientist and a cognitive scientist applying algorithmic thinking to ordinary life. The closest thing in print to the project of this book, which I read with admiration and slight competitive interest while writing. The chapters on optimal stopping and on caching are particularly good.
Godel, Escher, Bach.Douglas Hofstadter.
Long. Strange. Brilliant. The 1979 Pulitzer Prize winner that taught a generation of programmers to think about self-reference, recursion, and consciousness. Read it slowly, ideally over months. The chapters on the halting problem and on the structure of formal systems are unmatched.
∗ ∗ ∗
If you want to read about the mind, honestly
Books on anxiety, depression, and the work of getting through.
Battles in the Mind.Anna Chandy.
The Bangalore-based Transactional Analysis practitioner whose work, as I mentioned in Chapter 5, was central to my own recovery. Honest, practical, written by a clinician who has done the work for decades. If you are in or near Bangalore, her practice is real, and so is the work.
The Noonday Demon.Andrew Solomon.
The most comprehensive book ever written about depression by a person who has had it. Long, ambitious, encyclopedic, and honest in ways the popular literature usually is not. Solomon went everywhere, talked to everyone, and wrote it all down. If you have ever wanted to understand depression as a phenomenon rather than as a personal failure, this is the book.
Darkness Visible.William Styron.
Styron, the novelist, on his own clinical depression. Eighty-four pages. Read in a single sitting. One of the most honest pieces of writing about the inside of a depressive episode that has ever been published. The shortness is part of the gift. Styron wrote exactly as much as he needed to, and not a sentence more.
Man's Search for Meaning.Viktor Frankl.
Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist who survived the camps, on the question of what makes life bearable when life itself is barely bearable. The first half is a memoir of the camps. The second half is the theory of logotherapy he built from the experience. Be warned that the book is sometimes recommended in ways that make it sound glib. The book itself is not glib. The book is one of the most serious things ever written.
The Anxious Generation.Jonathan Haidt.
Haidt's argument that the rise of smartphones and social media is causally responsible for the recent collapse of adolescent mental health. The argument has its critics, some of whom are right. The book is, regardless, worth reading carefully, particularly if there are children in your life.
Why We Sleep.Matthew Walker.
A neuroscientist on the connection between sleep and almost everything else, including anxiety. The book has been criticized in places for overreaching on specific claims, and some of the criticism is correct. The general thrust, however, that sleep is more important than the modern world tends to assume, is so well-documented that the book is worth reading even with the caveats. Read it skeptically, take the broad claims seriously, take the specific numbers with caution.
∗ ∗ ∗
If you want writers who think the way this book does
The lineage, named by name.
This is, in some sense, the most personal section of the appendix. The writers below are the ones whose voices, over decades, taught me to write the way I write. If you enjoyed the tone of this book, the books below are where the tone came from. None of them is mine to claim. All of them are, in their proper places, doing better work than I have.
Cosmos.Carl Sagan.
Sagan was the writer who, more than any other single person, taught a generation that science could be written about with warmth. Cosmos is the book, and the accompanying television series is among the most beautiful artifacts ever produced by public broadcasting. Read the book. Watch the series. The world will feel briefly larger.
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.Richard Feynman.
Feynman's autobiographical anecdotes, told in the voice of a working physicist who never quite grew up. Funny, irreverent, and useful as a model for how a serious thinker can be playful without being unserious. The companion volume, What Do You Care What Other People Think, is, in my opinion, the better book of the two.
A Brief History of Time.Stephen Hawking.
Hawking on cosmology, written for the general reader. The book is famous because it was, in its time, the most successful popular science book ever published, and it is famous because much of it is harder than Hawking realized when he was writing it. Read it for the courage of the attempt, not for the success of every chapter.
The Selfish Gene.Richard Dawkins.
Dawkins on evolution, in the book that introduced the word meme to popular culture, in a sense almost the opposite of what it now means. The argument is occasionally overreaching, and Dawkins's later public career has done much to make the early work harder to recommend without caveats. The early work is, on its own merits, worth reading.
Sapiens.Yuval Noah Harari.
Harari's sweeping history of the human species, from cognitive revolution to present. The book has been criticized by working historians for specific factual claims and for occasionally substituting bold assertion for evidence. The criticism is, in places, fair. The book remains, on balance, one of the most useful single books I have ever recommended to people who want to think at scale.
The Order of Time.Carlo Rovelli.
Rovelli, a theoretical physicist, on what time actually is and is not. Short, beautifully written, occasionally challenging. Rovelli writes the way the rest of us would like to write: with the precision of a physicist and the cadence of a poet. His other books, particularly Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, are equally worth reading.
The Beginning of Infinity.David Deutsch.
Deutsch, a physicist at Oxford, on the nature of explanation and what knowledge is. Difficult. Worth the difficulty. The chapters on what it means for an explanation to be good are, in my opinion, the most useful single piece of philosophy of science ever written for a general audience.
∗ ∗ ∗
A note on crisis support
Where to call, if calling is what you need.
This is not a section I want to write briefly, but I am going to, because the right format for crisis resources is short and clear. If, while reading this book or after putting it down, you find yourself in genuine crisis, please reach out to one of the resources below. None of them is perfect. All of them are real.
iCall. Free, confidential psychosocial counselling in India by phone and email. Run by TISS. Numbers and email available at icallhelpline.org.
The Live Love Laugh Foundation. Mental health support in India. Resources, helplines, and a directory of practitioners at thelivelovelaughfoundation.org. Their work on rural mental health in particular is worth knowing about.
Vandrevala Foundation. 24/7 mental health helpline in India, multiple languages. The number is in their public materials online.
AASRA. Mumbai-based 24-hour helpline for the suicidal and distressed. Number available at aasra.info.
Befrienders Worldwide. An international directory of crisis helplines, organized by country. Useful if you are not in India. The directory is at befrienders.org.
A small thing worth saying. Calling these numbers, the first time, is hard. The person who answers will, almost certainly, be a stranger. The stranger will, on the whole, be there to listen rather than to fix. This is, in my experience, more useful than it sounds in advance. The act of telling a willing stranger what is happening inside you is, on its own, a small piece of the work. The work is not, in those moments, to solve. The work is, in those moments, to be heard. The willing strangers on the other end of these numbers exist for exactly that purpose, and they exist because someone, sometime, set up the system to make them available, on the theory that you might one day need them. Their existence is, on inspection, evidence that you are not as alone as you feel.
∗ ∗ ∗
This is the list. It is, as the opening note said, not exhaustive. There are books I left out because I was not sure they had aged well, books I left out because I had not read them carefully enough to vouch for them, and books I left out because the appendix had to end somewhere. Other readers, with other lives, would draw a different list. The reader who has finished this book is, I suspect, the kind of reader who will, over time, draw their own.
I want to say one last thing, because the appendix would be incomplete without it. The point of a reading list is not to read everything on it. The point of a reading list is to know what is available, and to pick, when the time comes, the next book that the moment calls for. You do not have to read all of these. You do not have to read any of these in any particular order. You may read one, and find it sufficient. You may read two, and find one of them more useful than the other. You may read none of them, and decide that this book was, for now, enough. All of these are, on inspection, acceptable outcomes. The reading list is a resource, not a curriculum. The curriculum is your life.