Bookshelf
Reading
Books that changed how I think. Mostly fiction and philosophy, plus a few that landed at exactly the right time. Not a list of everything I've read — just the ones that stuck.
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Notes from Underground
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The first book that made me suspicious of my own reasoning. The narrator is proof that intelligence and self-sabotage aren't opposites — they're often the same muscle. It's short, mean, and uncomfortably familiar.
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Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
I expected a thriller about a murder and got a 600-page argument about what you owe other people. Raskolnikov talks himself into being exceptional, and watching that logic collapse is the entire point. It rewired how I catch myself justifying decisions.
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1984
George Orwell
Everyone quotes the surveillance; the part that stuck with me was how language gets narrowed until certain thoughts become impossible to even have. As someone who builds software, the idea that you can engineer what people are able to express feels less like fiction every year.
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Animal Farm
George Orwell
A small book that does something huge: it shows how a good idea gets hollowed out one reasonable-sounding compromise at a time. I reread it whenever I catch myself assuming good intentions are what matter. They rarely are.
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Inferno (The Divine Comedy)
Dante Alighieri
Less about punishment than about the precision of it — every sin gets the consequence shaped exactly like itself. I read it as much for the architecture as the story; it's one of the most ruthlessly organized things ever written.
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Purgatorio (The Divine Comedy)
Dante Alighieri
The middle volume nobody talks about, and the one I liked most. It's about the slow, unglamorous work of becoming a better person — climbing instead of falling. Closer to actual life than either heaven or hell.
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Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
It's not really about banning books; it's about people choosing distraction over difficulty until the books stop mattering on their own. Reading it on a phone I kept wanting to check, the joke was clearly on me.
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The Art of Living
Epictetus
Stoicism gets flattened into productivity advice online, so going back to the source was clarifying. The core move — sort what's yours to control from what isn't, then act accordingly — is annoyingly hard to actually do. I keep it close anyway.
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A Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman
I did not expect a book about a grumpy widower and his neighbours to get me, and it did. It's a quiet argument that meaning is mostly built out of small obligations to other people. Funnier than its premise has any right to be.
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The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls
A memoir about growing up with parents who were brilliant and badly equipped for the world. What stayed with me is how little resentment is in it — she's trying to understand, not settle scores. That restraint is its own kind of strength.
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The Comfort Crisis
Michael Easter
The thesis is simple: we've optimized away every discomfort and quietly lost something in the trade. I don't buy all of it, but it pushed me to deliberately do hard things — physical and otherwise — and I'm better for it. A good antidote to a life lived mostly at a keyboard.