I’ve loved reading since I was a kid. My father used to read to me every evening from as early as I can think. Not too long after entering primary school, having acquired the ability to read, I started reading ahead in my own free time, since I couldn’t wait to see how the story would continue. When I moved to a different city for university at the age of 19, I had three bookshelves in my room at my parent’s house. One of them I’d built together with my father not too long ago, to expand my storage for all those books I kept accumulating. Out of curiosity, I counted them and thus realized I’d kept almost 300 books in my room. Except for 10 or maybe 20, I’d read all of them.

That said, these were the kinds of books I’ve been reading since my childhood. The vast majority of them fit into the category of “teenage fantasy” books with only a few odd one’s out such as the Bible, Stephen King’s It and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. As such, I hadn’t learned much from reading those books except that it endowed me with a rather solid German proficiency for my age. This article isn’t about those books, but about those of the non-fiction kind.

At some point not too many years ago, I developed an interest in the pursuit of

and so I kept telling myself, “you should really read some more hard facts bro”. I kind of did, but if I’m being honest, most non-fiction books I read weren’t all that fun. Or perhaps I needed to get used to an entirely different “reading vibe” than the fiction books I was used to. I guess it’s kind of the same as with regular cereal vs. oatmeal and white bread vs. rye bread: both are switches I did at some point in my life, where I didn’t like the taste at the start, got used to it at some point and even developed a liking for it now.

My reading thus ended up being very sporadic, perhaps two non-fiction books per year when I was lucky. This all changed early in my Master’s when I decided: I will read at least 10 pages in my non-fiction book every day, because otherwise I’m never getting anywhere. I am usually not a big fan of these sorts of rules since I end up forcing myself to do things that I don’t feel like doing and it puts the focus on quantity rather than enjoying the time spent reading and being “in the flow”. Besides, 10 pages isn’t a lot. That said, I followed my “10 pages a day” rule with very few exceptions for over a year, until quite recently when I started working and had to give up on it for lack of time.

I rarely ever read considerably more than my 10 pages a day due to limited motivation, yet I am quite satisfied with the results. 10 pages a day takes some time for reasonably dense non-fiction books, but can be fit into most schedules. And while this way it often takes a month to finish a single book, on the contrary this means finishing about 10 books per year. That’s a ~10x increase over my usual performance until then!

To get to the point, in this article I mostly want to talk about the books I’ve read and what I’ve learned from them. But to start, I want to talk about how I felt about the process in general:

As I said earlier, I rarely read more than 10 pages a day because I didn’t have the motivation for that. Even after doing this for a year, it still takes a certain amount of energy to pick up a non-fiction book and start reading, which is quite frustrating when I compare that to my usual fiction novels that often manage to keep me up for an additional hour at night or distract me from my other todos because I can’t wait to see what happens next. That doesn’t mean I had a bad time though. Well, sometimes at least.

You see, the range from “good” to “bad” books is genuinely wide, and to complicate this, this depends much, much more on your personal tastes than seems to be the case with fiction books: I genuinely believe I could pick up almost any fiction book out there and have a decent time with it. This doesn’t go for non-fiction books. I would go as far as say that two thirds of the time I spent reading were genuinely wasted because the book didn’t have anything to teach me in the first place, or it was extremely inefficient in saying what little it had to say. This is one of the reasons I am writing this blog post: one thing I noticed in the process is, that it is very difficult to figure out beforehand whether you’ll like a book or not, even if you read several reviews about it and receive recommendations from people you respect. The latter means that my own judgement here will probably be completely useless to you, dear reader, but I’m hoping it is still informative in some way. Besides, another reason I am writing this is to track which books I’ve read and how I felt about them. With 1000 words of preface out of the way, let’s get into the books. In chronological order of how I read them:

Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology - Chris Miller

His accounts span the entire stack from the necessary scientific advancements and technologies used, across the economics of the chip industry and its most influential company and nation-state actors, up to the geopolitical consequences and tensions around it. The book seems to be widely regarded as the most comprehensive coverage of the topic, and I found it quite interesting to read. It did feel slightly repetitive at times and I will also have to admit that the early history of the chip industry is not that interesting to me. The author also has a strange tendency to describe people and events, especially the early developments in the US and USSR, with a certain dramatic tone that feels out of place.

A thin man with dark hair and deep-set eyes, Malin was one of the Soviet Union’s leading experts on semiconductor devices.

That said, consdering that I’ve seen some criticisms about the book being US-biased, I found these to be small at best, and to not distract much from the content. Besides, it’s not like a better alternative exists. All in all, this was a good read and I can recommend it.

Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid - Rebecca Giblin & Cory Doctorow

The authors cover the current state of these indutries, often taking the creator’s perspective (authors, artists etc.) as well as digging into the misgivings of the monopsony holders. It covers a bit of history that shows us how these companies have grown using their monopsony positions, abused it to threaten rivals, choked independent creators and used regulatory capture to dictate working conditions and increase their fees. In the second part of the book, they propose several ideas to improve the status quo, aimed at artists, end users and policymakers alike.

Perhaps the biggest takeaways for me were, once again confirming that most big companies are genuinely evil and deserve to be wiped off the face of the earth. On a smaller scale, it is the realization that copyright and DRM have long ceased to be the crutches that creators use to protect their livelihood, but rather the tools that these companies use to appropriate works of art from their creators, and to shackle users to their ecosystems. This book is a big recommendation from me: it is one of those few books that are not only informative, but also on-point and entertaining. Perhaps the only downside I could think of, was that this book made me massively angry, several times, while reading.

On a sidenote, Doctorow offers sales of the book directly on his website, DRM-free, which is very in-tune with the content of the book itself, and guarantees that most of the proceeds go to the authors themselves. The guy directly mailed me on the day I bought the book and thanked me. I’m personally a fan of him for his activism, but he also writes both great fiction and non-fiction books. He’s one of those people on Mastodon whom I would love to follow but unfortunately cannot because they would single-handedly fill my timeline. He coined the term enshittification by the way.

How Infrastructure Works: Transforming our shared systems for a changing world - Deb Chachra

Unfortunately, the entire book is not very interesting. Perhaps more accurately, it is very descriptive, but without diving into any of the depths that would teach me anything new. Most of the book seems to be spent with the author getting lost in her excitement as she imagines the cables connecting the light in her room to the city’s transformers stations and the nearest powerplant, and how everything moves as she flicks the light switch. It is quite repetitive and there is practically nothing to learn here if you’ve had even the slightest interest in the environment and systems surrounding you throughout your life. Some of the places she visited are interesting, such as the famous Dinorwig Power Station in Wales, but they can’t save the overall impression.

So all in all, I cannot recommend this book. It’s not very entertaining to read and there is very little to learn. This is a bit frustrating because this was a recommendation from a technical blogger who I highly respect for their work but, like… what the hell man?

There was exactly one interesting takeaway in the entire book, close to the end, which I’ll share here so you don’t have to read the entire book:
Chachra makes an interesting point about the connection between infrastructure and discrimination, introducing the idea of infrastructure as a means of “displacing harms” in conjunction with discrimination of minorities, mostly in the form of systemic racism in the US and environmental issues in general. Infrastructure embodies the political climate of the time it was built in, and especially the opinions of those in power. As infrastructural systems grow and become more centralized, they allow us to shift the harms they are causing to places where they don’t bother us as much. When a new highway into a major US city was built, space had to be made for it. The choice was easy: it was the perfect opportunity to eradicate a cheap residential district, the only place close to the city center that many poor people could even afford to live in, and as a result, they even managed to displace them to the outside of the city, where they were easier to ignore. Similarly, a massive coal power plant can be built far away from major cities as long as it is connected with a high-capacity powerline. In contrast, if every neighborhood still had its own small diesel engine or similar for power generation, the fumes and dirt created by those polluters would be impossible to ignore, even if you don’t care for the climate at all. Similarly, globalization lets us export all of the manual labor, mining, chemical processing etc. of things we don’t like to poorer countries that do it for us.

The Euro: The Battle for the New Global Currency - David Marsh

The Euro covers the history of Europe after the end of the second world war up until the 2010s, focusing mostly on the economics of the region and especially on the negotations about a common currency. This was a rather wordy read. It probably spent about 200 pages describing the seemingly endless back-and-forth between rivaling economic perspectives within Europe, mostly France and Germany at opposite ends of the spectrum (as it should be). To be honest, it felt like the very same debate was rehashed over and over and over again for about 30 years, but Marsh still felt the need to describe it in all its detail. This was extremely repetitive and thus boring and exhausting to read.

But perhaps as a result of that, it certainly impressed on me how deeply divided European countries have always been. The fact that the EU exists seems almost like a miracle now. The path there has certainly been riddled with hardship, and it only happened because “the stars aligned”, with the then-heads of state grasping a once in a few decades chance to make it happen. This implies that the EU was formed under less than optimal circumstances, with countries' economies not properly aligned etc. The book also emphasizes how the EU is, at heart, still a currency union. It was a question of economics only. Overall, Marsh makes the EU look like a poorly planned experiment. He is probably right about many things, but he is also too negative in my opinion and seems ideologically motivated. He has nothing positive to say about the EU, and the lack of a section with advice or proposals on how the status quo could be improved, is both telling and frustrating.

While I wouldn’t call this book bad per se, it is quite a drag to read, and the learning/time investment ratio here is so low that I cannot recommend anyone read it.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation - Paris Marx

The book does however go beyond this thesis set out in the title: Marx starts with a short but effective and enlightening history of the automobile and especially how regulatory capture and public manipulation by oil and automobile companies have led to the sad situation we find ourselves in today, before jumping into discussing the initiatives put forth by Silicon Valley companies in recent years. He describes the rise of and tactics used by these companies to make big money while ruining public safety and infrastructure, and how these haven’t changed since the advent of the automobile in the early 20th centurey. He picks apart not only single ideas, but also the overall mindset that inspired them in the first place, pointing out how the very root of them is at odds with a community-minded transportation solution. He finally presents us with his own vision for a future focused on strengthening public transport and other forms of community-focused mobility.

All in all, the author manages to tie these three pieces together into a work that makes a very strong, coherent argument, taught me a lot about the things going on at the moment, but also about the history that still underlines the developments we see today, and he did all of this in a relatively concise, digestable book. This is another one of my personal recommendations: it is highly informative, concise and entertaining.

Economics 101 - Alfred Mill & Michele Cagan

From a similar motivation as The Euro, I ended up reading this introductory book, which I’d gotten together with a bunch of other “101” books in a bundle on Humble Bundle a few years back. It was also because The Euro made me feel like there are still too many gaps in my understanding to appreciate more involved materials about economics.

In short, this book does a good job at explaining many of the basic principles in economics and the interplay between different “mechanics”, though there are still some gaps left to fill. The book even prepares you for real-life economics commentary and discussion, since over the cause of the book, the authors go from “clearly biased” to “waging psychological warfare against the reader”. This book is downright manupulative in its later parts, but that’s what makes it all the more interesting: the authors make several statements that range from “very opinionated” over “factually wrong” and “can’t do maths” down to classic economist-playbook manipulative narratives. As a result, the authors, wholly unintentionally, provide you with ample opportunity in this book to feel confused, uncomfortable, manipulated or angry, in ways that are much clearer than in the environments these sorts of discussions usually take place. It’s thus a good opportunity to not just learn about the economic models themselves here, but also develop an intuition of what’s wrong with them.

If you’re like me, you will have experienced this feeling of “discomfort” when it comes to economic discussions. You get the feeling that their models and the things that are happening seem completely absurd and that the system must be horribly broken, but at the same time, there are people studying this stuff and they probably know way more than you, and if you’re being honest, you’re not all that familiar with economics so maybe you’re just wrong?

It took a while for me to pin down where the exact issue here is, and I need to write a blog article about this at some point. In any case, the authors of this book do not question the established models in the slightest, as seems to be custom in economics education, which is a big flaw, albeit not unexpected. I can genuinely recommend reading this book, but I don’t think these authors deserve your money.

If you want to see me getting annoyed at and picking apart some of the stupidities they spout, I collected my reactions in a thread on Mastodon: https://chaos.social/@nightoo/113033341740840763

Pro Git - Scott Chacon & Ben Straub

This is the official Git book, which is itself open-sourced through a Github repository here. It covers everything from the basics of Git to advanced usage of Git, typical workflows, configuration, its internal workings, self-hosting Git on a server, related ecosystems and integrations such as Github and IDEs to some extent etc.

I read this as it was a recommendation from Nikhil Suresh, but I couldn’t say I got much out of it. This isn’t to say that it is a bad book by any means, but it turns out that I’m already rather proficient with Git for all the things I need to know, and the remainder are mostly things I don’t know because I don’t need to. There’s no point in me reading about how to migrate from SVN to Git now, even if that may be useful at some point in the future. I’ll just look it up again once the time comes. The section on Git’s inner workings was interesting, and there are a few things Git can do that I never knew I needed, such as e.g. the git log master..my-branch syntax to get all commits from my-branch that are not on master or similar. That’s all there is to say about this book. I guess at least I got the street cred now.

World History 101 - Tom Head

Another book from the 101 book bundle mentioned above, I was at first afraid that this would be similarly biased as Economics 101, and was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t. Quite the opposite in fact, the author gives a strong factual overview and isn’t afraid to call out common misconceptions and specifically point to e.g. very early civil rights or equality movements that some people are trying their best to pretend that didn’t exist.

In a mere 250 pages, the author covers the entirety of human history starting with Sumer and Akkad up to an overview and outlook of the current state of the world. As a result, most coverage ends up incredibly shallow: there are 4 pages on the Second World War, 2 on Imperialism, 2 on the Mayans etc. This is not a critique, but a natural shortcoming of this kind of book. It means I didn’t learn too much from the book, but it did help to at least find out a few things I’d never even heard of “happened”, or to contextualize some names I’d only heard without knowing of their background. It was certainly fun getting a few extra details out of this for historical figures I’d seen pop up in Fate, after watching all of it only a few weeks prior with a friend.

Ballistic Missile Defense - Ashton B. Carter & David N. Schwartz

This is another book I saw in a recommendation list of a tech blogger I follow. It was an interesting read, not at the least because I am definitely not in the target audience. Rather than a book, this is more of a study or report, authored mostly by military advisors and people in the defense industry. Published in 1983 towards the end of the cold war, this book strategically evaluates the question “Should the US build a ballistic missile defense (BMD) system?”.

It is important to note here that “Ballistic Missile” is used to refer specifically to long-range nuclear missiles launched from silos and nuclear submarines. This book is specifically and concretely about nuclear war. Rather than any of the specific stances and arguments presented in this book, it is the way of thinking that underlines the entire discussion and shines through most arguments, that I consider the most interesting takeaways here.

The book goes into technical, economic and geopolitical detail of the available options. The particulars may be outdated by 40 years, but some of them are still interesting, and many haven’t even changed much from the time the book was written. The situation at the time was roughly as follows: both the US and USSR had thousands of nuclear missiles, and they had come to an agreement to not deploy BMD systems, called the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty.

Hold on you might think, why are they limiting the defensive side, rather than the offense? This is a great illustration of the status quo and the thinking of those days. The relative peace back then was fragile, based on the principle of mutually assured desctruction (MAD): both sides had enough nuclear missiles to raze every enemy city many times over. Thus the only thing preventing nuclear war, except for flimsy values such as morals, was the fact that starting a nuclear attack on the other party is equivalent to committing suicide.

So how does BMD factor into the equation here? Well, the first thing to note was that at that time, neither side had a (significant) BMD system deployed, among other things thanks to the aforementioned ABM treaty. If you’re like me, this might come as a surprise: 40 years after the first real use of a nuclear weapon, there was no defense against them? The same held for at least the US public back then it seems: most of them assumed that they were safe from nuclear attack. The reality was that it is essentially impossible to defend against a full-out nuclear attack from a nation as well equipped as the US or USSR. While BMD is generally possible, any particular defense can be overcome through simple tactics such as oversaturation (throwing more missiles at the target than the defense can handle) or staggering the attack across multiple waves to deplete defenses that only work for a limited duration. For example, even with the deployment of a perfectly reliable BMD by the standards of the 1980s, either side would still be able to take out the other side’s capital city by expending a mere 1% of their nuclear arsenal.

If this thought alone isn’t scary enough, the kinds of defenses available back then were not exactly inspiring confidence either. There were several approaches, and all of them are exceedingly crude, including tactics such as “launching a nuclear missile at the incoming missile and detonating once it is close enough” or “burying a small nuclear bomb close to the defended target and detonating it when you are attacked, shredding any missile passing through the resulting dust screen”. BMD systems were far from reliable, and came with significant drawbacks, to the point that a perfect or near-perfect defense was impossible.

Perhaps more interestingly, this hasn’t changed much in the 40 years since the book was written, the only significant difference being that the “launching a missile at the enemy missile” option has improved to the point that non-nuclear defense (i.e. taking out the enemy missile through a direct hit with a kinetic defensive missile) has become feasible. The fact that any defense can be easily overwhelmed by numbers is still true, so BMD systems these days are only deployed in small numbers, their purpose being to defend against nations with very small arsenals (North Korea, Iran or similar) and accidental launches.

It is chilling to think that a fascist and an autocrat are currently leading the nations whose nuclear arsenals are enough to raze every major city on the planet several times over, and there is nothing at all we can do to defend against this. Similarly, it is both fascinating and very scary to see the careful considerations and diplomatic maneuvering going into every move on the US side back then, and comparing that to the clown show that US politics has devolved into since then. No matter how offputting it might be to look at a graph plotting “effectiveness of a BMD sytem” against “percentage of the Soviet population that we can still erase if the USSR attacks first”, there is no doubt that the people writing this report have taken a lot of factors into consideration and are navigating this delicate matter with the highest level of caution, as they should. Seeing that made me feel like it is nothing short of a miracle that we haven’t had a nuclear war yet, considering the kinds of people holding the triggers.

So, back to the treaty: the argument here is that both the US and USSR were somewhat content with their nuclear arsenal so that the nuclear arms race, while not at a complete standstill, had at least calmed down. Developing even a somewhat capable BMD would force the other side to either expand its arsenal or otherwise further improve the existing offensive weapons to bypass the defense, possibly spurring a renewed offensive arms race. It is also argued that strong BMD is not desirable, because it serves as another incentive for a first strike: a nation that considers itself safe from nuclear retaliation might be more confident and thus more likely to escalate smaller-scale conflicts. Similarly, if the defense is strong but can be overwhelmed by the strength of the full enemy arsenal, it might be tempting to attack first, eliminate the majority of the enemy silos, and thus be confronted with a smaller counterattack against which the defense might still be effective.

This roughly summarizes the most interesting takeaways from the book. Not sure why exactly I felt the need to write about the contents of this specific book in such detail, but now I feel like I’ve covered most of it. While the additional arguments, the mathematical and technical details, diplomatic background and the outlook on possible future BMD developments are still interesting, I believe the above paragraphs communicate roughly 90% of the book’s content that any casual reader would be interested in, and, more importanty, the underlying way of thinking that I found so interesting. To summarize, this is an interesting book to read, but another case where I don’t think the amount of learning justifies the time investment to read a drawn-out military report. That said, reading something that is so far removed in tone and content from what I usually read was still an interesting and valuable experience.

Conclusion

That covers all non-fiction books I’ve read in the past 2 or so years. I am certainly going to keep reading, though with little in terms of actual goals in mind. For now, I’m looking forward to read Blue Machine by Helen Czerski for some ocean-propaganda after seeing it highly recommended, independently, by several people on Mastodon. I want to look into books on debugging, and will most likely start with Debugging by David Agans, and perhaps add Debug It! by Paul Butcher after seeing recommendations on some random blog: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/849

I’d started reading the classic Design Patterns book at some point, and might pick that one back up again. I’ve seen recommendations for Nassim Taleb’s books a lot and am very curious to see what that’s about it. Maybe I’ll also dive deeper down the Economics rabbit hole, and I somehow feel like reading a book on medieval catapults as well. The list is long, we’ll see what I’ll actually get to.

Perhaps one of the most interesting takeaways from the experience so far, is that many things are steeped in history, much, much more deeply than I thought. The books I’ve listed here span a wide variety of topics, but most of them do talk about history at some point or another. And even though most of them have almost nothing in common, I was still able to make connections between the things that were happening in some of them, because I had some very specific historical background on the same events from a completely different perspective. Additionally, a lot of the historical facts that I’ve read about in these books have ended up explaining or at least giving some background to things I’ve encountered in my own life.

As I’ve touched upon at the start, it is difficult to find good books, and as you see, I couldn’t recommend most books I read. The greatest issue I see is that most books don’t have a lot to say, or at least not much that is of interest to me, so I often end up reading 300 pages for knowledge that could be compressed to perhaps 30 pages. And even out of those books that are genuinely informative, many are still not exactly “fun” to read. The best books I’ve read managed to be both highly informative and rather entertaining to read.

Finally, I’m a bit worried about maintaining my learnings from the books I’ve read. Even of those that I highly recommend from the above list, I would often struggle giving you anything deeper than a high-level overview of their content. I can tell that “the vibe” certainly stays with me, but I’m afraid I lose most of the concrete facts presented in them. I’m still wondering how to deal with this: one option would be to frequently re-read only the good books from this list, but that might be too much of a time investment, considering how I am already reading way too little. I’ve read some advice about taking notes for the main ideas or main learnings from a book as you are reading, and then revisiting only those notes every once in a while to refresh you memory of the book. I should probably try that, but it seems a bit inconvenient to do while reading, and I haven’t figured out how to fit this into a “reading-workflow” yet, so I’m not doing it.

That’s all from me, I hope this was interesting and perhaps served as good (anti) recommendations for someone. Even though it is a bit difficult to get started, I can absolutely recommend getting into reading non-fiction books!

shorten BMD section