This is my To Be Read List
The Amplified Impact Podcast
January 14th, 2023
Curious about my 2024 reading list?
From Alan Turing’s impact to tech insights in “The Fabric of Reality” by David Deutsch, it’s a diverse mix.
I’ll dive into stories of innovators like Buckminster Fuller, Edwin Land, and early Microsoft days in “Hard Drive.”
Plus, insights from Jeff Bezos’ “The Bezos Letters” and Winston Churchill’s concise biography.
Excited to explore “The Almanac of Balaji” too.
What’s on your reading list this year?
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“I hate owning books that I have not read. It bugs me, but I’m also not going to just blow through them.”
– Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Yo, what’s up, everybody? So just the other day I got a question from somebody who was asking, hey, what’s, what are you planning to read in 2024? I had done a video recently on YouTube where I shared, you know, 16 or 17 of the books that have had the biggest impact on my business and my life over the last couple of years. And then I did a video a while back where I shared, you know, twelve books that I reread every single year. But this person was just interested, like, what’s on your to be read list? And the truth is I have a really long TBR list. I’m looking at the spreadsheet right now because I’m weird and I’m very, very anal about my books and how I arrange them. And so if you were to go into my library, which is the next room over, and if you’ve ever watched me on YouTube, I’m sitting in front of one of my bookshelves. It’s organized in a very, very specific way, and all the books that I have not read are on a very, very specific shelf, organized in a very particular way. And then I keep it all on a spreadsheet so I can track them all. I’m very weird about this stuff, but I have about 62 books, actually, no, 73 books on this list to be read, which are books on that shelf that I intend to kit to at some point because I am a completionist and I hate having books that I have not read.
I hate owning books that I have not read. It bugs me, but I’m also not going to just blow through them. That’s maybe something I would have done in my younger years, is just to check the box and get through them. It’s just to read them as fast as I could. But these years I’m getting old, I’m getting slow, and I’m taking a more methodical approach and trying to get more out of each book and taking my time with it. And so next year I’ll probably only end up reading twelve new books, plus twelve of the books that I reread every year. And I just wanted to share a couple of the books that I plan on reading in the next year. I got eight listed here.
I’ll probably leave some spaces open for new books or for other books to kind of like whatever grabs my attention in that moment, because it can be very hard for me to make a decision in the moment what do I want to read next? And I’ll just go sometimes in front of the shelf and let something speak to me. But here are the ones that I intend for sure to get to this year. And you’re going to notice a lot of biographies in this list. I read a lot of biographies these days. In fact, pretty much all of these. All but one, I think, are biographies. So the first one I’m reading right now, actually, is Alan Turing, the enigma. This is the story of Alan Turing and the code breakers of World War two and the effects that Alan Turing had on modern computational theory and AI development.
It’s very, very apropos given where we are with AI now. I think everybody kind of from his generation anticipated we’d be getting to AI much sooner than we ultimately have been. But it’s very interesting now to read back on what he was writing and thinking back in 1920s and has had such a massive impact on a lot of the theory and science and development of technology in its current state. So that’s a very interesting book. It’s also through the lens of the role that he had in helping break the Nazis codes and help us win World War II. So that’s a very fascinating read. And he’s just an interesting guy, too, because he was openly gay in Britain in a time period where that wasn’t cool, that wasn’t allowed, and he was convicted of some crimes as a result of that, that he was ultimately, in 2012, exonerated from. But a little late, all things told.
But that’s an interesting one. Alan Turing, the enigma. The next book that I’m planning on reading is the fabric of reality by David Deutsch. David Deutsch is one of naval Ravikant’s favorite authors. He wrote another book that. Oh, man, what is it? The beginning of infinity, which was a really good book. It was really interesting. It’s one that naval says he’s read, like, six times now.
He keeps going back to. He just keeps rereading it over and over and over. And naval is a smarter guy than me, and I didn’t get as much out of it as he seems to have. Doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. Just means that I might be dumber than him and we might just be operating on different wavelengths. But this is another one of David’s books, the fabric of reality, which is all about information systems, about the universe, about how we learn things, or rather, how we know what we know about the universe. And so it’s a very interesting read. Looking forward to getting into it.
Don’t know if it’ll have the same profound life changing impact that it had on, you know, I’m looking forward to it. Next one is the inventor of the future, the story of Buckminster Fuller. That’s a name you’re probably not familiar with. Honestly, I don’t know much about him either, except for the fact that he invented a shape called the geodesic dome, which we use in architecture on all sorts of places now. So that’s pretty interesting. I don’t know too many people who’ve invented a shape, but this book was recommended to me as, like, it’s supposed to be really good. He’s supposed to be really interesting. He’s just an inventor, and I’m actually looking forward to that, going into it, because I know nothing about the guy.
And so I imagine I’m going to learn a lot. Looking forward to that. The next one is a triumph of genius. This is the story of Edwin land, who is the founder and inventor of Kodak, Polaroid, something like that. I think they’re all kind of the same, right? Polaroid, yeah. Edwin Land is probably another name a lot of people aren’t familiar with. He was the guy Steve Jobs looked up to. Right.
He was Steve Jobs’s idol. So that tells you a little bit about who he was and what he kind of valued in terms of design and original inventions. This book has been recommended to me now by, like, a dozen people, which is a lot for a book that I guess most people probably haven’t heard of, or a person, rather, that they haven’t heard of. And so I’m really looking forward to that one. That might be the next book I read, actually, after the Alan Turing book. I’ve been very, very interested in it because it’s recommended so much. Looking forward to diving into it. The next book is Bill Gates autobiography called Hard Drive.
It’s about his life up to when he was, like, 35. So the growth in Microsoft up to that period of time and then doesn’t deal with anything that came after that, and the ensuing generations of Microsoft becoming the world beating monopoly that it currently is. And so this is really like his scrappy startup days and getting to that place of, like, we have arrived. So that book is also. I know a lot about Bill Gates, but I feel like I don’t know his story very deeply. So that one should be also very interesting. The next one. Okay, so this actually is not an autobiography.
This is the Bezos letters. This is just a compilation of letters that Jeff Bezos wrote both to shareholders. And then I think just random emails and memos to staff. I find Bezos to be a really fascinating character. Every time I’ve heard him speak or read any of his shareholder letters, I walk away with a surprising insight. There’s not many ceos that have that ability, honestly, where every time I consume something from them, I walk away going, that was simple but profound, a thing that he said. And I have heard really fantastic things about the Bezos letters. So really psyched about that one.
The next book on the list here is I want to learn more about Winston Churchill. So a friend recommended this biography by Paul Johnson. It’s supposed to be fairly consumable. The problem that I have mainly with biographies, I love biographies, but they are big, usually 600, 700 page behemoths. They go into great detail about things that you probably don’t really need to know in the grand scheme of things. But for the sake of being thorough, the biographers go into all the nitty gritty, and Paul Johnson, I think, does all a service with his autobiography or his biographies because they’re short. They’re like 100 and 5200 pages. So it’s like exactly just what you need to get the gist of the person.
And I’m going to start with that with old Winston boy here, because I think Winston’s a fascinating character that again, I know very little about. So looking forward to that one, too. And the last book that I’ll mention here is the almanac of Bellaji. So this is from the author, Eric Jorgensen, who wrote the almanac of Naval Ravikant. And that is one of my favorite books. It’s one that I reread every year. And so I think Eric did a fantastic job compiling all the podcast interviews, blog articles, tweets that naval had put out over the last couple of decades. Put them into a comprehensive book.
It’s just a one stop shop for all things naval. So he did that again for another human called Balaji. And Balaji is another trader. Great thinker, very popular on Twitter. Again, I don’t know much about him, but if Eric found him interesting enough to create another book, then I’m going to put him in the same tier as naval for now in the back of my mind and say, this should be a pretty good read. So really looking forward to that one. Now, those are some of the books I’m going to tackle in this next year, maybe subject to change, maybe I won’t get get to these. Maybe some other books will slip in there in the meantime, but that’s the current agenda.
So let me know. What are you planning to read in the next year? Drop a comment drop a review. You know the drill. So let me know what you guys are going to read, what you’re excited to get into, and I’ll catch you in the next episode. Till then, stay hyper focused, my friends.
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