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As software engineers, we are taught to iterate, optimize, and scale. But Peter Thiel’s Zero to One argues that true progress doesn't come from a 10% improvement—it comes from creating something entirely new.
Min Jin Lee spent thirty years writing Pachinko. It covers four generations of a Korean family across the twentieth century, from a fishing village in 1910 to Osaka in 1989. It is one of the most important novels of the last decade. It is also, beneath its historical sweep and its moral seriousness, an extraordinarily intimate account of what it costs to survive in a world that has decided, before you were born, what you are worth.
Alexandre Dumas wrote the greatest revenge novel in the history of literature. He also wrote, buried inside it, the most honest critique of revenge as a life philosophy that fiction has produced. The Count of Monte Cristo is not a celebration of what Edmond Dantès becomes. It is a reckoning with it.
As software engineers, we live in a world of abstractions. But beneath our compilers and algorithms lies a physical reality of silicon. Chris Miller's Chip War is a masterful look at the most critical, and fragile, supply chain in human history.
A look at Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. If you want to understand the "software" that allowed humanity to conquer the globe, this book is the ultimate documentation.
Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes in 1887, tried to kill him in 1893, was forced by public outcry to bring him back, and spent the rest of his life in an ambivalent relationship with a character he had made more famous than himself. Holmes is my favourite fictional detective. He is, by a considerable distance, the most influential fictional character in the history of literature. This is the case for why.
Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist has sold over 65 million copies, been translated into 80 languages, and is regularly described as a life-changing work of spiritual literature. It is also, on honest inspection, a self-help book wearing a shepherd boy's cloak. The disguise is thinner than people admit.