A list of books I read. 205
| Date | Author | Title | Year | Rating | Notes |
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| Ray Kurzweil | The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI | 2024 | |||
| Chris Jones | The Tripods: All For Nothing?: The Secrets and Stories Behind the BBC Series | 2024 |
| Date | Author | Title | Year | Rating | Notes |
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Georges Perec | Les Choses: Une histoire des années soixante | 1965 | ||
| Le style de Perec (en tout cas dans ce livre, je ne connais pas les autres) est déconcertant. Il n'y a pas vraiment d'action, d'intrigue, presque uniquement des descriptions. Pas de dialogue non plus. Les longues énumérations sont fréquentes. Toute la partie consacrée à Sfax est spéciale également. Je l'ai lue/ressentie comme une sorte de rêve. | |||||
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Françoise Sagan | Bonjour tristesse | 1954 | ||
| J'étais familier avec le titre de ce roman, mais je n'en connaissais rien. Une lecture très prenante. Une belle écriture. Une histoire qui me touche néanmoins relativement peu. | |||||
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Jean Giono | L'Homme qui plantait des arbres | 19553 | ||
| Un très court récit. J'en avais besoin, après Les Frères Karamazov. Cela m'a aussi fait du bien de lire quelque chose d'aussi positif. C'est une parabole, mais l'idée même de planter des arbres, en soi, est captivante. Je devrais le faire aussi. Littéralement, comme figurativement. | |||||
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Fiodor Dostoïevski | Les Frères Karamazov | 1879 | ||
| Un classique. Un long livre. Je dois admettre que j'ai eu un peu de peine à le lire. A coup de 10-15 minutes par soir, ça n'était pas suffisant. C'est vraiment lorsque j'ai commencé à dédier de plus grandes tranches de temps à ce livre que j'ai pu véritablement entrer dans le récit. La partie dédié au procès est captivante. | |||||
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Paul Bloom | The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning | 2021 | ||
| There's a subtle relationship between suffering, meaning, and happiness. I still don't know what it is, but I guess this book is raising a few useful questions. To quote The Guardian: "Bloom endorses motivational pluralism: we're all a tangled mess of complicated drives and enthusiasms, and finding the sweet spot that includes just the right mix of suffering and value and satisfaction is, as the book's subtitle puts it, the "key to a good life"." | |||||
| Date | Author | Title | Year | Rating | Notes |
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Lewis Carroll | Alice's Adventures in Wonderland | 1865 | ||
| It's difficult not to think about Disney's interpretation of the story. The book is quite different. Probably weirder. | |||||
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Peter Attia | Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity | 2023 | ||
| I've been listening to Peter Attia's podcast for 4 years now. I like his rather conservative approach to longevity. My personal takeaway is that I should exercise way more and eat more protein. | |||||
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Bill Perkins | Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life | 2020 | ||
| I started reading Perkins' book after hearing him on Peter Attia's podcast. Basically, this is a rich guy telling other people to spend more money, earlier in life. He makes some good points, I guess. Invest in experiences and people. Don't plan to do too many things when you're retired, as people's health get worse rather quickly. He's not wrong, but those are not very original ideas. His most interesting idea is that you should really think about the rest of your life and how you're going to spend your money. And maybe - maybe! - you're saving too much money, even if you're not rich. Maybe. I'm not convinced, as I don't live on a yacht, but I'll think about it. | |||||
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Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths | Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions | 2016 | ||
| I have a master in computer science, so I often think about the world in terms of algorithms. Some of them are useful on a day-to-day basis. Some of them are useful to better understand the world (so more in a philosophical way, almost). Some of the more advanced concepts coming from machine learning, for example. This book made me realize that there are more links than expected between computer science and the "real world". | |||||
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Victor Hugo | Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné | 1832 | ||
| Un livre absolument fascinant et en avance sur son temps, puisqu'il a fallu attendre presque 150 ans pour que la peine de mort soit enfin abolie en France. | |||||
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Douglas Adams | So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish | 1984 | ||
| Surprisingly quite boring compared to the previous books in the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy franchise. | |||||
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Cal Newport | Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World | 2016 | ||
| An important book at this point in my life. I've been implementing Getting Things Done (GTD) for more than 15 years now and I think I've come to terms with the idea that our time is limited (see Four Thousand Weeks and Midlife, for example). The logical conclusion is that we should have a clear set of priorities for all the domains/projects in our lives (e.g. it should be quite clear to anybody that health and the people you love should be at the top of your list) and that when you decide to do something, you should do it with intention and focus, hence the idea that deep work is important. As Newport explains in his book, deep work doesn't come without any effort. You have to decide that you want to work deeply and then make it possible to do it, with strategies such as time blocking, scheduling your days, quitting social networks, etc. | |||||
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Kieran Setiya | Midlife: A Philosophical Guide | 2017 | Kindle highlights | |
| A way better book than Christopher Hamilton's Middle Age, with some relatively actionable pieces of advice. | |||||
| Date | Author | Title | Year | Rating | Notes |
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Jack Schafer & Marvin Karlins | The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over | 2015 | Kindle highlights | |
| Part of this book contains useful tips to be more friendly to other people (nonverbal cues, showing empathy, etc.). The rest looks like a guide to become a spy. | |||||
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Aldous Huxley | Heaven and Hell | 1956 | Kindle highlights | |
| An essay included along with The Doors of Perception. I found it to be a bit more accessible. | |||||
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Aldous Huxley | The Doors of Perception | 1954 | Kindle highlights | |
| An intriguing book. A very intellectual take on a mescaline trip, among other topics. Again, I'm not a fan of Huxley's writing. I don't know why exactly. | |||||
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Aldous Huxley | Brave New World | 1932 | Kindle highlights | |
| It's a classic, but for some reasons I found it very hard to enjoy it. Maybe the vocabulary is harder to understand for non-native English readers than in most books? I don't know. I had to read a summary of the story half-way through to get an idea of what was happening. | |||||
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Stefan Zweig | Le Joueur d'échecs | 1943 | Kindle highlights | |
| Un très court roman qui m'a vraiment tenu en haleine. Pratiquant la méditation, j'ai par contre été (un peu) amusé par le peu de tolérance à l'ennui du mystérieux personnage du joueur d'échec, pour qui le quotidien dans sa chambre d'hôtel était intolérable. Je ne dis pas que j'aurais été insensible au manque de divertissements, mais la manière dont il décrit ces moments-là m'interpelle. | |||||
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Mark Manson | Everything Is Fucked: A Book About Hope | 2019 | Kindle highlights | |
| Coming from quite a different angle (meditation, etc.), Sam Harris also thinks that hope is not as positive as we think. It's basically wanting things to be different than what they are, which is often actually a negative thing. | |||||
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George Orwell | Animal Farm | 1945 | Kindle highlights | |
| Another (short) classic I hadn't read yet. I don't know why, but I expected it to be a book for children. I was pleasantly surprised to discover what it really is (i.e. a critique of political systems). | |||||
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau | Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire | 1782 | Kindle highlights | |
| Ne connaissant rien à Rousseau, j'ai mis du temps à entrer dans cette œuvre, en particulier à cause des passages traitant de la persécution dont Rousseau disait être victime (on a rapidement l'impression qu'il y a là une certaine paranoïa). Les différents chapitres ("promenades") sont autant de thèmes distincts qui sont abordés et on se prend rapidement à un jeu qui consiste à se demander de quoi Rousseau va ensuite parler. Éléments biographiques, retraite sur l'Île Saint-Pierre, réflexions philosophiques (qu'est-ce que le mensonge ?), passion pour la nature et la botanique, etc. sont autant de sujets abordés. | |||||
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Luke Burgis | Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life | 2021 | Kindle highlights | |
| A book about mimetic theory. | |||||
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Milan Kundera | Jacques et son maître: Hommage à Denis Diderot en trois actes | 1981 | Kindle highlights | |
| Une variation, au sens musical du terme, de Jacques le Fataliste et son maître, l'un des romans préférés de Kundera. Avec cette pièce de théâtre, plutôt divertissante, j'ai terminé de lire les oeuvres "officielles" de Kundera, c'est-à-dire les oeuvres qu'il reconnaît lui-même comme dignes d'intérêt, le reste n'ayant pas été réédité ou traduit. Je suis prêt pour le prochain livre de Kundera, qu'il est, je l'espère, en train d'écrire malgré son âge avancé. | |||||
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Oliver Burkeman | Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals | 2021 | Kindle highlights | |
| This is a book I really needed to read right now. I tend to commit to too many projects, without completing any of them, which causes anxiety/stress. Life is short/finite. We all have too many things to do compared to the time we have, so we have to get our priorities straight and commit to one important project at a time. | |||||
| Date | Author | Title | Year | Rating | Notes |
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Milan Kundera | L'Immortalité | 1988 | Kindle highlights | |
| Un roman rempli de thèmes qui me touchent : la musique, la pollution sonore (les motos, etc.), la pollution visuelle (les voitures dans les villes), le concept de chemin (qui permet une forme de méditation en marche) vs celui de route (qui permet d'aller d'un point A à un point B), vivre vs être (encore un appel à la méditation au sens moderne du terme, bien que Kundera ne semble pas très familier avec le concept), etc. Kundera oppose toujours assez naïvement la "grande musique" (i.e. la musique classique) et la "musique rock". C'est son côté vieux con, qui me plaît bien, au final. Je prends encore une fois conscience que les romans de Kundera sont difficiles à résumer. Les personnages se croisent. Le récit n'est pas linéaire. Les parenthèses sont nombreuses. Chacune d'entre elle est l'occasion de s'arrêter, de se questionner, de contempler. Oui, il y a définitivement un appel à la méditation et à la contemplation chez Kundera. | |||||
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Ray Bradbury | Fahrenheit 451 | 1953 | Kindle highlights | |
| A classic I hadn't read yet. I don't know why, but it evoked eerie and dream-like images in my mind, instead of futuristic ones. I could see David Lynch working on an adaptation. Strangely, it was François Truffaut who directed an adaptation of it in 1966, which I'll probably see soon, out of curiosity. | |||||
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Umberto Eco | Le Nom de la rose | 1980 | Kindle highlights | |
| I watched the movie a long time ago (probably in the 90s). I still remember some aspects of it, which influenced my reading (e.g. picturing William of Baskerville as Sean Connery...). The book itself is brilliant, full of long parts about specific elements, such as a dream Adso had, inspired by the Coena Cypriani, which I really liked (it's very Rabelaisesque at times). Probably a book I'll read again in the future. | |||||
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Duane Tudhal | Prince and the Parade and Sign O' The Times Era Studio Sessions: 1985 and 1986 | 2021 | Kindle highlights | |
| A brilliant book, even better than the previous one. I could almost copy-paste my comments for the book about 1983-84. At the time, I concluded: "He was a really hard-working artist." Yes, Prince was a genius, but he was also very lonely. And weird. It's quite obvious that he worked so much because he didn't really know what to do when not playing music. I hope more books will be released, especially about the 1987-88 years. | |||||
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Tara Brach | Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of RAIN | 2020 | Kindle highlights | |
| I'm quite convinced by the RAIN method described in this book, which itself was quite average (i.e. too long for the actual amount of information it contains). | |||||
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David Whyte | Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words | 2014 | Kindle highlights | |
| My second David Whyte collection. I really like his writing. I'm also currently listening to him reading his essays in Sam Harris' Waking Up app. | |||||
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Ted Chiang | Stories of Your Life and Others | 2002 | Kindle highlights | |
| Another excellent short stories collection. The movie Arrival, which I really like, was based on one of those stories. The only frustrating thing is that I've now apparently read pretty much everything Ted Chiang ever wrote... | |||||
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The School of Life | The Joys and Sorrows of Parenting: 26 Essays to Reassure and Console | 2019 | Kindle highlights | |
| A bit too short/light, but not bad. I should probably read some of those essays again from time to time. | |||||
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Milan Kundera | La vie est ailleurs | 1969 | Kindle highlights | |
| J'ai lu ce livre il y a 21 ans. Je ne m'en souvenais quasiment plus du tout. Un roman réussi à propos de la poésie, du communisme, de l'art, de la politique, de l'amour (y compris maternel), etc. J'ai bien aimé les passages oniriques, en particulier au début. Ce mélange rêve/réalité - qu'est-ce que la réalité ? - est aussi un thème/style que j'apprécie chez David Lynch. | |||||
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Phoenix Kaspian | MDMA solo | 2020 | Kindle highlights | |
| This was a weird read. There are some good things in this book, obviously inspired by the Internal Family System (IFS) model and Self-Therapy book, but it sounds like it was written by someone who's really paranoid and anti-authority. | |||||
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Ted Chiang | Exhalation: Stories | 2019 | Kindle highlights | |
| I discovered Ted Chiang thanks to the Very Bad Wizards podcast. This is the kind of science fiction I like. I've already bought another collection, Stories of Your Life and Others. | |||||
| Date | Author | Title | Year | Rating | Notes |
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Milan Kundera | La Valse aux adieux | 1972 | Kindle highlights | |
| J'ai eu un peu de peine à entrer dans ce roman. Puis on se laisse emmener par ces destins croisés, par ces personnages dont la destinée leur échappe. | |||||
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David Andrew Sinclair | Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don't Have To | 2019 | Kindle highlights | |
| I was already familiar with David's ideas and discoveries. You basically just need to watch a few YouTube videos to learn about them. I was especially curious about his views on how humanity will have to adapt to longer lifespans/healthspans and that part of the book somewhat disappointed me. Not all my concerns were addressed. In particular, automation/machine learning and the facts that a lot of jobs will really disappear at some point, without new jobs to replace them, the need for some form of universal basic income, and the fact that, mathematically, even if we still die, the world population will really become problematic at some point if we keep having children (maybe not in 100 or 200 years, but still). I recently heard David in a podcast briefly mention the fact that human beings will have to find a way to go to other planets in the future (or something to that effect). I guess that's what I expected to read in his book. But he wanted to stay optimistic, so he focused on the near-term future, I guess. | |||||
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Youssef El Baba | The Art of Living: Self-management - How to Survive and Thrive in the 21st Century | 2020 | Kindle highlights | |
| This book convinced me that it's time to migrate from my current system (based on G Suite) to a more specific tool (maybe Omnifocus - I was not convinced by 2Do). | |||||
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Stephen Hawking | A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes | 1988 | Kindle highlights | |
| I don't know why, but I expected something overly-simplified (not to say dumbed-down). Something I could understand. :) I was somewhat surprised to discover that this book tries to explain very hard concepts in a relatively simple way, which still leads to... a complex book with very complex concepts. I don't think you could say it's highly accessible. Which makes me wonder whether anybody could do better than Hawking. I'm not saying he failed. Popularizing science is really hard. I'm just saying I was a bit disappointed. | |||||
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Milan Kundera | L'Identité | 1995 | Kindle highlights | |
| Étrange passage de la réalité au rêve, autour de la thématique de l'identité et de ses frontières. L'essai suivant le texte est très éclairant. | |||||
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Terry Pratchett | The Carpet People | 1992 | Kindle highlights | |
| My first book by Terry Pratchett. I've heard a lot from him, but I'm not sure I'm a fan of his style (granted, this is probably not his most representative book). | |||||
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Douglas Adams | Life, the Universe and Everything | 1982 | Kindle highlights | |
| I particularly liked the part where Arthur discovered he could fly. | |||||
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Paul Éluard | Capitale de la douleur | 1926 | Kindle highlights | |
| C'est certainement très bon, mais ça ne m'a absolument pas touché. Je dois manquer des clés nécessaires pour comprendre ce genre de poésie. | |||||
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Milan Kundera | Une rencontre | 2009 | Kindle highlights | |
| Une rencontre ou Si Milan Kundera avait un blog... Kundera parle de compositeurs, peintres et écrivains/romanciers qui l'ont influencé. C'est toujours très bien écrit, mais ça m'a moins touché, ne connaissant pas la plupart des artistes qu'il mentionne. | |||||
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David Whyte | David Whyte: Essentials | 2019 | Kindle highlights | |
| I discovered David Whyte in February 2020. I liked his discussion with Sam Harris on the Making Sense podcast. This is the kind of poetry I like. I think. | |||||
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Denis Diderot | Jacques le Fataliste et son maître | 1796 | Kindle highlights | |
| C'est un hasard, mais c'est une œuvre très similaire à Candide, à savoir un "classique pas du tout ennuyeux", très libre dans sa structure (interruptions répétées des récits, discussions imaginaires entre l'auteur et le lecteur, etc.). On est encore relativement proche de Rabelais. Ça se lit très facilement. C'est à la fois léger et intelligent. | |||||
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F. Scott Fitzgerald | The Great Gatsby | 1925 | Kindle highlights | |
| I saw the 2013 movie and really liked it. The book is a classic, but it didn't manage to impress me as much. | |||||
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Gustave Flaubert | Madame Bovary: Mœurs de province | 1857 | Kindle highlights | |
| Un vrai classique, au sens où je me l'imagine. Comme Candide, je ne me souviens pas avoir étudié ce livre durant mes études. Je suis content de l'avoir lu avec le recul probablement nécessaire pour l'apprécier. Les longues descriptions typiques de Flaubert ne m'ont pas dérangé. Au contraire, j'ai trouvé son style plutôt impressionnant. Je ne m'étonne pas que l'écriture de cette œuvre ait nécessité plus de quatre ans de la vie de Flaubert. | |||||
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Agatha Christie | And Then There Were None | 1939 | Kindle highlights | |
| Crime novels are not my cup of tea and I'm not sure I will ever read another Agatha Christie books in my life, but I had a lot of fun reading And Then There Were None. | |||||
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Voltaire | Candide | 1759 | Kindle highlights | |
| Un texte qui se lit très facilement. Je ne me souviens pas l'avoir étudié durant mes études, mais j'ai eu beaucoup de plaisir à le lire. Je le classerais dans la catégorie "classiques pas du tout ennuyeux". | |||||
| Date | Author | Title | Year | Rating | Notes |
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Milan Kundera | La Lenteur | 1994 | Kindle highlights | |
| J'avais déjà lu ce livre, mais je ne me souvenais absolument pas de l'histoire, à part la scène de la piscine. Kundera mène une réflexion sur le monde moderne et, en particulier, sur le rôle des mass media (c'était avant l'apparition d'internet) et celui de la vitesse / de la lenteur dans l'oubli / la mémoire et l'Histoire. Il fait un parallèle avec Point de lendemain de Vivant Denon, démystifie un peu l'épicurisme (qui parle de plaisirs simples, pas de débauche, comme on pourrait le croire) et condamne ces "danseurs" qui font ce qu'on a appelé bien plus tard du virtue signalling. | |||||
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John Armstrong | How to Worry Less about Money | 2012 | Kindle highlights | |
| Not a self-help book. Like The Consolations of Philosophy, it's a book that uses philosophy to give us a new perspective on a topic. | |||||
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Prince Rogers Nelson & Dan Piepenbring | The Beautiful Ones | 2019 | ||
| Prince died a few months after starting to work on this project. It is what it is and I must say that Dan Piepenbring did a great job with what he had. | |||||
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Milan Kundera | L'Art du roman | 1986 | Kindle highlights | |
| Un regard critique et sophistiqué de l'auteur sur son oeuvre, sur la structure de ses romans, sur le rôle du roman en général, sur le lien entre l'écriture et la musique, sur l'exercice compliqué de la traduction, etc. | |||||
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Jay Earley | Self-Therapy: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Inner Wholeness Using IFS, a New, Cutting-Edge Therapy | 2009 | Kindle highlights | |
| First, IFS kind of sounded like woo to me, but after a while, it started to make sense. I think I like this approach. It's almost like an algorithm. It's also somewhat related to meditation in general and to loving kindness meditation in particular. I'm going to try it. | |||||
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Paul Verlaine | Poèmes saturniens | 1866 | Kindle highlights | |
| Je n'ai pas accroché. Je crois qu'il va falloir que je m'éloigne un peu des classiques pour que je trouve de la poésie qui me touche vraiment. | |||||
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Franz Kafka | La Métamorphose | 1915 | ||
| J'avais lu des extraits de ce livre en allemand il y a 25 ans, mais je crois ne l'avoir jamais lu en entier jusqu'à présent. Il s'agit ici de la première traduction, celle d'Alexandre Vialatte (apparemment problématique, mais tant pis). La Métamorphose est un texte très prenant, à la fois triste et révoltant, qui nous invite à un peu plus d'humanité. | |||||
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Derren Brown | Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine | 2016 | Kindle highlights | |
| A pretty good book about stoicism (mainly) and death. Reading A Guide to the Good Life by William B. Irvine was what led me to stoicism as a philosophy of life. Happy takes all those ideas from stoicism and confronts them with real life. It could have been shorter, but it's full of good advice. I guess it's a self-help book, but in the good sense of the word. Realizing that you can't control everything, that you have to prepare for death (both others' and your own), etc. is hard. So, yes, being happy is hard work. You can't just "think positively". That won't work. Bad things will happen. All the time. You have to learn how to react accordingly. The only thing I didn't agree with was Brown's argument that immortality would necessarily be boring. It kind of contradicts the fact that you can learn to not find anything boring (e.g. meditation). But this is a minor point. | |||||
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Douglas Adams | The Restaurant at the End of the Universe | 1980 | Kindle highlights | |
| A good sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. | |||||
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Annaka Harris | Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind | 2019 | Kindle highlights | |
| A good summary of the problem of consciousness. And, yes, panpsychism is probably worth investigating. | |||||
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Alain de Botton | The Consolations of Philosophy | 2000 | Kindle highlights | |
| I was familiar with Alain de Botton's YouTube videos (The School of Life). I've never been completely convinced by his approach. Is this self-help? Pop philosophy? Something else? I don't know. I'm still not convinced. | |||||
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Ursula K. Le Guin | The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas | 1973 | Kindle highlights | |
| A very short text. I read it after listening to the Very Bad Wizards episode about it. The vagueness of the story reminds me a bit of Jorge Luis Borges. | |||||
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Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson | It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work | 2018 | Kindle highlights | |
| Not bad. It's like a collection of blog posts. Or a big advertisement for Basecamp. Anyway, a lot of the advice found in this book should be common sense. But it's not, unfortunately. | |||||
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Ernest Renan | L'Ecclésiaste: Un temps pour tout | 1881 | Kindle highlights | |
| Texte original et étude/commentaire d'Ernest Renan. Le livre en lui-même, faisant partie de la Bible, est court. Le commentaire est nettement plus long, mais pas vraiment "à mon goût". L'approche irrévérencieuse de Dave et Tamler du podcast Very Bad Wizards correspondait plus à ma sensibilité (athée, donc). | |||||
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Milan Kundera | Le Livre du rire et de l'oubli | 1979 | Kindle highlights | |
| Un livre de Kundera plus inégal, pour moi. On y trouve toujours des passages géniaux et ce mélange entre la fiction, l'essai et l'autobiographie. Et puis, il y a des moments plus confus. Plus étranges. Comme le passage de l'île aux enfants. Je crois que je comprends les éléments allégoriques, mais ça reste malsain. Tout du moins en contraste avec le reste du livre. | |||||
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Matthew Walker | Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams | 2017 | Kindle highlights | |
| Summary: we should all sleep more. Lack of sleep is bad for... pretty much everything. See also Tips for Getting a Good Night's Sleep. 2021-04-05: see Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors. | |||||
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline | Voyage au bout de la nuit | 1932 | Kindle highlights | |
| Un classique, sur lequel tout a été écrit, par moments un peu difficile à lire à cause du langage parlé (peu de ponctuation, phrases longues, etc.). Il est difficile de ne pas se laisser emmener dans ce voyage un peu fou, souvent sombre, du narrateur, Bardamu, ce anti-héros auquel on finit par s'attacher - un peu, parfois. | |||||
| Date | Author | Title | Year | Rating | Notes |
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Yuval Noah Harari | Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind | 2014 | Kindle highlights | |
| I really enjoyed Homo Deus and since it looks like half of the world has already read Sapiens, I had to read it as well! This is not your usual history book. Harari is strongly opinionated. I'm still bothered by his use of some words (e.g. "religion" for "ideology"), but liked the book nevertheless. It's a bit oversimplistic at times (it especially struck me at the end of the book, where Harari is talking about genetic algorithms and computer viruses), but overall I liked Harari's high-level approach to the subject. For reference: Daniel Miessler's summary of the book. | |||||
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Peter Singer | Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter | 2016 | Kindle highlights | |
| This is the first book by Peter Singer that I've read. It's probably not his best or most well-known book, but I wanted something recent, that was not completely about effective altruism or animal rights (I'm already convinced in both cases), and that would show me how he thinks. As an introduction to his work, I think it's a great book. It's also very easy to read, as it's composed of 82 independent essays (grouped by theme). | |||||
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Michael Pollan | How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence | 2018 | Kindle highlights | |
| The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide was disappointing. This book is way better. It's good journalism. Apart from a tiny bit of quantum mysticism (?) at the end, I found it very critical, informative, and easy to read. The structure of the book is really clear (probably as much as the structure of The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide was confusing). It mentions recent studies, but always from a critical angle. Psychedelics are probably not a panacea, but there really is something to them. We need more research, as soon as possible. We have lost enough time since the late 60s. I'm personally especially curious about microdosing: does it work or is it just a placebo? | |||||
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Randy Pausch & Jeffrey Zaslow | The Last Lecture | 2008 | Kindle highlights | |
| According to my notes, I watched the lecture on July 26, 2008. Ten years ago; I would have sworn that it was only 5-7 years ago! Still according to my notes, I found the lecture "interesting" and "it made me think a little". I was apparently happy that Randy Pausch didn't make any mention of religion (I was in my "God Delusion phase" at the time, I guess). The book is a kind of a making-of. In 2018, I don't know what to make of it. It's moving. It's kind of impressive (Pausch died three months after the book was published). It's somewhat inspiring. I guess the way Pausch lived his life and especially the end of it is a reminder that life is short (again...) and that we should live our life accordingly. | |||||
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Sénèque | De la brièveté de la vie | 2013 | Kindle highlights | |
| Version Presses Électroniques de France. Traducteur inconnu. Un court essai écrit en 49 (il y a 1969 ans !), mais qui est toujours d'actualité (esclavagisme et orgies romaines mis à part). J'imagine que la traduction fait beaucoup, mais le texte semble vraiment beaucoup plus récent. | |||||
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Milan Kundera | Risibles Amours | 1986 | Kindle highlights | |
| Publié originellement en 1970. Cette traduction a été revue par Kundera. Il s'agit d'un recueil de textes datant d'avant son premier roman. Je ne sais pas si je l'aurais deviné, mais, le sachant, cela a teinté un peu ma lecture et je dois admettre que j'ai moins aimé ces textes que les romans avec lesquels je suis déjà familier. Je n'ai pas retrouvé le Kundera que j'aime bien et qui mêle avec habileté la fiction, ses connaissance de l'histoire, de l'art et de la musique. On a parfois de la peine à voir la limite entre roman et essai, et c'est ce qui me plaît en général chez lui. C'est beaucoup moins le cas dans ce recueil. | |||||
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Johann Hari | Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions | 2018 | Kindle highlights | |
| I don't know if many books have been written before about the "non-biochemical" causes of depression and anxiety, but this book gives a far more plausible explanation of depression than the chemical imbalance theory. Antidepressants don't work well (or at all, in many cases), so we need a new way to look at things. We can't always fix our problems by taking pills. Hari gives us at least seven solutions or, rather, potential avenues to explore. They're not quick hacks. They're difficult to implement. Some of them will probably come from larger societal changes and not from individual efforts. I will have to process my notes and see if I can actually do something actionable from them. | |||||
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James Fadiman | The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys | 2011 | Kindle highlights | |
| An uneven book. It's a collection of texts written by Fadiman, as well as other persons. It doesn't have a clear structure (at least to me). Fadiman believes in God. Not in a personal god, probably, but it's still a bit unsettling. A large part of the book is about the spiritual/mystical aspect of psychedelics. The part about microdosing was far more intriguing. Many studies about psychedelics were done in the 50s/60s and their quality probably leaves a lot to be desired. We need better books about this topic. | |||||
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Jorge Luis Borges | The Library of Babel and Other Stories | 2017 | Kindle highlights | |
| I got this collection mainly to read "The Library of Babel", so that I could listen to the Borges' Babylon episode of Very Bad Wizards. I'll just link to my review of the episode. To sum it up: I'm not a fan of Borges (yet). After that, I also read "The Garden of Forking Paths", from Collected Fictions. I'm still not convinced... | |||||
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Millionaire Mindset Publishing | Summary: The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat Loss, Incredible Sex and Becoming Superhuman | 2017 | Kindle highlights | |
| I'm rating the summary, here, not the original book by Timothy Ferriss. This is the first time I read a non-free summary of a book since my studies. Conclusion: I'm glad I didn't read the way longer book by Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Body). There are a few interesting pieces of information, maybe even some that will lead me to change something in my life, but this summary confirms what I have been thinking for quite some time: Tim and I are not trying to optimize the same things in our lives; Tim is interested in maximizing performance (and book sales); I'm interested in maximizing health/happiness. Does having more muscle or being able to run a marathon lead to happiness? For some people, certainly. For me? I'm not so sure. | |||||
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Susan Cain | Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking | 2012 | Kindle highlights | |
| This book will probably help me accept the fact that I am introverted and that it's okay, that I don't have to completely change the way I behave. The book itself is rather good, not great. It would have benefited from less "case studies" (i.e. anecdotes) and a more theoretical approach. | |||||
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Christopher Hamilton | Middle Age | 2009 | Kindle highlights | |
| This is a book about Hamilton's personal experience, with a lot of quotes, which touches a bit on middle age. It's not uninteresting, but it was not what I expected. | |||||
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Max Tegmark | Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence | 2017 | Kindle highlights | |
| Having read five books by Ray Kurzweil, I'm quite familiar with artificial intelligence and its consequences. This book focuses on the dangers of AI. Kurzweil was (still is?) an optimist, so it's important to think about what needs to be done, concretely, to make sure we create friendly AIs. To many, it will sound like an exercise in futility (like worrying about overpopulation on Mars, according to Andrew Ng), but I'm now convinced that this is something we really need to get right. And I'm happy that very intelligent people have already been thinking about this problem for years. | |||||
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Charles Baudelaire | Les Fleurs du mal | 1857 | ||
| Un classique de la poésie. Objectivement, je vois pourquoi il s'agit d'un classique, surtout si on le replace dans le contexte de son époque, mais je ne peux pas dire que beaucoup des poèmes de ce recueil m'aient vraiment touché. Dans un autre style, Paroles de Prévert m'avait paru nettement plus accessible. Cela dit, je n'y connais rien en poésie et il ne s'agit que du deuxième recueil que je lis depuis mes études. | |||||
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Milan Kundera | Le Rideau | 2005 | Kindle highlights | |
| J'ai toujours du plaisir à me plonger dans les essais de Kundera, même si je suis parfois dépassé par toutes les références à des auteurs ou compositeurs qui me sont inconnus. Il a toutefois une manière éclairante de mettre en contexte l'art du roman, ce qui rend ce mode d'expression unique, ce qui le fait traverser les frontières, au-delà des cultures soi-disant nationales. J'aime aussi sa façon de faire des parallèles avec d'autres formes d'art et en particulier avec la musique. Au final, Kundera défend la singularité du roman qui est selon lui seul à pouvoir aussi bien rendre intelligible le monde qui nous entoure, les sociétés, les époques, les évènements historiques, etc., beaucoup plus en interrogeant le monde, la psychologie des personnages, qu'en donnant des réponses toutes faites faisant référence à des systèmes de pensée préexistants. | |||||
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Chris MacLeod | The Social Skills Guidebook: Manage Shyness, Improve Your Conversations, and Make Friends, Without Giving Up Who You Are | 2016 | Kindle highlights | |
| Probably the kind of book I should have read twenty years ago. I'm shy. I've always seen it as a handicap. This book contains good "tips", but I guess they can only go so far in improving one's natural tendencies (personality, genes, etc.). | |||||
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Milan Kundera | La Fête de l'insignifiance | 2014 | Kindle highlights | |
| L'un des livres les plus courts que j'aie lu ces dernières années. Le langage est plus familier que dans les premiers livres de Kundera. Ses thèmes fétiches sont présents : les relations hommes-femmes (du point de vue de l'homme), l'histoire, le communisme, l'humour, etc. Je vais faire une comparaison incongrue, mais ce roman m'a rappelé Lapinot de Trondheim, où l'histoire est secondaire et où ce sont bien les discussions entre les personnages qui sont importantes. | |||||
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Armin A. Brott & Jennifer Ash | The Expectant Father: The Ultimate Guide for Dads-to-Be | 2015 | Kindle highlights | |
| A bestseller. A bit too US-centric at times, but this was expected. I skipped some parts about insurances, college savings plans, etc. I guess the rest was pretty good for that kind of books. I'll see in April/May whether it's actually useful or not... | |||||
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Duane Tudhal | Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions: 1983 and 1984 | 2017 | Kindle highlights | |
| I didn't think I would enjoy this book as much as I did. I consider myself a harcore Prince fan. I followed him since 1989. His death in 2016 was a traumatic event. There's not much I don't know about his work and in particular about his studio work (official and unofficial). Or so I thought. Tudhal spent more than twenty years doing research for this book (and upcoming books in the same series, I hope), interviewing musicians, engineers, etc. The structure of the book is very clever. It's basically a chronological list of studio sessions, rehearsals, concerts, and major events/releases, but interspersed with relevant bits of interviews, technical details, etc. The list approach really talks to the geek in me and the interviews from different people that were there at the time (1983-84) tell a coherent story. In summary, Prince was a really special musician. I already knew that. We won't see anybody like him again, at least for a very long time. But now I really have a sense of how much time he spent in the studio, days in a row, often all night long (a lot of sessions lasting until 5-6 AM!). That's really impressive. What's also impressive is that some engineers and musicians worked with him in those conditions, some of them answering the phone in the middle of the night and coming to the studio when Prince needed them. Prince had to record music when it was in his head. He was a really hard-working artist. | |||||
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Jacques Prévert | Paroles | 1946 | Kindle highlights | |
| Le premier recueil de poèmes que j'ai lu depuis très longtemps (depuis les études, en fait). Je n'avais jamais rien lu de Prévert et ne savais pas à quoi m'attendre. J'ai été agréablement surpris par le côté absurde de ses poèmes. Et par son côté antimilitariste et anticlérical. D'un point de vue plus terre à terre, j'ai apprécié pouvoir lire un livre de manière plus découpée. Il n'y a pas vraiment de continuité, hors des thèmes, entre chaque poème. Cela permet de lire un autre livre en parallèle, par exemple. Ce recueil me motive à lire plus de poésie. | |||||
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Randall Munroe | What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions | 2014 | Kindle highlights | |
| Not a bad book, but I must admit that, after a while, the concept (explained in the subtitle - "serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions") gets a bit repetitive. But, yes, some parts were funny and I even learnt some things (and already forgot many of them!). | |||||
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Peter Elsdon | Keith Jarrett's The Köln Concert | 2012 | Kindle highlights | |
| It's difficult to judge this book fairly, because I'm not a musician and a couple of chapters are pretty technical. That being said, I'm a Keith Jarrett fan, so it was interesting to read about The Köln Concert in several contexts: jazz in general, the 1970s, Keith Jarrett's other solo albums (Facing You in particular), other pianists' solo recordings (e.g. Chick Corea's), Keith Jarrett's 1975 solo tour, etc. The more "philosophical" discussions such as what it means to improvise (vs compose), what it means for a live performance to be released as an album, etc. were also quite illuminating. | |||||
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Yuval Noah Harari | Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow | 2015 | Kindle highlights | |
| This is a book I really liked. I heard Yuval Noah Harari on Sam Harris' podcast in March 2017. And then I kept hearing about people reading Sapiens or Homo Deus, so I knew I had to read one of his books... I had completely forgotten about it, but Harari is a vegan, an atheist, and meditates a lot, so I can easily relate to a lot of what he has to say. He also starts his book by mentioning Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, and Steven Pinker, people I'm very familiar with, so I was hooked from the very beginning. Now I don't agree with everything he says. This is something I had already noticed during his discussion with Sam Harris, but he uses some words very loosely. For example, he seems to use the word "religion" for "philosophy" and "ideology". I understand why he's doing it, but it doesn't make his point clearer, in my opinion. Just for reference, the word "science" (and related) appears 317 times in the book, "religion" appears 211 times, and "philosophy" appears only 27 times. He also seems to support the non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) view. I clearly don't agree with him on these points. Contrary to Kurzweil, he knows a lot about history and psychology, so he has quite a different point of view about our future. Whereas Kurzweil is very enthusiastic about uploading our minds to machines and living in virtual worlds, Harari is encouraging us to think about the relationship between intelligence and consciousness, the source of our values (in a world without gods and afterlife), and about how society and politics will work in such a future. Also for reference: Daniel Miessler's summary of the book. | |||||
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William B. Irvine | A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy | 2008 | Kindle highlights | |
| This very book convinced me that: 1) I really need a philosophy of life 2) stoicism is a good option 3) I'm already doing a lot of things correctly (according to stoicism). These next few months, I hope to "implement" stoicism in a bit more practical and conscious way (using reminders, etc.). | |||||
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Voltaire | Micromégas | 1752 | Kindle highlights | |
| Je liste Migromégas ici comme livre. Il s'agit plutôt d'un conte. Un conte philosophique, selon Wikipedia. Est-ce également de la science-fiction ? On y parle de science, de visiteurs de Sirus et de Saturne. Donc je dirais que oui, mais l'idée première est bel et bien de "remettre l'être humain à sa place". Il n'est pas le centre de l'univers. L'humour est également présent dans ce conte et il est difficile de ne pas penser en tout cas un peu aux géants de Rabelais. | |||||
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Milan Kundera | La Plaisanterie | 1967 | Kindle highlights | |
| Il n'y a pas grand-chose que je puisse dire à propos de ce roman qui n'ait pas été déjà dit mille fois. J'aime beaucoup Kundera. La Plaisanterie est son premier roman, que je n'avais pas encore lu. Il s'agissait ici de la traduction française revue par Kundera lui-même. J'ai beaucoup aimé le récit à la première personne, les personnages devenant tour à tour narrateur et leur histoire se rejoignant à la fin. Amour, politique, communisme, tradition, modernisme, vengeance, jeunesse, maturité, musique, etc. Les thèmes sont multiples et il est difficile de ne pas se laisser entraîner par les personnages de ce roman. | |||||
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Douglas Adams | The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | 1979 | Kindle highlights | |
| Another classic. But of course very different from Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I read two months ago. This is the first book by Douglas Adams that I read. His style is surprising, in a good way. This is definitely not "serious" science fiction, which I feared would lessen my interest, but it didn't. | |||||
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Susan Wolf | Meaning in Life and Why It Matters | 2010 | Kindle highlights | |
| I'm not sure I'm convinced by Wolf's argument: "In arguing that meaningfulness is a distinctive dimension of a good life, different from both happiness and moral goodness, and that the concept of meaningfulness is essentially tied to a commitment to objective distinctions in value, I have tried to show the importance of keeping the vocabulary of meaningfulness and value alive, and of not assimilating or reducing these terms to others that we are more comfortable with in both philosophy and popular culture." I will be very (too) brief, but, intuitively, I would say that Wolf's concept of meaningfulness looks like a kind of mix between self-interest and morality, not a distinct dimension. Of course, it's still important to have a concept of a "meaningful life" and Wolf at least tries to give a definition of what "meaningfulness" is in that context, but I'm not sure this book helped me clarify anything. On the contrary, I would say it made me a bit more confused than before. | |||||
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George Orwell | Nineteen Eighty-Four | 1949 | Kindle highlights | |
| A classic. The more the story progresses, the more it becomes captivating. The ending chapters grab you by the guts, in a kind of crescendo. Many people say that "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is very relevant today, because, according to them, we're living in a society of surveillance (think Facebook, the NSA, surveillance cameras, etc.), but, for me, what strikes me the most is the similarity between the constant lies of the Party and the constant lies of people such as Donald Trump. Of course, fake news is not a new phenomenon, but it is starting to look more and more like it is described in "Nineteen Eighty-Four". | |||||
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James A. Lindsay | Life in Light of Death | 2016 | Kindle highlights | |
| I agree with the main message of this book. Life is short. We will die. Really die. No heaven, no persistence of a soul, no resurrection, no reincarnation (the author is an atheist). Even if we manage to live longer and/or to upload our minds to machines, Earth will be destroyed by the Sun at some point in the future. And even if we manage to move to another planetary system and/or galaxy, the universe will most probably die as well. Our time is limited. We have to make the most out of it. Mainly by being kind, being with our loved ones, etc. The message is simple. Almost cheesy. This is not a "how-to" book. This is merely a warning. A reminder. I'm not sure I really learned anything. Also, the part of the book about ethical vegetarianism was pretty bad/baffling: the author seems to completely underestimate the suffering of animals in factory farms and doesn't address the environmental impact of meat. | |||||
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Mark Manson | The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life | 2016 | Kindle highlights | |
| A welcome reminder that we should care less about many things. And care more about what we value the most. This is not a revolutionary way of looking at things, but a refreshing, less serious perspective on what meditation already taught me. Daniel Miessler has a summary of the book on his site. | |||||
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David Le Breton | Disparaître de soi: Une tentation contemporaine | 2015 | Kindle highlights | |
| Un sujet intriguant (disparition volontaire ou involontaire de son identité, de ses responsabilités, etc.). Un livre malheureusement un peu répétitif. Je m'attendais aussi à une analyse plus éclairante du rôle de la technologie dans nos sociétés. | |||||
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Arthur C. Clarke | Childhood's End | 1953 | Kindle highlights | |
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Amélie Nothomb | Les Catilinaires | 1995 | Kindle highlights | |
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Bernard Stiegler | L'emploi est mort, vive le travail ! | 2015 | Kindle highlights | |
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James A. Lindsay | Everybody Is Wrong About God | 2015 | Kindle highlights | |
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Tiffany Jaquet | L'Enfant du placard | 2016 | ||
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Christophe Barbey | Non-militarisation: countries without armies: Identification criteria and first findings | 2015 | ||
| More of a working paper than a book, but received as a printed book, so I'm including it here. | |||||
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Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz | Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue | 2015 | Kindle highlights | |
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Matthieu Ricard | Plaidoyer pour les animaux: Vers une bienveillance pour tous | 2014 | Kindle highlights | |
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Jerry Coyne | Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible | 2015 | Kindle highlights | |
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Milan Kundera | L'Insoutenable Légèreté de l'être | 1984 | Kindle highlights | |
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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | Le Petit Prince | 1943 | Kindle highlights | |
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Michael M. Anissimov | Our Accelerating Future: How Superintelligence, Nanotechnology, and Transhumanism Will Transform the Planet | 2015 | Kindle highlights | |
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Milan Kundera | Les Testaments trahis | 1993 | Kindle highlights | |
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Paul Chiusano & Runar Bjarnason | Functional Programming in Scala | 2014 | Kindle highlights | |
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Amélie Nothomb | Hygiène de l'assassin | 1992 | Kindle highlights | |
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Ralph Leighton & Richard Feynman | Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! | 1988 | Kindle highlights | |
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John Christopher | When the Tripods Came | 1988 | Kindle highlights | |
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John Christopher | The Pool of Fire | 1968 | ||
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John Christopher | The City of Gold and Lead | 1968 | Kindle highlights | |
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John Christopher | The White Mountains | 1967 | ||
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Ben Goldacre | Bad Pharma | 2012 | Kindle highlights | |
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Amélie Nothomb | Stupeur et Tremblements | 1999 | Kindle highlights | |
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François Rabelais | Gargantua | 1534 | Kindle highlights | |
| See comments for "Pantagruel". | |||||
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Paulo Coelho | L'Alchimiste | 1988 | ||
| French translation of O Alquimista" by Jean Orecchioni. | |||||
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Carlo Strenger | The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-First Century | 2011 | Kindle highlights | |
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Carl Sagan | Cosmos | 1980 | ||
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Roald Dahl | The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl | 1991 | ||
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Sam Harris | Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion | 2014 | Kindle highlights | |
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Peter Boghossian | A Manual for Creating Atheists | 2013 | Kindle highlights | |
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Albert Camus | La Peste | 1947 | Kindle highlights | |
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Paul Thagard | The Brain and the Meaning of Life | 2010 | Kindle highlights | |
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Peter Hilton, Erik Bakker & Francisco Canedo | Play for Scala: Covers Play 2 | 2013 | ||
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Neil A. Fiore | The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play | 2007 | Kindle highlights | |
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Christof Koch | Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist | 2012 | Kindle highlights | |
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Joshua D. Suereth | Scala in Depth | 2012 | ||
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Gilbert Bruchez, Philippe Curdy & François Baillifard | Pierres à cupules et autres pierres gravées : Verbier, Bagnes et Entremont | 2009 | ||
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François Rabelais | Pantagruel | 1532 | Kindle highlights | |
| Middle French version, so quite a difficult read. Difficult to rate. | |||||
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Amélie Nothomb | Métaphysique des tubes | 2000 | Kindle highlights | |
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Richard Dawkins | The Selfish Gene | 2006 | Kindle highlights | |
| 30th Anniversary edition. | |||||
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Lawrence M. Krauss | A Universe from Nothing | 2012 | Kindle highlights | |
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Ernest Hemingway | Le Vieil Homme et la Mer | 1952 | ||
| French translation of "The Old Man and the Sea" by Jean Dutourd. | |||||
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Albert Camus | Le Mythe de Sisyphe | 1942 | Kindle highlights | |
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Amélie Nothomb | Le Voyage d'hiver | 2009 | ||
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Bertrand Russell | What I Believe | 1925 | Kindle highlights | |
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Ray Kurzweil | How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed | 2012 | Kindle highlights | |
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Douglas Crockford | JavaScript: The Good Parts | 2008 | ||
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Albert Camus | L'Étranger | 1942 | Kindle highlights | |
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Sam Harris | The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values | 2010 | Kindle highlights | |
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David McRaney | You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself | 2011 | Kindle highlights | |
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Sam Harris | Free Will | 2012 | Kindle highlights | |
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Ben Goldacre | Bad Science | 2008 | Kindle highlights |
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Derek Sivers | Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur | 2011 | ||
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Sam Harris & Annaka Harris | Lying | 2011 | ||
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Scott Adams | God's Debris: A Thought Experiment | 2001 | Kindle highlights | |
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Vincent Golay & Mix & Remix | Institutions politiques suisses | 2010 | ||
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Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon & Bill Venners | Programming in Scala | 2008 | ||
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Michael Fossel, Greta Blackburn & Dave Woynarowski | The Immortality Edge: Realize the Secrets of Your Telomeres for a Longer, Healthier Life | 2010 |
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Daniel Gilbert | Stumbling on Happiness | 2006 | ||
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Simon Singh & Edzard Ernst | Trick or Treatment?: Alternative Medicine on Trial | 2008 | ||
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Dylan Evans | Placebo: Mind over Matter in Modern Medicine | 2004 | ||
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Danielle Fecteau | L'effet placebo: Le pouvoir de guérir | 2005 | ||
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Dave Logan, John King & Halee Fischer-Wright | Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization | 2008 | ||
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Daniel Pennac | La Petite Marchande de prose | 1990 |
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Daniel Pennac | La fée carabine | 1987 | ||
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Ray Kurzweil & Terry Grossman | Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever | 2009 | ||
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Daniel Pennac | Au bonheur des ogres | 1985 | ||
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Philippe-Gaston Besson | Je suis fatigué mais je ne sais pas pourquoi...!: La fatigue chronique, fléau des temps modernes | 2000 | ||
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Maurice Chappaz | Le garçon qui croyait au paradis | 1995 | ||
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Ray Kurzweil & Terry Grossman | Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough To Live Forever | 2004 | ||
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Daniel Pennac | Chagrin d'école | 2007 | ||
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Régis Jauffret | Asiles de fous | 2005 | ||
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Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt | Ulysse from Bagdad | 2008 | ||
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Boris Vian | L'Automne à Pékin | 1947 |
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Eric van der Vlist, Danny Ayers, Erik Bruchez, Joe Fawcett & Alessandro Vernet | Professional Web 2.0 Programming | 2006 | ||
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Yann Arthus-Bertrand | 365 jours pour réfléchir à notre Terre | 2006 | ||
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Bruce Eckel | Thinking In Java | 2006 | ||
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Douglas Coupland | JPod | 2006 | ||
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Timothy Ferriss | The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, And Join The New Rich | 2007 | ||
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David Allen | Getting Things Done: The Art Of Stress-Free Productivity | 2002 |
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Muriel Barbery | L'Élégance du hérisson | 2006 | ||
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Robert-Vincent Joule & Jean-Léon Beauvois | Petit traité de manipulation à l'usage des honnêtes gens | 2002 | Handwritten notes | |
|
|
Richard Dawkins | The God Delusion | 2006 |
| Date | Author | Title | Year | Rating | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Boris Vian | L'Écume des jours | 1947 | ||
|
|
Ray Kurzweil | The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology | 2005 | ||
|
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Dan Brown | The Da Vinci Code | 2003 |
| Date | Author | Title | Year | Rating | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Laurent Gaudé | Le Soleil des Scorta | 2004 | ||
|
|
Milan Kundera | L'Ignorance | 2003 | ||
|
|
George Cole | The Last Miles: The Music of Miles Davis 1980-1991 | 2005 |
| Date | Author | Title | Year | Rating | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Ray Kurzweil | The Age of Spiritual Machines | 1999 | ||
|
|
Neil Gaima | Miroirs et fumée | 1998 | ||
|
|
Franz Kafka | Le Procès | 1933 |
| Date | Author | Title | Year | Rating | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Milan Kundera | Les Testaments trahis | 1993 | ||
|
|
Paul Tingen | Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis 1967-1991 | 2001 |
| Date | Author | Title | Year | Rating | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Franz Kafka | Le Château | 1938 |
| Date | Author | Title | Year | Rating | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Milan Kundera | La vie est ailleurs | 1969 | ||
|
|
John Searle | Le mystère de la conscience | 1999 |
| Date | Author | Title | Year | Rating | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Ian Carr | Keith Jarrett: The Man And His Music | 1991 |
| Date | Author | Title | Year | Rating | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Miles Davis & Quincy Troupe | Miles: L'autobiographie | 1991 |
| Date | Author | Title | Year | Rating | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Franz Kafka | L'Amérique | 1927 | ||
| Read in 1995 or 1996. | |||||
|
|
Michel Butor | La Modification | 1957 | ||
|
|
Henri Michaux | Plume | 1938 | ||
|
|
Daniel Pennac | Comme un roman | 1992 | ||
|
|
Milan Kundera | L'insoutenable légèreté de l'être | 1984 | ||
| Date | Author | Title | Year | Rating | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arthur C. Clarke | 2010 : Odyssée deux | 1982 | |||
| Arthur C. Clarke | 2001 : L'Odyssée de l'espace | 1968 | |||
| Milan Kundera | La Lenteur | 1994 |