Here are the books I’ve read in the past few years (I can’t remember anything before 2016 or so), listed in the order I read them.
Math textbooks are only listed if I read them cover to cover. This doesn’t necessarily mean I understood them fully, but it is useful to retain pointers (in the computer-science sense) for later.
Feel free to follow me on Goodreads.
2017
- Lingo (2014), Gaston Dorren
- The Girl on the Train (2015), Paula Hawkins
- The Power of Babel (2001), John McWhorter
- American Gods (2001), Neil Gaiman
- Stardust (1999), Neil Gaiman
- Neverwhere (1996), Neil Gaiman
- Good Omens (1990), Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
- Never Let Me Go (2005), Kazuo Ishiguro
2018
- On the Road (1957), Jack Kerouac
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), Douglas Hofstadter
- Flowers for Algernon (1966), Daniel Keyes
- The Language Instinct (1994), Steven Pinker
- Concepts of Modern Mathematics (1975), Ian Stewart
- Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), Edwin A. Abbott
- Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension (1977), Rudolf v. B. Rucker
- Introduction to Analysis (1968), Maxwell Rosenlicht
2019
- Introduction to Graph Theory (1993), Richard J. Trudeau
- The Metamorphosis (1915), Franz Kafka
- QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985), Richard Feynman
- Introduction to the Theory of Computation (1997), Michael Sipser
- The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013), Neil Gaiman
- Fermat’s Last Theorem (1997), Simon Singh
- The Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 1: Fundamental Algorithms (1968), Donald Knuth
- The Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 2: Seminumerical Algorithms (1969), Donald Knuth
- An Abundance of Katherines (2006), John Green
- The Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 3: Sorting and Searching (1973), Donald Knuth
2020
- The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Ernest Hemingway
- Anansi Boys (2005), Neil Gaiman
- Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Jared Diamond
- Surreal Numbers (1974), Donald Knuth
- The Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 4A: Combinatorial Algorithms (2011), Donald Knuth
- Additive Combinatorics (2006), Terence Tao and Van H. Vu
2021
- Number Theory (1971), George E. Andrews
- Catch-22 (1961), Joseph Heller
- Siddhartha (1922), Hermann Hesse
- Enumerative Combinatorics, Vol. 1 (1986), Richard P. Stanley
- In Our Time (1925) and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), Ernest Hemingway
- Breakfast of Champions (1973), Kurt Vonnegut
- Dancing Girls and Other Stories (1977), 1982 revision, Margaret Atwood
- For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Ernest Hemingway
- Educated (2018), Tara Westover
- One Job Town (2018), Steven High
- Cannery Row (1945), John Steinbeck
- The Moon is Down (1942), John Steinbeck
- Of Mice and Men (1937), John Steinbeck
- A Course in Arithmetic (1973), Jean-Pierre Serre
2022
- The Nick Adams Stories (1972), Ernest Hemingway
- A History of Modern Singapore, 1819–2005 (2009), Constance Mary Turnbull
- The Prodigy (1906), Hermann Hesse
- The Mathematical Magpie (1962), Clifton Fadiman
- Arabian Nights (1885), 1938 abridged version, translated by Richard Burton
- Mother Night (1962), Kurt Vonnegut
- The Sirens of Titan (1959), Kurt Vonnegut
- Heart of Darkness and Other Tales (1899), Joseph Conrad
- Nanjing 1937 (1996), Ye Zhaoyan
- Shovelling Trouble (1973), Mordecai Richler
- Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories (1966), Francis Scott Fitzgerald
- Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), Alice Munro
- The Dance is One (1973), Francis Reginald Scott
- Wilderness Tips (1991), Margaret Atwood
- Dear Life (2012), Alice Munro
- Vi (2016), Kim Thúy [French]
- How to Pronounce Knife (2020), Souvankham Thammavongsa
- Glorious Frazzled Beings (2021), Angélique Lalonde
- Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Kurt Vonnegut
- Narziss and Goldmund (1930), Hermann Hesse
- Runaway (2004), Alice Munro
- Beast at Every Threshold (2022), Natalie Wee
- Crush (2005), Richard Siken
- Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), Stephen Leacock
- Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Alice Munro
- The Whitsun Weddings (1964), Philip Larkin
- The Street (1969), Mordecai Richler
- Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories (1988), Raymond Carver
- Alexandre Chenevert (1954), Gabrielle Roy [French]
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (1865, 1871), Lewis Carroll
- The Love of a Good Woman (1998), Alice Munro
- Simple Recipes (2001), Madeleine Thien
- Funicular Volume 2, Issue 2 (2020), eds. Jeremy Bibaud and Jason Lee Norman
- A Farewell to Arms (1929), Ernest Hemingway
- Favole al telefono (1962), Gianni Rodari [Italian]
- The Picture of Dorian Gray and other Writings (collected 1982), Oscar Wilde
- The Golden Apples (1949), Eudora Welty
- Funicular Volume 3, Issue 1 (2021), eds. Jeremy Bibaud and Jason Lee Norman
- Demian (1919), Hermann Hesse
- The Heart of a Dog (1925), Mikhail Bulgakov
- Mrs Dalloway (1925), Virginia Woolf
- The Short Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction, 4th ed. (1994), Ann Charters
- Piranesi (2020), Susanna Clarke
- Fathers and Sons (1862), Ivan Turgenev
- Beowulf (8th century), unknown, translation by Seamus Heaney (2000)
- My Financial Career and Other Follies (collected 1993), Stephen Leacock
- To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Harper Lee
- Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily Brontë
- Our Spoons Came From Woolworths (1950), Barbara Comyns
- Marcus Aurelius and His Times (collected 1945), Marcus Aurelius et al.
- Here the Dark (2020), David Bergen
- Men Without Women (1927), Ernest Hemingway
- The Prophet (1923), Kahlil Gibran
- The Invention of Yesterday (2019), Tamim Ansary
- Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021), Sally Rooney
- Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Thomas Hardy
- The Sun Also Rises (1926), Ernest Hemingway
- We Were Dreamers (2022), Simu Liu
- The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories (1938), Sinclair Ross
- Burning Questions (2022), Margaret Atwood
- Shape (2021), Jordan Ellenberg
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Maya Angelou
- L’Étranger (1942), Albert Camus [French]
- Little Women (1868), Louisa May Alcott
- Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), Alice Munro
- Dubliners (1914), James Joyce
- Ethan Frome (1911), Edith Wharton
- Bluebeard’s Egg (1983), Margaret Atwood
- The Journey to the East (1932), Hermann Hesse
- Cat’s Cradle (1963), Kurt Vonnegut
- Little Ironies: Stories of Singapore (1978), Catherine Lim
- Bonheur d’occasion (1945), Gabrielle Roy [French]
2023
- Bunny (2019), Mona Awad
- Malay Sketches (2012), Alfian Sa’at
- St. Urbain’s Horseman (1971), Mordecai Richler
- The Pearl (1947), John Steinbeck
- Complex Variables (1972), Francis Flanigan
- Jacob’s Room (1922), Virginia Woolf
- As I Lay Dying (1930), William Faulkner
- A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man (1916), James Joyce
- To Have and Have Not (1937), Ernest Hemingway
- Frankenstein (1818), Mary Shelley
- The Queen of Spades and Other Stories (1834), Alexander Pushkin
- The Juniper Tree (1985), Barbara Comyns
- Crime and Punishment (1866), Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Burnout Society (2010), Byung-Chul Han
- Ces enfants de ma vie (1977), Gabrielle Roy [French]
- The Communist Manifesto (1848), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
- White Nights and Bobok (1848, 1873), Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Epic of Gilgamesh, translation by Nancy Sandars (1972)
- The Housing Monster (2011), prole.info
- Solaris (1961), Stanisław Lem
- Ghost Forest (2021), Pik-Shuen Fung
- First Person Singular (2020), Haruki Murakami
- The Moons of Jupiter (1982), Alice Munro
- Stone Mattress (2014), Margaret Atwood
- May (1836), Karel Hynek Mácha
- Du côté de chez Swann (1913), Marcel Proust [French]
- Strange News from Another Star (1919), Hermann Hesse
- The Master and Margarita (1966), Mikhail Bulgakov
- My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Ottessa Moshfegh
- To the Lighthouse (1927), Virginia Woolf
- El camino familiar del pez combativo (1992), Pierre Alferi [Spanish, French]
- Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century (2022), Kim Fu
- The Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Steinbeck
- Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), Hubert Selby Jr.
- The Waves (1931), Virginia Woolf
- Unsaid: An Asian Anthology (2022), ed. Anitha Devi Pillai
- The Torrents of Spring (1926), Ernest Hemingway
- Oryx and Crake (2003), Margaret Atwood
- The Art of Love (2), Ovid
- Magister Ludi (1943), Hermann Hesse
- Bad Cree (2023), Jessica Johns
- Lieutenant Kurosawa’s Errand Boy (2017), Warran Kalasegaran
- Letters to a Young Poet (1902–1908), Rainer Maria Rilke
- Are You Willing to Die for the Cause? (2023), Chris Oliveros
- Our Lady of Mile End (2023), Sarah Gilbert
- Capitalist Realism (2009), Mark Fisher
- All About Love (2000), bell hooks
- Interpreter of Maladies (1999), Jhumpa Lahiri
- The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (collected 1948), Rainer Maria Rilke
- The Agony of Eros (2012), Byung-Chul Han
- Warlight (2018), Michael Ondaatje
- The Vet’s Daughter (1959), Barbara Comyns
- Sweet Thursday (1954), John Steinbeck
2024
- Beautiful Losers (1966), Leonard Cohen
- Steppenwolf (1927), Hermann Hesse
- Silas Marner (1861), George Eliot
- Ice (1967), Anna Kavan
- The Compleat Angler (1653, 5th ed. 1676), Izaak Walton
- La chute (1956), Albert Camus [French]
- Worn: A People’s History of Clothing (2022), Sofi Thanhauser
- Silver Repetition (2024), Lily Wang
- Psychopolitics (2014), Byung-Chul Han
- Middlemarch (1872), George Eliot
- Open Secrets (1994), Alice Munro
- Moral Disorder (2006), Margaret Atwood
- Everything that Rises Must Converge (1965), Flannery O’Connor
- The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War (1969), Ernest Hemingway
- The Paris Review, Issue 247 (2024), ed. Emily Stokes
- Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), Alice Munro
- The Namesake (2003), Jhumpa Lahiri
- Negotiating with the Dead (2002), Margaret Atwood
- The Art of Repair (2021), Molly Martin
- La belle bête (1959), Marie-Claire Blais [French]
- Rosshalde (1914), Hermann Hesse
- The Long Valley (1938), John Steinbeck
- The Whole Animal (2023), Corinna Chong
- Surfacing (1972), Margaret Atwood
- Jude the Obscure (1895), Thomas Hardy
- Friend of My Youth (1990), Alice Munro
- The Conquest of Happiness (1930), Bertrand Russell
- Old Babes in the Wood (2023), Margaret Atwood
- Down Below (1944), Leonora Carrington
- The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Summer Book (1972), Tove Jansson
- Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (2010), Satoshi Yagisawa
- Anne of Green Gables (1908), Lucy Maud Montgomery
- Tortilla Flat (1935), John Steinbeck
- Best Canadian Stories 2025 (2024), ed. Stephen Beattie
- The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), Joan Didion
- Unaccustomed Earth (2008), Jhumpa Lahiri
- I Ate Tiong Bahru (2013), Stephen Black
- The Cyberiad (1965), Stanisław Lem
- The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Thomas Hardy
- Normal People (2018), Sally Rooney
- The Disappearance of Rituals (2019), Byung-Chul Han