Book Reviews

A list of books I’ve read throughout the years, some thoughts, and new things I’ve learned. The list is mostly organized in recent first order, but I start and finish books out of order and sometimes with large breaks. Note that I usually pick books that challenge my thinking. These summaries are also written usually from memory long after I read the book, and reflect what I’ve taken away from them in the long term.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson #

One of the first non-fiction books I read in full in elementary school was a Steve Jobs: Thinking Differently by Patricia Lakin. Although that’s still a favorite, nothing (including the two Steve Jobs movies) has as much depth to it as this biography. I started and read most of this book in November of 2024 and took a long break until January of 2026 to finish it. It’s quite an emotional book too, following Jobs through the challanges in his personal life. Isaacson is an incredible writer and very thorough with his research, having followed Jobs around for a while. You can learn lots about how Steve ran Apple and went will alongside essays I read on folklore.org.

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries #

Eric writes about startups in an approachable way. I liked his notes on engines of growth, which greatly inspired features I’ve added to products I work on. A lot of this book I remember agreeing with and having picked up from people who had read it before. Nothing felt completely new, but maybe that’s because this book has defined a generation of companies that I am now familiar with. An excellent read and a book I’ve gifted to a friend. I plan to go back and reread it because I read this book too quickly last year, and don’t remember a ton from it.

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman #

This book is entertaining but I mostly listened to the audiobook while doing chores.

Guide to Better Business Writing by Bryan Garner #

Unsurprisingly, Garner is an excellent writer. I picked this book up in the O’hare airport and finished it a few days later. Many rules of the English language confused me until I read this book. It even inspired me to create betterwriting.vim, which I’m using to write this. It’s surprisingly engaging and extremely helpful.

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s Most Exclusive School for Startups by Randall Stross #

A pretty good look into what early Y Combinator was like. I learned that there was actually a startup that operated at colleges including UC Davis (where I go) that tried to help match restaurant rewards with college students. Coincidentally, some friend of mine tried this idea too, but aren’t continuing it.

Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham #

I bought this book for my birthday and finished it about a week later. I’m a big fan of P.G.’s essays and knew I’d love this book. He talks about a range of topics like design, startups, email spam, and lisp. Reading this inspired me to learn his language Arc, and it was great having already used Common Lisp, Scheme, and Racket before. It was interesting learning about his thoughts on OOP and the future of programming, because programming languages ( PL) is what I research. If you’re a fan of his writing or haven’t read an essay yet, I’d highly recommend picking up this book.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking #

I listed to this audio book on the plane over the summer and it was pretty interesting. I’d say it’s not as good as space writing by Neil Degrasse Tyson but still interesting in its own right.

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter Diamandis #

An excellent book for learning about making impact. It promises impact in the title and certainly delivers. Diamandis writes about organizing people around big goals and how the bigger and more challenging the problem, the more people are interesting in working on it. Ditch the e-commerce website for solving super sonic commercial flight is an example that sticks out to me. Another vivid memory I have of the book is learning about how Lockheed siloed the larger company out of their Skunk Works organization to block them from the inefficiencies of the larger organization to develop critical technology in short timeframes and under budget. Blocking the larger organization for “Managerial Meddling” (as Andrew Grove calls it) improve efficiency. Before this, I’d only heard of “siloing” as a negative. Bold explores organizations, picking important ideas, and how to do great things. I also liked its explanation of hype cycles, the history of Kodak, and how to grow a following for ideas that need people to care about them.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni #

I liked how this book was structured as a fictional narrative following the main character Kathryn through her journey of fixing a company as it’s new CEO. This style of writing is the first that I’ve read. Other books I remember as facts and often have trouble placing where I’ve heard certain ideas. This books I can remember as a story, picturing what Kathryn did to fix problems and how she went about handling situations.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz #

I learned about the origins of the internet and what the early days of startups were like in the dot com era. Fascinating to hear from the perspective of Horowitz. I listened to this book as an audio book too quickly and need to go back in order to fully learn from it.

The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick #

The absolute best book for talking to customers. I was recommend this book by a YC founder who got their company acquired. My only regret is taking a few months to start it. Fitzpatrick is an engineer and writes to a general audience but most helpful to an engineering audience. This completely changed how I think about talking to customers and greatly helped me. I use advice from this book every time I talk to customers. I frequently recommend it to people I work with.

Principles of Building AI Agents by Sam Bhagwat #

I picked this book up for free at a VC’s office. This version I have is the first edition and liked it a lot. It’s a short instruction to learning about AI Agents before I had really encountered it in detail before. I have some extra copies of the second edition that Sam sent me for a hackathon I hosted, so If you’d like a copy, send me an email and I can get one to you.

The Ten Equations That Rule the World by David Sumpter #

This book contained some interesting information but most of it I had encountered before. I don’t love how this book makes a fictional story about a group of insiders called TEN who use these equations, when it’s just stuff like regression, confidence intervals, etc. Maybe the audience is people who have not taken entry stats and computer science, and in that case it’s alright. I do like how it feels like first principles instead of just showing you the math.

High Output Management by Andrew Grove #

An amazing look into Intel and management from one of the world’s best leaders. We learn about the computer industry and operating large organizations from the ground up. We start with a fictional breakfast shop and work our way up to understanding the computer manufacturing industry as a whole. I previously had a problem about how to optimize engineering teams without reducing quality but the idea of “countermeasures” greatly helped and inspired me to write STPRQ. You learn about what to do and what not to do when working with others and leading teams. For what not to do, he talks about “Managerial Meddling” and not overly controlling people. I’ve recommended this book to many people since I’ve read it.