• Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee. I got this book when it was mentioned in Zhedong Wang’s 2024 letter, where he said “Min Jin Lee is one of the only authors I’m a completionist for.” I understand why. At the beginning, I felt like the book was beneath me in some aspects (which is generally a terrible attitude to approach a book with). The writing was plain, there wasn’t much nuance, and I felt like everything was being told directly to me. I also struggled to relate to the nicher aspects of Korean culture discussed in the book. But about two thirds of the way through I realised I was just stupid and slow for not realising how important all the characters were. I saw aspects of my life and the lives of those around me within the myriad ecosystem of these quite beautiful and flawed people. In many ways, I felt it was if Emily Brontë had written the script for Love Actually. And there was also the quite relieving fact that it wasn’t just a novel about love - it made me feel a lot better about how difficult it is to know what to do with your life in your twenties. It’s nice to know that there are some people out there who would have turned down that job too. “Words never mattered’ he said, ‘seasons mattered.’”
  • The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. A very Douglas Adams-style exposition on whether we have free will, whether God is apathetic or not, and what the whole point of it is depending on the answers to those two questions. There is a comfort to be found in the fact that even if our civilisation’s history is a manipulation of cosmic forces for an alien race to get a repair part to one of their stranded travellers, then at least we got to be around to unknowingly be a part of it. I also found some interesting parallels between the pace of AI development and the Tralfamadorians (see here). “It took us that long to realise that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
  • Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli. To be honest, not the world’s biggest fan. Seemed way too superficial to be able to get any insight from it - basically good if you want to go to a party and be able to say confidently “Quantum spinfoam makes up space-time, and is a better theory of quantum gravity than string theory.” But I wouldn’t say you get anything beyond surface-level understanding. One interesting idea that jumped out at me, however, is how the maximum information content of a certain volume provides a link between quantum mechanics and general relativity. I had heard this idea previously in Dwarkesh Patel’s episode with Adam Brown, and so I decided to try and understand it in this post.