Books I Read in 2021

This was suggested to me by a coworker in a discussion about artificial general intelligence. I found some of the ideas a bit far-fetched, but fascinating. I also think that Life 2.0 isn’t done yet: we (humans) have not finished our evolution as a culture yet, so artificial intelligence is more like version 2.5.

This was another suggestion (in the form of a question) from a coworker. Sana’i was a Persian Sufi poet who lived in Ghazni (Afghanistan) in the late 11th and early 12th century.

This is an interesting travelogue cum history lesson plus attempted prophecies by the former Portuguese minister for European affairs. I liked the stories and the insights (for example an insight into the difference between the Chinese and the Indian way of doing business), but I’m not sure if I agree with extrapolating the Chinese economic growth linearly into the future.

This is a collection of Rumi’s ghazals, both in the original Persian and the author’s Hindi translation. Balram Shukla is a professor of Sanskrit and Persian at the University of Delhi. Of course, he teaches Sanskrit in Persian. I loved the translations, and it helped me understand many of the ghazals really well.

I read it as quick reading before a book club at work. This is probably the most-read book at Amazon book clubs. The graphic novel just made the reading faster.

This is one of the most abstract books I have read in a long time, and I must say that it is very hard to quickly read it. I am now looking for books to help me understand GEB.

This book was also suggested to me by a coworker, and served as a new perspective on the British mindset during the second world war.

I came across this book while trying to suggest a good book to understand Amir Khusrau.

This was part of my reading to understand the basic model of how the economy works, and how the political forces shape the economy. This is also the book that first introduced creative destruction to describe innovation.

This is part of my continued attempt at understanding the great recession and its aftermath, economic and political. Yanis Varoufakis was the Greek Finance Minister for a few months in 2015 as part of the Syriza government, and wrote a first-hand account of how the European Union functioned. He had the unenviable task of negotiating with creditors, when debt restructuring and abandoning austerity should have been the right thing to do. I highly recommend this book, but do read Mark Blyth’s Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea after this.

According to the author, “the next generation of American preeminence and the coming global disorder” is inevitable. This is the first book of Peter Zeihan’s series describing a new world order that (according to him) will start in the 2020s. This is when the US will become disinterested in policing the world, will be self-sufficient in energy and food, and the US rivals (China and Russia) will experience a demographic collapse. “It takes twenty years to raise twenty-year-olds,” according to Zeihan. I would recommend it to the people who are predicting that China is about to take over.

This book covers Jennifer Doudna’s career and the development of CRISPR, the gene-editing tool. I bought this for my daughter to get her inspired, and I got inspired too.