Reading List

I’m a fucking dolt and I want to read more. I love books and I always have. But I am bad at making time to sit and read them. In an effort to change that, I’ve compiled a list based on another list from, I honestly don’t remember where now. But I have made some additions and cultivated a path to get me reading more physical books. This is that path:

Tier 1 — On-ramp

• [IN PROGRESS]: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! — Richard Feynman Short anecdotes; literal chapters on safe-cracking and lockpicking. An esoterica-and-mischief memoir wearing a physicist’s coat.

• Ficciones / Labyrinths — Jorge Luis Borges Secret societies, invented encyclopedias, infinite libraries, codes, doubles. Stories are 4–8 pages. The bullseye for my sensibility, and the first one in my bag.

• Masters of Atlantis — Charles Portis A comic novel about a man handed a “secret” manuscript of the lost wisdom of Atlantis, who builds a whole occult society around it that slowly dwindles into absurdity. Secret societies and esoterica played as deadpan comedy — short, funny, and a real on-ramp.

• Prometheus Rising — Robert Anton Wilson Occult, absurd, funny; chunked into sections with exercises, so the two-pages-at-a-time thing works naturally.

• The Code Book — Simon Singh Cryptography history from Mary Queen of Scots to quantum, worked ciphers, and unsolved puzzles in the back.

Tier 2 — Momentum

• The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus — Gary Lachman Accessible narrative history tracing the legendary figure of Hermes Trismegistus from ancient Egypt through the Renaissance to now. A good spine for the whole hermeticism interest — and the one already on its way to me.

• The Western Esoteric Traditions — Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke A clear, scholarly-but-readable map of the whole field — Hermeticism, alchemy, Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, and more. The closest thing to a guide for what the podcast is walking me through.

• DMT: The Spirit Molecule — Rick Strassman The clinical-research account that launched the modern DMT conversation. Real research that wanders into metaphysics — altered states, gnosis, the “contact” experience. Connects to the esoteric thread more than it first looks.

• The Spy and the Traitor — Ben Macintyre Real Cold War espionage that reads like a thriller.

• Invisible Cities / If on a winter’s night a traveler — Italo Calvino Playful, absurd, structurally tricky, short sections. Adjacent to Borges.

• The Illuminatus! Trilogy — Robert Anton Wilson Unhinged conspiracy comedy — masks, subversion, paranoia played for laughs.

• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy — John le Carré The literary spy novel — tradecraft, moles, masks. Slower burn; worth it.

• Cryptonomicon — Neal Stephenson WWII codebreakers and modern hackers; cryptography as plot engine. Long but propulsive.

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell — Susanna Clarke Fantasy footnoted like a history book; dry, funny, immersive.

Tier 3 — The fiber

• Factfulness — Hans Rosling Gentlest entry in this tier.

• The Selfish Gene — Richard Dawkins Evolution from the gene’s point of view.

• Thinking in Systems — Donella Meadows How systems behave, and why they resist being changed.

• A Brief History of Time — Stephen Hawking Cosmology made legible.

• The Order of Time — Carlo Rovelli A short, lyrical take on what time actually is.

• How to Solve It — George Pólya A classic on the craft of solving problems.

• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — Thomas Kuhn Where the idea of the “paradigm shift” comes from.

• Guns, Germs, and Steel — Jared Diamond A big-swing argument about why history unfolded the way it did.

• The Righteous Mind — Jonathan Haidt Why people who disagree about morality are often both sincere.

• The Book of Why — Judea Pearl Causation versus correlation, done properly.

• Antifragile — Nassim Taleb On things that gain from disorder.

• Superintelligence — Nick Bostrom The case for taking machine superintelligence seriously.

• Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman The two-systems model of the mind. Worth reading once the habit can carry it.

• Behave — Robert Sapolsky A sprawling tour of why humans do what they do.

• The Mismeasure of Man — Stephen Jay Gould A critical history of attempts to rank human intelligence.

• The Denial of Death — Ernest Becker On mortality as the hidden engine behind a lot of human behavior.

• The Sufis — Idries Shah Esoteric tradition, teaching-stories, the absurd used as a tool. Genuinely strange.

• The Secret Teachers of the Western World — Gary Lachman Lachman’s broad survey of the Western esoteric current — wider than the Hermes book. Optional, but a natural next step if his writing clicks for me.

• The Art of Problem Solving — Richard Rusczyk Genuinely a workbook — read it with a pencil, not in bed.

Tier 4 — Bricks & experiences

• Gödel, Escher, Bach — Douglas Hofstadter Playful but huge — dialogues, paradox, self-reference. A savor-over-months book.

• Foucault’s Pendulum — Umberto Eco Occultism, conspiracy, semiotics — three editors invent a conspiracy and it eats them. Dense, and deeply my kind of book.

• The Hermetica (Corpus Hermeticum) — trans. Brian Copenhaver The primary source — the actual ancient texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, Copenhaver’s standard translation. Ranked late on purpose: short and foundational, but it rewards having the context from the histories first.

• House of Leaves — Mark Z. Danielewski Nested identities, typographic insanity, a book about a documentary that doesn’t exist. An experience-object.

• The Codebreakers — David Kahn The definitive cryptography history. Reference-grade brick — for when the habit is real.