Reading List

A single ranked path, built for traction rather than prestige: propulsive, interest-matched books first, big-idea nonfiction in the middle, and the dense bricks last. The order isn't sacred — I'll deviate — but the point is to never be without a "next." One rule baked in: if a book ever feels like a slog, quit it and drop to the next line without guilt.

Tier 1 — On-ramp

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.
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.
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.