Book Recommendations
Something for everyone...short, long, history, fiction, biography, thriller...
Pause on the regular programming for some book recommendations after a fantastic start to my reading in 2026. There’s something for everyone here..
If you like biographies and want to learn the (recent) history of AI…
The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby
As an avid follower of Sebastian Mallaby’s work, I was delighted when he chose to recount the history of AI through a biography of Demis Hassabis, one of the most influential, yet still under-hyped, individuals of the last two decades. This is very well-written - part biography, part history, part education on how models work for smart laypeople.
If you like learning about other cultures through historical fiction:
There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
This novel traces a single drop of water across three lives—a Victorian London street urchin turned Assyriologist, a Yazidi girl in 2014 Iraq, and a present-day hydrologist— to educate you about the persecuted Yazidi community and the lost world of ancient Mesopotamia and its Epic of Gilgamesh.
If you’re struggling to get back into reading and need something easy…
An ordinary man stumbles into a deadly espionage plot and goes on the run across London and the Scottish Highlands in the tense weeks before the First World War, in one of the earliest "innocent man on the run" thrillers.
If you want something meatier that will make you think….
The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
This novel imagines Castalia, a future monastic order of scholars who devote their lives to a sublime synthesis of music, mathematics and philosophy. An exploration of Europe's humanist and contemplative traditions, and a meditation on whether a culture of pure intellect can survive cut off from ordinary life.
If you want something short and poignant…
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
This novella follows a coal merchant in a small Irish town in 1985 who, in the run-up to Christmas, stumbles on the cruelty of a convent laundry. It’s a reflection on the horrific history of the Magdalene laundries and the complicit silence that lets a whole community look away.
If you want to learn how the contemporary art market works…
Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art by Michael Shnayerson
The contemporary art market is a perfect sandbox for understanding how tastemakers can define subjective value, which also happens in VC.
This history charts the postwar contemporary art market through the dealers and artists who drove it, taking you inside the culture of galleries, auction houses and mega-collectors. A portrait of how money, taste and ambition shape what the art world calls value.
If you prefer an audiobook…
Read by the author herself, this is a gorgeous story of love and growing up. Patti Smith’s memoir of her youth and intertwined lives with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is a window into the bohemian subculture of late-1960s and 1970s New York—the Chelsea Hotel, Max's Kansas City, the Warhol orbit—where poetry, rock and roll, art and sexual politics collided.
If you want to understand how the material world works:
I love these entry-level books explaining industries to outsiders (similar to Sebastian Mallaby). A story of six raw materials: sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium that underpin modern civilisation, tracing how we extract and refine them and how they will shape the energy transition ahead.
Links
The World Cup always brings us together…
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
A friend sent me this after my writing on fine-tuning open models and I loved it…sent me down a wonderful rabbit hole of Charlie’s writing:
Can’t wait to see the Sagrada Familia finally finished..
For Robotics enthusiasts…
Love seeing a team take the profits from their first business to tackle hard problems:
Can’t help but want Ti to win:
New forms of creativity:
Space X’s roadshow deck:
I don’t know what’s worse, the tasteslop, or the intellectualising of why it’s slop. The article is both entertaining and painful to read (click through on the pic)
Just Kids was so so so ahead of its time