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My To-Read List

Henry Josephson
April 26, 2025

Whenever I've seen a book that's vaguely interesting, I've been stashing it into my cart on AbeBooks. There's a tradeoff here between convenience — I can easily buy them when I'm ready — and shareability — I don't want to give others my password.

So, in the spirit of just doing both, Though everything is a tradeoff and we're always in triage, there's usually some meaningful sense in which you aren't on the pareto frontier and can just do both. I vibe-coded an app to extract my books into a neat little markdown list that I can easily publish — and at least semi-regularly update.

If you ever want to get me a gift and refuse to donate to charity (if you're ever on the fence, give to the charity. Please. Please!), you can do much worse than grabbing me something from here.

The List, in no particular order:

  • Thermodynamic Weirdness: From Fahrenheit to Clausius. Lemons, Don S.. (9780262039390)
  • Public Citizens : The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism. Sabin, Paul. (9780393634044)
  • Seizing Power : The Strategic Logic of Military Coups. Singh, Naunihal. (9781421422565)
  • Snow Crash. Stephenson, Neal. (9780553380958)
  • Seeing Like a State : How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Scott, James C.. (9780300246759)
  • Parfit's Ethics. Chappell, Richard Yetter. (9781108730532)
  • Invented State : Policy Misperceptions in the American Public. Thorson, Emily. (9780197512333)
  • Focus: The ASML way - Inside the power struggle over the most complex machine on earth. Hijink, Marc. (9798324450847)
  • Hope I Get Old Before I Die : Why Rock Stars Never Retire. Hepworth, David. (9798895150061)
  • Stronghold. Buzzati, Dino; Venuti, Lawrence (TRN). (9781681377148)
  • William Blake. Chesterton, G. K.; Anderson, Taylor. (9781981170258)
  • A City on Mars : Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?. Weinersmith, Zach, Weinersmith, Kelly. (9781984881724)
  • The Rickover Effect : How One Man Made a Difference. Rockwell, Theodore. (9781557507020)
  • Danton. Hampson, Norman. (9780715612811)
  • The Jet Engine. Rolls Royce. (9781119065999)
  • Littlewood's Miscellany. John E. Littlewood. (9780521337021)
  • Failure Is Not an Option Missi. Kranz, Gene. (9781439148815)
  • Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs. John Pilger. (9780224062886)
  • Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Struggle over Freedom and Security. Farrell, Henry; Newman, Abraham L.. (9780691216904)
  • Who Goes First?: The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine. Altman, Lawrence K. K.. (9780520212817)
  • Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers. Misak, Cheryl. (9780198755357)
  • Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War. R M Douglas. (9780300198201)
  • The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers, Seventh Edition. Heilbroner, Robert L.. (9780684862149)
  • Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress (Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Science). Chang, Hasok. (9780195337389)
  • Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. Kuran, Timur. (9780674707580)
  • Scientists Under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich. Beyerchen, Alan D.. (9780300018301)
  • THE LETTERS OF J. R. R. TOLKIEN: Revised and Expanded edition. J. R. R. Tolkien, Edited by Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien. (9780008628765)
  • The Singularity (New York Review Classics). Buzzati, Dino. (9781681378008)
  • Orality and Literacy (New Accents). Ong, Walter J.. (9780415027960)
  • Lest Darkness Fall & To Bring the Light. L. Sprague de Camp,David Drake. (9780671877361)
  • Poems and Songs (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets). Cohen, Leonard. (9780307595836)
  • The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King. Cohen, Rich. (9781250033314)
  • Permutation City: A Novel. Egan, Greg. (9781597805391)
  • Sadly, Porn. Teach MD, Edward. (9781734460827)
  • On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. Silver, Nate. (9781594204128)
  • Fatherland: A Novel. Harris, Robert. (9780812977219)
  • A Field Guide to American Houses. Unknown Author. (2800394739696)
  • Hack Your Bureaucracy: Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on Any Team. Nitze, Marina; Sinai, Nick. (9780306827754)
  • War Music: An Account of Homers Iliad. Logue, Christopher. (9780374536817)
  • Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State. Tau, Byron. (9780593443224)
  • George F. Kennan: An American Life (Pulitzer Prize Winner). Gaddis, John Lewis. (9780143122159)
  • Creating Superfans: How to Turn Your Customers Into Lifelong Advocates. Hodak, Brittany. (9781774580783)
  • Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. Spinney, Laura. (9781541736122)
  • Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the Worlds First Digital Weapon. Zetter, Kim. (9780770436193)
  • Coup d'État : A Practical Handbook. Luttwak, Edward. (9780674175471)
  • Nuclear Monopoly. George H. Quester. (9780765800220)
  • The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth. Hanson, Robin. (9780198817826)
  • The Censor's Hand: The Misregulation of Human-Subject Research. Schneider, Carl E.. (9780262028912)
  • Counterexamples in Probability: Third Edition (Dover Books on Mathematics). Stoyanov, Jordan M.. (9780486499987)
  • David Humes History of England, Edited for the Modern Reader: Vo. Hume, David. (9781482622744)

Please let me know if you think there's anything that should be on the list! (but be careful — I might already have it...)