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{
"author": "Martha Wells",
"title": "The Murderbot Diaries"
}

These are books I've been recommended, books I own but haven't started yet, books I've been given but am avoiding reading etc. etc.

General

  • Flash Boys by Michael Lewis
  • The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945-1967 by David French
  • The Library: A World History by James W. P. Campbell
  • Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience by Gitta Sereny
  • The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman
  • The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System by Marshall Kirk McKusick, George Neville-Neil & Robert N. M. Watson
  • The Illustrated Star Wars Universe by Ralph McQuarrie & Kevin Anderson
  • Blindness by Jose Saramago - "city gets hit with an epidemic of contagious blindness, survivors wander around"
  • The World Without Us by Alan Weisman - "non-fiction thought experiment of sorts, about what would happen to the planet if every human suddenly disappeared. Very interesting"
  • The Stand by Stephen King - "disease kills everyone, good survivors fight evil survivors"
  • LÖVE for Lua Game Programming by Darmie Akinlaja
  • Game Programming Patterns by Bob Nystrom
  • A Little History of the World by E. H. Gombrich - "In 1935, with a doctorate in art history and no prospect of a job, the 26-year-old Ernst Gombrich was invited to attempt a history of the world for younger readers. Amazingly, he completed the task in an intense six weeks, and "Eine kurze Weltgeschichte fur junge Leser" was published in Vienna to immediate success, and is now available in twenty-five languages across the world. In forty concise chapters, Gombrich tells the story of man from the stone age to the atomic bomb. In between emerges a colourful picture of wars and conquests, grand works of art, and the spread and limitations of science. This is a text dominated not by dates and facts, but by the sweep of mankind's experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity's achievements and an acute witness to its frailties.The product of a generous and humane sensibility, this timeless account makes intelligible the full span of human history."
  • The Viking World by Stefan Brink (2008 ISBN 0415333156)
  • The Open Organization by Jim Whitehurst (2015 ISBN-13: 978-1625275271)
  • Seneca Dialogues and Essays John Davie translation, Oxford World Classics (2009 ISBN-13: 978-0199552405)
  • The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart (2017 ISBN-10: 1849047995)

Cooking

  • The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
  • The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking by Barbara Tropp
  • Chinese cookbooks by Fu Pei Mei
  • A Taste of India by Madhur Jaffrey

China

  • Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations by Wang Zheng
  • Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao’s Great Famine by Yang Jisheng
  • Spying for the People by Michael Schoenhals
  • 我的前半生 The First Half of My Life; From Emperor to Citizen: The Autobiography of Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi by Aisin-Gioro Pu, Yi - (1964,1987, 2002) Foreign Languages Press. ISBN 978-7119007724 - "Ghost-written by Li Wenda, is well known as From Emperor to Citizen in the Western world. It was released in China again in 2007 as a newly and correctly revised version. Many sentences which were deleted in the 1964 version were correctly included."
  • The Corpse Walker: China From the Bottom Up by Liao Yiwu
  • Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China by Frank Dikotter - "China was turned into a nation of opium addicts by the pernicious forces of imperialist trade". This study systematically questions this assertion on the basis of abundant archives from China, Europe and the US, showing that opium had few harmful effects on either health or longevity, that most smokers used it in moderate quantities without any fatal 'loss of control', and that the substance was prepared and appreciated in highly complex rituals with in-built constraints on excessive use."
  • Chinese Industrial Espionage: Technology Acquisition and Military Modernisation by William C. Hannas, James Mulvenon & Anna B. Puglisi
  • Like Froth Floating on the Sea: The World of Pirates and Seafarers in Late Imperial South China by Robert Antony (ISBN 1-55729-078-4) link
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