What I Read

Updated: Jul, 2021

Fiction

• Agatha Christie: I am a big fan of the “Queen of Mystery”. The variety and quality of her stories was incredible. Here are my personal picks:

  • The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd: Agatha Christie’s novels symbolized surprising endings. This one caught me off guard the most.
  • Evil Under the Sun: For some inexplicable reason, this novel had a special spot in my heart. It was a perfect mix of salty breeze on the face and reckless horrors on the beach.
  • Five Little Pigs: It was an old cold case, but with intensity and passion behind the veil of time. It was astonishing to watch the lust of life dying away under the malevolent eyes.
  • And Then There Were None: This one was a league of its own. It got the perfect rhythm and perfect rhyme. Although spoiled by the film adaption before the read, my heart still pounded heavily as the plot accelerated. Definitely a masterpiece from all aspects. If you haven’t watched the film, resist the temptation and read the novel first!
  • 4:50 from Paddington: My first Marple piece. The bitterness of this faintly looking English lady was brilliant and hemorrhage-inducing. Often, I felt the soft-spoken remarks from Miss Marple was so overpowering that the plot progression was dwarfed to the secondary 😂.
  • A Murder Is Announced: A unique opening with an anticipated murder. The rest of the story was also quite good and it finished with a Christie(^TM)-ending. There was an interesting anecdote: More than one TV or film producers just wanted the right to produce of this famous opening but went on their own way for the rest, which, not surprisingly, rejected by the Christie’s family (source).
  • Honorable mentions: Peril at End House, The ABC Murders, Crooked House (Agatha Christie herself loved this one), Murder on the Orient Express (quite famous), Hallowe’en Party (had an aesthetic smear); Avoid: The Big Four (missed the Christie bar by a lot…)

• Jules Verne:

  • Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Seas: I was like a day-dreaming child when reading this book – who didn’t love sightseeing in a mighty submarine and reaching the unreachable? The book was full of amazing meticulous details: the ocean creatures, the submarine, the navigation, the underwater places of interest all imagined up… I couldn’t believe this was written more than 100 years ago.

• The Master and Margarita: A very unique book. Fantasy, comedy, romance and political satire? I don’t know what it was and maybe it didn’t try to be framed as one of them. Many pieces might be lost in the translation from Russian (which I couldn’t really tell), but you can find detailed notes on the Internet (like this). Some people loved it to death. It was a different kind of Russian gem outside of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.

• Foundation triology

• 西游记

• 郑渊洁: 80/90后小时候几乎没人没看过郑爷的作品改编的动画片，在欢乐的同时可能也留下一些童年心理阴影😬 。后来发现他也有写成人童话，堪称当代魔幻讽刺小说。首推下面两本：

  • 金拇指: 郑爷的现实魔幻主义的在这本书里被发挥到极致了。写人生穷困潦倒到极致，写人心虚伪贪婪到极致，写人的悲喜矛盾也到极致。如果只读一本郑爷的书，我觉得就是这本。
  • 智齿: 此书开门见山，给了个有意思的脑洞：天才都有天才智齿。和《金拇指》一样，书中夹杂许多郑爷调侃现实的私货。但比起前者，本书多了一份有趣少了一层压抑。

• 余华：

  • 在细雨中呼喊

Biography

• Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Non-fiction

• The Soul of A New Machine

• Bad Blood

• The Shortest History of Europe

• Hillbilly Elegy

• Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need To Know About Global Politics: This book was like Netflix mini-series on geopolitics. As the title suggested, it consisted of ten chapters with each dedicated to a major part of the world (e.g., Russia, China, US, the Middle East, etc.). I started by reading a few chapters of interest, but I couldn’t stop but finish it from cover to cover. The structure and language were both very well-done. While I didn’t agree with every geography centric argument the author made, looking at the world from the lens of the people and geography instead of ideology was a breath of fresh air. Understanding how destined we were would help us go beyond the destiny tomorrow. (PS1: The last chapter on the Arctic was quite interesting; PS2: Many episodes from Caspian Report resonated with this book quite well.)

• Rework

• Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the US, and the World

• So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion In The Quest For Work You Love: It was the kind of “good” self-help book that you could finish in either a few hours or five minutes (or just by reading the title!). It tried to debunk the myth of “follow your passion” in career choices. The message was strong albeit a little overfitting. You really don’t need to read it cover to cover, but I ended up reading most of it because the stories were interesting.

Science & Engineering

• The Feynman Lectures on Physics

  • Caltech website

• The Elements of Computing Systems