This is a personal reading record from a particular stage. The views in the books, my judgments, and how much I recommend them are all shaped by my reading experience at that time; they are not advice on buying books, health, career, or investing.

Why Write It Down

I have always been reading; I just rarely share it. After starting work, the time to sit quietly with a “miscellaneous book” has shrunk. Technical documentation, papers, and materials take up the bulk, while novels have carried much of my pure relaxation. The input is not small, but the output is scattered, so I wanted to give it an outlet.

Reading is, for me, almost instinctive: road signs, menus, advertisements, little cards — I can’t help reading them. When too much information comes in, a person gets tired, even numb to words. So this archive is not meant to prove “how much I read,” but to put the feelings worth keeping somewhere I can find them later.

Reading is hard to sustain. My experience is plain: when you can’t keep reading, read a little less — a few pages a day is fine. Rather than waiting for a complete, ideal afternoon, let reading become something you can come back to in fits and starts.

How I Read

I don’t have a strict toolchain, and I don’t want to turn reading into task management.

  • Paper books suit slow reading, flipping through, and marginal notes; used books, libraries, and physical bookstores can all bring unexpected discoveries.
  • E-books suit commuting and travel. Highlighting and search are convenient, but the screen also makes it easier to lose your attention.
  • Novels often begin on serialization platforms. They may not be “utilitarian,” but they keep the joy of reading itself alive.
  • Video, podcasts, and courses are sometimes better than text for understanding a stretch of history, complex communication, or an unfamiliar field; they are not a substitute for reading, just another entrance.

Tools and resource sites I was using at the time

The following are my personal usage habits and links recorded in 2023; site availability, content compliance, and copyright status may have changed, so please judge for yourself.

  • Physical books: JD.com, Kongfz, and the National Library’s borrowing service.
  • Reading devices and apps: Kindle, WeChat Read, and Qidian.
  • E-book search: I used a few e-book search sites at the time; just look up whichever site you need as you go.
  • Format conversion: I once used AConvert’s EPUB-to-MOBI tool; before using it now, confirm the formats your device supports and the source of the file.

Work-related materials and information aggregation don’t belong to this book list, so I won’t expand on them here.

When recording, I usually keep only a few items: the book title, when I started or finished it, my willingness to recommend it, and one or two thoughts that genuinely stayed with me. I used to try rating books, but later felt there was no need. Rather than a number that looks precise, I’d rather answer: would I recommend it to a specific person?

Not every book review needs to be a full essay either. Some books only need one line — “read it, worth remembering” — while others will reveal their meaning again much later, through a project, a conversation, or a life experience.

The to-read list (November 2023)

This list is not a schedule; it’s more like the books queuing up for now on the shelf and in the e-reader:

Sapiens, Homo Deus, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, The Selfish Gene, The Wealth of Nations, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Meditations, The Republic, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Judgment, Critique of Practical Reason, The World as Will and Representation, Decisive Moments in History, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, Evolutionary Psychology, Motivation and Personality, The Leadership Pipeline, The Justice of the Circle, The Details of the Rule of Law …

There are also some psychology, history, and social science books. Their being queued here doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily finish them; some books need the right experience and state of mind, and starting too early only makes reading a strain.

Recently read

Death on Mars and We Live in Nanjing

Both are Chinese science fiction I liked a lot. They didn’t make me rush to write a long review — they just left a simple conclusion: good, and worth reading. Web novels and genre fiction can also have very complete worlds, emotions, and imagination; when a book makes me willing to keep reading, that is already high praise.

American Prometheus

I approached it through audiobook, listening to the public recording of the prologue and first chapter. The appeal of a biography lies not only in its subject, but in that era dense with brilliant minds: some entered the frontiers of research very young, and over the following decades people kept verifying, extending, or refuting those ideas.

It reads well as a piece of the history of science and of its people. Still, the brilliance in a biography doesn’t necessarily translate directly into a guide for ordinary people; knowing what those people did and understanding why they could do it are still a long way apart.

The Garden of Forking Paths

After finishing it and reading some reviews, I still can’t say I fully understood it. The feeling it left me with is like a montage: time, space, the subjective and the objective keep shifting out of alignment, and the sense of fiction and reality interweave.

The question that made me pause most in the book is this: if history is only implanted memory and the future only assigned imagination, then how do we understand the present? It doesn’t answer for me. Perhaps literature was never meant to answer; it just leaves a strange enough space in the words for the reader to walk into with their own experience.

The Non-Designer’s Design Book

This is a lightweight introduction to design. People without a design background will get clear principles from it; those already familiar with design systems, interface hierarchy, and typography may pay more attention to the details. One practical reminder: it’s a full-color book, so it’s best not to read it on a black-and-white device.

Review+: Turning Experience into Capability

When I read it I wanted to do two things: use my existing review habit to find and fill gaps, and try to understand review from a broader organizational and systems perspective. My feeling after finishing it wasn’t great. Its framework has value, but the cases are too thinly developed, and many conclusions feel like big words simply lined up together.

The hardest part of review is still not memorizing templates, but returning to real events: what actually happened, who made what judgment under what constraints, and which single action can be changed next time. Without concrete context, no elegant framework can easily be put into practice.

Crucial Conversations, Change Anything, Crucial Confrontations, and Influencer

What I took away most from this series is a six-quadrant model: the personal, social, and structural environment, each viewed through the two lenses of ability and motivation. It reminds me not to attribute a problem only to one person’s attitude or will.

The rest felt somewhat repetitive to me, and carried a distinctly training-style tone. Learning communication and change ultimately comes back to a great many concrete situations: listening and paraphrasing effectively, building an atmosphere safe enough for discussion, and, amid disagreement, first finding the shared problem and interest. Books can give you vocabulary; only practice forms judgment.

Looking Out, Looking In

It made me more certain of one thing: communication is a practical art. Translation, cultural context, and the distance of the examples all affect whether a communication book can be absorbed; more importantly, it depends on whether you have the chance to experience both good and bad communication and receive honest enough feedback.

Learning a few “stock phrases” alone won’t solve the problem. What’s truly hard is recognizing the main point in a concrete situation, not making yourself the center of the argument, and moving the conversation forward to the next action.

Behind the Product: Building Breakthrough Product Thinking

This is a book from a product perspective. For engineering readers, its value isn’t in copying the process, but in reminding us: when a solution is placed into the product’s full pipeline, what constraints, delivery, and collaboration problems will it run into.

The book talks about a path for hitting a bottleneck, roughly: first observe reality, temporarily let go of your fixation, then look for new possibilities in information and action. What’s truly hard is often not understanding this line, but accepting the time gap, the expectation gap, and the inevitable losses along the way.

Vision, Attitude, and The Intelligent Age

These three books were read at different stages. My feelings about them have also shifted:

  • Vision has some reminders suited to early experience, but for people who have already formed their own judgment, there isn’t necessarily a need to reread grand principles.
  • Attitude moved me more. It made me try viewing the same idea from three positions — past, present, and future: could the me of back then understand it? Can I retell it now? Could I do better in the future? Many principles need to be slowly verified by experience.
  • The Intelligent Age is closer to a general-interest book. For non-technical readers it helps broaden their horizons; for practitioners, the bibliography is sometimes more worth pursuing than the main text. Technology changes quickly, and an older book’s predictions are better treated as a slice of their era rather than today’s answer.

The Two Jins and Sixteen Kingdoms

This stretch of history is extremely chaotic: regimes changed in a short time, figures were dense, and there are many stories and idioms. I entered it through a set of popular videos, first forming a rough outline before deciding whether it was worth going into the details — which is also a way to save attention.

How Google and Amazon Build Products

The title has a bit of a gimmick; the content is actually a product manager’s working methods. The most valuable part for me isn’t turning company experience into some mythologized process, but the many small, concrete collaboration questions it raises: how to sync information, how to make expression more precise, how to handle delivery and commitments, and how to put the truly important issues on the table.

When reading this kind of book, I often feel “unable to understand.” Later I gradually accepted it: understanding sometimes genuinely requires prior experience. Jotting down the concepts first, and coming back to read when a similar situation arises, is more effective than forcing myself to fully grasp it in one go.

Rich Dad Poor Dad

I’ve read it more than once. It has some insights about assets, cash flow, and choices, but it also has a very distinct stance and narrative style. When reading personal-finance books, I prefer to treat them as material for recognizing different viewpoints, rather than taking any one of them as an instruction to act.

Books can supply questions, but they can’t bear risk on your behalf. When money is involved, understanding your own situation, goals, capacity to bear risk, and the boundaries of your information matters far more than memorizing some “get-rich rule.”

The Pragmatic Programmer

Some of its ideas are still worth writing down, for example: different programming languages shape different paths of thinking. But engineering ability doesn’t grow just from finishing a book; practice, review, project collaboration, and articulating your experience clearly are what slowly turn scattered techniques into ability.

Elon Musk and Selected Works of Mao Zedong

The former made me feel the barrier to understanding a biography: without knowing the background behind a decision, you only see a string of events hard to relate to. The latter was a very slow read. I set myself no pace; I wanted to pause and think over every piece, so reading slowly was fine.

Knowing and Doing: A Technical Person’s Path to Management and The Netflix Culture

Reading about management and organizations easily creates the illusion of “I already understand this.” They can provide language, cases, and ways of observing, but any principle, when scaled to a specific team, needs to be re-evaluated. How a book’s positive principles land in the details is far harder than memorizing a slogan.

The Sword of Dawn

When it finished, I put it into the archive. As a long fantasy and science fiction web novel, it goes from a medieval-style fantasy world all the way to industrialization, war, myth, and cosmic narrative. The setting is interesting, and its temperament stays positive throughout: even in terrible situations, people still find ways to get things done. That drive to keep reading is itself the reason I like it.

A few judgments still slowly taking shape

Books can’t replace experience, but they make experience easier to name

Many books on management, communication, product, and life share a common limitation: before you’ve lived it, it’s hard to know what the book is saying; after you’ve lived it, it’s easy to feel it’s just restating common sense.

I now prefer to see books as a set of callable words. They don’t solve problems for me, but when a problem arrives, they give me the chance to describe, compare, and review more precisely.

Not understanding doesn’t mean reading in vain

There’s no need to turn every reading session into immediately usable knowledge. Some content stays in memory for a while and is only activated by a real situation months or years later. When you can’t understand, you can stop, or skip ahead; reading is not an exam.

A recommendation needs a recipient

“Recommendation” is never a fixed attribute of a book. It depends on what problem a person is facing, how much experience they already have, and how much time they’re willing to invest. When I write reading notes in the future, I hope to give fewer abstract total scores and be clearer about who it might suit and who it might not.

Epilogue

This archive won’t become a perfect library. It will keep mixing in unfinished books, one-line thoughts, judgments later overturned, and a passage suddenly remembered one day.

But at least I want to hold on to the slow change that reading brings: not becoming a different person after finishing a book, but finding, after many rounds of input, pauses, practice, and looking back, that I have a few more angles on things than before.