Book Recommendations

Here’s a list of some books I recommend. Some are related to cybersecurity, some to psychology, some to business, and so on. I’m a strong believer in continuing education. A person who never picks a book up again or never takes a course after high school or college is going to live a severely diminished life. This might sound harsh to say, though I strongly believe it. There has been some research showing the half life of information in the brain is about two years, which is referred to as decay theory.

We live in the age of Google, yet many people are becoming less capable and unwilling to learn. I share the sentiment of many others that a lot of it is because of things like meaningless short form content that people consume, and other sources of cheap dopamine. There’s plenty of research to show consuming short videos and short posts will rot a person’s brain and attention span. I thrive on long form content, whether it’s written, audio, or video, and it’s what I recommend to others as well.

Here’s a quote I like: “As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.” – Ursula K. Le Guin.

That quote has a massive importance to it. Everything you consume, not just books, but also videos and audio content, will become part of you as a person, even if you don’t realize it. You in the present tense will be different from you in the future tense after you read a book or watch a piece of content. What matters is whether you become a better or worse person. That’s why I pay attention to what I consume. I don’t fill my brain with nonsense or negative garbage. Ask yourself whether you can really be a happy person if you’re reading the morning newspaper or watching the latest pumped out garbage TV show. I don’t have the mental capacity to be able to or even want to care about all the negativity that happens in the world. Most other people don’t even though they think they do. If you can’t even effect change in your community, why bother about all the stuff that happens at a national level that you have zero control over?

Let’s get to the good stuff. This isn’t an all-inclusive list as I’ve read many great books and too many to list here, but what I do recommend here is excellent. Some of it is more of a fascinating read, like books about the spy community; some of it has had a profound impact on my life and molded me into a different person. You’ll find a brief description of why I list each book here, along with the titles and authors. These are also all available as audiobooks. I tend to prefer audio, especially if it was the author who voiced it. Having the author narrate a book tends to be a better experience because they know the material better than a different narrator, and because they had the passion to write the book in the first place.