Reading
Reading List
Books I’m currently reading, have finished, or have put down.
Currently reading
The Eye of the Bedlam Bride
by Matt Dinniman · started Jul 2026
Book six of the LitRPG Dungeon Crawler Carl series: Carl and Princess Donut go deeper still, into the Iron Tangle and whatever the Bedlam Bride is waiting to do about it.
AI Engineering: Building Applications with Foundation Models
by Chip Huyen · started May 2026
Chip Huyen's end-to-end guide to building real applications on top of foundation models, both large language and multimodal.
The StatQuest Illustrated Guide to Machine Learning
by Josh Starmer · started May 2026
Josh Starmer's fully illustrated, one-picture-at-a-time tour of machine learning, from basic statistics through neural networks.
Finished
Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch)
by Sebastian Raschka · finished Jul 2026
Sebastian Raschka walks through coding a GPT-style LLM in Python and PyTorch from the ground up: data, attention, pretraining, and fine-tuning.
The Butcher's Masquerade
by Matt Dinniman · finished Jul 2026
Book five of the LitRPG Dungeon Crawler Carl series: the dungeon opens a hunting-ground floor and lets its wealthy alien patrons come down to hunt the crawlers in person.
The Gate of the Feral Gods
by Matt Dinniman · finished Jul 2026
Book four of the LitRPG Dungeon Crawler Carl series: Carl and Princess Donut descend deeper into the deadly alien dungeon that doubles as the galaxy's most-watched game show.
The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook
by Matt Dinniman · finished Jun 2026
Book three. Carl and Princess Donut navigate the Iron Tangle, a sprawling, deliberately confusing subway-system dungeon floor.
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
by Ethan Mollick · finished Jun 2026
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick's practical case for treating generative AI as a collaborator (co-worker, tutor, and coach) in work and learning.
Carl's Doomsday Scenario
by Matt Dinniman · finished Jun 2026
Book two. Carl and Princess Donut press on through brutal new floors as Donut becomes an unlikely fan favorite among the galaxy's millions of viewers.
Dungeon Crawler Carl
by Matt Dinniman · finished May 2026
Book one of the LitRPG series: a Coast Guard vet and his ex's cat must survive an alien-built dungeon beneath Earth that's broadcast across the galaxy as a reality show.
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
by Yuval Noah Harari · finished May 2026
Yuval Noah Harari traces information networks from prehistoric storytelling to modern AI, and what the flow of information has done to societies.
Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
by John Green · finished Apr 2026
John Green on the history of tuberculosis and why the world's deadliest infection persists, told partly through one patient he met in Sierra Leone.
Absolution: A Southern Reach Novel
by Jeff VanderMeer · finished Mar 2026
Jeff VanderMeer's fourth Southern Reach novel, a prequel-and-sequel that returns to the Forgotten Coast and the origins of Area X.
Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI
by Anil Ananthaswamy · finished Feb 2026
Anil Ananthaswamy on the mathematics behind modern AI, from the 1958 perceptron to deep neural networks.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer
by Donella H. Meadows · finished Jan 2026
Donella Meadows' primer on systems thinking: how feedback loops, stocks, and flows drive the behavior of everything from organizations to ecosystems.
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
by Carl Sagan · finished Dec 2025
Carl Sagan's classic case for scientific skepticism and critical thinking as a defense against pseudoscience and superstition.