Category: Book

One Book At A Time – 2023

In 2023, the world of information consumption was dominated by short-form content. We’re constantly bombarded with bite-sized pieces of information from websites news, short / long videos, blog posts, social media, slide decks, even industrial research reports and PDFs. Podcasts have also become a popular way for me to consume information while jogging.

This constant influx of quick hits has undoubtedly impacted my reading habit, making it a slower year for in-depth, long-form reading, particularly of ebooks.

Anyway, here are the books (in purchasing order) of 2023:

And the best book to me this year is … The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma. YMMV.

Previous years’ book list:

AI 2041

Instead of believing in the marketing hype of generative AI, it’s important to understand what AI is, what AI can do, and what likely we will see by year 2041. Mr. Kai-Fu Lee’s AI 2041 is really a good read with all sorts of different AI use case scenarios. Highly recommended.

It’s also a dream came true to have Mr. Kai-Fu Lee’s “digital” signature with my Kindle Scribe in an AI event !

One Book At A Time – 2022

I told myself earlier this year I needed to read more SciFi, Blockchain and AI books. However, it’s a year with a lot less time to read …

It’s also year with a new Kindle – the big brother Kindle Scribe. Look forward to have better reading and note-jotting experiences with this great new device.

Anyway, here are my favorites this year :

  1. Winning the Right Game : How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World – A great strategy book about ecosystem innovation / disruption. Don’t miss it if you want to learn more on top of industrial disruption.
  2. 所謂「我不投資」，就是 all in 在法定貨幣 – Probably the best crypto foundation and investment book in Chinese, period.
  3. Proof of Stake: The Making of Ethereum and the Philosophy of Blockchains – The ideas behind Ethereum in the words of its founder, Vitalik Buterin. You will find that every crypto idea has been brewed for years.
  4. The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything – To me, it’s the best book of the year, for IT professionals. Lesson learned – the Metaverse is not what you think.
  5. Exhalation: Stories – Nine excellent SciFi short stories, from Time machine, to Robot, Metaverse, Video Artificial Memory and Quantum Machine. Some of the best SciFi short stories I ever read.
  6. Children of the new world – If you are fans of SciFi short stories and Black Mirror, and if you love the movie “After Yang”, don’t miss this book. Not as good as Exhalation and Stories of Your Life though.
  7. Stories of Your Life and Others – Another eight short SciFi stories from Ted Chiang (Exhalation, above) and great read. Note that some of the stories are Science Fictions, some are Fictions about Science.
  8. The Blockchain Innovator’s Handbook : A leader’s guide to understanding, adopting and succeeding with this disruptive technology – Post-COVID information about Blockchain, with 3 parts (This time it’s different, The journey, Making it happen). Good for business professional to understand and to promote the technology within your organization.
  9. The Bomber Mafia : A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War – I learned a lot about Second World War and Bombers from this book … bombing is not as easy as what you see from war movies.
  10. Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy – Will the search engine giant survive after AI and Machine Learning ?
  11. Scary Smart : The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World – The book that tells you why Ethical AI is important … “The course of action we take at any given time is also the result of a value system that guides us and sometimes restricts us from making decisions that contradict our values.”
  12. Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control – One of the most important AI books ever written, everybody should read it.

Previous years’ book list:

One Book At A Time – 2021

Second year of COVID-19 but another year of good Kindle readings. 15 books I read this year with the device and here are those one-line comments.

For me, the best read this year goes to book #10.

  1. Life 3.0 : Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence – Before AI, let’s have some hard thinking.
  2. Block Kong : 21 Entrepreneurs and Financiers Leading Blockchain in Hong Kong – 21 interesting interviews of Hong Kong’s Blockchain pioneers.
  3. The Right it : Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed – Techniques to validate your bright ideas.
  4. AI 2041 : Ten Visions for Our Future – 10 amazing AI Scientific (not Science) Fictions with great explanations.
  5. The Innovation Stack : Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time – Basically it’s about vertical integration, with Square as the example.
  6. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant : A Guide to Wealth and Happiness – Self-learning book for IT professionals … be happy.
  7. Indistractable : How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life – A great follow up to the previous book “Hooked”.
  8. The Unicorn Project – Stories about Development environment, Data Warehouse, QA, Operations, Security, Functional Programming, Digital Marketing.
  9. The Data Detective : Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics – Be curious, to your data.
  10. Leonardo Da Vinci – The real Da Vinci Code, decoded by Walter Isaacson
  11. Think Again : The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know – Individual Rethinking, Interpersonal Rethinking, Collective Rethinking.
  12. Think Like a Rocket Scientist : Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life – Nothing succeeds like failure.
  13. Experimentation Works : The Surprising Power of Business Experiments – What business experiments really are.
  14. Invent & Wander : The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson – Day 1 mindset, Long term mindset, and Customer obsessed.
  15. How to DeFi : Beginner – DeFi guide for dummies, but you are not dummy.