List: My books of 2019 / Reading Recommendations for 2020

Some of my hard-copy books from this year and my iPad (iBooks and Kindle)

This was a good year for my reading. I read thirty books this year and memorized two poems! Here’s some commentary on my ten favorite books. The full list is available at the end.

10. Dollars and Sense, Dan Ariely. This helped me understand how our psychology leads us to engage poorly with money. It also includes practical advice on spending better. The Richest Man in Babylon (TRMB) is very popular (I even read it again this year), but this book goes many steps deeper and makes it more likely that you can follow George Clason’s advice in TRMB.

9. Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of Machines, Hannah Fry. This book is well-written and I could not stop till I was done! It describes the algorithms that are shaping our age in a manner that is accessible to everyone. Dr. Fry describes applications ranging from predicting which customers are pregnant to neural networks for machine vision. It provides a toolkit for staying informed as AI becomes more integrated into daily life. I believe we’ll ultimately end up with algorithms and humans that work together in partnership, exploiting each other’s strengths and embracing each other’s flaws. In her words, “in the age of the algorithm, humans have never been more important”.